Acts of Nature

FOURTEEN

I knew that without my partner it was going to be a much harder pull, but I missed her more than I could calculate.
We were two hours into the trip back, twice the amount of time it had taken to make this leg to the Snows’ camp from the thick hammock of pigeon plum and strangler fig trees where the hidden camp may have survived the blow better than ours. I was hoping that the place had been sheltered by the trees and might be a serviceable resting spot. Now, after plowing through miles of water that had become a cluttered soup of floating, rootless vegetation, hope had turned into a prayer. I was envisioning beyond logical expectation a dry room, potable water, canned food of some sort, maybe even a battery-powered radio-phone. In the last hour my fear had grown that the latter was going to be a necessity if Sherry was going to survive with her leg intact.
In the still, flat light, I was watching her eyes while I stroked with the makeshift paddle I’d fashioned from the wall plaque. At first she’d been hyperalert, her eyes dancing from left to right, checking, assessing, nervous like a kid riding in the jump seat and watching the landscape go by when she really wanted to be facing the destination instead of having her back to it. She would grimace with pain each time the canoe slid up with a jerk onto some flotsam that stopped us with its thickness. More than a dozen times already I’d had to climb out into waist-deep water and pull us through shallows, fearful of steering us around them too far and taking the chance of getting off the direct line of GPS coordinates. Each time I pulled from the front, my handhold next to Sherry’s shoulder, my eye checking the pulse in her neck. Once refloated, I would get her to drink more water from the bottles, even when she argued, correctly, that we needed to conserve.
“You’re the engine, Max,” she said. “I’m just the passenger. If you run dry we’re both sunk.” I caught her repeating the same line an hour later, and Sherry rarely repeated herself. I started watching her eyes for signs of delirium. When they closed, for rest or out of exhaustion, I watched her lips to see if she was mumbling to herself. I kept talking to her, nothing complicated or even specific, just ramblings to keep her the slightest bit focused. Maybe to keep me focused too.
Now I was talking about springtime in Philadelphia, telling her about the blossoms on trees along East River Drive in Fairmont Park and how you could smell the aroma, even out in the middle of the Schuylkill River when you were rowing. While I talked I kept my eye on a marker, a clump of unusually high sawgrass, that I’d set using the GPS. One leg at a time, I thought to myself. I talked about high school, the guys in the neighborhood and some of the girls, piling onto the Broad Street subway at the Snyder Avenue station and riding down to the Vet on a Saturday night to see the Phillies play. We’d get Mitchey Cleary, whose older brother was a beer vendor, to slip us soda cups half full of Schmidts and then sit up in the cheap, seven-dollar seats and yell all night for Von Hayes to rap one out of the park to us in center field. I saw Sherry smile at that one, just a slight rise at the corners of her dry, cracked lips, maybe thinking about the beer. When I started going on about stopping off at Pat’s at Wharton and Passyunk for cheesesteaks I realized I was punishing even myself by bringing up food and drink and I stopped.
“We’re gonna be there in a little bit, Sherry. How’s the leg feel? Can you still move your toes?”
I was hoping for circulation and secretly worrying about infection, maybe even gangrene. The Glades is notorious for the waterborne bacteria and microbes that break down the vegetation and could have easily made it into her bloodstream through the open slash in her thigh and even onto the exposed bone before she was able to pull it back in.
“I’m OK,” she said softly, her first words in over an hour though she still did not open her eyes when she said them.
“Tell me more about the spring, Max. Tell me about trees. The shade. Tell me you love me, Max.
I thought again of delirium. What was the treatment? Shit. Had she answered my question?
“I love you, Sherry,” I said. “We’re going to be there in just a little bit.”
It was raining again by the time I looked up from a more determined pace. I was stroking as deeply as I could, feathering out the rhythmic repetitions, trying to block out everything but the reach, pull-through, kick out with as little interruption of momentum. I’d been repeating this motion for years paddling out on my river, even in darkness with only the light of the moon to guide me, up to the dyke flow and back, working the edges off whatever new rock was in my head. I could do it now, through exhaustion.
