If I had been Jimmy Stewart playing a country lawyer in Anatomy of a Murder, I just would have hung out a GONE FISHIN ’ sign. But I toil on the thirty-second floor of a high rise on Biscayne Bay where my time is billed at $250 an hour, and going fishing is an expensive avocation. So first I had to dictate the usual dilatory motions, bill customers for time spent ruminating on their problems while showering, return important phone calls from Granny and Charlie and the guy who’s shaping a new sailboard for me.
I skimmed a lawyers’ magazine with tips on how to get clients to pay for your word-processing system without their knowing it. I answered interrogatories in a lawsuit between two Ocala cattle ranchers over contraband bull semen. I interviewed a man with a mustache and goatee who said he was Carlos Manuel de Cespedes y del Castillo, the great-grandson of the man who proclaimed Cuba’s independence from Spain in 1868. He wanted to sue an imposter who was giving speeches to the Little Havana Kiwanis Club claiming to be a descendant of el padre de la patria.
I listened to a man whose eyes darted furiously around my office as he explained why he wanted to bring a class action against a brewer that claimed to make its beer with “Rocky Mountain spring water.” The beer actually contained poisonous gases from Neptune, he revealed, brought by aliens in cigar-shaped spacecraft that land on the Continental Divide.
“Neptune?” I asked him.
“Neptune,” he repeated, his eyes seeming to cross as they jumped back and forth.
“You’re sure it’s not Uranus?” I asked him.
I returned a phone call from a plastic surgeon in trouble with the Department of Professional Regulation for failing to warn patients of the dangers of silicone breast implants.
“A frame-up,” he told me. “The medical association’s out to get me because I advertise on TV.”
“What’s wrong with advertising?” I asked.
“They got a hard-on for me because of my toll-free number. I got the idea from a dermatologist friend, ‘444- ACNE.’”
“I still don’t see what’s wrong, unless…no, you didn’t…”
“Yeah, 444-TITS. Hey, business is business.”
The last appointment was with a guy arrested for slashing the bark off red mangrove trees, cooking it, and selling the foul-tasting potion to local botanicas. The tannin in the bark either cures diarrhea or causes cancer, depending whether you believe witch doctors from Little Havana or scientists from Harvard. I turned down the case, preferring murderers, con artists, and quack physicians to tree killers.
Then I told Cindy I was going fishing.
It was a top-down, partly cloudy March day. A trifle too humid, a trifle too warm for this time of year. The weather guys were calling for rain, maybe thunderstorms tonight. I had changed into jeans, deck shoes, and an old aqua-and-orange jersey, number 58, that the Dolphins had forgotten to retire. The ride on Tamiami Trail was smooth and straight. I found the dirt road just west of the Miccosukee Restaurant-fried catfish and frogs’ legs-and turned north. The narrow road bumped and twisted through wet prairie. Occasional cypress strands sprouted out of the saw grass, towering trees dominating the flatlands. I slowed and let two river otters cross the road, then heard a rumble, a mechanical growl somewhere in front of me. I came to a dead stop, and the noise grew louder against the silent landscape.
Then, from around a bend, it bore down on me. At first sight, the truck was all high bumper and huge tires. It braked and kicked up dust as it came to a halt just a few feet from the grill of my old convertible. It was about the size of a cement truck, but where the rotating cylinder would have been was a series of antennae and what looked like satellite dishes. There were two men in the cab, both wearing sunglasses and black baseball caps. They looked at me. I looked at them. Nobody said a word.
The sidewalk wasn’t big enough for both kids, and I was the smaller kid, so I flinched. I backed up and edged onto the gravel berm, trying not to get entangled in vicious mangrove roots. The guy on the passenger side got out, came to the front of the truck, and hand-signaled the driver to turn the wheel a hair to the right to get past me on the narrow road. A slight man in his thirties with narrow shoulders, he wore rubberized boots and white coveralls stained with mud up to the knees. The name “Tucker” was stitched across the chest of his coveralls.
