3 A Brewski for the Old Man (18 page)

“Speak for yourself,” Tully said, squawking open the door and heading back for the campground.

Within fifty yards of the road the gravel ran out and the track turned into grass and weeds. Flat and unditched, it wasn’t meant to be used at this time of the year, but right away I could see this was different from the deserted spots we’d already checked out. The grass was freshly rutted and beaten down by tires. Tire marks skirted large puddles and dug deep wells into the sides of the track. Twice there was evidence that someone got stuck. There was definitely someone in here where no one was supposed to be. I wasn’t liking this at all. My survival instinct was telling me to get the hell out of there. I glanced over at Tully. He could’ve been walking down any country lane on a Sunday afternoon. “Let’s go back,” I said.

“Why? We paid our money and it’s a nice day for a stroll.” A mile in we heard the scrape of metal against metal. I stopped and looked at Tully. “They’re here,” I whispered.

He moved forward, not trying to be quiet or to surprise anyone.

Ahead of us, someone laughed.

We smelt them before we saw them. “What the hell is that smell?” I whispered.

The air was rank with the odor of rotting meat. Think of throwing a Styrofoam tray that held raw chicken into the trash and then raising the lid an hour later. Now multiply that a hundred times.

Tully had his nose in the air like an old hound dog. “Blood,” he said. “Innards and bad meat. Someone has been doing some butchering.”

The rutted track swung right under a live oak, dripping with Spanish moss, and opened up onto the small campground. It was empty.

“Down there,” Tully said and pointed.

Even knowing they were there you could miss them. They were at the very end of the campsite, tucked back in a little clearing along the river, the campers pulled up close under the trees, their noses deep in the undergrowth. There were two pickups, one with a fifth wheel on behind.

“Let’s get the hell out of here.” I was backing up even as I spoke. But it was too late.

A man stepped out of the woods behind us, blocking our way. “You lost?”

“Nope,” Tully replied. “We’re right where we intended to be.”

“This campground is closed.” The man was at least six foot and two hundred and ninety pounds and completely without hair on his head or his bare chest, which was covered in tattoos. Tattoos ran up both arms. His body was the canvas for a lot of art and a lot of pain. The little heart on my behind that said “Jimmy’s” told me just how much he had been prepared to suffer for the animals that crawled over his body, a panther on his right bicep and some kind of lizard on his left arm. A snake circled his neck, the red tongue flicking onto his left cheek. Had he shaved the hair off his body to show off his tattoos? He pointed in the direction we’d come. “You’ll find an open campground back towards the lake.” His words were mild but he scared the shit out of me. Maybe it was his eyes, almost gold and shining.

I slid past him, breaking into a trot before checking to see if Tully was following me. He wasn’t.

Tully said, “We’ll have a look around first. Goin’ to have a family reunion this Thanksgiving, thought we’d pick a campsite away from others so we won’t disturb folks, if you know what I mean.”

Tattoo Man stepped out in front of Tully and crossed his arms. They were about the same height but he had over a hundred pounds on Tully.

Moonwalking away, I called, “Let’s go, Dad.”

Tully didn’t move.

“I’m going to be late,” I called.

Tully’s eyes flicked to me and then back. “Sure,” Tully answered, but he wasn’t moving. The two of them stood toe to toe locked in a staring match.

“Dad.” I wasn’t sure if Tully saw the two guys coming out from behind the camper, two man-mountains lumbering towards us.

“Come on now.” Nothing. “Please, Dad,” I begged. It was the please that did it, the surprise of it. Tully looked at me and then started towards me.

I didn’t wait for him to reach me. I was gone.

Out at the road I waited for Tully to catch up, leaning over with my hands on my knees, trying to catch my breath.

He was grinning at me as he strolled towards me. “You almost broke a landspeed record getting out of there, little girl.” “Contrary to what public opinion might say, I’m no fool.”

“You are a fast woman though.”

“Is that what public opinion says?”

“Not around me.”

“That guy was scary.”

“Well, I’m guessing that’s what he intended.”

“He totally convinced me, and the two others on their way to do you an injury were pretty convincing too.”

Tully laughed. “Told you it would take three good men to lick me.”

“Oh, they weren’t good men. Do you think those are the guys?”

“Maybe. What color are Ohio plates?”

“I don’t know. But that guy talked funny, northern. Call the cops and have them check them out.”

He didn’t say anything which was the same as saying no. Tully’s first thought would never be to call the cops.

“Uncle Ziggy never said anything about the tattooed man. It’s probably not them.”

“Zig never got a real good look at the guy that hit him.”

“What are you going to do?”

He didn’t say anything, just slouched along in that way of his.

Irritated and wanting to dig at him, I said, “You should wear runners out here instead of cowboy boots. Cowboy boots are stupid for anything but riding.” “I’ll remember that when I come back.”

I sprinted forward, grabbing his arm and jerking him around to face me. “Back?”

“I’d like to get a closer look. My nose tells me those fellas are doing some poaching. Gators likely, good market for them right now.” That statement begged another question I didn’t want answered. Lots of things about my father I just didn’t want to know. I followed him back to the truck in silence.

The sun was streaming down on my door handle so that when I reached out to open the door it burnt my hand. I jerked my hand away. “Shit.”

Tully climbed in and pushed open my door from the inside. The cab was a furnace — the seats burnt through my shorts.

“Let the cops handle it or the wardens. If they don’t get caught for what they did to Uncle Ziggy, they can get done for poaching.”

“A fine, nothing more.”

