The Same River Twice: A Memoir

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Two days after leaving Boston, I slept beneath a picnic table at a rest stop in Grizzard, Virginia, My body was stiff but I felt an adrenalized state of grace. The crammed sprawl of the Northeast lay behind me, I was bound for the southernmost tip of continental America, a gigantic swamp, a river of grass. I decided to give up alcohol and dope. The Everglades would be my detox center, a monastery. I was certain to live there the rest of my life.

An independent trucker stopped because he needed someone to keep him awake. Twenty hours later he dropped me off just south of Jacksonville, where I watched hundreds of drivers cruise along 1-95 without so much as glancing my way. I walked several miles to the intersection of A1A and found a message on a road sign. Scratched into the shiny metal back, as if by a dying man writing his own epitaph, were these words: “Worst place in USA to get a ride. 3 days here. Fuck Florida. Fritz.”

Below that ran an equally chilling ledger of the road:

3 days — Will

27 hours — Schmitty

17 hours — Larry

2¹/₂ days — Pablo

32 hours — Phil

1 day, 4 hours, 18 minutes — Pete the Tick

At the very bottom of the sign, carved with a wavering hand, was the finale: “You’re stuck, brother. Kick back, smoke dope, get high.”

Until a few thousand years ago, Florida was under water, making it the world’s most recent substantial landmass to emerge. Reading that sign made me wish it had remained in the sea. The lovely resort town of Flamingo was better than four hundred miles away. I decided to buck the odds, trust whichever goddess watched over vagrants and swamplands, and hang my thumb to the wind. To dodge the sun, I stood in the sliver of shadow cast by the sign. Seven hours later I was still there, bug-chewed, delirious from the heat, facing the flip side of freedom — the numb despair of immobility.

Nine miles east lay the ocean, an eternity of light-years away. The rest of the continent spread above me like a fan. I realized that I had no idea what I was up to, in fact never had. Twelve years after leaving Kentucky, I was still roving the twentieth century, ineluctably alone and no better at it, merely accustomed to the circumstance. The West was fenced, Everest climbed, and Africa plumbed. Even Tibet had white men moving through it like a plague. Thumbing was a pathetic substitute for adventure. As a young man, I’d found this means of travel ideal, but now I was thirty, beyond the excuse of youth. For the first time in my life, I felt aged.

I crossed the highway, turned north, and was picked up by an old fisherman hauling a tin skiff in a pickup. The back third of the boat hung from the truck. He made me sit in the boat. As soon as we crossed into Georgia, I banged on the window and hopped out. He gave me half a can of bug spray, the most useful gift I’ve ever received. By dawn, the can was empty and I no longer bothered to scratch the bites that covered my body. The flesh around my eyes was swollen to blindness. When I staggered from the brush, two college boys stopped their car. They seemed disappointed that I was a victim of insects rather than a dope deal gone sour. Out of pity they allowed me passage to Florida.

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.

The longest-term employee was a waiter named Grimmes, who always wore his white shirt and black pants. He’d spent so much time trotting to avoid the mosquitoes that he continued the habit indoors, I never heard Grimmes speak and neither had anyone else. He was the subject of much teasing by the only three single women in the swamp, all of whom were named Vickie. General consensus separated them as Vickie Uno, Vickie Dos, and Vickie Tres. One was the gigantic Ur-mother of the primordial swamp. Her breasts began at her throat, descending in a parabola that ended in a mysterious nether region beneath a loose dress. Her chief sidekick was less than five feet tall, and never stopped talking. She always wore the same jeans, with the top unsnapped. The third was older, seemed to be balding, and claimed to have been shot during a burglary.

The three Vickies separated at night according to whim and men, living an extraordinary life for women of plain appearance. They were high priestesses with their pick of consort. They ran in a pack with Rafe and Slim, generating an androgynous sexuality that rivaled the humidity in its permeation of the swamp. All of them smelled of salt, sex, and gin.

Bucky’s lieutenant was a blond woman with the straight-wired brain of a reptile. Rose had a crude glass eye in her left socket, and limped on a prosthetic left leg. The Haitian was so terrified of her that if someone mentioned her name, he immediately made the sign of the cross, removed his belt, and ran it through the loops the opposite way.