The drops of rain on my head mixed with the sweat and ran into my eyes and the sting finally made me look up. I wasn’t sure how long I’d been cranking but in the distance I could finally see what might be the remains of the hammock. From half a mile out, the dark rise of trees made the little island look like it had been sheared in half. A couple of taller spikes formed odd-looking inverted Vs against the background of pale sky. I took a break, fed Sherry the last of the bottled water we had, and then drank myself from the bailing scoop I’d fashioned from the Snows’ coffee can. I’d convinced myself that the rainwater would be pure enough to keep me hydrated and whatever else got mixed in with it from the bottom of the canoe would just have to be ignored. The bands of rain from the back end of the hurricane had followed us along the path but now the bottom of the boat was filling too fast for that to be the only source. My jury-rigged job with the duct tape was failing. The canoe was leaking. Glades soup was seeping in and trying to swamp us, but there wouldn’t be a fix now. If the darkening mound out there in front of us wasn’t the one we were looking for, or if the camp inside its sheltering trees was blown away, we were in deep trouble. I bailed while I rested and then reached out to touch Sherry’s foot. No reaction. I got to my feet and with my hands on either side rail of the canoe I leaned forward. I could still see the pulse in her neck so I sat back in my seat, began paddling again, head down, the pace a step faster than before.

I checked the GPS twice, three times, as we approached the island. The electronics were the only thing that could convince me. This was the place, but it looked nothing like the thick green, idyllic hammock we’d passed four days ago. The lushness was stripped away. Simone’s winds had brought down the long graceful limbs of cypress and dumped them onto a mud-covered web of mangrove and what at one time might have been a fern bed. The taller trees now showed the splintered white wounds from where their branches had been ripped away and I was immediately reminded of Sherry’s once-exposed thigh bone, and then pushed our way into the hammock’s interior, looking for the structure of the camp, hoping.
It was easily midafternoon by now and the light was already failing. I finally had to get out and pull the canoe through a nest of tangled grass. I stumbled and jerked the boat to one side and Sherry gasped in such a high, keening tone I went to her side and couldn’t stop repeating, “Sorry, babe, sorry, sorry, sorry.”
She was grimacing, probably a good sign. And she reached down to put a hand on the injured thigh, another indication that she knew her pain and was still cognizant of where it was coming from. While I’d still been paddling I’d set the open cooler out in the space between us trying to catch whatever rainwater would accumulate inside. I now poured it carefully into one of the empty bottles and held it to her lips. She drank, almost greedily, until it was done.
“We’re here, babe. I’m going to go find the camp,” I said to her closed eyes. She tightened her lids and weakly whispered “OK.”
“I’ll be right back.”
I picked up the flashlight we’d brought and stepped easily but with a purpose, worried about the sharp branch points and possible sink holes that could end up leaving two injured on the island. I had to climb over a couple of downed tree trunks to get to higher ground and then started looking for a leaning tree trunk that I might climb to get a higher view. I was looking for the edge of a structure, an unnatural right angle, a glint of metal or a flat plane of painted wood. About a hundred yards from the canoe I found the thick secondary limb of a tree that was partially down but still attached to the higher main trunk. I climbed it on all fours until I gained some height. From here I could see edges of water to the southeast and then picked up the shape of bent metal directly to the west. The color was dusty copper but there was also a patina of green at its edges, an old-time sheet metal roof, popular out here and similar to the one on my own river shack. It wasn’t more than fifty yards away and probably would have been invisible under the cover of the tree canopy but stood out now through the stripped branches. I traced a path through the vegetation that would offer the least resistance and then jumped down to follow it.
The angles became clearer within minutes. After wading through a couple of low mud bogs and climbing over several downed trees I began to make out the body of the structure, wood paneling that had turned ash gray from the weather, but was standing straight, an optimistic sign. By the time I reached the raised platform of the camp, my hope was rising. The building, simple and square, was intact but for the metal roof at the northwest corner that had been peeled back by the wind, the angle I’d seen from my tree stand. There was some splintered damage below it in the wall, but the deck planks seemed untouched though the film of mud told me that water had risen over them at one point. The windows were all shuttered with the old-style, wood-slat covers, but when I bent to look up through the spacing of those slats, there appeared to be some other kind of barrier besides glass behind them. I walked around to the south side, found the only door, and tried the handle. Locked. And locked tight. The lock set was made of stainless steel but had oddly been painted some kind of faux iron. I shook it hard and then gave the middle of the door a substantial butt with my shoulder, half of my weight behind it. Not a budge or even the slightest give. The builder had been very careful.
