Acts of Nature

TWENTY-ONE

The kid was skinny and awkward looking in a coltish way and his baseball cap was turned around backward on his head. His legs looked like sticks in a couple of denim bags and the long- sleeved shirt he was wearing draped on his shoulders as if on a hanger, the cuffs flapping down to his fingertips. He did not say a word. No “Howdy stranger.” No “Yo, what up?” No “Wow, somebody survived.” Nothing. Just a stare.
I stepped out toward the edge of the plank foundation and started to say something when a voice called out from my immediate left and the sound of another person’s words caused an uncharacteristic startle that made my neck snap in the direction of the sound.
“Hey, mister. How you doin’?”
It was another young man, dressed the same as the other but missing the hat. He may have been older, his neck more filled out, shoulders carrying some meat. His hair was buzz cut and instantly reminded me of police trainee academy, or maybe one of those juvenile detention camps.
I started to say, “Hey, are we glad to see you,” but I held my tongue, some taste of wariness stopping me. It did not take me more than a couple of seconds to realize that by their positions, I was being flanked.
“Well, guys, I could be better,” I said instead and stopped my forward motion. In fact, I took a step back, not an obvious retreat, but at a slightly angled step so that it was not as difficult to see both of them at the same time with my peripheral vision. I want the move to come off as polite, not tactical.
“That was your airboat I heard,” I said, not a question, a statement. A question can put you in a subservient position, like you want something, like you don’t know as much as they know, like you’re not in charge. A street cop does not ever want to be in a subservient position to people he does not know. I learned this years ago, dealing with pimps and pushers and just plain a*sholes on my beat sector of South Philly. They are lessons best not forgotten and suddenly they were boiling up in the back of my head like the prickly sensation on my neck.
“No. That would be my airboat you heard, friend.”
The voice came from my right and behind, more disconcerting because I was more vulnerable and because the deep sound of it was older, more mature, more confident. I hid my startle this time and turned with, I hope, a normal, easygoing attitude.
This visitor was not wary. He planted his big palms on the deck, swung a leg up, and mounted the platform like a rodeo cowboy mounting a horse. He was athletic. His forearms were cabled with muscle. He was not as tall as my own six- foot-three, but he was easily fifteen years younger, and even more disconcerting than his boys, he was smiling. A smiling stranger in the middle of the Glades after a major hurricane trashed the area. I did not trust any inch of him.
I turned my head to check any movement by the others and noted that they’d held their positions. The smiling man took one step closer and offered his hand, reaching out as though respecting my space. He was acting friendly. He was being careful.
“Bob Morris,” he said in introduction and I reached out, holding my own spot, and took his hand.
“Max Freeman.”
“Pleasure, Mr. Freeman,” the man said, then looked out past me. “Come on in, boys, don’t be rude. This here is Mr. Freeman.”
I was checking the man’s eyes. They were a gray so pale that they were almost colorless, and unflinching. His shirt was canvas and washed too many times. When he took my hand I noted that his own was soiled in cracks and under the fingernails and now I saw the smudges of dirt along the hard muscle of his neck tendons. He had been out for some time in this swamp, handling dirty things. The other two scrambled up onto the deck with less grace but still the kind of lithe comfort that you see in farm boys, or in this part of the country, young boat hands.
“We was kinda surprised when you came out, Mr. Freeman. Didn’t expect to find nobody out here after that ’cane blew through,” the man who called himself Morris said.
I offered nothing. Let him tell it. Let me get a sense of it. Sometimes silence encouraged them.
“We, uh, own our own camp just up the way to the northwest there toward Immokolee and were just out to see the damage and, you know, she was hit pretty bad,” he continued.
I nodded knowingly. “It was one hell of a storm.”
“Yep, she was.”
Morris looked at the boys and they all nodded their heads in agreement that a hurricane that ripped down walls and sailed roofs away and flattened hundreds of acres of tough sawgrass was indeed a hell of a storm.
“So how’d you make out?” I said, matching the simplicity of their language, maybe leveling some playing ground here, trying to come off as nonthreatening. The boys cut their eyes to Morris.
