Bright Orange for the Shroud Page 8

  Chook scowled at me. “To get Stebber and Gisik out in the open? You don’t look like a mark, Trav. And if you run into Wilma, she knows you.”

  “I have somebody all roped, and I need some competent help to pick him clean.”

  “Who?” Arthur asked blankly.

  “We’ll have to invent him. But if I have to produce him, we should have somebody in mind, somebody who could run over here at short notice and put on a good act.”

  “And you do have somebody in mind, don’t you?” Chook said accusingly.

  “You ever run into Roger Bliss?”

  She didn’t know him. I told them about Roger. Except for an unfortunate taint of honesty, he could have become one of the great confidence men of our times. After a fine arts education, he had gone to Italy to study and paint. There he had gotten in with the movie crowd and had been put to work doing character bits. He was a natural mimic. He’d learned he’d never make it as a painter. And, in time, the movie thing bored him. Now he owned a small expensive sales gallery in Hollywood, Florida, had nutured a profitable list of art patrons, lived well, was often restless, particularly during the slack season, and had helped me a couple of times in the past, when I needed someone who could be, on request, a convincing psychiatrist, air force colonel, college dean or Oklahoma wildcatter. He had a wicked ability of being absolutely plausible, down to the smallest mannerism and detail of dress. I would make sure he was available, just in case. And think up a cover story which would make Stebber and company salivate freely.

  So we cruised up the flank of the Everglades, past the misted shoreline of the Ten Thousand Mangrove Islands. It is dark strange country, one of the few places left which man has not been able to mess up. The great river of grass starts up near Okeechobee, the widest shallowest river on the continent, and flows south. The hammocks of oak, cabbage palm, fifty other varieties of trees, are the quaking islands in the thirty-mile width of the sawgrass river. On the broad moist banks are the silent stands of cypress. Where the tides seep up into the river, at the northernmost limits of brackishness, the dwarf mangrove starts. The Ten Thousand Islands comprise the vast steamy tidal basin where the river enters the Gulf and Florida Bay.

  Man, forever stubborn, has made but a few small dents in this eternal silence. Perimeter outposts—Everglades, Marco, Flamingo, Chokoloskee. But he has never thrived. There is rich soil there, rich enough so that a hundred years ago tomatoes grown in the Everglades were bringing twenty-four dollars a case in New York during the winter season. But hurricanes thrash through, pushing salt tides that take years to leach out of the poisoned soil. The fevers, the bugs, the storms, the isolation—these things have always broken the spirits of all but the toughest, the kind of human who can describe the peak of the mosquito season as the time when you can swing a one-pint jar and catch a quart of them.

  The tough Calusa Indians were there at the time Christ was born, building storm shelter islands out of the shells of the oysters and clams they ate, leaving a staggering enough tonnage of shells by the time the Spaniards totally eliminated them that miles and miles of the first rude roads into the edges of the Glades were paved with those shells.

  This is the land of the great enduring myth of the Seminole. They were a ragtag ethnic jumble, driven all the way down from Georgia and the Carolinas, until finally after the forced resettlement of most of them in the southwest, there were not two hundred and fifty left—scattered, hiding, demoralized—not worth any further military effort. For fifty years their numbers remained about the same. Then slowly they reestablished a new culture composed of remembered fragments of many old ones, speaking pidgin versions of old tongues. They had even begun to acquire a kind of plaintive dignity, but then the white man pushed the Tamiami Trail across the Glades from Naples to Miami, eliminating them as a tribe, turning them into roadside merchants of such a vast gypsy cynicism that of all the artifacts they manufacture and sell to the tourists—not one bears any relation to their customs, habits, or prior way of life. They are the carnival Indians, degraded by commerce, curious heirs to the big colorful lie that they were never whipped, never made a truce. They are the comedy Indians who, never having tomtoms in their history, never having used the tomahawks or bows and arrows like the Plains Indians, now made vast quantities of each and sell them to people from Ohio.

  Now, of course, having failed in every attempt to subdue the Glades by frontal attack, we are slowly killing it off by tapping the River of Grass. In the questionable name of progress, the state in its vast wisdom lets every two-bit developer divert the flow into the draglined canals that give him “waterfront” lots to sell. As far north as Corkscrew Swamp, virgin stands of ancient bald cypress are dying. All the area north of Copeland had been logged out, and will never come back. As the Glades dry, the big fires come with increasing frequency. The ecology is changing with egret colonies dwindling, mullet getting scarce, mangrove dying of new diseases born of dryness.

  But it will take a long time to kill it. And years from now foolish men will still be able to kill themselves off within miles of help, hopelessly lost among islands which all look exactly alike. It is a black land, and like every wilderness in the world, it punishes quickly when a mistake is made, quickly and with a casual, savage indifference.

