Cassidy stopped paddling with a nicety of judgment that allowed the canoe to glide the rest of the way, finally scrunching up onto the small beach on the intracoastal near the mouth of the Loxahatchee River.
His first love was now basketball, but he was small and skinny and regularly got trounced by the likes of Stiggs and Randleman, both of whom won much admiration on their junior high team. Cassidy, on the other hand, had had to skulk shamefacedly away from the list pinned to the bulletin board in the gym. He had not even made the first cut.
What he was good at was holding his breath underwater, at first a worthless skill until he found useful tasks to do while submerged, such as procuring various forms of dinner. He learned that grown-ups would shower him with high praise and rewards when he returned from water sports with one or more interesting entrées. He had become expert in the use of different kinds of pole spears and spear guns, but his favorite weapon was the Hawaiian sling, a sort of underwater slingshot.
Cassidy stowed the paddle in the back and took in the silence, resting in effort-induced contentment. The only sounds came from lapping wavelets and the light metallic scraping of a half dozen orange spiny lobsters in the front of the boat. Shirtless and barefoot, he got out carefully and—tides being second nature to him—pulled the boat up until it mostly lay on dry white sand, wrapping the painter round and round a cypress root. Fetching his net equipment bag from the boat, he dragged it over to a hurricane-felled palm tree and sat.
This was a good spot for mangrove snappers, but because they would be small, he decided against the Hawaiian sling he had been using all morning and instead began putting his pole spear together.
He didn’t hear the slightest sound, but when he looked up from his task, he was staring straight into the eyes of the largest and scariest-looking creature he had ever seen, either in real life or in the movies. And he had seen an angry hammerhead shark in real life.
Cassidy’s mouth dropped open, and though every molecule of his being was poised to flee, he didn’t move. He stared wordlessly at the apparition.
It was obviously a man of some kind but unlike any he had ever seen. Cassidy’s father was over six feet tall, but this man would have dwarfed him. And he was so muscular he looked like a caricature from the weight-gain comic book ads. The man was shiny from sweat and river water and was deeply tanned. Swamp muck coated his bare legs up to his knees. Cassidy was horrified to see a huge red leech attached to his thigh. He wore only cutoff army fatigues, dilapidated combat boots, no socks, and greasy burlap bags tied around his ankles. A sweaty reddish bandana circled his forehead. When he moved, Cassidy could see every strand of muscle gliding beneath taut skin.
Over one shoulder he carried a pair of wire animal traps, and over the other a live alligator that looked to be about four feet long, mouth neatly taped shut with electrical tape and feet bound together by pieces of clothesline. Tucked into his waist was a burlap bag full of something wiggling.
“Mind if I have a drink?”
The apparition dropped the traps where he stood, gesturing at Cassidy’s canteen, which he handed over wordlessly. In one long gulp the swamp man all but drained it before handing it back without comment. Cassidy noticed the man’s eyes held no malice, just intelligence and mild amusement, and he slowly let out some of the air he’d been holding.
The man placed the alligator gently under the shade of a palmetto bush, pulled the burlap bag from his belt, and tossed it down next to Cassidy before sitting matter-of-factly on the log beside him.
“You’re that Cassidy kid,” he said.
Cassidy stared, still wide-eyed, before noticing movement at his feet. He looked down to see a small head poking tentatively out of the burlap bag. He involuntarily jumped when he saw it was a snake.
“Just black snakes,” the man said. He was holding a handful of powdery sand against the big leech on his leg, drying it out. After a few moments he carefully peeled off the now white-coated creature and tossed it out into the water.
“Darn things,” he said. “Must have picked him up setting traps in Otter Creek. But I guess even leeches gotta make a living.”
Cassidy sat back down next to the burlap bag, peering at the little creature now trying to slither out. He reached down in one motion and caught the snake behind the head and pulled it smoothly out of the bag, holding it up in front of him to admire. The swamp man watched him, saying nothing.
“He’s pretty small, just a baby,” Cassidy said. The snake coiled around his wrist. Its skin was a beautiful greenish-black in a beam of strong sunlight.
“Found a whole nest of them about a mile upriver.”
Cassidy nodded, held the snake up again, then opened the bag and dropped it back in, twisting it several times and wrapping the top back up under the bottom to prevent more escape attempts.
“I see you got some bugs this morning.” The swamp man gestured toward the canoe, where the lobsters were still noisily scraping at their aluminum jail.
“Yes, sir.”
“They say you can go to forty feet and stay awhile. That true?”
“I guess maybe by the end of the summer. Can’t right now. These were only at twenty feet or so, right along the inner reef line.”
The stranger looked at him, and Cassidy had the distinct impression he was being appraised.
“I know your dad,” the man said finally. “And your uncle Joe. You don’t have to be afraid of me, son. I’m Trapper Nelson.”