“Oh, well, we got hit pretty good up there,” he said. “Most we could do was a bit of salvaging, you know, a few things we probably shouldn’t have left out there in the first place.
“So, you know. We figured since we was out, maybe we should stop on our way back south and see if any of our neighbors needed help. You’re the first person we run in to. So, you OK, Mr. Freeman? Is there anything we can do?”
I thought of Sherry on the cot in the room behind me. Yeah, these guys seemed a little hinky. Their approach, seemingly surreptitious and planned, put me on edge. Their appearance, like a band of salvagers at sea, was not altogether unrealistic out here in the Glades. I’d spent time with some far-flung Gladesmen and to call them a rough bunch could be considered a kindness. When the Morris guy had turned to point where they’d left their airboat, I had studied the swing of his loose shirt and seen no lump or catch to indicate he was hiding a weapon in his waistband. And out here those willing to use a firearm were more proud to show them than to be sneaky about it. I checked each of their eyes one more time, not that I had a choice.
“Yeah, you could,” I finally said to Morris. “I’ve got a friend inside who is badly hurt. She’s got to get medical help as soon as possible.”

They filed into the room behind me and I wasn’t sure what look was on my face when Sherry watched me lead them in. She had forced herself up onto one elbow. Maybe she had been listening. Maybe she’d heard my reticent voice. She was faking alertness, I knew, because the glossiness in her eyes did not match the relative strength of her posture.
“This is Sherry Richards,” I said. “We got knocked around quite a bit by the storm and she’s broken her leg. It’s a bad fracture and I’m not sure how much blood she’s lost but we’re going to have to get her to a hospital.
“Do you guys have a way to call in a rescue helicopter? They could probably get out here before it gets too dark.”
Morris touched the bill of his baseball cap and stepped forward. “I am really sorry to see your pain, ma’am. We will surely do whatever we can do.”
Morris could see behind Sherry’s front of strained focus. He could tell she was hurting and stepped forward again, not enough to be pushy or in a way that could be taken as impolite, but seemingly out of concern. He let his eyes move from her face down to the heavily bandaged leg.
“Y’all think you’d be able to move, ma’am? If we could get to the boat, I mean. She’s a bit of distance through the hardwood yonder.”
Sherry was watching the man’s eyes, just like I had, just like any cop, assessing, with whatever lucidity she had left.
“I’ll do whatever I need to do, Mr., uh, Morris, was it?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said and men turned to me. “You see, Mr. Freeman, we done lost a lot of equipment over to our place. All our radio stuff was dunked wet and lost. And the only cell phone we got, we ain’t had much luck with. Figure that the towers and all were probably knocked down by the storm.”
He was looking past me at the boys when he said this, as if for confirmation. When I turned to see their reaction I caught one of them, the thicker one, looking at the metal door to the other half of the cabin. He could not have missed the electronic locking mechanism next to the frame and was perhaps puzzled by it.
“Well, sir. We do have some fresh water on board we could bring in and we can take a look for anything we might use for some kind of a stretcher or something,” Morris said. “Is there anything inside the other room there that you figure might help us on that account, Mr. Freeman?”
I hesitated, and then lied, not knowing for sure whether a guy like Morris was perceptive enough to recognize the hesitation.
“The door is locked up,” I said, nodding to the obvious mechanism that none of them had missed by now. “So I’m not sure what’s in there. And to be honest, with your boat we could probably be to the state park ramp in just over an hour so I’m not sure we’re going to need anything more, Mr. Morris.”
The man looked again straight into my eyes, a practice that by now was a little unnerving, and when he smiled that little faux-friendly, backwoods smile again I felt my fingers start to flex. The testosterone of fight or flight was leaking down into my fist from somewhere back in my brain.
“OK, then. Why don’t we just go see what we can get from the airboat to see how we might get the missus out of here,” Morris said pleasantly.
When all three of them moved toward the door, my first thought was that they would leave us. In a few minutes we would hear the engine start and they would pull out to continue on their way. They don’t need us, we need them.
“How about if one of you stays to help me break down this other bed,” I said. “You know, maybe we can use the frame as a gurney and all four of us could lift her through the trees.”
They all stopped, the boys looking at Morris.