“At least something.” I could see by the hardness of his profile it wasn’t going to happen. Something in him demanded justice, wanted pain, the old eye-for-an-eye thing that went back to Adam and Eve. But there was nothing to keep me from calling the cops, was there?

He started the truck and pulled away. “How do you know that some of the wardens aren’t in on it?” Tully asked. “A few of them might turn a blind eye for a cut of the proceeds.”

“You really think so?”

“I know so.” He grinned at me.

“Man, you’re destroying my last belief in saints. I so don’t want to hear anything bad about them. If park wardens can be corrupted there’s no hope for the rest of us.”

“Some wardens feel there’s too many gators since they stopped hunting back in the sixties. For the last two years this park has let out licenses to hunt gators. Two thousand dollars per license and a hundred licenses each year, plus you have to pay for the people you bring with you. A quarter of a million dollars a year, that’s how much this park makes off gators. The park also gets money from the meat and the hides. You get about eight bucks a pound for the meat and a mature gator can dress out at about seventy-five to a hundred pounds. Then there are the hides. The belly is the most expensive bit, twenty-five to thirty dollars a foot. All and all you can make about a thousand bucks a gator. That gives the park another thousand dollars a license, over three hundred thousand each season. It’s a rich man’s sport. Rich guys are willing to pay big bucks for the fun of killing a gator.”

“It’s a crazy world,” I said and watched the wilderness slide by, deep green and tangled and jumbled together, a whole world outside the hard surfaces, lights and steel of my world. “Did you and Jimmy hunt gators?”

“No, we never got the chance.” His voice was full of regret. Jimmy had been like a son to Tully, a kindred spirit, and they’d fished and hunted together all over the state.

The truck rocked back and forth through potholes and rattled over a trestle bridge while I kept watch in the side mirror to make sure we weren’t being followed by the gator hunters.

As we approached the little kiosk, I asked, “Are you going to report them for parking in a closed campsite?”

Tully snorted with laughter. “Well, report them for poaching.”

He shot me a look I remembered from childhood. “Are you going to call the cops and tell them where to find Ziggy’s guys?”

“How do we know they’re the crew from Ohio?”

“Let the cops go out there and check. If they aren’t the ones we say, ‘Oh, sorry.’”

It so wasn’t going to happen. Well, not if Tully was going to do it but I could call Styles. How would Tully take to me going behind his back? And did I care?

We drove back to Cypress Island mostly in silence, deep in our own thoughts. Tully was planning something that didn’t involve calling any authorities. Did I want to be involved? Not really. A good rule of thumb is, if Tully Jenkins is involved it’s bound to end badly. The man is just a natural born screw-up.

The closer we got to town, the more I worried. As we rattled over the humpbacked bridge spanning the intra-coastal I asked the question I’d promised myself not to ask. “Are you going back there?”

“Yup.”

“Why?”

He laid on the horn as a tourist in an Avis rental pulled out in front of him barely missing the front bumper of the truck, which was fine; but then the tourist slammed on his brakes. I braced myself against the dash. I asked again, “Why?”

“Want to see if they’re from Ohio.” The tourist decided he was going the wrong way and made a U-turn, cutting off traffic coming towards us. More horns. “Going out there is a bad idea.”

“Well, it won’t be my first.” He grinned like a kid planning a raid on the cookie jar. The man just had no good sense.

“How? I mean are you just going to drive in there again? They won’t let you near their rigs. Maybe they’ve even packed up and moved by now.”

“Been thinking about that and you’re right. Those boys aren’t going to hang around. They’ll be gone by tomorrow. Maybe gone already. But my bet is they’ll wait ’til tomorrow. They’ll want to pull their hooks and they’ll know how slow anything involving authorities is, even if we reported them today, ain’t likely to be anyone out there to talk to them until tomorrow. They’ll be gone by then so I’m goin’ back today.”

“How?”

“They’re camped on the river mouth emptying into the north lake — Soldaat Lake it’s called. That river, well little more than a stream really, broadens into swamp with no way to really get a boat through to the lake. But there’s another stream that you can get a canoe down to Soldaat Lake. My guess is those fellas are taking gators out on the lake. That’s where I’d take them.” He grinned at me. “You can pull an electric boat up into the mouth of the river and not be seen, but no one can paddle up the other way and surprise you. Don’t want company if you’re doing a little poaching.”

I didn’t ask how he knew so much about poaching gators. Like in the army, my way of dealing with Tully’s alternative lifestyle was don’t ask, don’t tell. “So how are you going to get to the lake?”

“From the north, off Jefferson Road, a little creek feeds into Soldaat Lake. Just a nice easy paddle away from where I park the truck. Take about an hour and twenty minutes down the lake to the outlet of the river those boys are camped on. No sweat, little girl, I’ll get into their neighborhood real easy, see if they’re from Ohio and see if they’ve set any gator hooks on the lake.”

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Okay,” I said, nodding my head. “I’m coming with you.”

“What? No way! You almost wet yourself back there.”

“You aren’t planning on confronting them, are you?”

“No. Not planning that.” Somehow he didn’t sound all that convincing. I didn’t want to think about it, didn’t want to look too closely at all the ways this could go wrong. Like I said, Tully Jenkins had a history of disasters. “I’m coming with you,” I told him.

“Why do you wanna come?”

It was a sensible question and one I hadn’t worked out an answer to. But primarily I was hoping I could save him from himself, dampen down the violence and stupidity. With me along he’d be more cautious; at least I hoped he would. I kept those thoughts to myself and said, “Why should you have all the fun?”