Gateways. Part 18

"That's not necessary." Jack had planned to do a little aimless reconnoitering after checking out the intersection and didn't know if he wanted an old lady and a yip-yip dog along.

"No trouble at all," she told him. "Besides, you're a newcomer and I've lived around here awhile. I can keep you from getting lost."

Well...on that score, maybe she'd be more of a help than a hindrance.

"Okay. Thanks. But I want to stop at the hospital and check up on my father before we head out to the swamps."

"That can wait till you get back," she told him. "I was just there."

"You were?" He was touched by her devotion. "That's awfully nice of you. How was he?"

"When I left he was just the same as yesterday and the day before."

"No progress?" b.u.mmer. "How long can this go on?"

"Not much longer, hon," Anya said with a smile. "I have a feeling he'll be taking a turn for the better soon. Just give it a little time. But as for exploring the hinterlands, we should get started before it gets too hot."

She had a point. "Okay. Just let me throw a few things together and I'll be right out."

"Oyv and I will meet you at the car."

Jack figured he'd bring his backup .38 along-just in case. And mosquito repellent. Lots of mosquito repellent.

3.

A voice had called him from his long dream of the war and he'd responded. He was glad to leave the dream...so many dead men, with pierced skulls and ruptured chests...staring at him with mournful eyes...

And then he was out of the dream and awake. He sat up. He was in a bed, in a barrack. But where were the other beds, the other soldiers? No one here but him.

Then he saw a little woman, a thin bird of a woman in some sort of uniform, mopping the floor. He spoke to her. Not volitionally. The words seemed to pop out of his mouth. He didn't even hear them. But the woman did. Her head snapped up. Her eyes widened. Then she hurried from the room.

Where am I? he wondered.

Was this still part of the dream? If not, how did he get here?

4.

Jack tried to draw Anya out during the trip but she wasn't very responsive. He told her about the palmetto attack last night but she didn't seem horrified or even concerned. Her only remark was that it was "very unusual."

"How about you?" he said, s.h.i.+fting the subject from him to her. He wanted to know more about her. "Where are you from?"

"I moved here from Queens," she said.

"I'd have thought you came from Long Island."

"Well, I've lived there too."

"What about your childhood? Where'd you grow up?"

"Just about everywhere, it seems." She sighed. "It was so long ago it seems like a dream."

This was getting nowhere. "Where haven't haven't you lived?" you lived?"

"On the moon." She smiled at him. "So what's with all the questions?"

"Just curious. You seem to know a lot about me and my father, and you two seem close, so don't you think it's natural for me to want to know a little about you?"

"Not to worry. We're not involved. We never will be. We're just friends. Isn't that enough?"

"I suppose it is," Jack said.

He supposed it would have to be.

He took Pemberton Road southwest with Anya following on the map and acting as navigator. Oyv lay stretched out in the sun on the deck under the rear window. A drainage ditch paralleled the road, sometimes on the left, other times on the right. Probably served as a ca.n.a.l of some sort in normal times, but now it was mostly a succession of intermittent pools of stagnant water.

"They're called borrow pits," Anya said, as if reading his mind. "They're where the dirt and limestone came from when they were building up these roads. This time of year they should be filled with water, with turtles and little alligators and jumping fish. Now..."

He could see what filled them now: beer cans, Snapple bottles, old tires, and hunks of algae-encrusted Styrofoam.

Coa.r.s.e brown gra.s.s stretched away to either side. He spotted three white-tailed deer-a doe and two fawns-grazing near a stand of trees. As the car approached they leaped over a bush and disappeared.

He saw a sign that read PANTHER CROSSING.

"Panthers?"

Anya nodded. "They still have some around here."

The idea of wild panthers about was a little unsettling even when in a car. Imagine seeing that sign while on foot.

"I've driven through here with your father a couple of times. Every time we pa.s.s that sign he says some rhyme about a 'panther' and 'anther.'"

Jack had to laugh. "Ogden Nas.h.!.+"

"Who?"

"He was a very clever, down-to-earth poet. No airs about his stuff. Wrote a lot for kids. Dad loved him."

Jack remembered his father's nightly ritual of doling out a few of Nash's animal poems at bedtime.

He'd forgotten about those times. He made a mental note to check the bookstores when he got home and see what was still in print. Vicky would love Nash's wordplay.

He was jarred back to the present as they pa.s.sed a burnt-out area where some a.s.shole probably had flicked a cigarette out the window. Up ahead, a sign displaying a goofy-looking alligator informed them that this was a "South Florida Water Management District."

"Not much water to manage at the moment," Jack said as the pavement ran out and became a dusty, rutted dirt road bed.

"Even when there is they mis mis manage it. All the development north of here, it's screwed up the Everglades-screwed it royally." manage it. All the development north of here, it's screwed up the Everglades-screwed it royally."

