Chris Offutt - The Same River Twice - A Memoir

In Miami I caught a bus to Florida City. The driver spoke no English, which explained why so many New Yorkers moved there — they felt at home. Florida City was the last town before the Everglades, and I wondered vaguely how I’d ever get out of Flamingo once I reached it. Wet air sopped against me like a sponge. I went to the bus station and called Bucky, who said he was on his way. An old man chewing snuff sat behind the ticket counter. I told him I was going to the Everglades. He unleashed a stream of tobacco that spattered a stained wall.

“No you ain’t,” he said.

“I got a job there.”

“You ain’t going there.”

“Why not?”

“You’re in the Glades already.”

I went outside to wait for Bucky. From the edge of town, the monotonous landscape of saw grass and sedge spread in every direction, devoid of humanity’s imprint. Above the low treeline was a pale gray sky. A mosquito bit me. Gradually and then in a rush I realized that the manner in which I’d been hired was unusual. As the humidity collided with my body and dampened my clothes, I wondered if coming to Florida in August was somewhat of an error. I had sixty dollars in my sock, enough to get somewhere else. I studied my map. With Lake Okeechobee as its eye, Florida looked like a turtle poking its head from the shell of America. From another angle, the state resembled a scarred and flaccid lingam, and I was headed for its tip. The wrinkled map was horribly familiar. If I left, I didn’t know where to go. I’d lived in or passed through most of the country already.

A short, stocky man in a cowboy hat parked his truck at the curb.

“God double damn,” he said. “Civilization! Are you Chris?”

I nodded. He studied my swollen face.

“Well, you don’t look too natural for a Naturalist.”

Bucky handed me a can of mosquito repellent and we drove twenty miles along a narrow blacktop road that wound through clumps of mangrove and endless saw grass. He pointed out landmarks that were little more than bumps — Mahogany Hammock, Long Pine Key, a scenic overlook that was three feet high. Snakes lay in the road, drawing warmth from the tar. Huge birds flashed overhead.

The road opened into the most pathetic outpost erected since Ponce de Leon’s first camp. Flamingo’s main building had two stories with an open breezeway overlooking the bay. Below that lay a dock. Strung along the coast was a succession of low ratty cabins, each having settled into the soft earth at a different pitch and yaw. Bucky sprayed himself with repellent, opened the truck, and ran to the nearest door.

Though it was daylight, there was no one in sight and no cars in the lot. A pulley clanked on a naked flagpole. I had the feeling that reality had slipped: I’d been slaughtered on the interstate and this was a particularly malevolent form of afterlife. When I left the truck, a squad of mosquitoes found my neck and face. I ran to the mysterious door, jerked it open, and stumbled inside.

“Jeezum Crow,” Bucky said. “Don’t let the swamp in.”

He slammed the door and we spent the next couple of minutes killing mosquitoes. He gave me an official Naturalist shirt, the price of which would come out of my pay. He assigned me a room, and told me the employee dining hours. Room and board would also be deducted. I asked if we got paid in scrip, but he didn’t get the joke.

“You missed supper,” Bucky said. “See Captain Jack after breakfast.”

“Where is everybody?”

“Who?”

“Anybody.”

“No tourists today. The employees stay mostly indoors.” He shook my hand. “Welcome to the swamp.”

I got my pack and ran to my room, sustaining several bites while working the key. There was a dank bathroom, two double beds, and a sliding glass door that offered a ground-level view of the ocean a hundred yards away. Wet air stifled the room and mildew grew in the corners. I turned on the air conditioner, which pumped a weak stream of warm air.

I unpacked and began to read the Florida book, rather than merely looking at the photographs as I had in Boston. Altitude was measured in inches. The fruit of the manchineel tree was water-soluble and so extremely toxic that taking shelter from rain beneath its boughs would poison you. I had voluntarily entered the most hostile environment known to man. Ponce de León had spent most of his time on the island of Bimini, and now I understood why.

A consistent banging woke me at dawn. Bucky stepped inside wearing a bathrobe, cowboy hat, and boots.

“Can you cook?” he said.

I shook my head.

“Know anybody who can?”

“I just got here.”

“Right, right, the Naturalist. Forget breakfast, the cook quit. The boat’s broke down, so there’s no work for you today. Lucky bastard.”

The Heron was a flat-bottomed scow with ten rows of benches beneath an awning. In the morning light that filtered through mist rising from the swamp, the boat looked as seaworthy as a brick. The hull showed a thick covering of algae and scum that clung like tattered lace to the wood. I’d traveled sixteen hundred miles to love my boat, planning to call it “she,” and found the crone of the triple goddess. The most one could say of the Heron was that she might not leak.

A motorcycle honcho named Dirt concluded that to fix the motor, he’d have to pull it from the boat. I offered to help. We balanced the motor on the wide rail of the boat and began inching it onto the pier. Lateral pressure pushed the boat away from the dock. Dirt howled and I released the motor, which dropped into the dark green Florida Bay. Dirt spun to me, his face twitching at various spots. I backed away and he slammed his fist several times into the bridge.

For the next three hours Dirt sat slumped in the stern, staring overboard at the place where the motor had sunk. Each time I moved from the bow, he looked at me with such rage that I returned to my post and fought mosquitoes. Finally Bucky arrived, grinning like a frog.

“Fuck that motor,” he said to Dirt, “I’ve already got a new one on order. Be here in a week.”

“You fuck the motor,” Dirt said. “1 loved that thing.”

“Damn good motor, Dirt. Damn good. You hungry?”

“Rafe come back?”

“Got over his titty-fit in Miami and came running back to Slim.” Bucky looked at me. “They’re Latin homos.”

When I didn’t answer, an expression of chagrin passed rapidly across his face. “Don’t mean to offend you if you’re one,” he said.

“I’m not.”

“Don’t matter either way. Slim’s worthless but Rafe used to cook in Havana. Got to take the hen to keep the drake.”

After lunch, I learned that Flamingo had no beach. The land seemed neither to end nor the ocean begin, but at some imperceptible point one became the other in a fusion that shifted its boundary depending upon the tide. Mosquitoes hunted in great dark clouds. Tiny print on the can of repellent warned that the spray would corrode plastic, ruin varnish, and should not be ingested by humans. I limited its use to my clothes and sustained an average of a hundred and fifty bites per day. I soon developed something of an immunity.

While waiting for the new motor, I met a few of my fellow workers. Rafe and Slim were part of Castro’s mass prison release of sociopaths and infidels. Slim told me that he loved Cuba for setting him free, and hated America for sending him to wash dishes in a swamp. Rafe pinned curlers to his hair, shaved his legs, and wore, as he said, “sensible flats” in the kitchen. His temper erupted three or four times a week.

The Haitian prep cook was a gentle guy who smoked dope openly and was known simply as “the Haitian.” He constantly walked the shoreline searching for the Floridian’s dream — a lost bale of marijuana floating on the tide.