  I studied the chart and picked a spot. I went beyond Marco Pass to a wide pass named Hurricane Pass. The channel was easy to read from the topside controls. The Flush draws four feet and is heavily skegged to protect the shafts and wheels. Roy Cannon Island, deserted, lies just inside the pass. It was low tide as we came in just before sunset. The pass is so wide, Roy Cannon has a sand beach. I edged a little north to get the protection of the headland which forms the north edge of the pass. At dead slow I ran the bow into the beach sand. With Chook and Arthur helping, we put out all four anchors, the two bow ones well up on the beach, wedged into the skeletal whiteness of mangrove killed by the sand which had built up, probably after Hurricane Donna had widened the pass. I carried the stern hooks out into water neck deep, wedged them in, stomped them firm. She would rest well there, lifting free with the incoming tide, settling back at the low. I’d topped off the fuel and water at Flamingo. We swam as the sun went down, and then clouds of mosquitoes, shrill with hunger, drove us below decks to break out the bombs and drop the ones that had come in with us. It was such a hot and airless night, I started the generator and put the air-conditioning on. After dinner, over coffee, I took Arthur through the best physical descriptions of the four men that he could manage, particularly Stebber and Gisik. I wanted to be certain to know them if the names were changed.

  Saturday morning early I saddled up the dinghy and, taking Chook with me, droned south inside the islands to Marco Village. We achieved invisibility. There is an easy way to do it along the coast. I wore khaki pants, a white T-shirt, a baseball hat with a long bill, dark glasses. She wore white denim stretch pants, blue halter, dark glasses, and a little pot-shaped straw hat some female had left aboard, embroidered in red yarn across the front—Drink Up. We brought along a tackle box, two rods and a red beer cooler.

  Marco Village saddened me. The bulldozers and draglines had gotten to it since my last visit. The ratty picturesque old dock was gone, as was the ancient general store and a lot of the old weatherbeaten two-story houses which had looked as though they had been moved down from Indiana farmland. They had endured a half century of hurricanes, but little marks on a developer’s plat had erased them so completely there was not even a trace of the old foundations.

  But even the scurry of multimillion-dollar development slows to a sleepy pace in the island heat of late May. Loafers identified us instantly by type as we tied up and clambered out of the dinghy, and from then on their total bemused attention was on the fruitful flexible weight encased in the white stretch denim, with Chook quite comfortably aware of admiration and speculation. I asked my question, and we got one bad lead and then a better one, and finally found a sallow, thoughtful young man who took us to w
here his boat sat lashed to a trailer. Sixteen-foot, heavy-duty fiberglass hull, with a forty horse Evinrude bolted to the reinforced transom. Twin tanks. All required gear.

  “I don’t know about a week,” he said. “Figured on using it some myself. I’d have to get”—he wiped his mouth, stared into the distance—“a hundred dollars, mister?”

  “Seventy-five. I buy gas.”

  “I got fourteen hundred dollars in it, mister.”

  “Seventy-five right now, and if I only keep it three days, it’s still seventy-five.”

  He made a responsible show of studying my driver’s license, giving sidelong glances at Chook’s scanty halter, and got very helpful and cheery when he had the seventy-five in hand, describing places where we could hook into big snook and baby tarpon. He put it in the water for us. Boldly lettered on the white fiberglass, in pink, and for some obscure reason in Old English calligraphy, was the name Ratfink. We took off sedately, towing the dinghy astern, dock loafers watching us out of sight. Arthur was waiting on the beach when we returned. Without the burdens of Chook and the dinghy, I took Ratfink out into open water and found I had made a good guess on the hull design. It was very fast and stable, and when I came smashing back through my own wake, I found it was a dry boat.

  Another can of gas aboard would give it all the high speed range I’d need. It had one of the new control rigs, shift and throttle on the same handy lever. The cable control gave it a quick steering ratio. I taped a piece of white cloth over the too-memorable name, and with some black electrician’s tape I made an alteration in the registration number, turning a six into an eight and a one into a seven. It would stand inspection from ten feet away.

  I changed to slacks and a sports shirt, stowed a light jacket and tie in the locker under the forward deck, told them to be good kids, and took off up the inside route to Naples, an estimated twelve miles away, less than a half hour in my jazzy craft.

  I found an adequate little marina just short of the highway bridge on the southeast side of Naples. I filled the tanks, bought an extra five gallon can, had it filled with the right gas and oil mix and stowed it aboard. I said I might be leaving it there off and on for a week. The man said a dollar a day. And how about leaving a car here when I’m out in the boat? I asked. Right over there next to the building, where that pickup is, it’ll be okay there, no charge. I paid him a week on the dockage, and after he had shown me where to put it and wandered away, I tied it up in such a way that though the lines were firm, I could free them with one yank, shove off bow first, hit the starter button and be on my way. This was one of the elemental precautions. Never go in until you are damned well sure how you are going to get out. There are few roads in the Glades country, but more waterways than have ever been counted. With the jacket over my arm, I went up to Route 41 and walked across the highway bridge and down the other side of the bayou to the Fish House Restaurant. It was clean and quiet. The decor was seashells stuck into cement on the pillars, beams and ceiling. Tourists had pried out a lot of the ones within reach. I found they served a clam chowder with character. It would cure debility, angry the blood, and turn a girl scout troop into a baritone choir.