Cassidy had been hearing about Trapper Nelson since he was little, and the stories were all so mythic, so gilded with hyperbole and heroic imagery he hardly knew what to make of them. Trapper Nelson was supposedly bigger and stronger than Paul Bunyan, had more powers than Superman, knew more about animals than Tarzan; he wrestled alligators for fun, laughed at poisonous snakes. He disliked civilization and lived back in the swamp way up on the Loxahatchee River, hunting and trapping for a living. He would supposedly eat just about anything that walked, swam, or crawled. No one knew more about the ocean, the swamp, or the river than Trapper Nelson. His purview encompassed both the creatures that dwelled in them and the tastiest methods for their preparation. That included possums, turtles, alligators, snakes, sharks, oysters, stingrays, conchs, manatees, catfish, and of course the more standard fare of snapper, grouper, mackerel, and snook. And it apparently included, Cassidy surmised from the man’s frank and continuing interest, spiny lobsters.
Cassidy’s older friends snickered that rich and beautiful ladies from Palm Beach would leave their oceanside mansions to come visit Trapper in his primitive compound on the river, and some reportedly spent the night. Famous and powerful men were brought around, men like Jack Dempsey and Babe Ruth, who would become giddy and childlike in his presence, awed by his strength and obvious mastery of the Florida wilds.
And here he was, sitting next to the larval Quenton Cassidy like they were waiting for a bus! Trying hard to keep his voice casual, Cassidy gestured at the alligator lying placidly in the shade.
“What are you going to do with him?”
“It’s a her, I think. Haven’t checked yet. They asked for a female. She’s headed to a zoo outside St. Louis.”
“That’s kind of sad.”
“Is it? She’ll get fed regularly, be warm in the winter and cool in the summer. And she won’t get eaten by some hungry twelve-foot cousin of hers. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me.”
“Well . . .”
“But the best part of it is I’m going to get seventy-five American greenbacks for her!” He laughed so loud that a pair of pelicans erupted from a nearby cypress and flapped away up the river.
Cassidy couldn’t help but laugh, too, but he still felt bad for the little gator, destined to be ogled and hooted at by a bunch of white-kneed Yankees.
“You play sports, Youngblood?” Trapper asked.
“Yes, sir. Well, try to. Basketball, mostly. Haven’t made the team, though.”
“Lot of good players at your school. Pretty big boys, too.”
“Yes sir. I know I’m not that big.”
“Have you tried track?”
Cassidy looked down. “I’m not fast enough,” he said.
“Hmmm. Other ways to skin a cat.”
“Sir?”
When Trapper Nelson talked about skinning something, he might not be speaking figuratively.
“Just an expression. Tell you what, you know where my place is, up the Loxahatchee, where the rope swing is? You come by sometime. I got a bunch of critters around you might find interesting. Just be sure to ask your parents first. It’s up the river a good bit, just past the bend at Cypress Creek, if you’re in the mood to paddle that far.”
“I don’t mind. I’ve been down the intracoastal almost to North Palm before,” said Cassidy.
“Good! Means you’ve got some stamina! We’ll have to go for a run sometime. You ever run on the beach?”
Cassidy looked dubious.
“No? It’s fun. I used to do my road work on the beach at Singer Island back when I was training for boxing.”
Cassidy couldn’t imagine being hit by one of those huge hands.
“Well, better get a move on,” said Trapper, slapping his knees. “Got critters need feeding. Thanks for the drink, Youngblood.” He stood and started assembling his load, then looked back toward Cassidy’s canoe.
“Say, you wouldn’t want to trade for a couple of those crawfish, would you? Looking at them has made me hungry. I don’t have much with me. Would you have any use for a black snake or two?”
“I already have a couple, and my mother said if I brought another one home I’d have to live on the carport with it.”
Trapper Nelson smiled.
“But you don’t have to trade me anything, Mr. Nelson. You can have some crawfish. I can get more.”
“If you can go to forty feet, I bet you can,” he said, ambling over to the canoe where he stood appraising the creatures for a moment before nonchalantly grabbing the two biggest ones by the base of their antennae. He came back and wrapped the top on the burlap bag around them so he could carry both in his right hand. Then he threw the little alligator over his right shoulder and balanced it there while he picked up his traps with his left hand. He smiled and nodded to Cassidy before starting back upriver in water halfway up his shins, his shrugged shoulder pinning the little gator against his tilted head.
“Hey,” Cassidy called, “I can paddle you back upriver if you want!”
“My canoe’s just past Moccasin Gap. Thanks for the lobsters! I owe you one.”
Cassidy watched him walking down the river for a few moments, then stood up suddenly and called out, “Two! You owe me two!”
Trapper’s right arm, snakes, lobsters, and all, shot into the air in agreement, and Cassidy could hear the laughter booming down the river corridor.