I circled back to the northwest corner to see what the storm damage might offer and found a possibility. The west side was more exposed than the southeast where we’d approached. There were the remnants of a canal that was now choked with branches but navigable. I could row Sherry around and get her very close. Under the bent roof corner the siding was peeled away by the fingers of the wind and there was a black, open space in the top three feet of the wall, an opening big enough for a man to climb through. I dragged a downed tree limb across the deck and propped one end against the wall and used it as a step up and then took a good jump, high enough to get a grip on the bottom slat of ruined paneling and pulled myself up. Hanging with one arm I got the flashlight and shone a beam inside. There was space and something gray- white below, possibly a bed, straight down the inside wall. Two wall studs were still in place but I could probably squeeze my chest between them and drop, headfirst, inside. I felt like some amateur cat burglar in a half-assed break-in, but figured if I could get inside I could unlock the door and search the place. I put the flashlight back in my pocket—I hate that thing where Tom Cruise puts the flashlight in his mouth while he’s being lowered into some dark fortress. He’s going to fall and gag himself with that thing someday. Then I got a good grip on an exposed ceiling joist and pulled myself halfway up and through the wall opening. After much shimmying and tearing of clothing and clunking of boot soles, I managed to drop to the inside, hands extended out, and found my first bit of luck by half-falling onto the edge of a bed before landing on the floor. It was noisy and graceless, but there wasn’t anyone within miles to hear or even care.
Only the dull streaks of light seeping through the hole I’d created gave the room any illumination. And I must have been dunking of some kind of cop thing from my past because I rolled first, staying low, and then stayed silent. Finally I slipped the flashlight out and scanned the place: Table and two chairs. Kitchen cupboards and sink against one wall. Two beds, bare mattresses, lined up foot to foot against my wall. There was something like a desk against the third wall, next to the outside door. All the windows were darkened and I used the flashlight beam to help me move to the door but still banged the corner of the table with my thigh and the scraping noise it made as its legs dragged across the floorboards made me shiver. Not a scared shiver, but unsettling, like I’d moved something that had not moved in years. I found the doorknob, stainless and substantial and locked. I twisted out the button, tried it, and when the door still didn’t move I scanned higher and found another heavy-duty deadbolt and snapped it unlocked. It took a couple of yanks to get the door open; the frame was probably warped out here in the humidity and heat. I swung it wide to let the natural light stream in, and the outside air actually smelled fresh compared with what spilled out of the old place. I took a useless look around the deck and then stepped back inside.
The light did little for the place. There were no pictures, hanging fish trophies, or even a calendar on the walls. There were no magazines on the table, no coffee cups filled with pens on the bare desktop, no dishes in the sink drainer. But mounted on the wall above the kitchenette counter was a blue and white metal box labeled FIRST AID KIT. I slid it off its hooks and went through the contents: rolled bandages, tape, antibiotic cream and a bottle of antiseptic, some sterile gauze pads, and a thermometer. There was even some insect repellant and aspirin. I could probably wait to re-dress Sherry’s wound here, but the aspirin and bug dope I would take back to the canoe. I set them aside and then moved down to what appeared to be a half-size refrigerator at the end of the counter. Inside there were three half-gallon plastic jugs of water, at which I smiled. I took one out, noted that the top was still sealed, and then twisted it off. I still took a precautionary whiff of the contents and then drank in long gulps. I had not realized how dehydrated I’d become from the rowing and the heat that, despite the cloud cover, had drained me. I even contemplated pouring some of the water over my head in the sink but then thought better of the conservation of the gift. Who knew how long we might have to stay here? After another drink I looked again inside the refrigerator and found two old cans of Del Monte sliced peaches and a single wrapped package. Inside the plastic package, surrounded by tinfoil, was a bar of solid chocolate about the size of a man’s wallet. Since the refrigerator was without power, the chocolate was the consistency of warm butter, but I still pulled off a piece from the end and devoured it. The energy is what I needed, sugar to snap some of my dulled synapses back into shape. I took another gulp of water and with a clearer eye looked around the room again. The door to the second room was off-center and to the right. I stepped over to it but my eye picked up the flash of a metal box against the frame at chest level. I used the flashlight again and found myself looking at a digital locking device. I’d seen them many times before. But why the hell does someone have one on a room out in the middle of the Everglades?