“Don’t see many people out here,” I said pleasantly. “Or trucks like that.”
He mumbled something in agreement.
“What the heck is all that equipment?” I asked, like the good-natured rube I am.
The truck edged by me, threatening my classic canary-yellow paint job, but just missing. On the side of the cab in black letters was the name ENVIRONMENTAL SYSTEMS, INC. No address, no phone number, no cute slogan.
Without answering me, the guy in coveralls climbed back into the cab, and the truck rumbled off. I let out the clutch, eased back onto the road, and kept heading north. In ten minutes, I came to a Y and bore to the right, just as I’d been told, and in less than a mile, I ran out of road. I was on a rocky teardrop peninsula. Some bushes, some scraggly pine trees. Wet prairie surrounded me on three sides. A muddy green airboat sat in the shallow water, and a dark-complexioned man in the traditional Micanopy Indian jacket of turquoise, black, red, and half a dozen other colors stood silently on the shore. Maybe five nine, he had a brush cut of thick dark hair, broad shoulders, and short legs. In the Indian jacket, he resembled a colorful fireplug.
I turned off the ignition, put up the top, and locked the doors out of habit, probably thinking an alligator might steal the car. I walked over to the man by the airboat. “Jim Tiger?” I asked him.
He nodded and motioned me in. There were two molded-plastic chairs high on a platform above the flat- bottomed boat. He hit the starter, and the airplane engine coughed to life. The old wooden propeller jerked once, twice, then fired into a whirlwind spin. Tiger didn’t seem talkative, and just as well. Over the roar of the engine, I couldn’t hear a thing. We skimmed along the top of the water, sawing offshoots of grass, flying past pinelands and palms, flushing herons and egrets out of the shallow s. From the position of the sun, we seemed to be heading north, but after two or three sweeping turns, I lost my sense of direction. There was no land, just occasional islands called hammocks, a few cypress domes where wood storks waded, looking for lunch, and the endless river of saw grass.
We think of the Everglades as a vast swamp, but it is actually a shallow river fifty miles wide, flowing southwest for over a hundred miles to the Gulf of Mexico. Two thousand square miles of the Everglades are part of a national park, but that is only a seventh of its total area. Depending on the time of year and the location within the Glades, it can resemble a vast African savanna, dense forests, blue-water bays, rocky beaches, or even the swamp of our imagination.
Time travels slowly in the Glades. The roar of the engine, at first jarring, had a narcotizing effect, the drone making me sleepy after a few minutes. My eyes were growing heavy by the time the engine slowed, the throaty roar diminishing. We swung past a sandy outcropping into deeper water, then headed straight for a hardwood hammock. Frees had been cleared along the shore, and a towering house built of pine stood on stilts where the tree line ended. The rear stilts were on the ground, the front stilts in the water. A porch surrounded the house on three sides, wooden staircases leading from the rear down to the island, and from the front down to a small dock. A gasoline-powered generator sat behind the house, three feet above the ground, on its own stilted platform. In the summer, I imagined, the hammock was partly submerged. The slanted roof of the house was shiny corrugated metal. Drain spouts emptied into a cistern. Two satellite dishes and a microwave antenna were planted on the southwest corner of the roof.
Jim Tiger cut the engine, and we drifted toward the dock, where he hopped out, carrying a bowline. He tied the airboat to a dockside cleat, and I followed him, stretching my legs, before heading up the stairs to the porch, thirty feet above the waterline. On the way up, I caught sight of half a dozen gray-black gators snoozing on the muddy bank below. I hadn’t seen them from the water level, as they blended in with the muck and were partially hidden by the pickerelweed and swamp ferns.
Nicky Florio was sitting in a rocking chair of dark wood, a fishing rod dangling lazily in his hand. He wore chinos and a matching shirt with epaulets and too many pockets. His olive complexion had turned a darker, richer shade from the sun. His black hair was freshly washed, still wet, and combed straight back. Black sunglasses shielded his eyes. On a table of the same dark wood as the chair sat a half-empty champagne glass. A bottle of
