On the pale flats the lone trace of man was a leaning stake marking some lost channel that a storm or shift of current had filled in. On the end of the stake perched a ragged cormorant, its drying wings held wide in a black cross against the wind. The archaic bird, the rampant mangroves, the hidden underwater life raising ghostly puffs from the white marl dust of ages of dead creatures, deepened Burkett’s sense of solitude, of pointlessness. Earlier that day they had seen a silver horizon off to the west, where the Ten Thousand Islands opened out onto the Gulf, and this window of light, for a little while, had dissipated a vague dread that had been gathering for days.
The marl reaches were too shallow for the outboard, and the skiff moved so quietly across the flats that Burkett could hear the minute fret of water on the hull.
Facing astern, he tried to befriend the black man standing on the thwart, who always worked as if he were sneaking up on something, even in the open water, staring about him, catching his breath, as if emptiness itself were a thing to fear. On his sculling pole, leaning out over the stern, as far away from the white people as possible, the bony figure—the shadowed face under the straw hat, the tattered shoulder of his faded shirt, the unnameable odor—swung in arcs on the hot white sky, back and forth and forth and back against the wild green walls. The water, browned by mangrove tannin, turned gray when the sun clouded over, and the dark islets spread away, parted, regathered, always surrounding. With their silent boatman, his wife had said, it was like traveling the River Styx.
Behind him, Alice sat unprotesting in the bow. Her rag-doll smile, still pretty and fresh at forty-three, required no lipstick, and she rarely wore it. Why, he wondered, had she worn it to go fishing? The red smear of lipstick on her bucktooth, the funny sun hat, the white sun paste on her nose, the incongruous earphones of the tape player clutched too tightly in her hand—her eccentric aspect intensified his instinct that they had no place here. (She knew what she looked like and performed a whimsical fishing routine when he asked how she was doing, brandishing her rod, crying fiercely, “Fisher Woman!”) If only for her sake—since she was no fisherman—they should have gone deep-sea fishing out of Fort Lauderdale, or bonefishing out of Islamorada in the Keys, where there were friendly people to relax with, drink with, where she might have spent a day around the pool. In this wild region the inhabitants held them away, even this guide, who was too makeshift in his preparations to bring along his lunch and too uneasy to accept a part of theirs.
Burkett, who had his own small boat at home near the Potomac, was rather proud of his knowledge of boats and fishing. It seemed absurd to pay good money to sit in this hard skiff and be poled around in these godforsaken mangroves hauling in ladyfish and snappers when what he had come for was the robalo, or “snook.” “He has his heart set on a snook,” Alice had informed their friends in Washington, where he was a lawyer for the Interior Department. When Alice said that she understood why tourists might go elsewhere, he retorted crossly that they were fishermen, not tourists. To this, in the face of the gloomy discomfort of the guide, she hollered, “Fisher Woman! Snook!” (pronouncing it snewk in the local accent, yanking her rod back to set the hook, and battling the fierce snook to a standstill with eyes closed in a reckless parody of her own sexual abandon, to get him to laugh at himself, which at last he did).
At least the town was an inexpensive place that they could talk about entertainingly when they got home. An old-time Indian trading post from the days of commerce in otter pelts and egret plumes, this small fishing settlement at the far end of an eight-mile canal road was the “last frontier town” at the edge of “the last wilderness” of the Ten Thousand Islands. Here was a stronghold of the vanishing snook, and here hard-bitten shrimp and mullet fishermen—according to well-informed colleagues over at the Justice Department—grew rich on night runs of marijuana through this shallow-water archipelago, where patrol boats came to grief when they tried to follow, where new pickup trucks and limousines left for Miami from weathered cottages on the cracked and grassy streets of an old Gulf Coast town that lacked a decent restaurant, much less a movie house. The Burketts had seen no sign of limousines, but it was certainly true about the movie house. As for the fried food in the motel café, Alice said, it had been freshly reheated every day since the Civil War. In the evenings, owing to mosquito plagues, they could not walk the quiet streets under the palms. Instead they confronted a black-and-white TV in a dim, bare room that stank of disinfectant. Days and nights alike were hot and humid, and the nearest beach, a patch of sand among the mangrove roots, three miles away by boat down the main channel, was beaten hard by the gray and windy water of the Gulf.
At each new evidence that they had erred, Alice would gaze at him in wonder. Why didn’t her loving husband get her out of here? He didn’t stay merely out of stubbornness; he had some idea about getting to know these people. But these people had no wish to be known. That he kept trying, she supposed, had something to do with self-respect, with persevering to avoid some obscure defeat. Anyway, she did not expect him to explain to her what he scarcely understood himself. His first snook would justify the trip, and he had to admit he was sort of curious about the rumored drug trade, which might account for the suspicion with which they had been received.
Alice said that he was paranoid, these lovable folks were just standoffish with strangers. Like most Americans—she informed him—he couldn’t tolerate feeling unwelcome: “You cracker bastards gonna love us whether ya like us or not!” Alice declared, shaking her first at the silent community outside their cabin.
For all her clowning, Alice shared his own uneasiness. She sat there hunched up on her seat, having an eager, frightened time. With the dour black man looming over them—like a hanged man in the wind, said Alice—she rarely spoke, except for occasional mild exclamations about the confetti of white egrets on the green walls, or the sentinel herons that stood far out on the shallow water, waiting for—what? The coasting rays, small barracuda, the pale crabs turning up their claws as the boat passed—everything out on the white flats seemed to watch and wait.
