Florida had been built on a foundation of fraud and false promises as much as on a bedrock of limestone, riddled with holes and prone to devastating collapses.
In the lot outside the Shark Valley Visitor Center, I spotted dozens of cars and RVs, and I wondered, What kind of fool chooses to go wildlife watching in the heat of a late-June day when every breath feels like being waterboarded?
Then I caught sight of my sweating reflection in the glass booth where I paid my admission, and I knew what kind of fool.
The birds, though! Great and snowy egrets, blue and tricolored herons, anhingas posed cruciform in the mangroves, drying their wings, glossy and white ibises, roseate spoonbills, and purple gallinules walking across water lilies with their grotesquely oversized feet. Alligators lolled ridge-backed in the canals or sprawled in the verges between the paved walk and the stream. Enormous catfish, gar, and tilapia floated with a flutter of fins beneath the tea-colored surface. Never had I encountered nature in such glorious, riotous abundance. An eye-popping, caterwauling carnival of life.
I had probably lost ten pounds in water weight when, remembering my appointment, I returned to my rented sedan, buckled on my sidearm, pulled on my suit jacket, and drove across the street to the restaurant that served deep-fried reptiles.
When I stepped through the door, a blast of air-conditioning hit me in the face with the force of a meat freezer thrown open.
“I’m supposed to meet someone,” I told the host. His skin was the color of bronze, and he wore his black hair long and parted straight down the center.
“He’s not here yet.”
“I’ll sit down.”
“I think you’d better.”
The interior was festively decorated in bright colors and Native American motifs. The only customers were two white families—clearly foreign, clearly tourists—and a black man with gray hair seated at the lunch counter, reading a fishing magazine.
My waitress was so concerned that I might collapse of dehydration that she left a filled water pitcher on the table. She brought another five minutes later when I’d drained the first.
Half an hour passed. The families ate and left and were replaced by more families and an elderly couple and some college-age boys who were loud even before they ordered Budweisers all around. The man at the counter had managed to disappear without my seeing him leave. My server asked if I wanted to order some food while I could.
“We’ll be closing soon. We close at four o’clock.”
“Why so early?”
“We close when the park closes.”
I tried Fixico’s phone number but got an automated reply. I left a curt message for him to call me. As the restaurant emptied, I could feel the host watching me, willing me to get up and leave the way a cat wills you to feed it. I put down a ten-dollar bill for the water and the trouble.
2
I sat in my rented Hyundai with the air-conditioning cranked and fog inching up the windshield, trying to decide how to proceed. If I left now, I might still catch my flight home. But the hook had been set, and I wasn’t breaking free without a fight.
Why had Fixico brought me all the way out into the Everglades only to stand me up? Why not just tell me over the phone that, upon further reflection, he had nothing to say about Captain Tom Wheelwright?
Because he wanted to have a look at me first.
In the rearview mirror, I noticed the man who’d seated me leaving the restaurant. He paused to tuck his white polo into his pants and put on a pair of wraparound shades before making his way toward a Chevrolet Camaro parked in the thin shade of a palm.
Careful of fire ants, I crossed the sandy lot. “Excuse me, sir!”
The bronze man lurched to a stop. “You’re still here?”
“I have a question for you.”
“OK?”
“When I told you I was meeting someone, you said, ‘He’s not here yet.’ How did you know I was meeting a man?”
“You said you were.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“I think you’re confused. Look, I’ve got to pick up my kid.”
I watched the sports car accelerate onto the cracked highway headed back toward Miami. Then I shaded my eyes with the blade of my hand and scanned the endless flatness. I hadn’t seen the man at the counter leave, but I saw him now, not a hundred yards away.
Beyond the restaurant stood a second, smaller building with the same thatched roof—a tribal information center—and beyond that was a dirt lot that bordered a dull canal that might or might not have been the Shark River. The black man I’d noticed inside the restaurant stood on the bank, wearing a panama hat, smoking a cigar, and fishing with a cane pole unlike anything I’d ever seen in Maine.
“Captain Fixico?”
His back stiffened, but he spoke without turning. “I was beginning to have doubts about you as an investigator, Warden Bowditch. You didn’t expect me to be black. Some of us Natives are.”
“Do you want to tell me what that stunt was about?”
He tossed the cigar butt into the greenish water. A small fish came up to snap at it. A bigger fish rose from the depths to swallow the smaller fish whole. There’s always someone bigger, someone hungrier.
When Fixico finally faced me, I saw that he had an indentation in his forehead that spoke of a head injury neither recent nor ancient. His nose was straight, his brow slanting, and his eyes were so heavily lidded he seemed half-asleep.
“I wanted to check you out before we talked,” he said, a little smile playing in the corners of his mouth.
“And you didn’t like my looks?”
“Not particularly. How did you find me?”
“It took a while.”
“That’s not what I meant. How did you find me in the first place? You said Tommy didn’t give you my name as a character witness.”
Witness. I made a mental note of the word choice.
“Maybe I’m
