Jonathon King - Shadow Men

"If you don't mind my asking, Nate, where the hell are we going?"

"We's headin' over to Everglades City, son," he said, not taking his eyes off the water, studying, I assumed, its depth and direction. "I got you a man you need to talk with."

I could tell from the sun's position that we were moving generally to the southwest, even though the serpentine route of the water sometimes spun us in near circles before turning and heading again toward the end of the Florida peninsula. The cattails soon gave way to sawgrass that often sprouted six feet tall from the water. Tucked down in the brownish green maze it was airless and hot. The only breeze was from our own movement, and the air held the sweet, earthy odor of wet decay and new growth like some freshly cut vegetable just dug from a rain-soaked row.

At times the water became so shallow that both of us would have to pole the boat forward. Other times Brown was able to use the electric motor tilt to raise the propeller blades until they were barely churning and spitting the water. When it deepened again he would lower them back and we would gain speed, and the breeze it created was a luxury.

Above, a bowl of blue sky covered us from horizon to horizon, and while the sun traveled across it, Brown told me the story of John Dawkins.

"He was the colored man that was in them letters," he said. "The one that trucked the dynamite out there on the trail 'cause there weren't another man alive out here could have done it."

John Dawkins might have been from the Caribbean Islands or from New Orleans, but he and his family's blackness made them unique. But there were few enough families living in the Glades in the early 1900s, and those who had made it their home and braved its harshness knew one another as community.

"My daddy and John Dawkins was friends 'cause they needed to be. Out here, the onliest way a man got judged was by his work, and Mr. Dawkins was judged high on that account," Brown said.

Slope-shouldered and thick in the chest, with legs "like a full growth oak," Dawkins never turned down a job for which he would be paid with money or trade and was often called when the strength of other men flagged.

"Onliest time the man wouldn't work was on the Lord's day, and Daddy said everbody knowed that. Said Mr. Dawkins had a contract with God."

I waited for the story to continue as Brown pushed up the throttle in the now widening creek. The sawgrass fields were beginning to change.

"We're comin' on to Lost Man's River," he said as the stands of spidery-legged mangroves began to appear. With his own bearings set, he continued.

"I remember Daddy's stories 'bout John Dawkins bein' the man that hauled dynamite. He knowed the country as well as any and he had them oxen. I member ridin' in that there cart with his kids and ours comin' up with loads of mullet from the docks."

"So this Mr. Dawkins has relatives who are still living?" I said, hoping he was finally getting to his point.

"He got a son still livin'."

"And this son might have some recollection of his father transporting mail for Cyrus Mayes?"

"Don't know," Brown answered. "You gon' have to ask him yourself."

Now the river had widened and so had the sky. Brown pushed up the throttle and it was impossible to talk without shouting. We cleared a point of high mangroves and the water opened up onto Florida Bay. I settled back onto the gunwales and breathed in the stiff salt wind, while Brown remained standing, guiding the boat north through what was known as the Ten Thousand Islands region along Florida's southwest coast. The name comes from the uncountable patches of mangroves. From the air or at a distance they look like thick, green lumps of land, but up close there is little if any dry soil around the mass of roots that support and feed the leaves. The semiprotected water that flows through the green islands is a perfect breeding ground for fish. But the area has no beaches, no hard sandy shores on which to build. It is not the stuff of Florida postcards. And the few people who have chosen to live here over the past century like it that way.

Farther north, Brown swung the boat into what he called the Chatham River and again began spinning his way through thin waterways and around piles of mangroves. Again there were times he would have to use the electric motor tilt to skirt over sandbars that were hidden to an untrained eye. The old Gladesman would look back on occasion; I thought it was to check his trailing wake until he called out to me.

"Them those enemies the gal at the hotel was warning you on?"

I instinctively looked back at the water behind us, but saw no sign of another boat. When I turned back to Brown he was pointing one finger to the sky. High behind us a helicopter hung in the sky. It kept a distance but swayed back and forth to keep its line of sight and our V-shaped wake in view. It was too far away for me to make out the number on its belly or tail.

"It ain't the park service or the sheriff," Brown yelled above the whine of the outboard.

"Some kind of tourist ride?" I said. He shook his head.

"I know 'em all."

He pushed the throttle up another notch and seemed to take a line that cut much closer to the mangrove walls.

"It ain't the DEA neither," he said, and I'd heard enough of his reputation to believe he knew what he was saying. Brown jacked the engine to a higher pitch and I squatted down and got a firmer handhold on the rail. White water was cutting deep off the prop wash. The old man banked the boat into the next turn, sending our wake surging into the mangroves, and I watched the chopper slide into the same movement. At this speed the green walls beside us were blurring and I couldn't make out the turns ahead. Suddenly Brown turned his head and yelled: "Hold on!"

I had just shifted my weight when he cut the wheel to the right and killed the engine. The instant silence might have been peaceful, but for the sleek glide that was sending us into a mass of mangrove. Brown leaned his weight hard into the starboard gunwale and said "Duck," and the boat seemed to buck against its own wake then slide to the right onto a partial water path and plow into the outcrop. When she hit the thick roots the bow made a fingernails-on- chalkboard screech and I tumbled forward. Brown kept his feet.

I lay still for several seconds, not as stunned by the crash as by the change. One minute we'd been just short of flying across sunlit water in front of a screaming, full-bore outboard, and the next we were stock-still in a dark, silent cocoon of tangled leaves and roots.

"Y'all OK?" Brown said, still crouched on the balls of his feet.

"Yeah," I said, sitting up and pushing my back against the console.

The old man looked up and specks of sunlight danced on his face.

"Let's just see if they was trackin' us or not."

We waited without speaking. I watched a family of spiders shaken from the mangrove branches scurry across the deck. Any birds or nearby gators would be long gone, scared the hell away. It took a few minutes, and then I could hear the patterned woofing of the helicopter blades. The sound grew but I couldn't see through the ceiling of green. The pilot had circled back but kept his altitude and never came close enough to stir the leaves with his downdraft. I swatted at a gang of mosquitoes on my face and checked my fingers for the smear of blood. We listened to the chopper circle and hover for maybe ten minutes, until it finally flew off to the northeast and did not return.

"Ain't nothin' bothers me more'n to have somebody follerin' me," Brown finally said.

He shifted his weight but could not stand up, and when I saw him slide one leg over the side to get out I copied him and went out the other side into the water and warm muck. It took us a few minutes of pushing and rocking to get the boat floated back out in deep water. We climbed back in, again soaked to the waist. I could see now that Brown had made a calculated turn into a passage that broke off the main river and looped around a small mangrove stand. From back out in the main channel the turn was nearly impossible to see. It had been a firsthand example of Browns legendary knowledge and ability to slip the park rangers and anti-drug agents who had tried to catch him poaching gators and off-loading marijuana trawlers from the Gulf to make deliveries inland. He'd done it for years. I was used to being the law, not running from it, and I knew if the chopper had been tracking us, it wasn't the law doing it this time.