She had a horror of the bottom life, the myriad amorphous things acting out silent destinies and violent ends in shrouds of underwater dust, and could scarcely bring herself to look over the side. At home she loved her bird feeders and garden. So much impenetrable growth, so many gaunt huge bleak-eyed birds, oppressed her. The sonatas of Europe on her tape recorder protected her from the great New World silence.
As for the boatman, he was inclined to silence even when spoken to. Most fishing guides were easygoing guys, and the best of them made the client feel like a real fishing partner. But Dickie’s discolored eyes were evasive, unamused; most of the time he whistled tunelessly under his breath. (“When he’s really uneasy,” Alice said, “he sounds like a tea kettle.”) They assumed that this had something to do with being a black man in a backwater town bypassed in the fight for civil rights. The black people lived in their own community several miles up the canal road toward the state highway, and were unwelcome in Seminole after dark, as Burkett discovered on the evening of their arrival when he tried to locate a fishing guide for the next day. He made no attempt to conceal his surprise, which was instantly perceived as disapproval. “Jest seem to be the way them folks prefers it,” he was warned by “Judge” Jim Whidden, the owner of the Calusa Motel and unelected leader of the town. “Ain’t no law about it, mister. Maybe they ain’t exactly integrated, but they ain’t discriminated, neither, not the way you people think.”
Asked the next day about the black community, the guide glowered and grinned at the same time and did not answer, pretending that the white man had made a joke. Annoyed by his wife’s warning poke, Burkett persisted. His feeling was that, as a representative of the U.S. government, he should probably report the matter to his colleagues over at Justice. But it turned out that the guide was proud of his own status as Whidden’s servant. In fact, he slept in the “Whidden Buildin” on nights when he helped out in the café. “All de res’ of ’em haves to go home. Guess dass de way dat cullud folks prefers it, jes’ like Judge Jim say.” Burkett had hoped that Dickie would relax once he understood that their concern about the situation was sincere, that they had marched in the civil rights demonstrations in the sixties, and that any confidence he might make to them was safe. Instead, their friendliness intensified his fear of them. He seemed more skittish every day.
Because none of the mangrove islets had dry land, they went ashore at midday on one of the spoil banks of white marl and fossil shell along the channel to the open Gulf used by the fishing boats and a few private craft. Here Alice could stretch her legs a little, and go behind a bush. But the dry marl was baked hard, there was no place for her to sunbathe, and with Dickie nearby, sighing with hunger, they felt obliged to share both food and conversation.
One day Burkett brought along their bottle of rum, to make the trip slightly more festive. Because it was awkward to exclude the guide, he ignored his wife’s raised eyebrows and offered Dickie a drink, well mixed with tonic. Dickie looked startled, but he did not turn it down. He even smiled after a pleasant interlude, asking Alice if he might listen through her earphones. Clearly she had mixed feelings about this, but she handed them over cheerfully enough, and Dickie enjoyed a little Mozart. He asked how much the tape player cost, and when she said uncomfortably, “Oh, a couple hundred dollars,” he gave in to an impending fit of nervous laughter. “You bes’ tip me good, ah gone get me one!” Exhilarated by the first social occasion they had enjoyed since they had arrived, Burkett included Dickie in a second round, which Alice refused to share.
Dickie put down his empty glass, sighed, shook his head, and smiled. “You folks wants somethin in dis ol’ town, you jes’ ask Dickie,” he said, excited. “I de number-one cullud around here, de number-one.” Still smiling, he glanced from one to the other. Then—neither forthright nor furtive—his long hand slipped slowly as a snake into the basket and removed a sandwich. Having gone this far, he lost his nerve, and dared not eat in front of them. He cocked his head toward the rumble of a boat motor behind the islands, and on this pretext, swaying and laughing, moved away to do something with the skiff.
Burkett was always aroused by rum and the smell of sunburn cream; he wanted to touch his wife. But Alice was intent on Dickie. Against the water shine that haloed his dark head, they could see the silhouette of earphones, as if he were tuned in to outer space.
She shifted, restless, under his hand. “Listen, I love your idealism, and your curiosity and good intentions. I do. How else could I have married a damn bureaucrat?” She took his hand to soften what was coming. “But I think what you’re doing with Dickie is stupid as hell.” She waved away his protest. “You just don’t have to come on so hard as his white fishing buddy. I think you should stick to catching that weird snewk.”
The wall of islands parted to release a broad white boat. High in the bow, with a deckhouse and a long low work deck, she threw a deep wake that struck the spoil banks of white shell on either side of the narrow channel. The wave carried outward, slapping noisily into the mangroves.
Burkett watched the boat through binoculars. He grinned when he saw someone with binoculars observing him through the deckhouse window. The unused nets had a new linen color, and unlike other shrimp boats they had seen, this one seemed to ride too high out of the water. Burkett waved to a pale man in a black T-shirt who came out on deck. The man did not wave back, and Burkett jumped to grab the rum bottle and basket as the boat’s wake surged high onto the spoil bank, washing down again with a brittle tinkling of old shells.
“Sonofabitch! No shrimps in that boat!” he cried out to the guide.
Refloating the skiff, Dickie stared off in the wrong direction.
“You see that?” Burkett demanded of his wife, who raised her eyebrows, gazing after the departing boat as if she had missed something. “See how clean she looks? That shrimper never carried shrimps, I’ll tell you that!”
“You don’t know that. You just want to believe it because you’re my square darling and you’re a little drunk and it would make your vacation more exciting for some reason.”
