"You've got you some ugly enemies, Mr. Freeman. An' that's your business," were her opening words. No hello. No "Can I get cha?"
"But folks here don't like you draggin' 'em round behind you."
"Is there a message in there somewhere?" I said, not reaching for the beer.
"There was a couple of city boys come in after you left last week, askin' questions."
"Yeah?" I was trying to get the rhythm of the conversational rules here.
"They wanted to know who you were talkin' to and whether you were a regular." She was wiping her hands with the gray bar rag, looking first at my face and then at the untouched beer bottle like I'd sinned by leaving it there alone.
"And you told them what?"
"To fuck off," she said.
The cribbage boys sniggered down at the end, nodding their recollection of the conversation and their approval.
"Can you tell me what these two men looked like, other than ugly?"
"No, sir. Just that they didn't belong out here. They were from the city."
"Do you happen to know what they were driving?" I said, this time reaching into my shirt pocket and pulling out a fold of bills.
"A new, dark-colored Buick sedan when they come in. And a dark-colored Buick sedan with a busted out back window when they left," she said, and the boys chuckled their approval again. Rag woman knew I understood the distinction. I had experienced the parking lot etiquette myself in the past. I stayed quiet and put a ten- dollar bill next to the bottle and lifted it to my lips.
"We don't like visitors round here, Mr. Freeman. Y'all are here cause you got a friend," she said, this time tipping her head to the back of the room. I turned and the adjustment of my eyes allowed me to see the shape of Nate Brown sitting alone at a table in the corner.
"Thank you," I said to her, but she had already turned away with my money and was not bringing back change. I picked up the bottle and joined Brown. The old man stood when I approached and I shook his leathery hand.
"Nice girl, eh?" he said, nodding at the bar.
"A true charmer," I said, pulling out a wooden chair. The table was a polished raw mahogany like the bar. The wood was native to the hardwood hammocks of the Glades, but the early loggers had recognized its beauty and sales potential, so little of it was left in the wild these days. A fat, cut-glass tumbler of whiskey sat before Brown, soaking up the yellow light from a nearby wall fixture and holding the glow. Another sat next to it, empty.
"How much you wanna poke round in this here look at Mr. Mayes, Freeman?" he said after a few quiet seconds.
"Depends on what the poking tells me," I answered. "Why?"
I had forgotten Brown's penchant for abruptness. He was not a man who had survived in a rough wilderness for eighty years by being subtle. He had also not survived by being stupid. He reached down beside his chair and came up with a bottle and half-filled my glass. I thanked him and sipped some of the smoothest whiskey I had ever tasted.
"I'm trying to find the truth, Mr. Brown," I finally said.
My answer seemed to stop him, and an amusement came to his eye.
"The truth," he repeated. "The onliest truth is the sun comin' up and the ocean moving, son. I know y'all are smart enough to know that."
I let him watch me drink. I knew he was right, but such philosophy was not on my timetable yet.
"Do you think Cyrus Mayes and his boys died out here, Nate?" I said instead.
"More'n possible."
"Do you think they were killed?"
"They's a lot of scar out here, Mr. Freeman. Some of them deserve to be healed and some don't." It was not a question and I knew he did not expect an answer. I waited while he sipped his own drink. "That's why I asked you how much you want to find out."
The skin on his face was nearly as dark as the whiskey and had captured some of the same glow.
"I consider what you done before with me was an honest collaboration. An' that might be the onliest way to do this one," he said. "I believe maybe I owe you. But it ain't just for you neither, just like before."
"So what do you suggest?" I said.
"Let's go."
As we walked to the door, the bartender called out, "Good afternoon, Mr. Brown," with more politeness than I would have thought she possessed. He waved and got the same response from the card players. As I passed the bar I looked for the old construction photograph but it was missing from the wall. When I turned and asked the bartender about it she looked past me at the clean, empty rectangle its removal had left on the wall and shrugged her shoulders. "I hadn't noticed," she said.
Outside we got into the truck and Brown directed me south. I had never seen the old Gladesman in anything other than a boat and he looked small and uncomfortable in the passenger seat. He rolled his window the rest of the way down and I half expected him to thrust his head out like a retriever. He was not a man for closed- in places. He soon had me pull off onto a dirt track and we bounced a quarter mile west into a thick stand of rimrock pines. When we ran out of trail I stopped and he simply said, "You might want to slip right there under them boughs. Keep her out of the sun some." I did as instructed and we got out. I could see no path or obvious opening beyond the trees, and when Brown started to move off I said, "Should I lock it up?"
"Suit yerself," he said, and kept walking. I had learned in my last encounter with Nate that in his world, you were best off just to trust him. I locked the truck and followed.
He slipped into the trees, moving with a slow and steady grace that I could not match. I stepped where he did, ducked under the same limbs and avoided the same ankle-breaking ruts and holes, but with only some success. About fifty yards in, the pines thinned and the ground turned moist. We skirted a patch of cabbage palms and in seconds were calf-deep in standing water. I was about to break my silence when I spotted the white fiberglass of a boat hull. Nate had left his center console runabout floating along a wall of cattails in crotch-deep water. He clambered up over the stern and I followed. I watched as he wordlessly pulled in the anchor line and then used a pole to push the boat backward into some kind of natural channel. When he seemed satisfied with the depth, he stood at the console, cranked the starter, and at idle speed began to guide us along the snaking ribbon of water. Soaked to my waist and now completely lost I finally checked my patience.
"If you don't mind my asking, Nate, where the hell are we going?"
"We's headin' over to Everglades City, son," he said, not taking his eyes off the water, studying, I assumed, its depth and direction. "I got you a man you need to talk with."
I could tell from the sun's position that we were moving generally to the southwest, even though the serpentine route of the water sometimes spun us in near circles before turning and heading again toward the end of the Florida peninsula. The cattails soon gave way to sawgrass that often sprouted six feet tall from the water. Tucked down in the brownish green maze it was airless and hot. The only breeze was from our own movement, and the air held the sweet, earthy odor of wet decay and new growth like some freshly cut vegetable just dug from a rain-soaked row.
At times the water became so shallow that both of us would have to pole the boat forward. Other times Brown was able to use the electric motor tilt to raise the propeller blades until they were barely churning and spitting the water. When it deepened again he would lower them back and we would gain speed, and the breeze it created was a luxury.
Above, a bowl of blue sky covered us from horizon to horizon, and while the sun traveled across it, Brown told me the story of John Dawkins.
"He was the colored man that was in them letters," he said. "The one that trucked the dynamite out there on the trail 'cause there weren't another man alive out here could have done it."
John Dawkins might have been from the Caribbean Islands or from New Orleans, but he and his family's blackness made them unique. But there were few enough families living in the Glades in the early 1900s, and those who had made it their home and braved its harshness knew one another as community.