Racing the Rain (3 page)

When Reggie got ready to try the right again, Cassidy saw an opening and stepped in and hit him hard in the midsection with his left hand, sinking his little knot of a fist into the declivity under Reggie's sternum that Cassidy's cousin Henry called “the solar plexus, your opponent's secret off switch.”

Reggie's face lost its sneer and turned into a comic aggregation of circles, round eyes, and round mouth inside a round face. His hands dropped as he grabbed his knees and began struggling for breath, just as Cassidy had. Red faced now, he looked up at Cassidy almost in disbelief, and for a very brief moment Cassidy saw in his eyes something he was not expecting: a look of the old rapport they had had in their comic-book-trading days.

Cassidy lost a lot of his anger then, but not his will to finish this. As he stepped toward Reggie, thinking to get him in a headlock and wring the rest of the fight out of him, Reggie's middle brother, Dickie, stepped between them.

“All right, round one. Time-out,” he said. He had an unfiltered cigarette behind his left ear, and he was barefoot. He had a ballpoint “tattoo” on his biceps of a cross overlaid with a dagger dripping a single drop of blood.

“Huh?” Cassidy said.

“It's round one. Now we go to our corners and rest.”

“What corners?”

“It's just what they call it. You seen the Friday Night Fights, ain't you? Brought to you by Gillette blue blades in the handy dispenser? What'll ya have, Pabst Blue Ribbon?” He was helping Reggie over to where the oldest brother, Donnie, sat in the grass, smoking a cigarette and looking disgusted. He was in high school and had a work-study job at a gas station.

“My dad drinks the beer that made Milwaukee famous,” Cassidy muttered to no one in particular. But maybe Dickie had a point. None of the fights at Fern Creek Elementary ever had “rounds,” but Cassidy had to admit he had seen them on TV.

Fingering several sore places on his face, he trudged over to where Randleman and Carl Wagner were lying in the grass poking at some kind of woolly caterpillar with a twig.

“Pretty neat!” said Carl Wagner. “You really pasted him good!”

“Why didn't ya clean his clock when ya had the chance?” said Randleman.

“I don't know. I guess we're doing rounds,” Cassidy said.

“Rounds?” said Carl Wagner.

“Like boxing, on TV.”

“Aw, those old guys. Some of them are even bald! They don't look tough to me,” said Randleman, hard to impress as usual.

“They don't hit each other all that much,” Cassidy admitted. “They just kind of stand there and hug each other for a while and then the referee comes in and makes them stop. My dad likes it though.”

“Mine, too,” said Randleman. He had finally coaxed the caterpillar onto the twig and was holding it up for Cassidy to see. Carl Wagner reached over to run his finger down the bug's furry back and everyone shivered in disgust.

Cassidy flopped on his back, watching the low clouds sliding across the blue summer sky. He was still breathing hard.

“I have to go finish my decals,” said Carl Wagner, chewing dried cement from his forefinger. “Are you guys going to fight any more?”

Cassidy shrugged.

Stiggs helped him up, and he and Cassidy walked over to where the Harris brothers were sitting. Randleman stayed to hold Timmy back, and Carl Wagner was given custody of the caterpillar.

“Okay, Reggie,” said Cassidy. “Ding goes the bell.”

Reggie looked up at him, glanced at his brothers, then looked away. Cassidy couldn't believe it. He looked to Dickie, the apparent ringleader, for an explanation. Dickie looked away, too. The disgusted Donnie was already getting up to leave, rolling his pack of Luckies into the sleeve of his T-shirt.

“I'll be ready in a minute,” said Reggie, trying to salvage something.

“I'm ready now,” said Cassidy.

Reggie didn't say anything. Dickie was sitting cross-legged, looking down at the grass between his knees.

“I'm going to count to ten, then screw you guys, I'm going home,” said Cassidy. “One, two, three . . .”

Reggie wasn't going to get up, any fool could see that. But Cassidy felt he had to do something to give this nonevent some kind of arguable conclusion, so no one could ever say he chickened out.

When he finished counting and Reggie hadn't moved—hadn't even looked at him—Cassidy returned to the others. Carl Wagner was showing the caterpillar to his little sister, Suzie, who had wandered over with her so-called babysitter, Maria DaRosa, who wasn't much older than she was.

