Night vision

CHAPTER 15

"Howdy," said the man in the canvas hat.

"Howdy," I said right back.

The canvas hat had little brass eyelets and a drawstring tied around his neck. Long pale hair stuck out below the hat and over the ears. The face was tanned to a tree-bark finish from the middle of the nose down. The chin was strong and the mouth firm, and if he ever smiled, he didn't let it linger. The shirt was khaki with lots of buttons and flaps, and the pants matched, with loops here and there and enough pockets to boost all the T-bones from the A amp;P. He reminded me of someone, but I couldn't curl my mind around a name.

I had parked next to a line of juniper bushes. I got out, contorted myself into a couple of spinal twists and dropped into half a dozen knee bends. My back had stiffened into little knots and coils on the drive up the turnpike. The ancient but amiable convertible can still hum along at ninety without tossing a piston, but there is little to relieve the tedium of a narcotizing drive through the middle of the state.

I had headed the old convertible north from Miami, past Lauderdale, the Palm Beaches, and Fort Pierce, then northwest away from the coast, through Okeechobee County north of the lake. I shot past Orlando, where ten million tourists queue endlessly under a broiling sun for a two-minute ride twenty thousand fathoms under an irrigation ditch, where every motel is walking distance to a wax museum, a water slide, a dolphin show, or a jousting tournament, where "attractions" substitute for mountains, rivers, and open spaces, where our joy is computerized and packaged and spic-and-spanned, a place where every developer, syndicator, and huckster would sell time-share parking spaces if only there were a place to park.

I made a pit stop at Fort Drum. The turnpike rest areas have been remodeled into a trendy architect's idea of Florida. It is a vision never shared by the Caloosas, Seminoles, or Miccosukees. Pink and pale blue stucco with gables and tile trim. Wooden trusses overhead like a SoHo loft or a Beverly Hills Tex-Mex eatery. On the walls, pink neon palm trees say it all.

In the gift shop, not much has changed. The orange juice is still fresh, the coconut patties still stale. Next to the alligator postcards and cretinous bumper stickers is a rack of miniature orange trees guaranteed to last twenty-four hours anywhere north of the Mason-Dixon. There is a collection of key chains, ashtrays, and doodads shaped like the Florida peninsula. Does anybody buy this junk or are those the same knickknacks I saw when I drove the old buggy down here in '74?

The restaurant has changed but the food would still make an astronaut nauseous. Premade hamburgers indistinguishable from the Styrofoam container, gritty metallic coffee from a giant urn.

Welcome to the Sunshine State. Having wonderful time. Wish you were here. Come on down, the weather's fine. Six thousand folks a week follow the postcard's advice. They leave the acid rain and radon soil and descend on a land of drained swamps, where the phone number for mosquito control is second in popularity to 911. They did a survey a couple of years back on the best place to live. Not a popularity poll, but a statistical study of crime, alcoholism, divorce, and traffic congestion. Every Florida city flunked. By objective standards, the place is a humid hellhole, a place that attracts drifters and grifters, where the streets are crowded and the streams will soon run dry.

Work crews were busy patching one of the turnpike bridges near Orlando. That's going on all over the state. Especially the newer spans. At the beginning of the century, they built concrete bridges to connect the Florida Keys with the mainland. The cement was thickened with tough granite rock and was allowed to harden for more than a week. The bridges have lasted eighty years.

In the 1980s, the smart guys in Tallahassee built new bridges of watery cement, then added a dash of soft Florida limerock and a splash of chemicals to make it dry faster. The cement began cracking as soon as the saltwater hit it. No matter, though, if the new bridges don't last fourscore years. By then, global warming will likely melt the ice caps. Key West will be a suburb of Atlantis, and they'll sell beachfront lots in Orlando.

I had pulled up at the log cabin outside of Silver Springs just after nine. The parking lot was a dirt field covered with wood chips. He appeared out of the darkness, quiet as the night.

