The boys must have heard the chug of the airboat engine turn over twice, three times while they were walking across the mud that used to be Marshall's Circle because when it finally caught and burst into a roar, they started running.
"Son of a bitch will leave without us for sure," said Marcus, toting his quick packed duffle and a Lil' Oscar cooler filled with water bottles.
"Yeah? Where's he gonna go without us to do his lifting and totin'," said Wayne, who sounded cocky, but didn't stop running either.
When they jogged up to Chadwick's place, Buck had the big airboat out on a new mud slick near the old mechanic's nearly submerged dock. It was there that he usually loaded in the tourists who had been lured by his AIRBOAT TOURS OF THE ANCIENT EVERGLADES sign posted out on the Tamiami Trail. Anybody who'd lived here for any of the last three or four decades could still pick up some business from folks passing by from Naples on the west or Miami to the east who wanted a peek at the gators or bird flocks or just the open sawgrass range of still-wild land. The boys could never see the attraction. Buck thought it was as bad as running carnival rides, catering to gawkers and thrill seekers who had little respect or appreciation for what they were seeing. But he'd still served as a substitute driver for Chadwick as long as he got paid in cash.
The boys stepped up onto the flat boat deck, built like a pontoon skiff in light aluminum but with an angled bow so it could slide up over a small bank or plow right over tall grasses and thin-stalked trees. Buck had loaded the big open deck with a line of red five-gallon gas cans, a cooler, and his duffle. The boys tossed their bags behind the raised seats and then climbed up behind Buck's pilot chair. The huge, wire- caged propeller was right behind them and the airplane engine roared when Buck pushed the throttle forward to keep the rpms high. He reached back to them to offer a plastic bottle of little yellow chunks of spongy material you could stuff into your ears to cut down the thrum of noise. He didn't say a word, even if they could have heard him. They both waved him off. This was nothing they hadn't dealt with in Cory Marshall's Honda Civic with the Bose CrossQuarter speakers that thumped out Da Trill and vibrated the whole car on a Saturday night roll over to Naples. When Buck's head turned forward, Wayne pointed his finger forward and mouthed the words: "Let's flow, dude." Marcus read his lips and they both giggled like little kids.
FOURTEEN
I knew that without my partner it was going to be a much harder pull, but I missed her more than I could calculate.
We were two hours into the trip back, twice the amount of time it had taken to make this leg to the Snows' camp from the thick hammock of pigeon plum and strangler fig trees where the hidden camp may have survived the blow better than ours. I was hoping that the place had been sheltered by the trees and might be a serviceable resting spot. Now, after plowing through miles of water that had become a cluttered soup of floating, rootless vegetation, hope had turned into a prayer. I was envisioning beyond logical expectation a dry room, potable water, canned food of some sort, maybe even a battery-powered radio-phone. In the last hour my fear had grown that the latter was going to be a necessity if Sherry was going to survive with her leg intact.
In the still, flat light, I was watching her eyes while I stroked with the makeshift paddle I'd fashioned from the wall plaque. At first she'd been hyperalert, her eyes dancing from left to right, checking, assessing, nervous like a kid riding in the jump seat and watching the landscape go by when she really wanted to be facing the destination instead of having her back to it. She would grimace with pain each time the canoe slid up with a jerk onto some flotsam that stopped us with its thickness. More than a dozen times already I'd had to climb out into waist-deep water and pull us through shallows, fearful of steering us around them too far and taking the chance of getting off the direct line of GPS coordinates. Each time I pulled from the front, my handhold next to Sherry's shoulder, my eye checking the pulse in her neck. Once refloated, I would get her to drink more water from the bottles, even when she argued, correctly, that we needed to conserve.
"You're the engine, Max," she said. "I'm just the passenger. If you run dry we're both sunk." I caught her repeating the same line an hour later, and Sherry rarely repeated herself. I started watching her eyes for signs of delirium. When they closed, for rest or out of exhaustion, I watched her lips to see if she was mumbling to herself. I kept talking to her, nothing complicated or even specific, just ramblings to keep her the slightest bit focused. Maybe to keep me focused too.