“What are you going to do with him?” Suzie asked.

“Well, we thought about eating him for dinner,” said Randleman.

Her eyes widened and she studied the others, ever on the alert for teasing. “You wouldn't!”

“They might,” said Maria DaRosa. “Boys are pretty stupid, you know.”

“Why not?” said Randleman. “Course, you have to skin them first.” More wide eyes.

“Cut it out, Randleman,” said Cassidy. “They're not going to eat him, Suzie.” Randleman was just trying to impress Maria, who was almost as good an athlete as most of the boys. But Cassidy knew she didn't impress easily.

“We could,” said Carl Wagner defensively. “My uncle Cliff said they eat bugs in survival school. He's a Ranger. And they had to drink water out of a stream that had green stuff growing in it!”

They all made noises of disgust. Citrus City had lots of lakes, but they were mostly clean. It was hard indeed to imagine how gross it would be to drink green slime, though they would have gladly watched someone else do it.

“Besides eating caterpillars, what are you all doing?” asked Maria DaRosa.

“Having a fight,” said Cassidy.

“With who?”

“Reggie Harris.”

“Where is he?”

Cassidy gestured behind him, but when he looked, Reggie and his brothers were gone.

“Come on, Suzie,” said Maria DaRosa. “Boys are stupid
and
boring.”

C
assidy stopped paddling with a nicety of judgment that allowed the canoe to glide the rest of the way, finally scrunching up onto the small beach on the intracoastal near the mouth of the Loxahatchee River.

His first love was now basketball, but he was small and skinny and regularly got trounced by the likes of Stiggs and Randleman, both of whom won much admiration on their junior high team. Cassidy, on the other hand, had had to skulk shamefacedly away from the list pinned to the bulletin board in the gym. He had not even made the first cut.

What he
was
good at was holding his breath underwater, at first a worthless skill until he found useful tasks to do while submerged, such as procuring various forms of dinner. He learned that grown-ups would shower him with high praise and rewards when he returned from water sports with one or more interesting entrées. He had become expert in the use of different kinds of pole spears and spear guns, but his favorite weapon was the Hawaiian sling, a sort of underwater slingshot.

Cassidy stowed the paddle in the back and took in the silence, resting in effort-induced contentment. The only sounds came from lapping wavelets and the light metallic scraping of a half dozen orange spiny lobsters in the front of the boat. Shirtless and barefoot, he got out carefully and—tides being second nature to him—pulled the boat up until it mostly lay on dry white sand, wrapping the painter round and round a cypress root. Fetching his net equipment bag from the boat, he dragged it over to a hurricane-felled palm tree and sat.

This was a good spot for mangrove snappers, but because they would be small, he decided against the Hawaiian sling he had been using all morning and instead began putting his pole spear together.

He didn't hear the slightest sound, but when he looked up from his task, he was staring straight into the eyes of the largest and scariest-looking creature he had ever seen, either in real life or in the movies. And he had seen an angry hammerhead shark in real life.

Cassidy's mouth dropped open, and though every molecule of his being was poised to flee, he didn't move. He stared wordlessly at the apparition.

It was obviously a man of some kind but unlike any he had ever seen. Cassidy's father was over six feet tall, but this man would have dwarfed him. And he was so muscular he looked like a caricature from the weight-gain comic book ads. The man was shiny from sweat and river water and was deeply tanned. Swamp muck coated his bare legs up to his knees. Cassidy was horrified to see a huge red leech attached to his thigh. He wore only cutoff army fatigues, dilapidated combat boots, no socks, and greasy burlap bags tied around his ankles. A sweaty reddish bandana circled his forehead. When he moved, Cassidy could see every strand of muscle gliding beneath taut skin.

Over one shoulder he carried a pair of wire animal traps, and over the other a live alligator that looked to be about four feet long, mouth neatly taped shut with electrical tape and feet bound together by pieces of clothesline. Tucked into his waist was a burlap bag full of something wiggling.

“Mind if I have a drink?”