“Now there’s some thinking, Mr. Freeman. Sure. Wayne, stay here and help with that idea. We’ll go get some tools and whatnot from the boat and plan out a path. That just might work.”
Again the smile, which also stopped the beginning of a protest from the one called Wayne.
“We’ll be back directly,” Morris said and then he and the other boy walked out. I heard them splash as they jumped down from the deck and all I could do was hope that they wouldn’t look carefully under the foundation and notice the opening left by the trapdoor that I’d forgotten to close under the next room. As the sounds of their movement faded, I watched the sullen look on the kid’s face deepen. He might have been wondering if he too was being left behind.
“So, Wayne,” I said, reminding him that the older guy had already let his name out, a betrayal to some degree. “Let’s see about using this bed as a trauma cot.”
He looked over as I pulled the other bed frame out away from the wall.
“I tried to break it down some already,” I said, pointing to the metal strapping where I’d removed my impromptu pry bar. “Maybe you can figure a better way. You look like you might be the mechanical one of your brothers.”
“They ain’t my brothers,” Wayne said, bending to pull at one corner of the frame with his left hand.
“So, your name isn’t Morris?”
“No. It ain’t.”
“You kind of look alike,” I said, interviewing, and hoping it was not too obvious.
“No, we don’t,” the kid said.
I was guessing that he might be fifteen or sixteen, but on closer inspection, the barely discernable mustache he was trying to grow made me think he was possibly older, just a little behind in maturity. A follower? A simple ride-along? When I was still a cop in Philadelphia, I’d shot and killed a twelve- year-old tag-along who had joined one of his buddies for a late-night convenience store robbery. I’d been responding to an alarm and when the first guy out of the store took a shot at me, splitting the muscle and tendon in my neck, I returned fire and hit the second person out, a child who took the 9mm slug in the middle of the back. Just a boy, dead at the scene. It was the event that led to my resignation for medical reasons. It was the reason I’d come to South Florida to escape my inner-city dreams. Maybe it was part of the reason I was standing here, stuck to some natural destiny.
“Let’s flip it over,” I instructed. “It might be easier to disassemble these legs. It will be a lot easier to move that way.” I started to turn my end and the movement forced the kid to expose his left hand for the first time. I’d noted his reluctance from the moment I’d seen him standing in the open, his shirtsleeves hanging down past his fingertips, his hand held slightly behind his hip. At first I’d thought—weapon. A handgun or even a knife. Now as he reached to twist the metal frame of the bed, I saw that he was missing his thumb. The scar told me it wasn’t something that happened at birth. It was a definite injury and one he was careful about showing. I thought of the round, quarter-size scar of white tissue on my own neck where the bullet on the street had burrowed through. I had not caught myself reaching for it in quite some time. I’d lost the habit, if not the memory of killing a child.
Wayne got down on his knees to inspect the bolt system on the legs of the cot and then looked around.
“Y’all got any tools?”
I was right about his mechanical inclination.
“I had to bend the metal of that strap to get it off, just worked it until it broke,” I said.
“Yeah, I seen that,” Wayne said, like I’d pulled some third- grader stunt on the thing. He got up and I watched as he walked to the sink, now disregarding me. He went through a drawer and came out with some silverware—a spoon, a couple of butter knives with blades so dull they’d have a time cutting butter. I’d passed them all over on my earlier inspection.
“So none of you guys seem to be injured from the hurricane,” I said, continuing my interview. “Your place must have held up pretty well.”
“Yeah,” he said, giving up nothing more. Not a storyteller.
I watched the kid set to the bolts, using the straight lengths of the two knife handles to pinch the metal nuts in parallel and then turn them. The fingers of his left hand worked in an odd but efficient manner, making up for the loss of his thumb. He’d adapted. Maybe this kid had never heard of the evolution of the opposable thumb that let man crawl out of swamps like this one a million years ago. Right now I was hoping for a little less sophistication in his perceptiveness.
“Mr. Morris said your camp was up to the northwest, so are you all from Belle Glade or Clewiston or what?” I said.
“Hell, no,” the kid reacted, like I’d put him in some rival high school. He started to go on but thought better of it.