Before my arrival, I already had an enemy. Mossy had been the interim Naturalist before someone else could be conned into the job. He was very tall, thin from the waist down, and had six fingers on one hand. Mossy’s face and body embodied the myth of America, containing a gene of every immigrant who’d strayed across the Atlantic. Unfortunately, he also retained elements of the landbridge walkers during the Ice Age. A week before, he’d been crawling along a table in the dining room, following a rare insect he couldn’t identify. The rest of the employees calmly moved their plates for his passage. He suddenly recognized the bug, stood on the table, and lost the top of his scalp to the ceiling fan. By happenstance, I had called the following day and been hired. Mossy loathed me for having usurped his job.

Several other staff members moved through the swamp in such a peripheral fashion that I never knew them. A steady stream of new employees trickled in daily. Some people lasted a full day, but most turned tail after a few hours. Two were followed and arrested by state police. Like rotgut and rainfall, I’d found my low spot.

The breezeway was an open bridge that connected the main facility to a small park ranger’s office. Inside was a large, gridded map for charting the progress of storms from Africa to Florida. The ranger was from the Bronx. He devoted his hours to a tiny radio, trying to follow the Mets.

Initially, life in Flamingo reminded me of a rooming house-inhabited by kooks and outcasts, dice that rolled off the table, wrinkles on the face of God. After a week of breathing the heavy air, I took a different view. We were de-evolved humans who’d chosen proximity to the foundations of our existence, living on neither land nor water, but in a foreign world of both. The transient existence prevented anyone from, getting too close. No one asked questions. The choice to live in a swamp implied a past that was somehow worse, therefore worth leaving. The Glades were America’s version of the French Foreign Legion, and the meager pay kept us all locked in harness.

I soon lost weight from the steady fare of Cuban prison food. Starch was the mainstay, with canned vegetables boiled to limpness. Rafe’s primary concern was storing food that could withstand the humidity, since bread grew mold overnight. There were no dairy products for thirty miles. Breakfast was powdered eggs mixed with water and scrambled to a mortar the color of willow buds. I began eating fruit for every meal.

At peak mosquito time I lounged in the ranger’s air-conditioned office, reading pamphlets about the swamp. He could never answer any of my questions. He didn’t like the swamp and he didn’t like me. I borrowed all his books and learned enough to fool any hapless tourist into believing I knew the area like a Seminole. Two weeks after my arrival, Dirt installed the new engine. My vacation was over. The last day before working the tour boat, I applied a thick layer of mud to my face and hands and entered the mangroves.

I became lost immediately. Tree roots rose beyond my head, their branches forming a dim canopy. A myriad of insects swarmed over the mud, entering my ears, mouth, and nose. Water splashed mysteriously in all directions. Though I’d not taken a dozen steps, it was impossible to discern my trail. Panic doused me like kerosene. I wanted to run and to scream. My perceptions became so lucid that I could feel my sweat straining against the mud filling my pores. I saw nothing except the strange cellular familiarity of wet earth. My boot caught an underwater root and I fell. Mud washed from my face and the mosquitoes attacked. I scrambled to the nearest tree and began climbing, feet slipping on the branches, harsh leaves tearing my face. The tree was small but it merged with a large one and I was able to navigate above the water from tree to tree. A line of sunlight pierced the foliage. I moved closer, lost my foothold, and fell out of the swamp a few feet from where I’d entered.

Two silhouetted figures were walking toward me, one short, one enormous.

“There’s your Naturalist,” Bucky said. “Be double damned if he ain’t the seriousest yet.”

I shaded my eyes and looked into the ancient face of Captain Jack.

“Are you a serious-minded man?” he said.

I nodded. He plucked a three-inch chameleon from my shoulder. Holding it between thumb and forefinger, he squeezed its belly until the tiny jaws gaped wide, like a clothespin. He lifted the lizard to his ear and released it. The chameleon clamped its mouth around the captain’s earlobe and wriggled its feet wildly in the air. I began to laugh.

“He’ll do,” the captain said.

Bucky frowned, both hands on his hips, shaking his head. It was the first and only time I saw him unable to produce his managerial grin.

Captain Jack climbed lithely aboard the Heron and looked at me as if waiting. His hair was close-cropped, white as salt. His eyes were slits in a sun-creased face. With his chin slightly raised, hooked nose, and fence post posture, he had the air of a Roman statesman.