Now I was talking about springtime in Philadelphia, telling her about the blossoms on trees along East River Drive in Fairmont Park and how you could smell the aroma, even out in the middle of the Schuylkill River when you were rowing. While I talked I kept my eye on a marker, a clump of unusually high sawgrass, that I'd set using the GPS. One leg at a time, I thought to myself. I talked about high school, the guys in the neighborhood and some of the girls, piling onto the Broad Street subway at the Snyder Avenue station and riding down to the Vet on a Saturday night to see the Phillies play. We'd get Mitchey Cleary, whose older brother was a beer vendor, to slip us soda cups half full of Schmidts and then sit up in the cheap, seven-dollar seats and yell all night for Von Hayes to rap one out of the park to us in center field. I saw Sherry smile at that one, just a slight rise at the corners of her dry, cracked lips, maybe thinking about the beer. When I started going on about stopping off at Pat's at Wharton and Passyunk for cheesesteaks I realized I was punishing even myself by bringing up food and drink and I stopped.
"We're gonna be there in a little bit, Sherry. How's the leg feel? Can you still move your toes?"
I was hoping for circulation and secretly worrying about infection, maybe even gangrene. The Glades is notorious for the waterborne bacteria and microbes that break down the vegetation and could have easily made it into her bloodstream through the open slash in her thigh and even onto the exposed bone before she was able to pull it back in.
"I'm OK," she said softly, her first words in over an hour though she still did not open her eyes when she said them.
"Tell me more about the spring, Max. Tell me about trees. The shade. Tell me you love me, Max.
I thought again of delirium. What was the treatment? Shit. Had she answered my question?
"I love you, Sherry," I said. "We're going to be there in just a little bit."
It was raining again by the time I looked up from a more determined pace. I was stroking as deeply as I could, feathering out the rhythmic repetitions, trying to block out everything but the reach, pull-through, kick out with as little interruption of momentum. I'd been repeating this motion for years paddling out on my river, even in darkness with only the light of the moon to guide me, up to the dyke flow and back, working the edges off whatever new rock was in my head. I could do it now, through exhaustion.
The drops of rain on my head mixed with the sweat and ran into my eyes and the sting finally made me look up. I wasn't sure how long I'd been cranking but in the distance I could finally see what might be the remains of the hammock. From half a mile out, the dark rise of trees made the little island look like it had been sheared in half. A couple of taller spikes formed odd-looking inverted Vs against the background of pale sky. I took a break, fed Sherry the last of the bottled water we had, and then drank myself from the bailing scoop I'd fashioned from the Snows' coffee can. I'd convinced myself that the rainwater would be pure enough to keep me hydrated and whatever else got mixed in with it from the bottom of the canoe would just have to be ignored. The bands of rain from the back end of the hurricane had followed us along the path but now the bottom of the boat was filling too fast for that to be the only source. My jury-rigged job with the duct tape was failing. The canoe was leaking. Glades soup was seeping in and trying to swamp us, but there wouldn't be a fix now. If the darkening mound out there in front of us wasn't the one we were looking for, or if the camp inside its sheltering trees was blown away, we were in deep trouble. I bailed while I rested and then reached out to touch Sherry's foot. No reaction. I got to my feet and with my hands on either side rail of the canoe I leaned forward. I could still see the pulse in her neck so I sat back in my seat, began paddling again, head down, the pace a step faster than before. I checked the GPS twice, three times, as we approached the island. The electronics were the only thing that could convince me. This was the place, but it looked nothing like the thick green, idyllic hammock we'd passed four days ago. The lushness was stripped away. Simone's winds had brought down the long graceful limbs of cypress and dumped them onto a mud-covered web of mangrove and what at one time might have been a fern bed. The taller trees now showed the splintered white wounds from where their branches had been ripped away and I was immediately reminded of Sherry's once-exposed thigh bone, and then pushed our way into the hammock's interior, looking for the structure of the camp, hoping.