I punched at the top row of buttons, numbered for a combination. No response, though without power I wasn’t expecting it. I examined the door more closely, then gave it a shoulder. Nothing. I put some weight behind the next one. Thing was solid. I knocked at the flat surface with the butt end of my flashlight. The sound was distinctly metal, and then I banged on it a few more times at an angle. By scraping off some paint I could see that someone had taken pains to paint a faux wood design on what was a substantial metal door. My only thought was that something valuable was inside. You don’t build an extra-heavy-duty safe room without something to keep safe inside of it. But the guesses were endless out here: Food? Hunting weapons? I swept the flashlight through the room again. Not a clue. This side of the place was sparse. Too sparse, in fact.
“Hell with it,” I said out loud and the sound of my own voice went dead in the thick air. I snatched up a water bottle, left the front door open, and stepped out onto the porch and checked my handheld GPS. I figured to go through the brush again and then row the canoe around. I could pull Sherry out next to the deck and then get her inside on the bed. Maybe I’d overlooked some blankets, something to keep her covered. I’d tackle the locked room later. Maybe it was the sugar hitting the back of my head, maybe the sharper image now of Sherry’s leg, still propped and bound in the bow of the canoe without me there to watch her. But suddenly I wanted her inside, somewhere safe. The light was seeping out of the late afternoon sky now and even though the coming darkness would be no more intense than any other time out here, I did not want to be exposed again.
When I had climbed and slogged and ducked through the beaten hammock to the canoe and spotted Sherry’s head through branches in the distance, I called out her name but the dark blondness of her hair did not move, and it scared me.
“Sherry!”
No answer. No movement. I started crashing through some downed poisonwood.
“Sherry!”
Her hand came up, palm facing away from me, fingers straight up and stiff, not a sign but a signal and I stopped. I tried to see beyond her, into the bush and the twig mass that I’d dragged the canoe through to its resting spot. I kept my vision low, water height, and then tried to move slowly.
Ten yards closer and I spotted the nostrils, like moss- covered walnuts resting on an equally dark log. But these were too symmetrical and behind them, maybe a foot, two hooded black marbles shone. It was hard to tell how big he was from where I stood, or whether he was on a solid mass of vegetation or still floating. I have seen gators get up on all fours and charge with amazing speed. But under most circumstances they like to lay quiet, like a spring trap, and snap their prey with a speed and strength that seemingly comes from nowhere. This one might have been stalking Sherry, or her scent, moving at incremental inches until it was at striking distance. My rustlings in the hammock seemed not to have distracted it in the least. Usually, man-made noise, a passing airboat or even shouting and the whacking of boat paddles, caused the animals to whiplash their tails and dive down and away into any nearby water. Usually. What the passing hurricane had done to the flow of nature was unpredictable and I was not going to guess the mood of this monster. Last year a woman jogger who had simply stopped along the edge of the lake in a Broward County park to dip her feet in the water was snatched by a fourteen-footer, pulled into the lake, and dismembered. With gators there was no such thing as predictable.
I was thinking strategies and to go along with them I picked up a good sturdy limb that had been sheared from an old-growth mahogany above. I set down my supplies and pulled my knife from its scabbard and started hacking strips off one end of the limb, half a dozen downward strokes, the blade so sharp it slid through the two-inch diameter stake like it was putty, and left a glistening, bone-colored point. You could poke ’em. I’d seen the wildlife resource officers for the state maneuver even the nasty ones by poking them with long-handled nooses and then roping them. But I had no such interest. Just a poke in the snout if the thing came forward. Maybe a jab in the throat if he opened that mouth of his. I took hold of the stick like a foolish caveman and moved toward Sherry. When I got next to her she cut her eyes to me and whispered in a raspy voice: “Jesus, Max. What the hell are you going to do with that?”
Adrenaline had perked her up. She was fully conscious.
“Hell if I know,” I answered as truthfully as I could and handed her my knife.
“And what the hell am I going to do with this?”
The gator snuffled, I swear, and let out a whoof of air that rippled the water in front of him but he did not move.