The apparition dropped the traps where he stood, gesturing at Cassidy's canteen, which he handed over wordlessly. In one long gulp the swamp man all but drained it before handing it back without comment. Cassidy noticed the man's eyes held no malice, just intelligence and mild amusement, and he slowly let out some of the air he'd been holding.

The man placed the alligator gently under the shade of a palmetto bush, pulled the burlap bag from his belt, and tossed it down next to Cassidy before sitting matter-of-factly on the log beside him.

“You're that Cassidy kid,” he said.

Cassidy stared, still wide-eyed, before noticing movement at his feet. He looked down to see a small head poking tentatively out of the burlap bag. He involuntarily jumped when he saw it was a snake.

“Just black snakes,” the man said. He was holding a handful of powdery sand against the big leech on his leg, drying it out. After a few moments he carefully peeled off the now white-coated creature and tossed it out into the water.

“Darn things,” he said. “Must have picked him up setting traps in Otter Creek. But I guess even leeches gotta make a living.”

Cassidy sat back down next to the burlap bag, peering at the little creature now trying to slither out. He reached down in one motion and caught the snake behind the head and pulled it smoothly out of the bag, holding it up in front of him to admire. The swamp man watched him, saying nothing.

“He's pretty small, just a baby,” Cassidy said. The snake coiled around his wrist. Its skin was a beautiful greenish-black in a beam of strong sunlight.

“Found a whole nest of them about a mile upriver.”

Cassidy nodded, held the snake up again, then opened the bag and dropped it back in, twisting it several times and wrapping the top back up under the bottom to prevent more escape attempts.

“I see you got some bugs this morning.” The swamp man gestured toward the canoe, where the lobsters were still noisily scraping at their aluminum jail.

“Yes, sir.”

“They say you can go to forty feet and stay awhile. That true?”

“I guess maybe by the end of the summer. Can't right now. These were only at twenty feet or so, right along the inner reef line.”

The stranger looked at him, and Cassidy had the distinct impression he was being appraised.

“I know your dad,” the man said finally. “And your uncle Joe. You don't have to be afraid of me, son. I'm Trapper Nelson.”

Cassidy had been hearing about Trapper Nelson since he was little, and the stories were all so mythic, so gilded with hyperbole and heroic imagery he hardly knew what to make of them. Trapper Nelson was supposedly bigger and stronger than Paul Bunyan, had more powers than Superman, knew more about animals than Tarzan; he wrestled alligators for fun, laughed at poisonous snakes. He disliked civilization and lived back in the swamp way up on the Loxahatchee River, hunting and trapping for a living. He would supposedly eat just about anything that walked, swam, or crawled. No one knew more about the ocean, the swamp, or the river than Trapper Nelson. His purview encompassed both the creatures that dwelled in them and the tastiest methods for their preparation. That included possums, turtles, alligators, snakes, sharks, oysters, stingrays, conchs, manatees, catfish, and of course the more standard fare of snapper, grouper, mackerel, and snook. And it apparently included, Cassidy surmised from the man's frank and continuing interest, spiny lobsters.

Cassidy's older friends snickered that rich and beautiful ladies from Palm Beach would leave their oceanside mansions to come visit Trapper in his primitive compound on the river, and some reportedly spent the night. Famous and powerful men were brought around, men like Jack Dempsey and Babe Ruth, who would become giddy and childlike in his presence, awed by his strength and obvious mastery of the Florida wilds.

And here he was, sitting next to the larval Quenton Cassidy like they were waiting for a bus! Trying hard to keep his voice casual, Cassidy gestured at the alligator lying placidly in the shade.

“What are you going to do with him?”

“It's a her, I think. Haven't checked yet. They asked for a female. She's headed to a zoo outside St. Louis.”

“That's kind of sad.”

“Is it? She'll get fed regularly, be warm in the winter and cool in the summer. And she won't get eaten by some hungry twelve-foot cousin of hers. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me.”

“Well . . .”

“But the best part of it is I'm going to get seventy-five American greenbacks for her!” He laughed so loud that a pair of pelicans erupted from a nearby cypress and flapped away up the river.

Cassidy couldn't help but laugh, too, but he still felt bad for the little gator, destined to be ogled and hooted at by a bunch of white-kneed Yankees.