“Ever been on a boat, kid?” he said.

“No sir.”

“You cast off and I’ll do the rest.”

“Yes sir.”

“Were you in the service?”

“No sir.”

“Do you call all men ‘sir’?”

“Sometimes.”

“Why?”

“My father made me.”

“Was he in the service?”

“No sir.”

He stared at me for nearly a minute. He was really looking, regarding in the older sense of its meaning. When he spoke, his voice was softer than before.

“You don’t have to call me ‘sir.’ ”

I unhooked the lines and we moved away from the dock and into the bay. Flamingo’s rickety line of buildings looked twice as pathetic from the sea, vulnerable and lonely, as if they’d been beached by tide rather than built by man. We entered a channel and moved inland. The red mangroves leaked tannin that dyed the water the flat color of old blood. Captain Jack slowed the engine to a dull steady pulse. Our passage had curved until we were surrounded by the dark groves.

“What happened to your ears?” I said.

The tips of both were corrugated like sawteeth, red and ragged.

“Healed-up cancer. You get it from the sun reflecting off the ocean.”

I looked into the shadowy world of the shore. “We’re safe here, I guess.”

“Yes,” he said. “This is one of the dark places on earth.”

The somber landscape slid by. Above the engine’s laboring throb came the drone of millions of insects, eating and being eaten, living a life in a single season. Captain Jack stared far ahead, handling the Heron by intuition.

“Watch that log, kid.”

I followed his gaze forward, seeing only the endless gnarled mangroves and occasional knees of cypress. The boat’s wake spread behind us like a turkey’s tail fan. I expected to hear the sound of a log striking the bow, thumping the length of the boat and ruining the propeller.

“Port side,” he said.

Barely visible in the murky water, a log floated away from us, its knobby surface blending with the swamp. It bumped against a strip of muddy shore and continued to rise. Water drained away as a tapered snout climbed the bank, followed by two stubby legs, a long armored body, two more legs, and a scaled tail that dragged the mud. The alligator began walking parallel to the boat, head high as if proud. I felt both envy and awe. Three hundred million years had passed in the forty seconds I watched it move from water to land.

“Small,” Captain Jack said. “Only runs to a six-purser.”

We reached Coot Bay, a lagoon soaked in light where butterflies flitted among the branches. Our passage out seemed less foreboding. As we moved into the final turn that opened to the Gulf, an eagle attacked an osprey in the sky. The osprey dropped the fish it was carrying and the eagle snatched it in midair. Captain Jack called the eagle “an aerial rat.”

For the next three weeks we traveled into the swamp twice a day. There was a sunset voyage into the Florida Bay, watching the sun fall behind the Gulf, staining the long strips of cloud pink and scarlet. Occasionally dolphins cavorted beside us, blowing funnels of water into the air. The plaintive cry of gulls faded into the dusk.

I stood amidships with binoculars and a portable PA system, identifying birds, trees, the occasional manatee and alligator. My most enthusiastic lecture concerned hurricanes. They arrived an average of every seven years, and the last one of any real force had been in 1926. The Everglades was now severely congested, thick and stagnant. A hurricane acted as a giant cleaning machine, ridding the swamp of overgrowth, depositing new seeds and soil, blowing tropical birds from island to mainland. Nature required hurricanes. They were as necessary and valuable as forest fires in the Northwest.

The ranger gave me a pad of graph paper for mapping the movement of storms. A station in Key West announced weather updates every hour, and Captain Jack lent me a radio. Of three tropical depressions, only one developed into a storm, but it petered out while crossing the Atlantic.

When a tour was canceled due to weather, Captain Jack and I talked.* During forty years in the Coast Guard, he had killed three men, only one of whom he regretted. Smuggling was the chief crime. I asked if he knew Spanish and he claimed enough to communicate at sea.

“Let’s hear it,” I said.

“Cómo se llama? De dónde es? Todo es una mentira. Salga de la barca.”

“What’s that mean?”

“What’s your name? Where are you from? It’s all a lie. Get out of the boat.”

“What else?”

“Nothing, That’s all I ever needed.”

