Sherry used a strong paddle in the front, her back and shoulders flexing each time she reached out and grabbed at the next purchase of water and pulled it back, the strings of muscle in her triceps and forearms tight as cable. But she was still a novice. She steered the canoe like she was on the inner- city streets or in a pursuit chase, looking ahead to the next obvious turn in the river and then heading the bow in a direct, point-to-point line. I could tell her a dozen times to watch the current and just let the boat flow with the water, sometimes down the middle gut of the stream, sometimes in the deeper water running stronger near the edge. But it was like telling someone how to drive, a strong-willed someone. She had stopped glancing back at my suggestions and now simply ignored me. Her action had its intended effect. I shut up.
Now, only at times would I quietly call out "turtles to the right" when I spotted a crop of yellow-bellies sunning themselves on a downed tree trunk or "snout on the left in the pool" when I saw a gator's arched eye sockets and nostrils floating on the mirror-flat surface of a pond of water off the main channel.
Sherry was also becoming adept at spotting the herons that kept pace in front of us or the rare afternoon appearance of a river otter on a sand bank. She would simply extend an arm and point in the direction and then look back at me, smiling, to see if I was paying attention.
After an hour of hard and fairly synchronized paddling, we slid out of the wooded part of the river and into the open. Here sawgrass started to dominate and before long we were at the mouth of the river-an open acreage of lowland bog and a feeder aqueduct that ran through a ten-foot-tall berm that served as a man-made border to the true Everglades. We got out and hauled the loaded canoe up the incline and then from the top looked out over the sea of water-soaked grassland.
The sky was Carolina blue and cloudless. The sun was high and even without shade I still guessed the temperature was only in the midseventies. There was a slight breeze out of the west that smelled of damp soil and sweet green cattails. The sawgrass ran out to the western horizon like a ruffling Kansas wheat field. The texture would change and shimmer as acres of grass tops moved and danced with the shifting winds.
Sherry had her profile in the breeze, her nose turned up and eyes wide.
"It's really gorgeous, Max."
"Yeah. Not a tiled roof or billboard till you hit Naples."
She didn't turn to me or even indicate she'd heard my crack but I was watching her carefully, her eyes, the lack of tension in her shoulders. We had known each other as investigators working cases together and as lovers in the way that couples with a special chemistry enjoy. But she had never seen me in this environment, in a lonely place, in a place this natural. Over the past few years I'd taken this wild and open expanse as my home and as a sanctuary from the past. Would she be willing to adopt even a part of it? Would I be willing to give it up? You make those choices when you're on the edge of something, Max, I thought to myself. Maybe she was making them too.
I checked the GPS even though I knew the direction to start off in. We took a few extra minutes to admire the view and then slid the boat down the backside and refloated it.
Though I hadn't done any extensive planning for this week, and certainly none for this spur-of-the-moment trek to the Snows' Glades camp, I silently congratulated myself for near perfect weather. It was the end of the hurricane season, late October. We'd had some recent rainstorms that kept the water levels in the Glades fairly high. In fact late last week the far outer bands of a tropical storm that was probably the last of the season had pelted us pretty good and replenished the evaporation and runoff that constantly rules over this place. But the last I had checked that named storm was rolling well south of Key West and heading toward the Yucatan peninsula. Its passing had helped create the high pressure and the accompanying clear sky and low humidity that now blessed us. At seventy-five degrees I could paddle all day and in high water we could keep a nearly straight course on the GPS reading. For the first hour I kept us moving due south in the open channel alongside the berm. As we neared the Loxahatchee Recreation Area, we struck out west onto the sawgrass plain and into what author and conservationist Marjory Stoneman Douglas made famous as "the river of grass."
We ran through about a quarter mile of six-foot-tall sawgrass and around some outcroppings of melaleuca until we came upon an obvious airboat trail. The flat-bottomed airboats cruise regularly across the close-in Glades. With their propeller airplane engines mounted on the back to provide the push, the boats can glide across the water and over even the thickest patches of grasses and small-diameter trees. Having slapped down the vegetation on the most frequently used trails, they have effectively created six-foot-wide waterways cutting through the grasslands. We took advantage. The open-water strips make canoeing a simpler task but beware if one of the wind machines catches you on its freeway at high speed. The safe part is that the raw, ripping sound of an airboat engine at full throttle can be heard a quarter mile away, which gives you plenty of time to ease your canoe off into the sawgrass to avoid being swamped or run over. Today, it was silent.
There is something of a physical hush in the tall grass here. I believe it is the heat, the slow simmer of the Florida sun trapped in the quiet water, and the smell of wet stalks and green lilies. On occasion the wind will pick up and there is a brushing sound just above our heads and then the call of an anhinga or wood stork passing on wings above.
"What is it that you like so much about being out here, Max?"
Sherry's voice was no louder than the bird calls above. I pondered the question for a few seconds.
"I'm never in a hurry out here," I finally said. "All those years on the street, always in a hurry, even when you were doing nothing but surveillance, the anticipation made you feel like you were in a hurry. Maybe it was just my nerves."
I took a long, hard pull on my paddle and looked up at Sherry as I followed through with the stroke. "Why? You don't like it?"
She looked back with that grin that shows more in her eyes than it does on her lips.
"It's way different from anywhere I've been," she said. "Maybe a little too innocent."
"It does have that quality," I said, thinking of the term as a positive whereas I was sure she was still unsure of her own definition. We lapsed into silence again. If you took a deep breath down here, the must of growing grass and decaying humus was sweet and ancient. If you stood, just the altitude of a few feet changed the aroma like a lingering perfume that only interests you when the woman wearing it passes by but intrigues you as it drifts away.
"I think Jimmy would have liked it out here too. He liked innocent. That's what got him killed."
If it were possible to sound both wistful and bitter at the same time, Sherry had captured it. Her husband, also a cop, had been killed in the line of duty. He'd answered a robbery in progress at one of those convenience stores every cop hates and often call the Stop amp; Rob, letting the humor cover the anxiety. Jimmy had caught a glimpse of someone running from the store as his partner pulled the squad car up, and he bailed out of the unit and then chased the subject into a dead-end alley.
"You really think that, Sherry?" I said. "He was a good cop from what I've heard. A holdup. A routine traffic stop. You know the statistics. It wasn't like he was cowboying."
She took another two strokes before answering.
"I'm not saying he wasn't careful, or that he was naive, really. But he had a certain trust in people, especially kids."
When Jimmy had closed in on the runner trying to scale a ten-foot wall at the end of the alley, he realized it was just a kid, a skinny-armed eighth-grader wearing sneakers too big for his feet. He relaxed. His weapon was still holstered and he was giving the boy one of those "come here, kid" gestures, his fingers bent, palm up like he'd caught him sneaking candy from a bowl. That's when the child pulled a 9mm from his baggy shorts and fired a round into Sherry's husband's heart. Freak tragedy. Never should have happened. It's something you never forget if you're the loved one left behind. All that crap about closure and moving on doesn't remove the memory cells that live in a human brain. I'd seen Jimmy return in Sherry's eyes a few times since we'd been together and I was still at a loss for how to react. Maybe she was thinking of him, what she was missing. Maybe she was thinking of what it would be like to be with someone who was the opposite of him. So I stayed quiet. Let her enjoy it, or shake off the vision on her own. Some things we handle alone.