After the howdy, he asked, "You Lassiter?"

"Guilty as charged."

Tom Carruthers studied me with a drill instructor's look. "You going into the woods like that?"

"I thought the tie would be useful in an emergency. An unexpected dinner invitation, maybe."

"What the hell do you call those shoes?"

"Actually, except for right and left, I haven't named them."

He didn't crack a grin.

"But they always come when I call them," I said, looking down at my black wingtips and then at his shin-high thick-soled brown boots.

"You're a real city slicker, aincha?"

It didn't sound like a compliment, so I didn't thank him. Now, who did he look like? It still didn't compute.

"I came straight from court, drove six hours," I told him.

"You a lawyer?"

"Guilty to count two."

"I hate lawyers."

"Well, I'm not a very good one."

He pointed toward my shoes. "You can't go into the woods like that."

"I've got basketball high-tops in the car."

He spat into a bush. "Sneakers?"

Overhead, unseen birds sang little jeering songs. A stiff breeze rattled the juniper leaves and filled the air with their tangy fragrance, the violet berries glistening in the fading light. Somebody once told me that juniper was used to flavor gin. I fought off the urge to disclose this treasure of woodsy knowledge.

I had missed dinner, and Tom Carruthers didn't offer me any. Now he stood behind me and stared into the 442's trunk like a cop without a warrant. My trunk is a lot like me. Big and messy. There's enough rust on the floor to let wet windsurfing equipment drain onto the asphalt. There's a gym bag and miscellaneous beach gear crusted with sand. I tossed aside two or three universal joints, a battered sail, and a couple of booms. I found a bruised briefcase full of half-baked pleadings and a lawyer magazine with articles about your Keogh plans, your 401-Ks, and how to double-bill your clients and not get disbarred. Finally I uncovered an old pair of black high-tops with decent enough tread for pickup games on the asphalt.

Carruthers was still looking into the trunk. "No tents allowed," he said, pointing at the pile of junk.

"That's a six-meter sail, not a tent."

"Thought it was one of your new Miami fashions, a purple-and-orange tent for the fancy-pants drug dealers."

"Why would I want a tent for a hike?"

He laughed and spat perilously close to my chariot's fender. "Forty-eight hours in the woods, some folks want to use a tent. But you can't get your survival rating if you sleep in a tent. You gotta-"

"What forty-eight hours?"

"— sleep under the stars or build yourself a hut, a lean-to, a wickiup."

"A wake-me-up?"

"Wickiup. Indian hut made from tree poles covered with brush, bark, what have you."

"I thought this was just a two-hour hike."

He spat again. "Not with me, no candy-ass stroll to watch the birds. I put you in with a bunch from the Pensacola Survival League. A few mercenaries, ex-marines, Klansmen."

"Sounds like the juries I've been getting. If it's all right with you-"

"They're already in the forest. You're late."

"So just give me the mini-version. We walk in, talk, have a beer, walk out."

"You want a little hike in the woods, one of the park rangers can arrange that tomorrow. You want Tom Cat, you go forty-eight hours, minimum. No food, no water, no matches, no compass, no sleeping bags, no tent."

"Tom Cat?"

Finally the hint of a smile. Weathered creases showed at the edge of his mouth. "They've called me that for years. In the woods, I'm a cat. I can walk over a branch of pine needles two feet from your ear, you'd never hear me."

He bent over, put a hand on a knee, and started a slow crouching walk, bringing each foot up high, then coming down gently on the outside ball of the foot, rolling to the inside, and finally, silently bringing down the heel.

"A Seminole taught me how. I added my own refinements. Up here, they call it the Tom Cat Stalk."

"What do you stalk?"

"Everything from squirrel to deer. You ever kill a deer with just your bare hands and a knife?"

"Not that I recall."