“Goddamnit, Alice, they run enough dope through this place to turn on the whole state—” He checked his outburst, seeing Dickie standing there holding the skiff. Angry, he said, “Goddamnit, Dickie, tell her what that boat is really used for!”
The black man was silent for a moment.
“Shrimp boat, suh.”
“How come she rides so high out of the water? Pretty light cargo, wouldn’t you say? And how come she’s heading out so late in the day?”
“New boat, suh. Jes’ checkin her out, what dey calls shakedown.” Dickie steadied the skiff as they got in. “Shrimps comes to de surface in de night. Fish dem at night.”
Burkett winked at his drinking companion, but Dickie’s face had closed again, and his wife’s face was closed, too. He resented her superior attitude, but he also knew he had behaved stupidly, and he got into the skiff in a foul humor. In the afternoon sun, the rum had given him a headache. He prodded a mangrove snapper with a sneakered toe. The gray fish lay stiff on the skiff floorboards, mouth stretched painfully.
The tide was low when they got back, and the dogs, old people, and children, moving out of the shadows of a giant banyan, stared straight down at the sun-parched foreigners with the red knees and comic hats. Every day this small convocation included old dock fishermen in tractor caps wearing bright white T-shirts under nylon shirts despite hot weather, and a washed-out child with one hand on a smaller brother and the other jammed between her legs.
Rum-and-sun-struck, Burkett rose, spreading his hands for balance. The folks laughed. “Give you a hand, Dickie?” he said.
“Nosuh.” Dickie braced the skiff and waited, averting his gaze from them as if ashamed. He seemed to efface himself against the bulkhead. The onlookers murmured when Burkett, helping his wife onto the dock, had to push her buttocks from below, exposing the painful red line between thigh and hip (“Beach or no beach,” she had said, “I’m not going home without a tan!”) and again when she clambered a little way on hands and knees before rising and turning, waiting for Dickie to hand up their gear. “Ahs got ’em,” Dickie said ungraciously. He had not offered to take their things the day before, and later they attributed his newfound manners to the presence of Judge Jim Whidden. Arms folded on his rolling chest, Judge Jim observed them from an overturned boat under the banyan.
Whidden rose and tipped a pearl-gray hat. He was a fat man but not soft, with a strong face hard-packed in lard, and a twitch of humor.
“You folks make out all right?”
“No snook yet,” Burkett said. “Nice snappers, though.”
“Why, that’s fine, Lawyer, that’s fine. We’ll fry ’em up for you this evenin.” Judge Jim beamed from one to the other. “Dickie take care of you good?” The man’s big voice carried easily to Dickie and the onlookers, and Burkett started down the dock, unable to focus or dispel his irritation and anxious to remove himself from the whole scene.
“Oh, Dickie was fine!” Alice was saying, with the haunted look she always wore when she had to pee.
Judge Jim caught Burkett’s elbow as he went past. “I told him take care of you folks good when you first come here. Ain’t a nigger in town knows them holes like Dickie there.” He gave Burkett a confiding wink. “Or Nigra, neither.” To the onlookers, he said heartily, “Got to take care of our tourists good, y’know, bein as how we ain’t got hardly any!” He patted Burkett’s shoulder, setting him free, in sign that this afternoon’s jokes and hospitality were at an end.
Whidden’s tossed chins commanded Dickie to get these people’s stuff up to their cabin. Burkett thanked Dickie, who hurried past them. Aware of being watched, they walked up the street to the cabin on the white sand yard behind the “Whidden Building,” two stories of worn white clapboard that housed post office, the Judge’s office, and the kitchen, bar, and restaurant of the Calusa Motel.
At the door of their cottage they were welcomed by the yard man, who presented them with the baskets left by Dickie. As far as the Burketts could determine, this small black Johnny in red sneakers had the only friendly face in town. “We gone fix dem snappuhs nice fo’ you! Dass right! In de ol’-time way.”
Alice squirmed past and rushed into the bathroom, which had a hook lock, a pink plastic tub, and a wide gap under the door. When she emerged, poking her hair, the funny hat and the white paste were gone. “You’re getting a nice tan,” he said, to cheer her. Acting pleased, she raised her fingertips to her fiery brow, and touched by her gallantry, he said by way of apology, “I guess I thought there would be other people here, someone to talk to.”
She nodded brightly, and he went into the bathroom, still fuzzy from the rum at noon. How sick he was of drinking rum from thin bathroom glasses, in the long evenings confined to this damn cabin! They couldn’t even sit outside because of all the holes in their porch screen, and nowhere else in town did they feel welcome.
Poor old Fisher Woman, he thought, with a rush of affection. We’ll make love.
She was sitting on the bed edge, the lunch basket in her lap, as if trying to remember something. She ignored his fingertips on her neck. “Dickie forgot to bring the rum,” she said. “It’s not in the basket.” Her voice had an edge, but she shrugged off his inquiry.
“Hell, I’ll go get it,” he said, bothered, too.
“Be careful,” she murmured unaccountably, following him out onto the porch, and he made a pantomime of fighting off giant mosquitoes, which did not amuse her. “I mean, don’t get him in trouble,” she called after him. He stopped.
“Why not?” he said. He told her his new opinion of the guide, how much he disliked this sullen ungrateful man. Wasn’t it patronizing and hypocritical, wasn’t it reverse racism, to indulge a shifty-eyed sonofabitch like that just because he was black?