The majority of our passengers were European tourists making their first American stop. The French complained that our bread was too soft, the British fretted about malaria, and the Germans hated our beer. One day thirty French people crowded our boat. We moved into the bay and I spotted a log floating along the bank. Following Captain Jack’s bilingual example, I spouted my best French: “A droit, a droit! Alligator a droit!”

The entire gang reacted as if I’d announced the new Beaujolais was of a wonderful grape. They forced their way to the rail, taking pictures and grunting in polite tones. The boat tilted to starboard. A four-year-old boy leaned over the water, his body between the rails. Slowly his feet rose into the air and I watched his little legs slide overboard. Swift as thought, I vaulted the iron rail and hit the nasty water, my feet brushing the bottom. I grabbed the kid by the hair. Something struck my head and I lost him. Floating beside me lay the life preserver attached to a line. The boy was treading water easily, a better swimmer than his rescuer. I grabbed the life ring and beckoned to the kid, who stuck out his tongue and made a face. I splashed water in his eyes and took him by the throat.

Four men pulled the rope back to the boat. Captain Jack stood with one hand on the tiller and the other holding a pistol that I didn’t know he carried. My head banged the hull. I pushed the kid up and he kicked me in the face. By the time I was hauled into the boat, my shirt was stained from a nosebleed. The boy was in his mother’s arms.

Captain Jack maneuvered the Heron to the dock, where I tethered us to the continent. I thought about the boy who’d fallen off his horse in New York, and wondered if rescuing this kid had squared me with the cosmos. As the passengers disembarked, each one kissed me repeatedly on the cheeks. Captain Jack looked very sad.

“What were you going to do?” I said. “Shoot me if I didn’t save him?”

“No,” he said. “For sharks.”

“What?”

“They get trapped in here when the tide goes out. They can’t get past the reef. You jumped in shark water, kid. Damn foolish thing to do.”

I tried to sit and missed the bench.

“Get up, kid,” he said. “You’re all right. My wife will be glad for supper company.”

I changed clothes and he drove us through the swamp to Homestead. Occasionally he glanced at me and shook his head. Mrs. Jack was very large and treated me as though I were a son home from college. She served fish stew loaded with vegetables, my first real meal in months. Captain Jack nodded as she talked of her day — the perpetually failing garden, a bridge game partnered with a woman she didn’t like, the price of lettuce. There seemed to exist between them a pact regarding communication, perhaps the result of her life spent wondering if he’d come home alive. I complimented the food and asked what it was.

“Shark,” she said. “The captain’s favorite.”

He laughed silently, then took me to a screened-in back porch, where he smoked a pipe. He turned the bowl downside up, a habit from the sea. We didn’t talk although I sensed he wanted to. Being inland forced a shift between us, a minor tectonic slip we couldn’t bridge. At ten o’clock he said it was time for bed.

He showed me to a room with a life-size poster of John Wayne on the wall. A shelf held a row of model cars and a dusty baseball glove. Propped on a desk was a framed photograph of a young face, stoic in a Marine dress uniform. Beside it lay a small box. Captain Jack nodded to the photograph.

“My boy died saving three men. Damn foolish thing to do.”

He opened the box, which contained a Bronze Star on a faded ribbon. “Fat lot of good it did him,” he muttered. “Or his mother.” He closed the box, replaced it in the exact spot on the desk, and stepped into the darkness of the hall. “Damn foolish,” he said again.

I turned off the light and stood beside the bed for a long time. I undressed, rolled my pants into a ball, slipped them into my shirt for a pillow, and slept on the floor.

The next day the Haitian was gone from the park. He’d been arrested for possession while I’d been at the captain’s house, and the scuttlebutt was simple — I had snitched. No one joined me at meals. If I sat with others, they moved. Even Bucky became more formal, slightly distant, as if giving me plenty of lead rope. Captain Jack and I continued to work well together aboard the Heron, but talked less. He was gruff and impatient. His son had come between us in a way I never understood. Captain Jack seemed to resent my knowledge of him, the way a man feels anger toward a friend who saved his life.

My official poetry notebook rapidly filled with journal entries. Friendless and stranded as I was, the journal became a prolonged scream into the swamp, the incessant chatter of a man talking to himself. This was my most productive period.