“How ’bout I loosen these up and you can finger twist ’em off, sir,” he said instead, looking over at me before moving on to the next leg.
“Yeah, sure.”
I changed positions with him and we worked together. The kid was either naturally closed-mouthed or savvy enough not to let loose any more information about himself and his buddies than he was forced to. His could be an attitude from too many times in the backseat of a police cruiser or in the local juvenile lockup, or a simple backwoods avoidance of people unlike himself. A perceptive kid would have noticed the difference in our clothing, my speech, even in the way I moved. I’d already done the same with this trio. I was leaning toward the supposition that they were Gladesmen, or closely descended from. Easy in the water. None of them carried a sweat in the humidity, meaning their bodies were used to the climate. Their boots were old leather, the kind that was oiled and waterproofed the old-fashioned way. They were all lean, the leader with a cabled musculature that meant tough manual labor and a diet that was more local and natural than the empty calorie, fat-filled urban or suburban fare. But my eye had been a lazy one too. I’d searched the kid over, looking for clues, and missed the biggest one.

Wayne took a few steps back after he loosened all the nuts and stood while I finished the job. I looked up a couple of times, continuing to ask questions that might give me more information to size his crew up, give me some clue why they were rattling my internal cop alarms. A couple of times I caught him looking down at Sherry, who had gone quiet. It was hard to read her pain now or tell how much her head was in the moment or moving deep into survival mode, concentrating only on the internal, on keeping her core together. From where I was I couldn’t even see if her eyes were open.
Not for a moment did I think of the kid’s eyes roving over her body, the fabric of her sweats cut away almost up to her crotch when I’d cleaned and bandaged the leg wound. Her blouse, soaking wet and transparent, stretched across her breasts. Then she said something—“water”—in a rough whisper.
The kid jumped, and then started looking around.
“Over there. The bottle by the end of her cot,” I said, directing him.
He stepped over and picked up the bottle and moved to Sherry’s side. She turned her hand slightly, opened her palm and he had to bend over to get the bottle to her. But instead of taking it, she motioned to her mouth with her fingers and the kid bent lower, nervous about pouring the water into this woman’s open lips. I stayed on one knee, watching, but still working the other bed’s legs. All I could see were the tops of both of their heads from behind and then the sudden, violent movement of Sherry’s hand, clawing at the boy’s throat.
“You thieving little bastard,” she suddenly shrieked in a voice I had never heard before.
The kid’s head started to snap back, but inexplicably stopped for a fraction of a moment, and then, suddenly loosed, reeled up away from her.
“You f*cking little thief,” Sherry screamed again, the rough dryness of her throat making the words come out like a shovel blade stabbing gravel. “You picked the wrong cop to f*ck with this time, you little shit.”
The kid’s eyes were wide as saucers, eyebrows dented by fear, like he’d seen a witch come alive in his face, and I jumped up wondering if he actually had.
“Jesus, Sherry!” I shouted, and stepped over the bed frame I was working on. “What the hell?”
She was up on her elbows now, her face turned a crimson color that was such a stark contrast to the paleness it replaced that it looked devilish. She was staring at the kid, her eyes focused and hateful. Without saying a word she opened the hand that I’d seen her go at the kid’s throat with. Two stones, one a diamond and the other an opal, tumbled from her palm on the end of a broken gold chain.
It didn’t take a second for me to recognize the necklace Sherry’s husband had given her, the one that she had finally removed before the last time we’d made love on a soft Everglades night that seemed impossibly far in the past now.
I stepped toward the kid, not even realizing that I’d stood up from our dismantling job with one of the wooden bed frame legs in my fist.
“Where the hell did you get that!” I started. But the words had barely left my lips when the cabin door burst open and Morris stepped in with a big .45 in his right hand, its big black nosehole pointed at me.
“Whoa now, folks,” the man said. “How about we just settle down some, OK?”

“They’re cops, Buck,” Wayne started shouting. “Goddamnit- all, they are cops.”
Morris, whose name had now turned into Buck, moved his eyes from me, to the boy, to the bed frame on the floor and finally to Sherry, who was still on one elbow, but otherwise prone on the cot.