  I didn’t bother phoning Crane Watts’ office. His residence was on Clematis Drive. A maid announced it as The Watts Resydense and told me, “They’s at the Club.” And when I asked if it was the Cutlass Yacht Club, she said, “Nome, they play tennis at the Royal Palm Bath Club.”

  I looked up car rentals, phoned one and was told they couldn’t deliver. Just one man on duty. I took a cab to the place the other side of town. I signed up for a dark green Chev, four door, with air-conditioning. The attendant told me to go about another mile north and then look for the Bath Club sign on a road to the left, turn and go about a half mile. I couldn’t miss it. I didn’t.

  I found a parking place in the lot. The huge pool, behind woven fencing, was a gabbling, shrieking, belly-whomping mass of kids. They had a crescent of private beach dotted with bright umbrellas and oiled brown flesh, prone and supine. Despite the early afternoon heat, their dozen asphalt courts beyond the pool area were all full. You could see at a glance it was very proper tennis. Everyone raced about in spotless white, sweating and banging hell out of the ball, calling out Love, Add, Out and Nice Shot.

  The club house was a flaking Moorish pastry onto which had been pasted a big wing in supermarket modern. I wandered in and found a bulletin board in a corridor. They are always useful. The bulletin board was folksier than the tennis. There was a mimeographed copy of the last club bulletin tacked to it. Seems that on May tenth the Taylors had given a big farewell bash for Frank and Mandy Hopson, before they left on their dream trip, three whole months in Spain. Crane and Viv Watts were listed among the guests. I found a phone booth and book, but it gave me no clue as to good old Frank’s occupation, if any. I roamed until I found a door labeled OFFICE. I knocked and pushed it open. A thin girl was alone in there, typing. She had a pert look, a large toothy smile. “May I help you, sir?”

  “Sorry to bother you. I just got to town today. I called Mr. Frank Hopson at his home but I couldn’t get an answer. I remember him speaking of this place, and I thought maybe Frank and Mandy might be out here.”

  She made a sad mouth. “Oh, dear! They went away on a long trip.”

  “Don’t tell me they finally made it to Spain. Son of a gun.”

  “They were as excited about it as a pair of little kids, believe me, Mr.…”

  “McGee. Travis McGee. They’ve been after me for years to come over and see them. Well … that’s the way it goes. At least I got a look at the club.”

  She hesitated for some additional inspection. I am conspicuously large, and I have a permanent deep-water tan, and I would not look out of place on a construction crew. But the slacks and shirt and jacket were top grade and she knew it. And I smiled at her like Stoney Burke admiring a speckled calf.

  “Well, I think we can do better than that for any friend of the Hopsons,” she said, making her decision. “How long will you be in town?”

  “Maybe a week. On business.”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Hopson would certainly want you to use the Club.” She winked. “In fact, I distinctly remember Mr. Hopson saying that you should have a guest card if you ever appeared while they were gone.” She pulled the sheets out of her typewriter, ran a card in and filled it out. I gave her the Bahia Mar box number. She signed the club manager’s name, put her initials under it, and handed it to me with a little flourish. “These are good for two weeks, Mr. McGee. You can sign and be billed directly. The only restriction is that you can’t bring guests here. Except your wife, of course.”

  “Unmarried. How about just one lady? One at a time.”

  “No one could object to that. Please don’t be shy about mingling and introducing yourself. You’ll find all the members very friendly, particularly toward any friend of Mr. Hopson. And please put the card number on the chits you sign. Tonight we’re having an outdoor steak roast, buffet style. If you want to stay for it—it’s really very good—I can take your reservation.”

  “Might as well. Thanks. You’ve been very kind, Miss …”

  “Benedict. Francie Benedict.” The smile opened her up back to the wisdom teeth. “I do wish I could show you where everything is, but I do have to finish this.”

  “I’ll just wander around.”

  “You can rent swim trunks from Albie in the men’s locker room.”

  She was typing again as I pulled the office door shut. I found a dark, cool, quiet bar in the Moorish part. The sedentary types were there and in the adjoining card room, several grim tables of male bridge. I stood at an empty expanse of mahogany bar. The bartender approached with one eyebrow shoved up in cautious, supercilious interrogation. I whipped out my card, and his smile of acceptance would have looked more plausible if he’d been outfitted with those stainless steel teeth the Russians have developed. After he served my Plymouth gin on ice, the clot of members down the bar motioned to hi
m. He leaned across the bar. There was a whispered question and answer; they looked me over and got back into their argument.

  A pudgy chap with a statesman’s face and careful coiffure of white locks said in liquor-slurred tones, “But you got to face facts, Roy. The fact remains, we got the evidence right in front of us, the decay of the nashal moral fiber, mob rule in the streets, violence, punks killing decen’ people. Am I right or am I right?”