Jack sensed anger in Anya's voice. And something else...

"You sound as if you're taking it personally."

"I am, kiddo. I am. No decent person can feel otherwise."

"Pardon my saying so, but isn't it really just a big swamp?"

"Not a swamp at all. Swamps are stagnant; there's constant flow through the Everglades. It's a prairie-a wet, saw gra.s.s prairie. This whole part of the state runs downhill from Lake Okeechobee to the sea. The overflow from the lake travels all those miles in sloughs-"

"Whose?"

"Slough. It's spelled S-L-O-U-G-H but p.r.o.nounced like it's S-L-E-W. The sloughs are flows of water through these prairies that keep things wet. We're near the Taylor Slough here. The Miccosukee Indians call the Everglades Pa-hay-okee Pa-hay-okee: river of gra.s.s or gra.s.sy waters. But look what's been done in the past fifty years: Ca.n.a.ls have been cut and farms have been put in the way, leaking all their chemicals into the water-or should I say, whatever water reaches here. What the farms don't take is 'managed' by so many ca.n.a.ls and dikes and dams and levies and flood gates that you've got to wonder how any of it gets where it naturally wants to go. It's amazing anything at all has survived here. Just pure dumb luck that the whole area's not a complete wasteland." She glanced at him. "Sorry, kiddo. End of lecture."

"Hey, no. I learned something. But I'd think that since Florida is just an overgrown sandbar, all of the water in the sloughs would just seep into the ground."

"Sandbar? Where'd you get that idea?"

"I heard somebody describe it that way, so-"

She wagged a finger at him. "He was talking out his tuchus tuchus. Florida is mostly limestone. It's not an overgrown sandbar; if anything, it's a huge reef. There's sand, sure, but dig down and you hit the calcified corpses of countless little organisms who built up this mound back in the days when all this was under water. That's why the water runs downhill to the Everglades: Because it must."

"How'd you manage to learn so much about these problems?"

"It's no secret. You just have to read the papers. Supposedly the government is going to spend billions to correct the mess. We'll see. Shouldn't have let it happen in the first place." She glanced down at the map. "We should be coming up on it soon."

"On what?"

"The intersection." She pointed through the winds.h.i.+eld. "There. That must be it."

Jack saw a stop sign ahead. He slowed the car to a stop a dozen feet before the intersection. The crossing road was unmarked. Jack took the map from Anya and stared at the intersection he'd circled.

"How do we know this is the place?"

"It is," Anya said.

"But nothing says that's South Road."

"Trust me, kiddo. It is."

Jack looked at the map again. Not too many crossroads out here. This had to be it.

Leaving the engine running to keep the AC going, he got out and walked to the stop sign. It sported a couple of bullet holes-.45 caliber, maybe-but the rime of rust along their ragged edges said they were old. A sour breeze limped from the west. He stepped into the intersection and looked left and right. He checked the ground. Little pieces of gla.s.s glittered in the dust. This was where it had happened.

"What are you hoping to find?"

He turned and found Anya approaching. Oyv trotted behind her, weaving back and forth as he sniffed the ground.

"Don't know," he said. "It's just that a lot of things don't add up, especially with the timing and the a.s.sumption that my father ran a stop sign."

"I imagine a lot of people do that out here. Look around. Here we are, midmorning on a Thursday and not a car in sight. You think maybe there were more in the early A.M. Tuesday?"

"No. I guess not. But he was-is-such a by-the-book guy, and not a risk taker, that I can't see him doing it. And I can't see what he was doing out here in the first place."

"Oh, I can tell you that: He was driving."

Jack tried not to show his irritation. "I know he was driving. But where to?"

"To nowhere. Many nights he had trouble sleeping, so he'd go out for a drive."

"How do you know?"

"He told me. Asked me if I wanted to come along some night. I said he should include me out. I don't know from insomnia. Like the dead I sleep."

So I noticed, Jack thought.

"Where did he go?"

"Out here. He said he always took the same route. He'd drive with his windows open. He said he liked the silence, liked to stop and look at the stars-you can see so many out here-or watch an approaching storm. That would have been back when we had storms, of course." She sighed. "Such a long while since we've heard thunder around here."

"All right. So he's out here on his nightly drive and-"

"Not nightly. Two, maybe three times a week."

"Okay, so Monday night or early Tuesday morning, he's out here and somehow he winds up in the middle of an intersection when something else is coming along. Something big enough to total his car and keep on rolling."

"A truck then. Sounds as if he pulled out in front of a truck."

Jack looked up and down the road. His father's Marquis had been hit on the right front fender. That meant...

"A truck? It would have to have been coming from the west...from the Everglades. Maybe he had a little stroke or something."

"Dr. Huerta said his brain scans showed no damage."

"Then it's a mystery."