Lost Man's River (98 page)

“One time a feller from St. Augustine, had him a zoo, he paid me to hunt him up some crocs. Sure enough, he shows up at my house at Flamingo—‘Got muh crocodiles?' I says, ‘Sure thing, got sixteen right out back.' Only thing, all he had out front was a pink Cadillac. ‘What in the hell you aim to
haul
'em in?' I says. ‘Muh crocodile car! That's her you're lookin at!' ‘Why hell,' I says, ‘I got me a croc back here that goes twelve feet! Fill that whole limmo-zeen!'
‘Twelve feet?'
he hollers. ‘I want that 'un
now
!'

“So we jump on that croc and rassle him around, roll him up into a ball, get him humped some way into the trunk, and that ol' tail whacked that Cadillac a lick that rung out like a dang mule in a tin stall. I fling the smaller ones in the backseat, they hit that velveteen just a-snappin and a-crappin, and this croc fancier don't mind one little bit. Takes off for St. Augustine bumpin the ground with the load of crocs he's got in there, left a big ol' ugly cloud of smoke right in my yard!

“Next time he showed up, he bought him a hen crocodile. Had a big hump on her shoulders, big as a coconut. Said, ‘That 'un don't look so good, my friend, I'll give you ten down and twenty-five on top if she goes two weeks.' So he sent a letter with no money in it, notified me she had upped and died. Well, the next year I was passin through St. Augustine, dropped in to see him, and there she was, my humped-up crocodile! Star of the show!

“So I says, ‘My, my, that sure is a purty little hen you got in there!' ” Speck nodded a little at this memory. “Well, you fellers know somethin? Darn it all if I ain't went and hurt his feelins! Cause he hollers out, ‘No, no, no,
no
! That ain't your purty little hen! Ain't her
at
all!' Speck nodded more. “That's the way we left it, cause she didn't have no pedigree nor nothin.” He shook his head over life's vicissitudes. “That feller had him a good head for the croc business, is what it was. That's how you get you one of them big Cadillacs, I reckon.”

Watching the others laugh, Speck remained somber. “If crocs was rocks, Christ could of walked acrost the water on some of them coastal bays east of Flamingo. I guess I could still find a few crocs in the Park, but I'd have to hunt for 'em. Today any crocodile you show me in the Park, I'll take you outside and show you five.” He spat into the flames. “I told them so-called scientists, ‘You're worried about them crocodiles but you're the ones to blame, cause you went down there and went messin with the nest. It's just like birds, you keep messin with the nest, they're goin to leave it. You went there and caught them crocs, put beepers on 'em, electrical fuckin apparatus to where you can hear 'em fart two miles away. It's like a horse, you tie a kerchief to his tail, he'll run hisself to death trying to get rid of it. Can't find no crocs to hang beepers on no more, but you still got the guts to wonder what become of 'em!' ”

Back in the forties, a man could see crocs from his car window on the Key West Highway, Whidden commented, poking the fire. When Andy teased him—“Probably gators!”—Whidden laughed, saying crocs weren't all that hard to tell from gators. Their range was coastal, and most were a green-gray color that was rarely encountered in a gator, even those that wandered down around salt water. True, the few crocs that turned up on the mangrove coasts north of Cape Sable were mostly the same black-brown color as the gators, so one had to look for the narrow snout and the big teeth protruding from both mandibles.

“Pertrudin from both manderbles, you said?” Speck's jeering was a reminder to his son-in-law that there was a real croc expert in this outfit who did not need these half-ass interruptions. “I might not know much about manderbles,” Speck said, “but I do know that to see a croc today, you got to organize a damn safari, and even then, you got to night-light 'em, and even then, all you might get is a puff of mud or a little far-off ripple out acrost the water. Them big old crocs are few and far between, and they ain't the only critters that are disappearin. Look at your sawfish, sea turtle, your manatees! Them big kind of wild critters was dirt common all around these rivers in our daddies' time! And plume birds—egrets! Since the Park took over and messed up the water, they are more few and far between than what they was back when they had the shit shot out of 'em by every cracker in south Florida! It's like I told Parks, If you go on like this, you'll have a big dead country on your hands, dead, dead, dead!—just dirty water and dry mud, and nothin stirrin in the saw grass and the mangrove, only wind.

“Us fellers finally give up on the poor fishin, give up on tryin to make a livin obeyin all them laws put through by them outsiders. Them fools love the heck out of Mother Nature, but they don't know nothin about the backcountry,
and never give a hoot in hell whether us damn natives lived nor died.

“We felt real bad when we had no choice but to go back gator-huntin, cause it's gators that digs the water holes that sees the fish and birds and snakes and turtles through the dry season. Trouble was, with the terrible drought brought down on 'em by all that drainin, even them scaly dinosaur damn things was startin to die out, so they shut down our markets for the hides. So us poor raggedy-ass home fellers, we had to go back to the midnight export business, same as our daddies and granddaddies done, bird plumes and liquor. Today it's mostly ordnance, munitions, tomorrow it might be marijuana dope—hell, it don't matter. The law can't catch us back amongst these mangroves and it never could.”

Moving sideways into the sea grape to relieve himself, Speck kept an eye on them, not in modesty but because in his swamp nature, with its wariness of a concealed presence, or anything approaching from behind, he would never be caught unaware out in the open.

Andy whispered, “Know something, Colonel?” He had intuited Lucius's torn mood. “I
do
like that ornery sonofagun, I just can't help it! I got to like just about anybody these days who cheers me up! But I never took him for a good man, cause he ain't.”

