The Butterfly Forest

FOUR

My impromptu stop had eaten a hole into the day. I altered my errands to now include Max. I had planned to spend a few hours at Ponce Marina reworking the wooden trim on my twenty-year-old Bayliner before heading back to my old house on the river.

But Max’s bladder is even smaller than her patience level. I’d swing by, pick her up, and drive to another store before leaving for the forty-minute trip to Ponce Marina. I thought about the attack from the perp in the Walmart parking lot, and I thought about Elizabeth Monroe and her daughter as I drove down my long driveway, oyster and clamshells popping beneath the tires. A red-tailed hawk flew from the top of a palm tree, beating its wings twice, soaring across the St. Johns River.

I’d bought the place out of a foreclosure estate sale not long after my wife Sherri died of cancer. The rambling house was more than sixty years old, built on an ancient Indian shell mound. Its frame was made from heart-of-pine, but its soul was held up by cypress pilings driven deep in the old mound. It came with a tin roof, rough-hewn floors, coquina and rock fireplace, a large screened-in porch overlooking the river, and a guardian heart left behind from six decades of sheltering families.

Now the old home’s family was Max and me, and I’d brought my own ghosts.

As I parked beneath a live oak older than America, I could see Max jump from her rocking chair to the floor of the porch. She paced, a slight whimper of excitement coming, her pink tongue almost wagging like her tail.

“Have you been holding down the fort, little lady?”

Max responded with a single bark. Walking up the porch steps, I saw her attention quickly divert to a lizard scampering across the outside of the screen. I opened the door and Max trotted out, licked my hand and found a shady patch of grass to pee. She looked back over her shoulder at me. Eyes bright.

She was all of nine pounds — a dachshund with the heart of a lioness and the body of a slender warthog. Her brown eyes, with their enduring natural eyeliner, had their own sense of excitement as she played hide-and-seek with the lizards. I’d convinced her to stay away from the alligators. She was a dog that left sleeping logs alone.

“Hungry, Max?” That was all it took to have her attention. She trotted up the steps and bolted past me as we entered the kitchen. I poured her favorite lamb and rice mixture into her bowl and fixed a hot mustard, onion and turkey sandwich for myself, and opened a Corona. “Let’s eat on the dock. Quite a morning. I’ll tell you all about it.”

My dock stretched forty-five feet into the river. To my left, the river ambled beyond an oxbow. To my right, it crept around a bend, thick with bald cypress and palm trees. The river flowed north 310 miles from its birthplace west of Vero Beach all the way to the Atlantic Ocean east of Jacksonville. My location was one of the most remote along that path — near the midway point. The Ocala National Forest was across the river. My closest neighbor was less than a mile downriver.

I sat on the long wooden bench I’d built at the end of the dock. Max finished her food and rested on her haunches. She didn’t blink as she waited for me to toss her a piece of my sandwich. She’d been my companion since Sherri’s death. My wife had adored this expressive little dog; memory of her was kept even more alive with Max by my side. I watched an osprey dive in the river, catch a small bass and fly to the top of a dead cypress tree. Ovarian cancer had taken Sherri’s life, but somehow I felt a bit of her spirit live through little Max. No one is wired to know his or her fate. Maybe, somehow, Sherri knew she would die early, and that was why she seemed to truly live for the moment. Even when very sick, she was always engaged with the art of living.

Max barked. “Okay, kiddo. I don’t mind sharing.” I tore a small piece of turkey from the sandwich and tossed it to her. She seemed to smile as she chewed.

The wind picked up and brought the scent of jasmine, honeysuckle and wet moss downriver. The flawless blue sky was such a rigid sapphire canvas, I felt as if I could have written across it with a piece of chalk. What message would I leave? Maybe warn the spring breakers on Daytona Beach to watch for rip currents?

A fisherman motored in a small boat down the middle of the St. Johns. The wake from his engine lapped across the river and rocked a baby alligator from its nap and cradle on a fallen log. Max and I watched the tiny gator swim from the cypress knees through tannin water the shade of old pennies. Spanish moss hung from low-lying cypress limbs like long, gray beards swaying in the breeze, tickling the river’s belly. Leaves from a bamboo tree near the bank fluttered down on the surface as if the silent wind whispered an invitation to dance with an invisible partner.

The pirouette ended when my cell phone rang and changed the tempo. Max cocked her head and looked at the phone lying on the bench beside me. I answered. Dave Collins, one of my marina friends, was on the line.

“Sean, there was a news blurb on Channel Nine. They mentioned your name. Hell, they had pictures of you talking with two attractive women in what appears to be a crime scene right in the middle of a Walmart parking lot.”

“Happened this morning.”

“Are you okay?”

“I have a sore elbow. One of my ribs lets me know it’s there when I sneeze.”

Dave chuckled. “Looks like this isn’t something to sneeze about. They say you prevented a kidnapping, maybe even two killings. They gave a traffic ticket to the perp.”

“Traffic ticket?”

“He blew through a light on his bike outside of Lakeland. A trooper pulled him over, wrote him a ticket and let him go before hearing that there was a BOLO out for him. Perp’s name is Frank Soto. Long rap sheet, strong-armed robberies and drug running. He’s a former biker, an enforcer, a guy who’s sent in to settle scores. A hit man. You managed to stop one nasty bastard. Let’s hope he doesn’t plan to return.”

I said nothing. Looked down at Max. Watched a dragonfly hover over the river. I thought about the eternalness of evil, buried in landfills, resurrected by scavengers, the abhorrence encircling the innocent like smoke from a smoldering fire.

“You there, Sean?”

“I’ll call you back.”