“Now just calm it down there, boy,” he said and the kid seemed to snap his mouth shut like it was a command he was familiar with.
“Uh, Mr. Freeman, sir. Would you kindly lay that there chunk of lumber down, please, and move over that way?” Buck said to me, using the muzzle of the gun to indicate the direction. He stepped farther into the room and the other boy, whose eyes were now only slightly smaller than his friend’s, followed him, dropping a canvas sack holding something that clunked heavily onto the floorboards.
The fact that I now had two names, Wayne and Buck, wasn’t much of a trade-off for having a handgun pointed at my chest and a band of thieves as Sherry’s only chance of survival out of this hellhole. I laid the bedpost down.
“Now if you don’t mind, sir,” Buck said, “could you tell me just what the hell is goin’ on?”
I gathered myself. I now knew I was looking at a crew of looters. I have seen it before as a cop in Philadelphia and everyone with a television has seen it on the tube following major rioting or disaster in American cities coast to coast. In some instances it’s an “I’m gonna get mine” attitude. The storefront window is blown out, cops are busy helping others, I’ll go in and take what I can take. In the aftermath of Katrina it was sometimes people just taking something that floated, something to eat, something to live. In places like Miami and L.A., it was just brazen, crowd-incited criminality and greed. I knew the only way Wayne had gotten Sherry’s necklace was by rummaging through the ruins of the Snows’ cabin where she must have lost it. This group had been there and this place was their next target.
I wasn’t going to guess the motivation. Right now I was going to be the greedy one and try to make the best of the situation for Sherry and myself.
“I don’t know,” I lied. “I think my friend just woke up and freaked or something. Your buddy here was giving her something to drink and she just woke up and started clawing at him. He got scared and jumped back when she started screaming and it surprised the hell out of me too.”
Buck looked down at Sherry, who now collapsed off her elbow and was lying flat again with her eyes closed. I stepped over to her and went down on one knee and he let me. Wayne started to whine: “She said she was a cop, Buck. She ripped that necklace off me and said I stole it and she was a f*cking cop.
I tipped the water bottle to Sherry’s mouth and had to pour it through her parted lips just to get any of it in.
“That true, Mr. Freeman?” Buck said behind me. “She’s a law enforcement officer?”
“She used to be,” I said. “Long time ago up north somewhere. Some little town in Michigan but she retired down here years ago.
“Look, Morris,” I said. “She’s delirious. She’s dehydrated, lost blood, is in some deep pain and isn’t making a whole lot of sense. I just need to get her some help, get her in to land, the state park boat ramp where we can get her to an ambulance.
“And,” I added, “could you not point that gun at me? That’s really uncalled for and it makes me nervous.”
The guy looked out at the end of his arm, like he’d forgotten he even had the .45 in his hand even though I knew from experience that particular weapon is heavy as hell. He lowered the gun and crooked his finger in a “come here” command to Wayne, and then bobbed his head to the other one.
“We’re gonna step outside if you don’t mind, Mr. Freeman,” he said like he was asking permission. “So I can sort this out.”
I nodded and all three of them stepped outside, but they left the door halfway open, the boys on the other side, and Buck with his gun hand still on my side, his head tipping back to check my movements every few seconds. I heard him say, “Goddamnit, boy,” but the rest of the conversation was low and unintelligible with the heavy door in between. I checked Sherry again and she half opened her eyes, cutting them to the right like she was trying to locate the others. She wasn’t as out of it as she’d appeared, but the color had run back out of her face and I had never seen her look so weak.
“He stole my necklace, Max,” she whispered. “My necklace. Jimmy’s necklace.”
“Hush, hush, hush, baby. I know,” I said quietly. “I know. But we have to get you out of here, Sherry. We need these guys now. We can worry about everything else later. Right now, we need them.”
I was trying to keep my voice soft, understanding, appeasing because I was not sure how much she understood. I needed to calm her and I knew I was working against her nature. She was not the kind of woman who stands by when she feels violated, when someone has pissed her off. Even her subconscious was going to fall back on natural reaction if you push her.
“Don’t let him take Jimmy’s necklace, Max,” she whispered, and the words stung me as much as they bolstered my resolve not to let her die.