into a trap where the Spaniards murdered him. That was the beginning of the end of the Calusa.
At the same time, a similar drama was being played out in the Ten Thousand Islands, a region of mangroves, black water and swamp south of Marco Island. The ruling chief there was Salvador. Like Carlos, he was a human god, controlled the skies and storms, wore a royal golden medallion and carried a sacred totem. He, too, despised the Spaniards.
To illustrate, JoAnn read part of a letter from one of the priests who tried to convert Salvador: 'When my fellow priest, Fray Castillo, ordered Salvador to tell his people to pray to the True God, Salvador became angry. Salvador gave the Father a number of blows to the face. He then rubbed human excrement on the Father's face while he was praying. Then Salvador urinated on him, saying, 'Man boy, why are you so small?' He then told we religious many times that they did not want to become Christians and that we should go away.'
JoAnn added, 'Because the Spaniards couldn't make Salvador cooperate, they started recruiting a traitor. It solved the Carlos problem, so why not assassinate their second great chief?'
I said, 'Religion had an edge to it in those days.'
'Uh-huh. What's the biblical line? Something about a terrible swift sword.' She paused for a moment. 'Funny thing is, Tomlinson said you'd understand that part easiest of all. Deposing one leader to put your own guy in power. Political assassination, that sort of thing. What'd he mean by that, Ford?'
Very softly, I said, 'One of Tomlinson's little jokes. He thinks he's funny.'
The traitor selected to dispose of Salvador was an outcast shaman from a 'distant land' they called Tocayo, a dangerous man, according to one of the priests, but potentially useful to the Spaniards' cause.
The priest wrote, 'I believe that the devil is in Tocayo, yet he promises that he will accept the True God if we help him depose Salvador. Tocayo also promises that he will forsake witchcraft and burn his sacred idol and no longer kill and eat the children of his enemies, nor have unclean knowledge of his daughters. He has promised that he will remove the sodomites.'
I said, 'This was five hundred years ago?'
JoAnn looked at the paper. 'The thing I just read, about killing children and the sodomites, it was written in 1568, a little over four hundred years ago.'
After Tocayo hacked Salvador to death, the priest returned from Havana to discover that Tocayo had murdered fifteen principal men of neighboring villages and eaten their eyes. It was a belief of the Calusa that a man's permanent soul resides in the pupil of his eyes. The Calusa weren't cannibals, but Tocayo was. As Lopez de Velasco wrote, 'They say that their idol eats human men's eyes.'
Tocayo had made himself a human idol.
The priest found Tocayo and his captains holding a celebration and dancing with the heads of four chiefs, kicking their heads through the shell courtyards as if playing at sport.
Tocayo had also taken for himself the golden medallion- a chaguala- and the wooden totem, both considered sources of great power.
I leaned a little closer to JoAnn, listening carefully as she read, ''Fray Castillo believes that these two idols possess unholy authority. Now Tocayo guards them jealously and laughs when we ask to examine them. He tells us that Light is in one of the idols, Darkness is in the other. They are the source of all his strength and he will not part with them.
''But he has kept his word on other matters. He now kneels before the cross. He is serving Your Holiness as he promised. I know that Tocayo is not a tool of the Devil. He is a tool of the One True God.''
JoAnn turned to me. 'Dorothy found them both. The gold medallion and the wooden totem. When she was digging on the bank of that canal.'
'How do you know they're the same artifacts? Maybe the Calusa had several.'
'Tomlinson says they're the same ones.'
'Ah.'
'He seems pretty certain of it.'
'I'm not surprised. Omniscience is one of his specialties.'
One thing was clear, though: someone wanted those artifacts. Wanted them badly enough to risk several break-ins. Wanted them badly enough to dig up the grave of a long-dead child. Maybe wanted them badly enough to come after me. Because that was the night, a Friday night, the foggiest night of the year, when a sensitive and civilized dope surprised two intruders on his boardwalk.
Me, the sensitive and civilized dope.
The next morning, we were gone-on our way to Marco.
Seven
Marco Island is a community of block-and-stucco, landscaped lots, fairways and beach condos, everything laid out as symmetrically as a Midwestern community college. It illustrates the tidy Toledo-by-the-Sea approach to development that has become the template of modern Florida. The effect is all the more striking because Marco lies several miles deep into the confluence of a great saw grass and mangrove wilderness.
Until the mid-sixties, Marco was a fishing and clamming village. Enter three brothers, the Mackles, who decided to work a classic Florida finesse, but on a grand scale: presell lots to snow-weary northerners and use the cash to finance the infrastructure of an entire city; a city that had yet to be built.
For months, the Mackles ran ads in major newspapers touting a new golf and retirement resort in the Ten Thousand Islands. It was billed as a world-class facility even though no facilities existed. What did exist were artists' renderings and little diorama cities that real estate agents flogged at high-pressure sales 'parties' that promised free trips to Florida.
The gambit worked. It's easy to push sunshine in The Great Gray North. They sold millions in raw property and used the profit to build precisely what they had promised, including a mazework of canals to create more 'waterfront' lots.
The result? Marco was an environmentalist's nightmare, but a triumph of business ingenuity.
In recent years, development has stabilized and the community has found its own character and direction, though that was not easily seen as I summited the Marco bridge in my old pickup. From the peak of the bridge, the island spread away below: residential areas in computer-chip patterns, then a jagged fringe of high-rise condos on the beach.
I'd followed Jo Ann down from Sanibel-not easy to do, because she was a fast, confident driver in her black Lexus. I had to keep my truck floored much of the time just to keep up. Prior to leaving, she'd told me she wasn't looking forward to the trip, and not just because of the funeral. 'I come back like maybe every couple of years, and it's always the same,' she said. 'More houses, more building, more traffic.'
I'd pointed out that the same could be said of Sanibel. The same, in fact, could be said of all Florida.
'I know, but it's different when it's the place where you grew up. That used to be a heck of a nice little island. Real friendly and simple. Piney wood houses along with the new stuccos, and still lots of barefoot kids. The monsters they got there now, they're like stamped from a mold. They say it's still Marco Island, but it's not. Not the way I remember it. What they did was, they built something over Marco but they kept the name.'
I've listened to enough bitter fellow Floridians to know there is no sensible response to their lament nor to their rosy remembrances of the past. There are a couple of reasons. In a state so young that nearly everyone is only three or four generations removed from somewhere else, the birthright of 'natives' is easily argued. Also, Floridians have chopped up, dredged and reconstituted their homeland as eagerly as the most thoughtless of outsiders. Or happily sold it to developers who did worse.
So I said nothing as I listened to her.
I'd driven because I was going to continue on down to Key Largo after the service. JoAnn was not. Also, my truck has a trailer hitch. If I was going to be on the Keys for a few days, I would need my boat. I told her it was because I wanted to hunt some big October bonefish.
Only partially true.
For me, being near water without a boat creates a sense of confinement that approaches neurosis. Claustrophobia is a word that comes close to describing what I feel.
