"Yeah, and I've got to get out to the mansion," I said and got up. "Thanks for breakfast, son."
Down at the dock I flipped my Voyager canoe and wiped out the webs that a golden-silk spider had put up between the struts. I loaded in containers of fresh water and a canvas bag of clean clothes and then floated the bow. Planting my left foot in the middle of the hull and gripping the gunnels on either side in a well practiced move, I pushed out onto the flat river water and glided out. When I'd settled into the stern seat with my paddle in hand, I turned to wave at Griggs, who was standing on the dock with his thumbs in his belt loops, and I knew he was jealous.
The sun was high and white and flickering off the water and I took my first few strokes north and drifted. I moved my weight around on the seat to find the right balance and then put some shoulder into the paddling. The river was wide here and moved strong to the sea when the outgoing tide pulled at it. I kept my course close to the sand banks so I wouldn't have to fight the middle current, and found a rhythm.
The fumbling city boy who'd come here without a clue for the feel of the water and natural wind and wilderness had morphed into a competent riverman. The hours of hard paddling had earned me technique. I could dig into a purchase of water, pull through a stroke and kick the blade out at the end to send a spiral of water like a spinning teacup out behind me. And I could do it at sixty strokes a minute if I put my back into it. For a mile and a half I worked my way up past the sand pine terrain and then the low mangroves took over. The river narrowed and moved north and west for another mile until finally entering a cypress forest and tunneling into a shady greenness that was truly prehistoric.
My T-shirt was soaked through with sweat by the time I slid in under the canopy of trees. It was several degrees cooler here and I shivered with the change. I let the canoe drift in while I peeled off the shirt and pulled a dry one from my bag. The quiet here never failed to amaze, as if the lack of noise itself was something you could touch. Each time back from the city I could feel it cup over my ears like a changing of air pressure. I let the canoe come to a stop and listened for a full ten minutes before finally dipping the paddle and following the clearing water, which was now leading back to the South.
For a half mile I steered through the cypress knees that broke the surface and around fallen red maples. The hard sun was gone and the shafts that made it through the canopy speckled the ferns and pond apple leaves like luminescent streaks and drops of paint. Two bald cypress trees marked the entrance to my place and I paddled in on a shallow water spur off the main river. Fifty yards into the green my stilted shack stood hidden. I lashed the canoe to a small dock, gathered my things and after carefully checking for any footprints on the moist risers, I climbed the wooden stairs to, as Griggs had called it, my permanent residence.
Inside I stowed my supplies and started a pot of coffee with the fresh water on a small propane stove. The room held a mingled odor of mildew, still swamp air and fresh-cut wood from Griggs's and my repair work. The northeast corner showed the new honey-colored planks where we'd stopped and the blackened, soot-marked pine that was still structurally sound. Nothing inside was painted, so I'd left the scar. Along the opposite wall hung a row of mismatched cabinets above a butcher-block counter and a stainless slop sink. An old hand pump that might have been installed when the first owner built the place in the early 1900s as a hunting lodge still worked, with the help of some new rubber washers. With a half dozen pumps of the handle I raised water directly from the swamp below and rinsed out my coffee cup.
While the coffeepot burbled, I went to one of the two worn armoires that stood against another wall and searched the bottom drawer. I had not carried much to South Florida that would remind me of my Philadelphia days. There had already been plenty in my head. But I had a small, gray-metal lock box that I now pulled out and put on the big oak table that took up the middle space of the room. I poured a cup of coffee and sat in one of the two straight-backed chairs and slipped a key into the lock. Inside was an oilskin cloth wrapped tightly around my 9 mm handgun. I held the weight of the package in my hands and then set it aside. Underneath I'd tucked important papers: birth certificate, passport, a life insurance policy and three letters I had written to my ex-wife but had never sent.
Under them was an old photograph of my mother, taken when she was a shy Catholic nursing student. With it were her rosaries, which she asked me to keep as she lay on her deathbed. Snapped inside a plastic case was a medal of distinction from the Philadelphia P.D., awarded to my father back when both he and it were yet untarnished. I kept digging until I found the yellowed tearsheet from an old neighborhood tabloid.
It was a photograph of two dozen men, standing in uniform and looking self-conscious. My graduating class from the police academy. I was in the back row, among the tallest, face stern, hair short and swept to the side. I scanned the other rows but finally had to refer to the list printed in small letters below to find Colin O'Shea. He was in the second row, his hair curly and dark and seeming too long for standard requirements. His face was pale, his head slightly tilted as though he were about to whisper something out of the side of his mouth to the man next to him. The paper was faded, yet I thought I could detect a smirk on O'Shea's face. I took a sip of coffee and twenty-year-old memories came back.
He'd been good in class. One of the smart ones who would sit back and listen, watch the others offer up wrong or incomplete answers, and then just when he could tell the instructor was going to give in and enlighten us all, O'Shea's hand would fly up and he would have the answer down pat. He was a good athlete. Finished high in P.T. In team drills he would give a hand and encouragement to the stumblers and overweight guys, the ones who were no threat to him. But when it came to competition he would hang back just off the leaders, drafting, and then try to surprise and outsprint them at the end. It wasn't cheating. It was calculating. The better guys would still beat him, but he would still seem pleased with himself, like he'd pulled something off, had changed the finish and in his way won. I watched him, like I watched all the others, but stayed clear of his game. When he tried to use our connection to the South Philly neighborhood to buddy up, I just acknowledged him and moved away and stayed on my own path, whatever the hell I thought that path might have been.
I finally shoved the photo aside, got up and selected a book from the shuffled stack on the top rack of my bunk bed. They were mostly history and travel books-Billy's contribution to my derelict education. I spent the rest of the daylight reading a collection of stories by Ernie Pyle called Home Country out on the staircase landing, my back against the door. Between pages I looked out into the canopy when a quiver of leaves shook under the weight of a green heron. While Pyle described the Drought Bowl of 1936 in the Dakotas, my ears listened to the low croak of a wood stork working the shallows to scissor a snake or baby gator in its long, drooping bill. After dark I warmed soup on the propane stove and ate it with the fresh bread I'd brought back from the coast. Later I sat in the pool of light from my kerosene lamp and listened to rain gather in the trees and then patter down on my tin roof. The irregular beat was not unpleasant. Finally I undressed and lay down on my bunk. It was just cool enough to use a thin cotton sheet as a cover. I left the lamp burning on the table. For some reason, lately, I did not want to sleep in the dark. On Thursday I went back into the city. Billy and I had talked about work now that he was back. I knew from experience that his high energy level had him fidgeting to get plugged back in. I was bringing Rodrigo Colon into the office for a joint interview. I picked up the young Filipino down the street and around the corner from the hotel where he and the other injured workers were staying. The small man climbed into the passenger seat of my truck, pulling his right leg up after him.