A False Dawn

ONE

Max saw him first. Then I saw him out of the corner of my eye. A hundred yards downriver from my dock, a man stood chest-deep in the river. He held a long pole, prodding underwater as if he was searching for something. Maybe it was because I’d clocked too many years in law enforcement, but it looked like he was searching for a body. He was coming my way.

“Think a gator will get him before he can make it to the dock?” I said to Max as she cocked her head and trotted to the end of the dock. Max, my ten-pound dachshund, let out a slight whimper. She watched the man in the distance. He didn’t look our way while he poked and prodded the riverbed.

I turned and got back to the work I was doing, searched through my open tool box for four-inch nails and I found a hunting knife under my hammer. I glanced back at the man. He was still a good ninety-five yards downriver. I saw him put something in the pouch he carried.

After sniper training, after my time in the first Gulf War, I still calibrated distance in trajectory — what I had to do to make sure a.50 caliber rifle bullet hit a target the size of a grapefruit a quarter mile away. I looked at the river’s surface. There was no wind. The man walking in the river wore a wide-brim hat. From where I stood, I could aim with a scoped rifle, if I had one, for the middle of the hat, right above the brim. From this distance, the bullet would hit him dead center in the forehead.

I blinked hard. Enough. Not everybody is a hostile. Not everybody is homicidal or a homicide suspect. I swatted a deerfly and took a deep breath. It was spring and the river carried the smells of renewing life. Alligators building nests out of sand, sticks and river mud. Spoonbills and herons feeding live fish to squalling young. Honeysuckles and wild roses blooming.

I removed the knife from the toolbox and laid it on the wooden bench. I looked over my shoulder at the man in the distance and began driving a nail into the wood. I wanted to replace worn and broken planks on the long bench. The morning was already hot, near eighty I guessed. I was shirtless, jeans. Sweat rolled down my back as I hit the nails.

My Uncle Bill, a World War II vet who never spoke of the war, only the demons he fought after it, used to say that anger drives the nails into your own coffin. He also said that every man has his breaking point. After a thirteen year career as a homicide detective, I began to understand what Uncle Bill meant.

It’s gut rot of the soul, and it was the most pervasive part of the job in fighting crime. In homicide, I didn’t fight crime. The crime had happened before we arrived. I fought the motivation, the detached switch that allowed someone to derail another person’s life. And it fought back. It had pierced the scab covering a dark ember in my marrow, and the buried ash smoldered beneath the surface of night sweats.

I pounded another nail so deep into the wood I couldn’t see the head. After my wife, Sherri, died of ovarian cancer six months ago, I moved here to this remote spot on Florida’s St. Johns River with Max. Sherri had bought the miniature dachshund when I’d been away on a three-day stakeout. She named her Maxine and allowed her sleeping quarters at the foot of our bed on her own “doggie blanket.” When I’d returned home, my wife said that Maxine was the only other warm body she’d let in our bed. I couldn’t argue that, and so this little dog, with her soft brown eyes, permanent eyeliner and heart of a lion, became our companion.

Now it was just the two of us, and Max was sleeping under the blanket on her side of the bed. I’d sold everything with the house in Miami. My new home was an old Florida cracker house with a large tin roof, plenty of rambling rooms, huge screened-in porch, and a generous view of the river. The house sat on one of the few high banks overlooking the river. Most were bluffs of ancient Indian shell mounds. The native people had lived off the river, eating fish, clams and oysters. They piled the shells and bones into mounds up and down the river.

“Dog’s gonna be a meal for a gator if it gets too close to the edge.”

I whirled around and saw the man, now less than fifty feet from my dock. How had he walked that quickly? Had I been pounding the nails so hard I didn’t hear Max bark? Did she bark? She stood there, little paws at the edge of the dock, tail wagging looking at the man in the river.

He wore an Australian outback hat that looked as old as Ayers Rock. He walked along the river bottom, water up to his chest, the pole tapping the unseen. Max uttered a low growl.

“It’s okay, Max,” I said. She looked back at me like she didn’t believe me. I glanced at the knife on the bench and looked at the man.

He held his hat and slowly dropped down into the river, the dark water covering him. Within seconds, he was gone.