My insane reaction was to yell at the top of my lungs and then lunge out at the animal, bringing the broom-length staff of mahogany down with a sharp swat on the surface of the water. The spray erupted in front of the beast’s face and in response it snapped out with amazing quickness and bit the end of the stick and pulled it from my grasp.
“Shit,” I said, and reached back into the canoe, fingers searching, and found the long metal staff of Big Bertha that I’d tossed in the boat at the cabin. I whipped the headless golf club out and it whistled past the gator’s nose, and he seemed momentarily awed by the sound. He froze but I did not. I reloaded for a second shot and this time I lunged and stabbed at the thing’s face, jabbing at the nose but missing and unintentionally sticking the end of the metal shaft a good three inches into its eye socket.
The gator did not roar, did not make any sound at all but spun his huge body away and the slew of his huge tail sent a wave at us, catching me up in the chest as if a ski boat had just peeled by, and when I shook the water from my vision I saw the ass-end of the gator slipping through the greenness headed in the opposite direction.
We were frozen in silence for a few beats, listening to the rustle in the brush echo away, listening to me breathe in gradually slowing gulps, listening, each of us, to our own heartbeats trip down.
I finally turned to Sherry and it appeared as if she had not moved since I left her. Her face was sallow; either sweat or water from the gator splash had covered her face. But at the corner of her mouth was a tickle of a grin.
“I would have just shot the bastard,” she said, and the tickle went to both sides.
I retrieved the fresh water for her, which she drank carefully and also with one of the aspirin. I then gave her the package of chocolate, which she started to gobble, but thought better and licked more than bit at the mushy bar. I told her about the cabin, that it was intact and that there were some medical supplies but nothing that was going to help much with the pain.
“Just get me inside, Max. The pain I can deal with.”
I backed the canoe out and climbed in. There was now a good four to six inches of water in the bottom but I didn’t bother bailing. I could remember the route I’d figured from the treetop and we paddled around to the water entrance of the cabin in less than twenty minutes.
“How long was that thing lying there watching you?” I finally asked as we got underway. I was still cutting my eyes in either direction, watching for unnatural ripples.
“Seemed like forever,” Sherry said from the bow. “Probably as long as we were watching him over the past few days.”
The water and no doubt the chocolate had raised her energy and her humor.
“Wally?” I said.
“Same beady eyes,” she said and again the smile had partially returned.
She whimpered only once when I lifted her out of the canoe and set her on the deck. The splint was holding up. But when I carried her through the entrance of the cabin and lay her down on one of the beds, I came away with a dark bloodstain on my shirt sleeve and right hip. I got out the first aid kit, ignored the scissors and used my own sharp knife to cut away the duct tape and then the old sheet bandages, and finally more of the leg of her sweatpants.
Her thigh was swollen, maybe from infection, maybe in combination with the tightness of the wrapping. The skin around the wound was puckered and white and I guessed that it was from the constant moisture. Keeping anything dry out here was a struggle. Under these conditions, impossible. I laid the knife next to her and then poured the alcohol onto the wound and used the sterile gauze to clean it. Sherry watched but didn’t make a sound even when I picked up the flap of skin and poured more into the gash. I slathered on the antibacterial cream and then used the other sterile pads to cover and then wrap the thigh with another gauze roll, not as tight as before. She needed antibiotics, probably a straight IV drip, probably a drip with all kinds of fluid to hydrate, fight the sure infection, stop the possibility of gangrene.
“OK,” I said. “Let’s get your shoes off, make you comfortable.”
She was already looking around the room.
“Anything in the back room? Radio? Keys to the helicopter?”
I pulled off her mud-covered shoes, those funky red Keds with the yellow laces.
“Haven’t gained entry yet to check it,” I said and used the alcohol-soaked gauze to clean her toes and get a take on their color. I was looking for pinkness, hoping for circulation.
“Yeah, gained entry,” she said in a mocking tone. “I see the digital lock, Max. What’s up with that?”
I was concentrating, very carefully poking the pads of her toes with the sharp tip of a corner of the aluminum medicine tube, hoping for reaction, but getting none.
“You saw the digital lock, right, Max?”
She couldn’t feel her toes. I needed to get her out of here to a hospital.
“Yeah,” I said, standing up. “I gotta check that out. Who the hell does that out here, right?”