Hot air falling off the African coast had found a low-pressure spot fed by chilly wind. Heat and cold spun into a tropical depression which moved across the Atlantic, gathering force, following the traditional path of storms. I was elated when it achieved storm status and the name of Jacob, Several times a day the radio station in Key West gave its latitude and longitude, which I charted on my small grid. As the storm failed to dissipate, I became more and more hopeful, staying in my room, listening to the radio. The announcer spoke in a slow drawl. He had a habit of pausing between phrases long enough for me to pose a question in anticipation of what he’d say. When I was right, it was as if he’d answered the question and I was conversing with someone.

“Where you broadcasting from, Joe?” I asked.

“This is Joseph Grady in Key West…”

“What are you talking about?”

“… with an update on tropical storm Jacob…”

“Okay, where is it?”

“… four hundred miles offshore with winds at seventy-five miles per hour. The National Weather Service now calls it a hurricane…”

I heard a noise outside my window. Half expecting to see a tidal wave pushed by Jacob, I jerked the curtain back. Dirt stood behind the glass. “Narc!” he snarled, showing both his middle fingers. “Fucking radio narc!” He backed into the darkness, slapping mosquitoes.

Two days later Jacob was sixty miles offshore, bearing for the coast. Life in the park hadn’t changed except that the hostility toward me had become quite open after Dirt’s discovery of my radio. I ignored everyone and focused on the hurricane. At the ranger station I compared my small chart with the big one on the wall. The numbers matched but the pinpoints on the map were different. My route showed Jacob aimed directly at us, but the wall chart had the hurricane missing Flamingo by two hundred miles. I copied the official numbers onto a new graph, recharted the path, and compared it to the one on the wall. Instead of finding my error, I discovered the ranger’s mistake.

I rapped on the office door. The ranger was hunched over his radio, sweaty and tense. I expected Joseph Grady’s voice but heard only fuzzy static. The ranger smacked his fist against the desk and moaned.

“Son of a bitch,” he said. “They walked him.”

I showed him the discrepancy and his face became pale as milk. He swallowed twice.

“I’ve got to tell the head ranger,” he whispered.

The tourists were evacuated. The ranger packed equipment and left at dusk. Bucky decided to wait another forty-eight hours to save the expense of lodging employees in Miami hotels. Jacob moved thirty miles closer. Joe Grady warned that traffic out of the Keys was very heavy, and drivers should be careful. The sky was dark gray, the weather incredibly calm. The surf rose all day.

The next morning, Jacob sprawled like a monster on the horizon. At noon the hurricane’s perimeter swept over the swamp in wind and rain. Strange wet leaves pasted themselves to every surface. The water had risen six feet, but it seemed as if the land had sunk. Employees formed a convoy that I was not asked to join. Dirt led the procession into the mangroves.

I went to my room and wrote a will, leaving everything to my brother, I tried to write a poem but couldn’t get past the title—“Blue Flamingo.” I bundled my journal in a plastic garbage bag, put on a poncho, and carried the package outside. I had never felt so calm. Jacob was closer now. I climbed the superstructure of the breezeway to a roof support. The bay below chopped white, full of sticks. I tied my package behind a steel post facing away from the sea, toward the rest of America.

Years ago, I’d left. Kentucky and set into motion a pattern of repetitive exile that had ended by dropping me into a rapidly sinking swamp. I had entered the world to become a man and wound up truly caring about very little. Most of my life had been a sequence of halfhearted attempts at self-destruction. Somehow I’d always scampered away — you can’t get me, I’m the gingerbread man. Now I faced a worthy death, a death of honor in the face of a stormy god. I felt as if I’d summoned the hurricane like a farmer calling hogs, or a shaman making rain. Jacob was coming for me and I would meet him freely. Hoka hey.

During a brief period of calm, I heard Dirt’s big Harley in the parking lot. Behind it came the cars. I dropped to the catwalk and asked why they’d come back.

“Roads are flooded past my waist,” Dirt said.

I looked at Jacob hulking twenty-five miles away. He had turned us into an island. An arm of rain lashed my face. Everyone ran for cover and I began to laugh. No one had rain gear except me.

I stayed on the breezeway past dark and watched Dirt and Slim break into the bar. They made three trips, carrying out beer and liquor by the case, giggling insanely the entire time. The night was black as a cow’s insides. Bored by my death vigil and exhausted from tensing against the wind, I left the breezeway. Through an open door to a room I saw several people naked, each holding a bottle of liquor.

