Paul Levine - Mortal Sin

I reached in, avoiding the jagged fragments, and opened the door. Being careful not to cut my feet, I climbed into the cab, brushed the broken glass from the seat, and sat down. A few added touches not usually found in your everyday truck. A computer keyboard, a printer, sets of dials and gauges that made no sense to me. A stack of computer paper was piled up in the printer’s receptacle. I looked at it. Sharp lines, forming peaks and valleys, like an electrocardiogram. Next to the keyboard was a map, neatly folded. I opened it. The northern part of the Everglades, including the Big Cypress Swamp.

The hammocks were numbered. A red X on each of thirty or so hammocks, a date written in ink alongside. One of the dates was yesterday. That had to be this hammock. At least I knew where I was. Next to each date were letters and numbers that were meaningless to me.

I got out of the cab and looked around. A canoe with two flotation devices and two paddles was stashed under some big-leafed ferns. So far, that was the best news of the day.

And that was it. No tents, no shovels, no six-packs of beer. I followed the tire tracks through the woods to the shore. It was no more than five hundred yards. I emerged near the larger dock on the far side of the hammock from where I first set foot. But the tracks stopped where the path from the woods hit the beach. I bent down and looked closer at the sandy soil. The ground had been whisked clean by palm fronds. I had missed it my first walk around the hammock.

Okay, smart guy, what do you know?

Somebody hauled the truck here, either on a barge or on the back of a very large manatee. The workers were here yesterday and would likely be back soon. That was good for me, or was it? Who did they work for, and what were they doing, and why did they hide the truck like that?

More questions than answers. I kept thinking, turning it over. The workers don’t stay overnight. They either travel by boat or helicopter. You could easily land a chopper on the beach, away from the trees. They sometimes travel offshore but not far; otherwise they’d have a powerboat and not just a canoe. They take some effort to disguise the fact they’re here. Maybe they just want to protect the truck from vandalism by fishermen or froggers or the other iconoclastic types who hang out in the Everglades. But the way the truck was jammed into the trees seemed to suggest that they didn’t want to be seen from the air, either.

It didn’t compute. I thought of Nicky Florio. We were probably ten miles from his fishing cabin and thirty miles from his planned Las Vegas in the Swamp. This was something else, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that Nicky Florio’s grimy paws were all over that truck.

I went back into the woods and committed a little gentle larceny. Climbing into the truck, I took the map, then hauled the canoe out of the brush. It was an old wooden model, painted green. Wooden paddles, too.

I started out in midafternoon, watching the position of the sun and heading south. I took long, deep strokes with the paddle, counting out, “left, right, left, right.” I sang as many Nat King Cole songs as I could remember and replayed an AFC championship game in my mind. I passed through the mist of the cypress strands and what seemed to be open lakes. I paddled until just before dark, then decided to look for a Holiday Inn.

I chose a hardwood hammock with a fine line of pine trees to spend the night. I slept on a bed of soft grasses and awoke at dawn, famished and dreaming of room service: fresh-squeezed orange juice, blueberry muffins, and eggs Benedict with a steaming pot of coffee. I had wrapped the map in my discarded shirt, which dried out in the sun. Now I used the shirt to wipe the dew from the plants, squeezing it out and drinking the fresh water. More pinecone seeds and pollen for breakfast.

I paddled and drifted, paddled and drifted, the slow, easy current from north to south helping me out, but not much. I used the map to navigate south toward Tamiami Trail. Sometime before noon, I heard a thunderous explosion and looked toward a hammock to the west. A cloud of dust rose from a clump of mahogany trees, and a dozen herons croaked in protest.

By midday, I saw airboats at a distance, lazing in the water, with fishing poles sketched against the sky. A barge went by, two more of the gleaming white trucks perched on the deck. A short time later, the water became less, and the land became more. A ragged shoreline was strung with the hated melaleuca tree. Introduced from Australia in a misguided effort to dry up the swamps, it was doing just that, squeezing out native trees and plants, sucking the water from the slough, depleting our aquifer. Now, years later, we’re importing a sawfly from Australia that likes to eat the melaleuca and Lord knows what else.

Just before sunset, not more than a mile from Tamiami Trail, I heard the roar of an engine ahead of me. A touring airboat with perhaps a dozen tourists was headed for me. It slowed, politely, I thought, so as not to swamp me. Then it idled, and I heard the tour guide as he pointed, not so politely, at me. He was a young guy with a mustache who exuded the counterfeit charm of a used-car salesman.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he announced, his eyes hidden under a New York Yankees cap, “coming up is an excellent photo opportunity. Here we have an authentic Micanopy brave in full…ah…war paint.”

“War paint, my ass!” The skeptical customer was a pudgy man in plaid shorts and a Budweiser T-shirt. He had creamy sunblock on his nose and sat next to a middle-aged woman in a straw hat. “Looks like dirt to me,” the man added.

I kept paddling and was close enough to hear the click-clicks of the cameras.

“Yes, indeed,” the guide sang out, studying me as I got closer. “Quite right. War mud. One of the little-known practices of the remnants of the Creek Confederation.”

When in trouble, a savvy tour guide, like a quick-witted lawyer, improvises, trying to turn shit into gold. I always appreciated the talent.

“The mud ritual is also part of the ceremonial rain dance,” the guide continued, still winging it.

“Bullshit,” the tourist said. “Don’t waste your film, Martha.”

“Harold!” The middle-aged woman shushed him with a stern glare.

“It is one of many festivals of the Seminole and Micanopy. There is the harvest dance, the high-tide ceremony, the full-moon chant…”

“The harvest dance?” The tourist snickered and shook his head. “Sounds like Friday night at the country club.”

I was directly alongside now. It was time to stretch anyway, so I stood up slowly, taking care not to tip the canoe. As I did, I displayed the one part of me not covered by ceremonial mud.

Drifting by, I heard the woman gasp. “I’ll get a picture of that for the bridge club.”

The guide didn’t miss a beat. “…and, of course, the ceremonial fertility rites.”

Then he gunned the motor, revved up, and was gone.

I pulled the canoe onto a grassy bank, waded back into the water, and dived under, trying to get clean. It was futile. Caked into mortar by the sun, the mud had become my suit of armor. Soaking wet, I climbed the bank to a wooden dock, wrapped my T-shirt around my waist to provide a modicum of modesty, and headed off, leaving a trail of grimy footprints.

I was in the parking lot of a small marina just off Tamiami Trail. I walked to the highway, pointed myself east toward Miami, and held up my thumb. I didn’t look any more threatening than, say, Charles Manson if he’d just escaped from prison through a sewage canal.

A Jaguar zoomed by. So did a Mercedes and a Lexus. So did two eighteen-wheelers, a tour bus, a couple of Winnebagos, and assorted other cars, motorcycles, and vans.