He expected her to defend Dickie but she said quietly, “I don’t like him either. He’s sneaky and he’s aggressive. I’ve watched how he sucks up to Whidden and how he bullies that nice Johnny, and the old lady who cleans up. The man’s a fascist, or at least a shit.” When her husband laughed, she said, “But maybe we encouraged him or something, okay? So don’t get him in trouble.”
He went down to check the boat, certain now that the search would be in vain. When he climbed back up onto the dock, a thin local man in a worn felt hat and white long-sleeved Sunday shirt buttoned at the neck was standing there under the banyan, hands in hip pockets. His flat gaze warned the stranger that he had his eye on him. Burkett almost explained what he was doing in the boat. Instead he said sharply, “Can I help you?”
The man bared his upper teeth, to suck them. He watched Burkett go.
Up the street, laughing and frowning simultaneously, Johnny agreed that it was a nice evening. He said he was waiting for his ride, that he did not know where Dickie was. His gaze darted up and down the street.
It was near twilight, the mosquitoes were convening, and by the time Burkett reached the bar door of the café, he was running. He jumped through the screen door and yanked it shut.
Without taking their eyes off Burkett, two men on the point of leaving moved back among the tables in the rear, feeling behind them for their chairs. They sank down slowly, watched him with the others, not with hostility or curiosity, but in the same relentless way they had watched the plastic colors of the TV screen over the bar.
The front end of the bar was strewn with a litter of candy and cigarettes and peanuts, and the shot bottles were lined up on a shelf behind. A dark outline marked the former location of a mirror. On three unattached stools at the far end perched three old men in stained straw hats. They were drinking beer with an old woman who sat on a fourth stool behind the bar. Because the stranger appeared to be looking for somebody, she did not come forward, and Dickie, who was wiping off an empty table, refused to let Burkett catch his eye. Their eyes met for a single moment as, gathering up abandoned glasses, he drank one off defiantly between bar and kitchen. Then the door swung to behind him.
Cocking his head to observe the stranger, one of the old men pushed his hat back. “Lemme have one of them beers,” he muttered. The old woman reached back into the cooler without turning around and fished him out a bottle, which he opened carefully with a knife. “I reckon this here is number eight.” The old man looked at the bottle with surprise, turning it slowly in his hand.
The woman nodded. “Close onto it, anyways,” she grunted.
Dickie did not reappear, and Burkett shifted from one foot to the other, intent on the old advertising cards for plug tobaccos.
“I guess you know it ain’t me is gonna pay for it.” The old man worked the wet label from the bottle with his thumb, looking belligerent.
“Judge Jim don’t give a good goddamn who pays. You talk to Jim.”
“Why, goddamnit to hell, my boy takes care of me! Makes more than he know how to spend! He told me, ‘Pap, go drink it up, and welcome!’ ”
She glanced at Burkett. “He’d tell you, ‘Pap, you shut up your fool mouth,’ if he was here.” She climbed off her stool and shuffled down the bar to Burkett, who realized that Dickie was not going to come back.
“Yessir. Coffee? Black or integrated?”
“Up north, them people like their coffee integrated,” one of the old men insisted when Burkett ignored the woman’s bait. “That’s what Judge Jim says.”
“I’d like a bottle of rum, if that’s all right.”
“All right by me, but we ain’t got none. Ain’t got but Seven Crown and John Begg, leastways in fifths.”
“Seven Crown is fine.”
The old woman raised her voice as a service to the customers. “What brand you folks use up there in Washington, D.C.?”
To encourage his conversation, she sat down on the bar and folded her arms across an old blue dress. In the silence, he could hear the hum of flies against the ceiling.
“I guess Mr. Whidden told you where we were from.”
“Judge tole me hisself yest’day morning. That’s my boy, you know. Run this café for him.”
“Well, well,” Burkett said. “So he’s a judge.”
“Yep. Judge enough fer us.” She looked at him closely. “We ain’t got no federal men round here. Don’t have much call fer ’em.”
He laughed. “I’m just a lawyer up there. Environmental lawyer.”
“Ain’t got much law around here, neither.” This time she cackled, and the chairs shifted. “Judge Jim pretty well takes care of what law they is.”
“I guess I’ll take that Seven Crown then, Mrs. Whidden.”
“Your money, mister.”
When she returned from the back room, the people watched Burkett take his change and the bottle of whiskey. “Don’t need no Seven-Up with your Seven Crown? We get a lot of call for Seven and Seven.”
He shook his head. “Goodnight,” he said.
“Come see us, hear?” She spoke over her shoulder.
“WELCOME TO GLORIOUS Snook City!” To keep his spirits up, he gestured grandly through the skimpy curtains at the huge red sun in the black archipelago to westward and the long string of evening ibis, flapping and sailing down the sky. Opening the whiskey, he described his adventures to Alice, who was still distracted and did not laugh as he had hoped.
“You’d think,” she said, “they’d have a nice saloon, to attract snewk-ers.”
“They don’t want to attract snewk-ers, and guess why? Did you see Dickie’s face today when I pointed out that so-called shrimp boat?” Burkett poured himself a darker drink than usual and drank it with a loud gasp of relief.
“Maybe that was just a shrimp boat. Maybe you should forget this whole drug business. What would they do to Dickie if they thought he told you?”
“Hell, they’re not hiding it. I told you about that old guy in the bar.” Feeling irritable again, he rattled the ice in his thin glass. “Anyway, I thought you didn’t like him.”