I went to my room and woke with the sea twenty feet from my back door. Joe Grady told me the hurricane had stopped sixteen miles from the tip of Florida. I dressed and pulled on my poncho. Outside, Rafe was calmly vomiting, wearing only a bra. In the dining room two people ate peaches from a can while drinking beer. I fixed a sandwich and walked to the edge of land.

The eye of a hurricane is big enough for planes to fly into. From this central axis extend dozens of spiral arms composed of wind and rain. The farther they are from the hub, the more they blend together. With Jacob’s eye so close, each arm was distinct from the rest. As the hurricane spun, one arm after another struck the coast, like spokes in a wagon wheel. Three minutes of incredibly fierce wind brought on a horizontal rain of pellets the size of rocks. The rain stopped abruptly, followed by three minutes of absolute calm between the arms. Then the cycle repeated.

I sat a few feet from the ocean and watched the horizon turn dark on the left side, clear on the right. As the hurricane rotated,* the colors switched sides. The sky seemed to spin like a top, flashing black and white. Time moved in a hypnotic cycle of wind rain calm, wind rain calm. The periods of utter calm were the most frightening, a feint before Jacob delivered another blast of power.

A large pelican tried to fly against the wind. Though it was a few feet from me, I could not hear the sound of its heavy wings. The bird appeared suspended in midair, unable to go forward regardless of effort. A sudden gust hurled it to the ground with killing force.

Night arrived early and I returned to the dining room for food. Shards of broken whiskey bottles glittered underfoot. Mold had already begun to form on the half-eaten food that lay on the tables and floor. Someone slept in a corner. Dirt sat in a folding chair like lost royalty in a demented kingdom, legs open to accommodate Vickie Uno woman on her knees before him. Her head rose and fell. Rafe crouched beside her. “Not bad,” he was saying. “Use your neck, not your shoulders.”

I made a sandwich, found some carrots, and went to the breezeway. The shadow of my wrapped notebook clung to the steel brace like a cocoon. The lulling, calm was at hand, a warm night in the tropics. From the bay below came the sound of the Heron steadily banging the dock. The mangroves and ocean blended with the sky in a vast darkness, as if the world had turned inside out to create a cave. Rain battered my poncho like buckshot. Water gushed along the breezeway.

I lifted my hands into the air as wind came from every direction, twisting the poncho around my face. A tremendous gust lifted my feet. My body tipped over the bay, held by wind to the railing, while my legs lifted behind me. For several seconds I hung in the air, waiting for the blast that would crush me like the pelican. I screamed at the hurricane, daring it to come, cursing it for its refusal.

The wind shifted and my legs dropped, knees striking the concrete. Another gust pinned me to the rail. I shrieked, unable to hear myself. The wind slowed as Jacob’s tentacle followed its spiral path. In the sudden rain I realized I was crying, utterly frustrated by my failure to be defeated. I went to my room and took a shower for the first time in three days. My eyes hurt from airborne grit. I turned off the radio and lay shivering in bed, disappointed to be stuck with life.

Jacob was gone by morning.

Sunlight sparkled the water beneath a pristine sky. The hurricane had sucked the clouds into its bowels and the air was clear as that of a desert. The water had receded a few feet, leaving sodden mud where grass had been, flecked with debris. The Heron’s awning was stripped away. The boat held three feet of water in which a long snake swam from port to starboard, seeking exit. Dead fish lay on land. As I climbed the steps of the breezeway, an alligator walked across the parking lot, tail scraping the tar, an egret in its mouth.

The bay lay motionless, filled with trees, planks, and a dead manatee. I shinnied up the framework for my notebook. It was damp but safe. In the dining room Bucky and Dirt were sweeping the floor. Bucky grinned at me.

“Knew we were fine,” he said.

“Shut up,” Dirt said. “My head hurts.”

Rafe squealed from the kitchen amid the sound of stainless steel pots crashing to the floor. Another voice began yelling in Spanish.

“Grab a broom,” Bucky said to me.

“I’m quitting.”

“Now’s the best time to be here,” he said. “No bugs. No tourists. No humidity.”

“You owe me for six days.”

“The hurricane doesn’t count.”

I stepped close enough that he couldn’t wield the broom.