“Speck's some talker, all right.” Concerned about Sally, Harden peered off down the beach. “Enjoys hell out of his own stories, so everybody else gets a kick out of 'em, too. And he don't hide his thinkin, he tells it to you straight, least when he ain't lyin.”

“Straight and dirty,” Andy House agreed.

Daniels came out of the bushes yanking his zipper. Jerking a thumb in Whidden's direction, he bent to speak into Andy's ear, lowering his voice to a loud hoarse whisper. “One of them damn Hardens, now—and I ain't sayin which one, case he feels shy about it—we made him some big money before he quit, but he won't settle up the $700 he still owes me for nothin in the world but gas and groceries!” Daniels raised his eyebrows in disbelief, peering from one face to the next for a clue to such perfidious behavior. “Last time I seen him, he told me, ‘Speck, you'll get that money, don't you worry!' ” Here he paused to give Whidden a deadly smile. “And I told him, ‘Boy, I might
look
like a spring chicken, but I ain't gettin no younger and I want what I got comin!' Know what this young Harden says to a poor old man? Says, ‘Speck, if you kick the fuckin bucket fore you get your money, you won't have a worry in the world, and I won't neither!' ”

Andy said, “Your language ain't improved, I see.”

“Weren't
my
language! That was
Whidden
talkin!”

“There's a young lady down the beach, is all.”

Daniels lurched drunkenly around to stare off down the shore. Blinking to adjust his sight, he took his hat off and wiped his mouth roughly with the back of his hand. Sally had her back to him, and when she bent over from the waist, picking up seashells on the sandy point, Speck shaded his eyes against the sinking sun, the better to appraise the finer points of her hindquarters. When she straightened, he turned back to the men, visibly moved. “Well, she's a lovable little thing, I can see that.” He hitched at the crotch of his disconsolate old pants. “I sure hope I don't steal her off you fellers.”

“I hope so, too, cause that is your own daughter.”

“Good God A-mighty, Whidden! I forgot!” In prayer, Speck put his hand over his eyes. “Ain't life a pity? I mean, what is the world comin to when a man is begrudged a piece of his own daughter?” He watched Whidden's grin as it twisted off his face.

“That ain't no way to joke!” Andy protested.

“Ain't no way to joke?” Speck studied the blind man like a specimen, nodding his head over and over. In a cold flat voice he said, “I believe you was jokin some just now about my smell. You recollect that day over to Miami when I come into your gas station and you done the same? Well, next time I come to town, I dropped by to say I had a bath and lived to tell the tale! What do I find? A whole swarm of Cuban Spanish—loud radios, babies, big-fin cars, the whole fiesta! So I says to 'em, ‘Now what in the name of Jesu Cristo have you spicks gone and done with Andy House?' And one of 'em shows his teeth in a gold smile and lays his thievin fingers crost his eyes like the blind monkey. And he says,
‘Finito!
See Seen-yore! Seen-yore Andy ees
finito
!' ”

Speck nodded some more, undaunted by Andy's wide blue gaze. “ ‘See Seen-yore.' Them Cubanos told me all about you. So what you got to say about it? You
finito
? Struck blind for your sins by your First Florida Baptist God—I bet that's what your nice little missus decided! Probably decided you was spendin too much time layin on top of her—”

Andy grunted as if his wind had been knocked out. His big face looked slapped red. “Ol' Speck,” he said, tasting that name. “You sure don't change much.” He drew closer to the fire.

Daniels drew his flask out of his coveralls and helped himself to a hard snort before passing it around. Nobody took it. “Since when?” he challenged Lucius. “Since Gator Hook? Ain't gone to drink with a man that's on your list?” He took a few turns like a dog before settling slowly. Raising the flask, he toasted them all in an ironic sweep, and when he lowered it, he fastened on Whidden Harden, seeking a purchase. “That li'l Sally is a tough customer and then some,” he began. “Too tough for
me
. And she got you pussy-whipped, just like I warned you. Otherwise, you'd be back workin for me.
Workin out what you still owe me,” he added quickly, lest Whidden imagine he was wanted on his own merits, or that Speck Daniels might excuse old debts just because he was his son-in-law.

Whidden said, “You'll get your money. Comes in slower in the landscape business. Slow but sure.”

“Landscape business,” Daniels said, disgusted. “Whole fuckin state of Florida is in the landscape business.”

He gazed balefully at his own flask, turned it in his hand. When he spoke again, he tried halfheartedly to patch their mood. “Speakin about tough customers and pussy puts me in mind of one of Andy's cousins. Tried that stuff myself one time, didn't get nowhere! As Mud Braman's daddy used to say, ‘That darn ol' critter, she's so tight, her pussy gets to squeakin when she walks!' ”

“Speck?”

“Told me he
heard
it! Sound just like a mouse!”

“Speck? We all know you don't mean no harm, but don't go givin my cousin a bad name!”

“Well, she would of give
me
a bad name, Andy, and I didn't need it. I already had one!”

“Still takin care of the ladies pretty good, I see,” Whidden said, to smooth things.

“Ain't been no complaints, not lately.” Conspiratorial, Speck spoke from behind his hand. “Don't know too much about
ladies
, now, but I had me a certified piece of ass, I don't believe it was more than maybe four-five years ago. Ol' Diddley here stuck to my leg like a wet leaf for two weeks after, that's how whipped he was.” Cocking his head, Speck scanned their faces avidly for signs of outrage. “Schoolteacher, y'know.
Skinny
damn thing! I was pickin the bones out of my prick all winter!”