“I don’t,” she said, frowning at her drink. “But I’ve decided it’s societal conditioning. He’s been warped by heartless capitalist oppression.”
He refilled his drink and gazed out at the sunset, sighing.
“Stop stalling,” she said quietly, after a pause. “Did that Negro gentleman swipe our hootch, or didn’t he?”
“We have to give him the benefit of the doubt.”
“Okay. Because my tape recorder’s missing, too.”
“You must have left it in the boat.”
“You looked in the boat, remember?”
“He couldn’t be that crazy, Alice! In this town?”
“Maybe he didn’t steal it. He didn’t steal that sandwich, either. Maybe he just took it.”
“I’m just not going to accuse him, that’s all!”
“That’s the point right there. That’s what he knows.”
“He couldn’t count on that. He wouldn’t chance it.”
“A man might chance anything if he was angry enough. And drunk.”
“You really believe that?”
“I believe he took my tape deck, isn’t that enough? And you do, too.”
Burkett was silent. He thought about those people in the bar, and Dickie’s reckless rage, gulping that drink. He thought about the man in the white Sunday shirt, down by the boat. He thought of the big man in his pearl-gray fedora and the big damp patches under his arms. He told her he could not report the black man to Judge Whidden, but neither could he disregard the theft.
“Why the hell not?” Alice said. In her outrage, she felt violated and seemed willing to do either one. “These rednecks like our money but they don’t like us, and boy, it’s mutual,” she said, voice rising. “I want to get out of this damned place!”
NEXT MORNING, he was itchy-eyed from lack of sleep and felt disorganized and indecisive. “I just don’t think we can go around accusing people,” he complained.
“Who’s asking you to accuse anybody? Whose tape deck was it, anyway? Forget it!”
“Maybe it was my fault, getting him drunk. Maybe he set it down someplace, forgot about it.”
“Keep talking, pal. You know he took it, and you know you’re not going to report him, and he knows it, too. So let’s get out of here.”
“Alice, we just can’t pretend it never happened, that’s all!”
“Why not? Why the hell not?”
He was surprised by her set, cold expression. She rolled over in bed and would not look at him. He wanted to shout at her, something like “Because we’re citizens!,” but he was wary of her tongue, and did not dare. “Look,” he said, “we’ll face him with it, tell him how crazy he is to try something like this. We’ll talk to him out in the boat.”
“You talk to him. Talk to him man to man. Straight from the shoulder.” She shrugged him away when he reached down to her. “I’m staying here.”
GIVING DICKIE AS MUCH ROOM as possible, he sat in the bow, and even from here he could smell the rum on him. He had only to look at the curled lip under the hat, the deep brow creases, the drinker’s simmering belligerence and crazed hauteur, to know that Dickie was awaiting him. The black man did not whistle, scarcely seemed to breathe, and his sculling oar probed so softly through the water that only the wan motions of the bottom life gave evidence of their gloomy voyage across the waste.
In his anger at Alice, he had forgotten the sunburn cream, and the bright windy morning sun punished his sore places, but for once the guide worked hard to find a snook. In hidden channels Burkett cast where the long finger pointed. No fish rose. Then Dickie, speaking for the first time that morning, whispered, “Dat place. Try’m again,” and Burkett dropped his lure in a brown eddy where the mangrove branches, dragged by currents, bowed and beckoned.
The earth responded with a hard thump on his line, which veered out sideways from the skiff, slitting the water, then shot back toward the channel. As Burkett hollered, a flashing brown-and-silver fish leapt from the tide, shaking sun-shined drops of water from its gills. It smacked the surface, bringing the water and green leaves to life.
Dickie was already turning toward it, moving skillfully and fast, before Burkett yelped at him to swing the boat. The fish was stripping too much of the light line, and he worked it carefully. Minutes later, when the lean, strong thing lay gasping on the boards between them, he reached down gently and touched it. “Snook,” he marveled. “How about that? Snewk!” He burst out laughing. “Fisher Woman! Wait till she sees this!”
Dickie produced a curdled smile of pride, and his eye held for the first time all day. When Burkett said, “Too bad we don’t have that rum along, to celebrate,” Dickie was ready.
“Yassuh, we’s got it, suh.” Dickie whisked the bottle out from beneath the seat and thrust it at Burkett in a kind of challenge. “Got lef’ dere yest’day,” Dickie said, although most of it was gone.
Burkett saw that Dickie knew that Burkett knew Dickie was lying. He grinned in exhilaration and relief, waiting for Dickie to produce the tape deck, too. Instead, Dickie offered a dirty plastic glass, and Burkett poured himself a drink, handing back the rum. The guide finished it with a loud gasp and hurled the bottle violently into the mangroves.
“Dickie, I wonder …” But the man’s head was already shaking, as if loose on a broken neck. “The tape deck,” Burkett finished quickly, to make the premature denial less preposterous. The man hid behind a wild-eyed darkie mask, and rolled his eyes.
“Nawsuh, nawsuh, ain’t seen nothin, nawsuh!”
Dickie veered out over the water on his pole, turning the skiff, feet twisting on the worn green paint, black veins ropy beneath dull black hide strangely silvered by sun-dried salt water.
“I don’t want to get anyone in trouble,” Burkett said after a moment, striking match upon wet match and sucking foolishly on the damp cigarette. “I’d rather not report this to Mr. Whidden.”
Dickie’s head only shook more violently, as if trying to escape the cords in his straining neck. “Nawsuh, doan go jitterin Judge Jim!” He started to say something else, then stopped.