“It counts,” I said.

Bucky tried to grin, then looked at Dirt, who stared at me. Both smelled bad and needed shaves. Their clothes were as dirty as mine.

“Six days’ pay,” Bucky said. “What’s that after room and board? About sixty dollars.”

I nodded.

“I’ll give you time and a half to help clean up. We got us a triple damn mess here.”

I shook my head. Rose stepped through the batwing kitchen doors. Her eye patch was damp.

“You got no way to leave,” she said. “If you don’t work here, you’re nothing but a tourist. You’ll have to rent a room.”

“How much is a room?”

“About sixty dollars.”

Dirt watched me carefully. I looked at the wreckage in the room, knew the park would stink from rotting animals by nightfall. None of it had anything to do with me.

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay, what?” said Rose.

“Yeah,” Dirt said. “Okay, what?”

His expression was one of genuine curiosity mixed with anger. I looked at him while I spoke, keeping my voice flat. Any trouble would come from him. I didn’t really care, but I didn’t need a sucker punch either.

“All I want is my pay.”

“Suit yourself,” the woman said. “Pay him, Bucky. He better be gone by noon.”

“He will,” Dirt said. “With me. I’ll draw my check too. I hate this fucking place.”

“Leave and I’ll make a phone call,” she said. “The state boys’ll be waiting on you.”

“I’ll come straight back here,” Dirt said. “I can outrun any car they got and I’ll ride my bike across your other leg. If you set me up, it’ll be worth it.”

She stepped backwards and bumped into the kitchen doors. They swayed in, swung back, and bounced against her. She stumbled on her false leg.

“Bucky,” she said. “Fire them.”

“Well, I’m afraid they already quit.”

He chuckled and Dirt began to laugh. I joined them and we left the dining room together. Bucky paid us cash and shook our hands.

“She won’t stay buffaloed long,” he said to Dirt. “You better skedaddle.”

“If I get caught,” Dirt said, “I’ll leave you out of it. But tell her she was aiding and abetting.”

Dirt roped my backpack to a chrome spiderweb on the motorcycle’s sissy bar. He straddled the bike, kicked the starter, and I climbed on the back. He popped a wheelie and we entered the mangroves.

Twice we stopped for snakes and three times for high water. Birds were dead in the boughs of trees. With the moisture gone from the air, the sun illuminated everything with a clarity both frightening and lovely. We passed three rainbows that plunged into the swamp. Coming around a sharp curve, we surprised an alligator herding her young across the road. Dirt braked and swung to the left. As we shot by, one of the babies turned its head. For the merest fraction of a second we looked directly at each other. The little alligator seemed as surprised as I was.

A few miles farther, we stopped for a giant sea turtle slowly dragging its way along the road. Dirt broke a stick and jabbed the turtle toward the water. It left a sinuous path across the tar.

“Fucker’s lost,” Dirt said

“Why’d you give me a lift?”

“I don’t know. Sick of her lording it over me.”

“That wasn’t a CB in my room.”

“I know. I broke in the next day. You’re a sick fuck, in there talking to it.”

“Nobody else would.”

“You were a narc, you’d have left with the ranger. Let’s ride. I got to split fast. I’ll drop you in town.”

We roared into Florida City and stopped for gas. The town looked the same. Dirt unhooked my pack and tossed it to the blacktop.

“Give me your driver’s license,” he said. “We’ll swap.”

I frowned, wondering if this was a biker ritual of farewell. Since I didn’t own a car, I wouldn’t need it anyway.

“If she rolls over on me,” he said, “your ID’ll get me by for a while. You aren’t on the run, are you?”

“Not from the law.”

I handed him my license. It was from Kentucky, the last physical evidence of where I’d started. Everything else in my wallet proclaimed me merely American. Dirt straddled his bike and winked at me.

“Don’t let your meat loaf,” he said.

I watched the proof of who I was drive into the street, turn a corner, and disappear. I checked his license to learn my name. Jesus Christ, I thought, no wonder he goes by Dirt. I suddenly realized that I didn’t know where to go. Chris Offutt was driving away on a motorcycle. Someone else stood in a Florida ghost town beneath the terrible burden of freedom.

The old man at the bus station ignored me, as if he’d become accustomed to escapees from the swamp. He spat near a trash can.

