Randy White: The Man Who Ivented Florida

"What I'm going to do is call the…" Then she paused, looking at the television. "Hey," she said, "it's working again."

"Not for long if you don't-"

"Oh, for God's sake! He's up the stairs.. One of the rooms toward the end of the hall. Find it yourself."

Tuck started to walk away but then stopped. "I know what's going on in that mind a yours, ma'am. You're thinkin' the moment I head up the stairs, you're gonna call the law. Or them whatever you call it-orderlies? But I'll tell you what: You give me ten minutes with my old partner Joe, I'll leave real quiet like. You don't, you can kiss that television of yours good-bye."

The woman flinched, some of her anger returning. "I won't tolerate threats against our television set! It's our only recreation."

Tuck was smiling. "Then you best not risk it. Ten minutes. Understand?"

The television screen faced the ceiling. The actors with the sprayed hair were tangled in an embrace, whispering to each other. The nurse said, "You leave me alone till this show's over, I don't give a damn what you do." She glared at him once more, then didn't look at him again.

The rest home's second floor was a catacomb of narrow bed pens, and Tuck pushed open one door after another until he saw Joseph Egret. Joseph stood at the far end of the room, by the window. He wore a hospital gown that tied at the back; black hair hung to his shoulders,- his head and his hands shook with a slight pathological tremor as he held his fingertips to the glass, as if trying to reach through to the outside.

Tucker stood at the doorway, looking in. Except for the window, the room was dark, and his eyes were having trouble adjusting. He was also trying to adjust to the room's odor. The stink hit him when he opened the door,- caused him to snort and cover his nose. The smell seemed to come from the beds, only one of which was occupied: A shrunken figure lay connected by tubes to a sack of clear liquid suspended from a stand. The smell was a potent mixture of urine and some other odor that, had Tuck been younger, he would have recognized as the malodor of age and dying. He was standing with his hand over his nose when a quivering voice said, "It's that damn Indian. The stink. He farts continually and smells like a wet dog." The figure in the bed was talking, an old man with tiny bright eyes.

Tucker said, "Well, you don't smell like no box of Valentine candy yourself, buster," and pushed his way through the stench. He reached up to tap Joseph on the shoulder, saying, "Hey, you old fool-you gone deaf or something?"

Joseph turned to face him for the first time, and Tucker had to step back a bit-that's how surprised he was at the way Joseph had changed… had changed more in a year than Tucker would have thought possible. The great wedge of a nose was the same; the same high Indian cheeks, too. But now Joseph's beamy shoulders swooped like folded wings, and the sharp, dark, humorous eyes Tuck remembered were a syrupy glaze. He didn't seem nearly so big, either. Once Joseph had been six and a half feet tall, weighed probably 250. What the hell had happened?

"Gawldamn, Joe," Tucker said gently, not wanting to hurt his old friend's feelings, "these vultures stick a pin in you and let the air out? I've seen road kill looked healthier than you."

Joseph looked down, blinking at him, as Tucker added quickly, "Course, I don't mean that in a bad way."

There was no reason to get Joe mad; they'd been friends too long for that. Friends for more than fifty years, ever since they were teenagers, a few years after the completion of the Tamiami Trail, which crossed the Everglades and connected Miami with the west coast of Florida. In those days, he and Joe had developed a mutual bond that ensured honesty, affection, and scrupulous concern for the other-that bond being a massive white liquor still that either would have shot the other for. That still had produced forty gallons of liquor week in, week out, with little labor or upkeep on their part, and earned for them enough money to buy most of the villages on Florida's west coast. Had they wanted to buy villages. Which they didn't.

It had taken the two of them the best chunk of a month in Havana to piss all that money away, but they had managed. And they had been secretly proud of the inventive methods required to do it.

After government men destroyed the still, Tuck and Joseph had joined talents in a variety of enterprises over the years, which included running rum, smuggling in Orientals from Mexico, smuggling in Mexicans from the Bahamas, and running guns to Castro's revolutionaries, for which they received absolutely nothing and were, in fact, just happy to escape with their lives.

In recent years, they had spent a few evenings each month together. Sometimes, they'd poach a gator or two, knowing full well there was no longer anyplace in America to sell an illegal hide. Or shoot a few white ibis-curlew, Tuck called them-and fry them up with rice and tomato gravy. Some nights, Tucker would let some of his cattle escape, blame the neighbors, and contact Joseph with a desperate plea for roundup help. Actually, it was just an excuse to ride and drink as they once had, and the bulk of their sentences began, "Remember that time…?"

Mostly, the two men drifted apart. All friendships begin on a chance first meeting and usually end on an equally unexpected last encounter. Friendship is more closely related to alchemy than to chemistry, so it is always a little bit of a surprise that the laws of mortality still apply. Joseph Egret retreated to a cypress strand a few miles north of the Tamiami Trail, where he lived in a shack with a thatched palmetto roof and a 1971 Playboy calendar on the wall. Tuck retired to his scrub cattle and mullet skiff in Mango.

The last thing Tuck had heard about Joseph was from a bartender at the Rod amp; Gun Club in Everglades City. The bartender told him that Joseph had been found, sick and near death, in his shack by some hunters, who had contacted the county welfare people. One of the welfare people had approached the sleeping Joseph with a rectal thermometer. Joseph had rallied sufficiently from his surprise to throw the welfare worker through the wall. The welfare worker contacted the Sheriff's Department, got a judge to sign the right papers, and now, the bartender told Tucker, Joseph was paying his dept at Everglades Township Rest Home.

"Serves 'im right," Tucker had said at the time. "Teach 'im not to throw white people around like that."

But that was before Tucker had descended into the despair of his own loneliness; before his horse Roscoe had discovered that sulphur spring; before Tuck had realized the spring's wonderful potential; before the state, those bastards, had tried to pin him to the wall.

Tucker was thinking about all of this when he touched the shoulder of his old and beloved friend. Well, he was thinking about it a little bit. Thinking that once he had been nothing more than a cow hunter with evil ways, but now he was elevating himself, coming to this nasty damn place to rescue an old friend.

"Joe, you okay?" Tucker asked. "Can you hear me?"

Joseph looked at Tucker, and his eyes seemed to focus for a moment. "Lordy God," he said, "I hope somebody locked up my wallet."

Tucker took the big man's arms and shook him slightly. "Hey, Joe, it's Tuck. Me, your best friend!" He'd expected a warmer reunion.

Joseph studied the face before him. His mind was a gauzy shambles of reality and dreams, and his eyes were milky. "I know who you are. We got another whiskey run to make? I want to count the money this time, you cheatin' bastard-"

Tucker was still shaking him gently. "Joe! Listen to me. We ain't run no liquor in fifty years."

"I don't care if it was a hundred. You shortchanged me on that run to LaBelle. Don't think I ain't got ways of finding out."