“You have to trust me,” Burkett said, awaiting him, but Dickie would not meet his eye. He muttered hopelessly, “Bes’ fish dat same spot, you gone get de next one.”
Burkett shook his head. “We’re going in,” he said, with as much menace as he could muster. Dark rain clouds off the Gulf shrouded the sun, which had burned him badly. He turned his back and laid his rod down in the boat.
The frightened guide was muttering to himself, and Burkett thought, I don’t know how to help him. Not until they arrived at the main channel, and the royal palms and roofs came into view, did he turn to confront Dickie a last time. Before he could speak, Dickie howled in anguish, “Why you come roun’ here causin trouble! Everythin goin good befo’ you come!”
At opposite ends of the boat, they averted their faces and were silent. The last recourse was to threaten Dickie with a public accusation, but he doubted his own will to carry it through. At the expense of a small tape deck and some minor irritation, how much easier it would have been to forget the goddamned “principle of the thing.” He was defeated. Alice is right, he thought, we’ll go on home.
Judge Jim Whidden awaited them on shore. With the wide-eyed calm of a prey creature, the guide observed the line of white people as he eased the skiff up to the dock. And the people, too, were calm, their collective visage withdrawn, noncommittal.
“Git that boat on in here, Dickie,” the Judge ordered, although the prow already nudged the pilings. Dickie flipped the snook onto the dock, and Burkett followed.
The Judge laid a heavy arm across his shoulders. “Tape toy, ain’t it? Well, you don’t wanta worry, Lawyer, I already got a purty good idea about it, a purty damn good idea. I got goin on it soon’s they told me your missus was huntin around the premises for somethin. But you oughta had reported it this mornin.”
Burkett nodded submissively, and later he remembered this with shame. He longed to dismiss this big man coldly, but the man and the throng behind the man were overpowering. And after all, what harm had this “judge” done? Hadn’t he been friendly and solicitous? And wasn’t he sincere in his outrage now?
Judge Jim told Dickie to go straight to his office, then led Burkett toward his cabin as if he were taking him behind the woodshed, a big bad boy in shorts caught with a snook. “I got a purty good idea,” he muttered, sucking his teeth by way of savoring his own deductive powers. “Not in my town! Not in my motel they don’t rob the tourists, no sir!”
“They?” Burkett’s voice sounded too high to him. His red nose and forehead, the red knees and shins, were swollen dry, and he felt a little dizzy, and he heard the nervousness in his own laugh.
Judge Jim laughed with him, very briefly. “That’s a hot one, ain’t it?” He chuckled without pleasure. “You’re keeping up your sense of humor, boy.” The voice had a new quality, as if the stranger had stumbled and exposed a weakness. There was no mistaking a proprietary tightening of the fingers above Burkett’s elbow.
“There’s something we have to get straight—” Burkett stopped short, twisting his arm free. “I don’t want anyone accused of theft, it’s just not worth it!”
“Now hold on, Lawyer!” Whidden reared back a little, squinted. “Nobody’s gonna accuse nobody, just ask ’em a few questions. That’s my bounden duty, ain’t it? I just can’t let ’em think, not for one damn minute—”
“There you go again, Lawyer!” Judge Jim shook his head and smiled. “I got my eye on the white trash, too, and we got our share of it, believe you me. Nobody’s sayin a man’s okay just cause he’s white, you know. I ain’t sayin that.” He paused for emphasis. “Now Johnny, that’s the yard man, and Aunt Tattie, that tidies up the cabins, and Dickie there, they all good niggers far as I know, and I knowed ’em all my life. But hell, boy, it just stands to reason! I mean, how many white people you seen around your room?”
“I’d just rather forget the whole business, if it’s all right with you.”
For a moment, Judge Whidden considered Burkett’s pale legs, the baggy shorts, red shins, the torn wet sneakers.
“It ain’t,” he said.
Judge Jim took Burkett’s arm again, concerned, cajoling. “I mean, you’re down here to try out our fishin, ain’t that right, you and the missus, you want to have yourself a dandy time? And how can I show folks a dandy time when their personal propitty ain’t safe, even?” He patted the other’s shoulder, then swung away along the white shell path toward his office.
“But you have no authority to make arrests—”
Judge Jim turned to look him over. “Don’t think so, Lawyer? Sheriff ain’t no further than my phone, and he don’t ask questions. Not here he don’t.” He came back and thrust out a big hand, taking the fish away as Burkett flinched.
“I’ll take care of that for you,” he said. “Just go on in and chew the fat with your little lady. You all just enjoy yourselves, y’hear? Got a vespers and bingo over to the church this evenin, everyone welcome. First Baptist Church.” He was smiling again, but the smile had jelled. “Bet you people never knowed today was Sunday.”
Burkett watched him go. He told himself he was too old for shorts, he would never wear these stupid shorts again.
Alice was watching through the window. “I went over to the café,” she whispered, close to tears. “I thought about what you said about not accusing people, and I wondered if maybe he left it there last night, when he was drunk. I didn’t mention him!” she added hastily, seeing his expression. “I asked if maybe you had left it there.”
He said nothing. Going inside, he saw that she had packed their bags.
BECAUSE HE WOULD NOT leave that afternoon (“You got your damned snipe, didn’t you!?”), they fought. At first she said she admired his attitude and was ashamed that she had lost her nerve, but when she realized he meant to see it through, she jeered at his stupid principles and stupid inability to mind his own business that had caused all the trouble in the first place. He got angry, too, dismissing her as the usual fair-weather liberal, the kind that always quit when the going got rough.