He almost laughed. "You'd remember if you had. Stalking a deer's almost impossible, even for me. You gotta have 'em trapped, nowhere to run. Or you can jump out of a tree, get 'em by the neck. Slice and choke. They'll buck and try to throw you off. You gotta hang on, blood spurting like water from a garden hose, all hot and sticky, covering you, splashing your face, filling your mouth. Squeeze the life out of them, but love them all the while."

I just let that hang there. I didn't have a comparable story to swap. Once I had shooed a land crab out of a lady friend's kitchen, and she had taken me to her bed in gratitude. Still, it didn't have the same flair.

"Never kill an animal for sport," he went on. His voice was flat and unemotional, his eyes hooded under the brim of the canvas hat. "Only for food. The Indians used every last part of the deer. Ate the venison, tanned the hides, boiled the hooves into glue, strung fishing line from tendons, and carved bones into utensils."

"Complete recycling," I said.

He nodded gravely. "I don't expect you to kill a deer…"

"Lucky for Bambi."

"You don't need that much food."

"A bacon cheeseburger would do fine right now."

"Too late for that."

"Even a turkey on rye, if we're watching the cholesterol."

He motioned me toward a path behind the cabin. Behind it lay the blackness of the Ocala National Forest. "There's lots to eat in the woods. Nearly all your furry mammals are edible. Weasels, foxes, bobcats…"

I must have been shaking my head because he kept running down the late-night snack menu. "Rodents too. Voles, mice, lemmings, rats. In a pinch, I've made a stew out of maggots and earthworms. Loaded with protein."

"Come to think of it, I should cut down on the meats."

"No problem. Grasses, cattails, pine needles. You ever drink acorn tea?"

"Does it come in instant?"

He grimaced. "I'll bet you don't even know how to make a fire out of a spindle and bow."

We were wending down a rocky trail in the moonlight when I got around to asking him about it. "They got any women up here?"

He snorted. "Scarcer than hen's teeth."

"Not like in Miami. Boy, we got all kinds."

He didn't bite.

"So what do you do for excitement?" I asked.

He hopped over a fallen log, graceful as a jaguar. "You either make friends with the palm of your hand, or you get the hell out of here. Gainesville's got the coeds, a horny bunch if ever there was.

Orlando's filled with divorcees from the north, all coming down for a fresh start."

"A guy like you must wow them with this buckskin bullshit."

He stopped in his tracks and I nearly bowled him over from behind. I thought I had offended him, and maybe he'd pop me one, but he just put a finger to his lips and cocked an ear toward the darkness.

"Black bear," he whispered. "Season doesn't open till November."

I didn't hear anything and didn't have a license, anyway. A moment later we were moving again, Carruthers doing a brisk version of the Tom Cat Stalk and Lassiter bringing up the rear with a city-slicker shuffle, tripping and cursing over every branch and rock in the darkness.

I got my mind back on track, thinking of the role I had to play. A college drama professor once told me to visualize the character to become him. My mind's eye saw a sweaty-palmed guy in a bar, shirt unbuttoned to the waist, gold chains dangling on his chest. I laid on the sleaze. "Yeah, in Miami, we got your basic panorama of flesh. Every color and shape. We got your waitress types, your business and professional types. We're loaded with stewardesses."

My line drifted with the current. Not a nibble.

After a pause I asked, "You get down to wicked Miami at all?"

"Once in a while."

"Really?"

"Yeah."

"When?"

"What?"

"I mean, when you get to the city, call me. We'll go stalk the wild stewardesses."

"Too many hang-ups."

"How's that?"

"City women. Too many hang-ups. Too much talk."

"I know what you mean."

He clammed up again and we walked some more. It was growing darker under the canopy of slash pine and red maple trees. We emerged from one thicket into a clearing only to enter the woods again a few hundred yards away. Branches kept swatting me across the kisser, and my feet were still stumbling on the rocky ground. The air was moist with the sour perfume of fermenting flora, and little animals could be heard scurrying in the undergrowth. The brush grew thicker until we reached a stream. He led me across a trail of rocks to the other side. I only got one foot wet with a slip on the moss. Lousy sneakers.