“Do you know who I am?” I asked him.

He shook his head. I smiled and called Shadrack collect. When the operator asked who it was from, I checked the driver’s license again.

“Clarence,” I said.

He refused but I broke in, saying, “It’s me, it’s me,” and Shad accepted the charge.

“You got room for me?” I asked.

“When?”

“Three days probably. I’m coming by bus.”

“You can stay at my dump for twelve hours.”

“That’s all I could take of seeing that trash you paint.”

“I don’t paint anymore, Chris. I quit to write my memoir. You’ll be a key character. I don’t have time for this.”

“Okay, bye.”

“Wait, Chris. There’s one more thing.”

“What?”

He hung up, the oldest joke between us.

The bus north was a rumbling gray coffin, evidence of my failure, like a tamed and crippled raptor. We passed a hitchhiker and I ducked, unwilling to see the disdain on his face. Returning to Boston was the first time I’d ever gone back anywhere. For a decade my motto had been “Always Forward,” but that had taken me to a swamp and reduced me to a bus. Forward had become backwards.

I had six dollars when Shadrack met me in Boston. He kept remembering money he’d borrowed in the past, enough to keep me in cigarettes and food. He also deigned to share with me the towel I’d given him. I found work at a one-hour photo store, producing imagery before the sentiment had time to fade. Since I was the only male and the only white, customers assumed I was the manager. I quit, tired of people believing lies about me. I wasn’t an actor, painter, playwright, or poet. I was just one more nondescript person on the planet. Ponce de León died from a Seminole’s arrow at age sixty, still trying to live the life of a youth. I would not make his mistake. I moved into an upscale rooming house and wrote some poems.

A few months blurred by and I met a woman. Rita was a psychologist and musician. She was attractive in an honest way, rather than a gender contraption of makeup, diet soda, and designer jeans. Her body was simply her body, not kneaded by Nautilus into a sculptor’s plaster form. Her eyes were enormous and in constant motion. She was far more intelligent than I. She was Calliope making do with a mortal.

Rita asked me to take her out of town, and though I’d lived in the Boston area for years, the only place I felt confident of finding was Salem. The House of Seven Gables has a secret passage that tourists can be led through for a fee. We held hands in that narrow space between the two worlds of past and present. I wanted to kiss her but the guide was hurrying us along.

Later I showed her my poetry and she told me they weren’t poems but only looked like them. We had our first fight, which ended when she suggested I write prose. I taught her to drive a car, play poker, and shoot pool. Rita returned me to the species with a careful formula of protection and guidance. I ate and slept in regular patterns. I gained weight.

Within two years we moved three times, first to her hometown of Manhattan, where we were married. Rita had no brother, and her parents considered me a son. We saved some money and moved to Eastern Kentucky. My family welcomed Rita like royalty. They were pretty sure that with her around, I wouldn’t wind up in prison or dead.

After a year in the hills, we had run through our savings in a failed attempt to renovate a small house, having gotten as far as adding on a bathroom. Neither of us found work. The journal had become useless, an obvious dodge. With nothing but the familiar around me, I resorted to fiction.

Rita had long urged me to go to a writing school but I refused, afraid to learn that I had no talent. Of all my imagined artistic enterprises, writing was the only one at which I’d made genuine effort. I had three stories, all written in Kentucky, on my home hill.

Broke and in debt, I applied to several graduate programs, choosing the schools on a geographical basis. Rita favored the desert of Arizona and I wanted the Montana mountains. A teacher at the local college suggested that I apply to the University of Iowa, which I did, although the prospect of living on such terrain didn’t excite me. Iowa was the first to respond, with an acceptance.

A month later we took out a promissory note and rented a van. I was leaving home again, abandoning the hills. I’d never really found a place in the outside world, but had stayed away too long to fit in at home. We drove twelve hours with my stories in an envelope on my lap. The closer we got to Iowa, the worse the stories seemed. I’d had to reenter the hills to start writing, and I wondered if I’d be able to continue on flat land.

We camped by the Coralville Reservoir until we found an apartment in a condemned building beside the jail. The first year was hard and I considered leaving, an old pattern. Rita convinced me otherwise. We moved to a house by the river, where I built a small room to write in. I had my goddess. I had my temple. The prairie spread in every direction.