In the dead aftermath, he had drunk most of the whiskey, and later, an indefinite time later, he lay sweating in bed, heart pounding from a dream about night creatures from the open sea drifting over the white flats like moon shadows. A frightened voice tore at the dream—Get out of here, goddamn you! Go away! He turned on his back and saw his wife’s silhouette against the window. A big voice came from across the yard:
“Goddamnit, nigger, you sit tight till I git my pants on!”
She leaned across and clenched his arm. “I heard someone outside fooling around, right by our porch! I yelled at him!” Outside the window, a few yards from the porch door, a black man stood still as a rabbit against the hot white moonlight of the yard, and a screen door banged.
Burkett lay silent a long moment, listening. Then he sat up. “Goddamnit, Alice.” He brushed away her plea. His palms were wet. He got out of bed, stumbling a little. “Goddamnit, Alice.” He repeated it under his breath, then said it aloud again, stupidly, wiping his palms on his pajama legs, trying in vain to concentrate on his wife, who was weeping quietly. He thought, Now why can’t she shut up? He longed to strike away her voice, all the damned voices.
The last shreds of the dream had blown away and still there was that moaning in the yard. He groped after his clothes, shaking her off. “Oh Christ!” she cried. “Let them fight it out! You just stay out of it!” When he stepped onto the screened porch, the moaning stopped.
Demanding something, Whidden was cuffing the small black man, who was on his knees. The Judge still had him by the collar and was yanking him back and forth with short piston strokes of his thick arm, both bodies black against the sand.
“Ain’t your business,” Whidden told Burkett without looking at him. “Go on back to bed.”
Voices from the street drifted quietly into the yard.
“Sound like a stuck hawg, don’t it? Hear him all the way down to the dock.”
“What’s that nigger doin here, middle of the night?”
“Better find out, ain’t we?”
“That’s what I’m doin,” Whidden said. “You boys go home.”
“Who’s that standin in the shadders? That the federal?”
Burkett stepped into the yard.
“That there’s my tourist, Speck. The one got stole off of.”
No one moved. Burkett listened to the frightened moaning of the black man, who lay crumpled where Whidden had shoved him away, and the rasp of Whidden, breathing hard from his exertions, and the crazy ring of crickets, louder and louder.
“Heard you was interested in shrimp boats, mister.” The voice was quiet. “Take you out night fishin in the Gulf, you so damn interested. Take your wife, too.”
This slow hard voice spoke straight into his ear. On the soft sand, as silent as a ray, the man had eased up to a point just behind his shoulder.
Burkett stood still. He did not turn to look. He said, “Thanks.” He said, “We have to leave tomorrow.” Later he recalled having glanced at Whidden, as if seeking protection from the law. Hands on hips, the Judge studied the ground, like a man thinking something through.
Then Alice’s hand was tugging at his pajama top, and Burkett backed into the cabin as that slow voice said, “Gonna miss the lynchin, then,” and the others laughed. Alice clutched at him, and he put his hand over her mouth.
Through thin curtains, he watched thin men convene around the Judge. Hands in hip pockets, all but Whidden were looking at the door where he had gone. They were laughing so quietly he could scarcely hear them. He saw the moon glint on a tooth and thought about a ring of panting dogs.
Then someone spat on the white sand, and the crickets started up again, one by one around the moonlit yard. The Judge spat, too, and turned toward the café. “Lock him in the shed, there, Speck. I’ll get onto it first thing in the mornin.”
The man in the white Sunday shirt prodded the yard man with his boot.
“Let’s move it, Johnny.”
Burkett could not sleep. Going over the sequence of events, he realized it could have been Johnny after all.
At first light he got up and dressed, ignoring Alice, and crossed the dirty footprints in the sand to the rear door of the café. When nobody answered his soft knock, he sat on the porch steps in the dawn grayness, trying to clear his head.
An ancient bus came down the street and several black people got out, Dickie among them. Dickie unlocked the café door, and Burkett entered behind him. Shoulders high, eyes glaring, Dickie looked puffed up with threat like a huge bird. “Judge Jim ain’ b’lievin nobody who go ’cusin Dickie! Jes’ cause de man white? You crazy, mistuh!”
Burkett heard the Judge’s voice. He trailed it into a back room, where Whidden was drinking coffee with the man Speck. The Judge waved his guest to an empty seat, shouting at Dickie to hurry it up with the Lawyer’s coffee, then turned in his wood swivel chair and leaned back, grinning.
“Rode my tourist here kinda hard last night, now di’nt you, Speck?”
Speck returned Burkett’s gaze without expression. “Made him homesick, ah guess.”
“Ol’ Speck never meant no harm, no harm at all!” Laughing, Judge Whidden slapped Burkett’s arm with the back of his hand. “See, Speck don’t rightly come from around here. Come up on them night fishin boats from Frigate Key. To hear ol’ Speck let on sometimes, they’s got better fishin down to Frigate Key than we do here!” Judge Jim leaned over and took a noisy swallow from his coffee.
“Mr. Whidden, we’re not pressing any charges!”
“Why, that’s all right. We’ll press ’em by ourselves.”