"So how long since you been there?" I asked.

"Where?"

"Miami. My home sweet home."

"Couple of weeks. I give an outdoors class at the YMCA every month."

The timing could have been right for Mary Rosedahl. I thought of her sprawled on the floor of her tiny house. Serving coffee, tea, and smiles at thirty thousand feet, hungering over the keyboard in the eternal search for Fantasy Man, a kind, sensitive, knowing gent who can fix a leaky faucet and share his innermost thoughts. Searching for love and intimacy and commitment and all the other words that have been Cosmo' ed into them. And maybe she found the deerslayer, a fantasy with a nightmare ending.

We stopped in a clearing and sat down, cross-legged, like Indians in a Western. It was a cloudless night, and I could see his tanned face clearly in the moonlight.

"Okay," he said, "what's your best choice for shelter?"

"The Holiday Inn on Route 200-"

"This land's sloped. Figure the angles, so if it rains, you don't have a stream through your bed."

"— preferably with room service."

"Start by finding some good, strong branches for your ridgepoles. There's plenty of brush, tree boughs, and bark for the roof. Get some leaves to make a bed."

I hadn't seen him remove the knife from a sheath on his leg, but now there it was, gleaming in the moonlight. A row of sawteeth on one edge, a smooth bevel on the other, it looked big as a machete.

"You don't seem to be into this, Mr. Lassiter."

"It just takes me a while."

He scraped the blade of the knife against a rock. Some people are afraid of snakes. With some, it's guns. With me, it's a foot-long blade of stainless steel. I hate a knife.

"That's some blade," I said, forcing a smile.

"Combination Bowie and Rambo. Can chop down a tree or field-dress a deer. You wouldn't believe how it can open a rib cage."

I believed it. I took a breath and said, "Bet you could slice out a kidney with that."

"What?"

"A guy who guts animals probably has a pretty good idea about anatomy."

"I know the intestines from the liver, if that's what you mean."

"Catch me if you can, Mr. Lusk."

"Huh?"

His face was blank, showing neither malice nor curiosity.

"Tom, would you agree that 'woman is the lesser man'?"

"The fuck you talking…?"

"Never mind," I said.

He brought the blade of the knife across a rock, harder this time, and the metallic grating sent a shiver up my spine. "Flint and steel," he said. "All you need for a fire. Bring me some dried leaves, little twigs for tinder."

I unwound my stiff legs and, like a good scout, gathered a pile of forest flotsam, which I dropped at his feet. He didn't look up. "We get all types up here," he said. "Doctors, company presidents, retired folks. Even had a couple fairies from Lauderdale a few weeks back."

"Imagine that."

"Not too many lawyers."

"Be thankful for small blessings."

Little sparks shot from the blade into the kindling. He leaned close to the ground and gently blew into the pile. I could see his face, half-shadowed, half-lighted in the orange glow of the small fire.

"Most guys," he said, "when they come up here, they want to know about the trees and the animals and the dewpoint. You want to talk about women in Miami."

"Just a red-blooded all-American guy, what can I tell you?"

"There was somebody up here a few days ago, a Miami cop. I told him to fuck off."

"Well put."

"I hate cops."

"And lawyers," I agreed.

"Cop wanted to know the last time I was in Miami. And if I saw women down there. Then a guy in shiny shoes drives two hundred fifty miles to take a walk in the woods, asks the same questions. What would you think?"

"Life is full of coincidences. Sixty-five million years ago, when the dinosaurs bought the farm, all the plankton in the ocean died, too. What do you think of that?"

He stood up without using his hands or breaking a twig. "I think you're a cop-lawyer or a lawyer-cop, and I think you'd better find your way home by yourself, mate."

In his silent half crouch, it took only a few seconds for Tom Cat to creep into the darkness of the forest.

Then it hit me. Mate. Crocodile Dundee, but without the charm.