When Whidden put his hands behind his head, still chuckling, Burkett struggled to control his voice. “Look,” he said, “you have no authority. I’m not leaving here without talking to the Sheriff—”
“Why, sure you are!” In sudden anger, Judge Jim shouted, banging his chair down hard. “Sure you are, boy! That’s just what you’re going to do!” He folded his arms across his chest, nodding his head. Then he smiled again. “Soon’s you pay up, of course.” Burkett was still staring at him, and he said comfortably, “You told us last night you was leavin, so I give up your room.”
“Between midnight and this morning?”
“Yessir, between midnight and this mornin.” Whidden was trying not to laugh. “Yessir, I give that room up to ol’ Speck here. Speck been needin a room in the worst way, ain’t that right, Speck?”
Dickie’s head appeared out of the corridor. Looking at the wall, he said, “How he want dat coffee?”
“Lawyer likes it integrated, ain’t that right, Lawyer?” Judge Jim sighed. “Dickie, c’mere a minute.” Contemplating the Lawyer, the Judge placed his fingertips with light restraint on Dickie’s forearm.
Dickie was staring blindly in the general direction of the splayed white woman on the girlie calendar over Whidden’s head, and noticing this, Speck sat up slowly, stiff as a bird dog. “Hey nigger,” he said in a flat voice. Dickie jerked his head so that it stared sideways, out the window, and Whidden’s grip tightened.
“Lawyer Burkett don’t care none for no ‘Hey nigger,’ Speck. Round here, we’re integrated good. We say, ‘Hey Nigra!’ ”
The Judge sighed, squinting up at his guest.
“While back I told you I was gettin goin on this, right? So what I done, I got Dickie in here, and I told him I di’nt much care who done it, him or Johnny, but less I find out quick, it was gonna be hard time for both, and that’s the road gang. So Dickie been tellin me that Johnny got hisself some kind of a Injun woman out in the cypress, that right, Dickie?” The Judge cocked his head back, speaking to Dickie over his shoulder. “Been hard up for money, that right, Dickie?” Chuckling, he let Dickie go, and the black man fled the room.
“So he says Johnny did it.”
“Well, he di’nt exactly say that, Lawyer, cause he don’t exactly know, but after last night we can sure as hell agree that Johnny knows something about somethin. I’m gonna get that son’bitch in here in a minute, and he’s gonna tell ol’ Speck and me just what he done with your little tape toy.”
“I’ll be back in a minute,” Burkett said.
Dickie, coming with his coffee, backed up into the kitchen. He seemed astonished by the anger in Burkett’s face.
“Goddamnit, you go get that tape deck.”
“Johnny took it! Took it home dat night! Got scairt, dass all, he was bringin it back, den Miz Alice hollers out and Judge Jim caught’m!” Seeing Burkett’s doubt, he went on furiously, “Tellin you God’s truth! Maybe Johnny slung it into de bush someplace! Doan know where he got it!”
“Well, go find out! He’s over in the shed!” He shook Dickie’s arm, slopping the coffee. “Suppose he tells that man in there who gave it to him in the first place?” Dickie just stared at him. “Christ, what does it matter now who took it? You’re both in trouble!”
Aware of a furious impulse to cuff Dickie, to yell at him in exasperation—Stupid damn nigger!—Burkett was suddenly all out of breath. He went outside and sat down heavily on the stoop. There would be no victory here, whatever happened. Dickie came slowly to the screen door.
“Just get it, that’s all! I’ll say I found it!” Once again the guide was hissing his denials through the sagging screen, but the hissing faltered. Burkett could hear the rusty doorknob turning, forth and back and forth again.
“Better trust me,” he said. “I’m the best you’ve got.” Still the man stood there. Then he snaked through the door and down the steps and around the building, his hands spread-fingered in conflicting agonies.
Burkett walked up the street a little way, trying to calm himself, as the sun rose to the black tops of the eastern trees. The palm fronds shivered hard as the wind freshened. In the early light, the water of the creek was thick bronze silver, like a heavy oil.
Alice came running. He turned his back to her in sign that she must not interfere and returned to the kitchen door, where a paper bag was sitting on the steps.
She looked exhausted. “Dickie took that bag just now from beneath our porch!” Her voice rang loudly in the stillness, and his nerves gave way. He snapped at her, “Just stay out of the way!” Her face was crumbling as he mounted the steps, but he could not deal with it, not now.
Poking his head into the kitchen, he said to Dickie, “How much do I owe you? For guiding, I mean?”
“You’s gots to see Judge Jim ’bout dat.”
He took a deep breath and knocked. “Judge Jim?” He entered the back room. “I’m sorry for all the trouble,” he began, holding out the small thing in both hands, like an offering.
“Oh Godawmighty!” Whidden said, half-rising from his chair, wiping spat coffee from his chin with the back of his hand. “What in hell is goin on around this place!”
When Burkett produced his traveler’s checks and began to sign them, Whidden sank back slowly, both hands flat down on his desk, trying to control himself. “You ain’t so smart as you think you are,” he muttered finally, counting the checks. “This business ain’t finished by a long shot.”
He raised his eyes. “What you waitin on, Lawyer? You people get the hell out of my town.”
Passing the kitchen, Burkett thanked Dickie, offering his hand. The black man backed away. In a stifled voice he said, “You leavin here. Leavin us stuck wit it.”
Burkett thought, I’m stuck with it, too.
To the east, the royal palms on the old street were black against the growing sky. In front of their cabin, Alice was waiting in the car, her pale face watching out for him over her shoulder. He had hardly started across the yard when Whidden’s voice bawled, “You, goddamnit, Dickie, get on in here!”
“Keep movin,” Speck called quietly, when Burkett faltered.
1985