“I want my mommy.”
Ricky never saw the open-handed slap coming. It cupped the side of his head over his ear and sent him sprawling.
Louder crying now. “I didn’t find the coin. A girl did.”
“You’ve been lying to me all along?” Slap. “Who is this girl?”
“I don’t know! I swear!”
Slap.
“Kathy? Karen? I can’t remember . . .”
Back on Highway 98, a Datsun was on a slow roll.
“Wait! Stop!”
“What is it?”
“Back up! I saw his truck!”
The quarterback threw the car in reverse, then barreled down the dirt road toward the parked Dakota. It skidded to a stop just as Ricky came bursting through the cane stalks, bloody nose, crying, ripped shirt.
The quarterback got down on a knee and hugged the boy tight.
Then another voice from an unseen source a few cane rows over. “Come back here, you little fucker!” The boat captain broke through the final row and stopped.
The quarterback stood up. Without looking down at Ricky, he placed a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Go wait in my car.”
Crack Nasty pointed at them with the hand not holding the bottle. “Now you listen here! I gave him a hundred dollars and we had a deal!”
It was a short chase.
They gang-tackled the captain only a few steps from where he started. The ensuing beating was not for the squeamish. Savage kicks to the ribs and head as Crack desperately tried to crawl for sanctuary that wasn’t there. More kicking and stomping in rage. It wasn’t thug life. It was family life. One of them found a stick and smashed it over his neck. Another hit him with a rock. A few more kicks and Crack finally rolled onto his back, an unconscious, bloody mess. But the kicking continued.
The quarterback jumped in and grabbed the others. “Guys! Guys! Stop or you’ll kill him!”
“So what?” Kick.
“I feel the same way, but if you think our lives are shit now . . .” He looked back at the Datsun. “Plus we need to get Ricky home. His mother must be worried sick.”
They took turns spitting on Captain Crack.
Then the Datsun drove away.
Chapter 22
Port Mayaca
The gold Plymouth picked up two-lane State Road 710, also known as the Bee Line Highway: an odd, almost perfectly diagonal shot northwest up through the unpopulated part of Palm Beach County, along the railroad tracks, through the Loxahatchee Slough, up past the old Pratt & Whitney aircraft-engine plant that brought thousands of transplants to the county in the early sixties. They reached Indiantown, and turned decidedly west on Route 76, into more and more nothingness.
Coleman petted the pouch on his chest and looked out the window at scraggly woods. “Are we actually heading anywhere?”
“Lake Okeechobee,” said Serge. “Another of our crown jewels, so huge it dominates photos taken from the Space Shuttle. And to hell with it: I’m going on the record right now, and will take on all comers. At seven hundred and thirty square miles, Okeechobee is the largest freshwater lake in the country. Oh, sure, everyone else says it’s the second biggest, behind Lake Michigan. But that one’s open at the top, mixing with Canadian water. How is that the record? Where were the referees on that one?”
“It’s just not fair.”
“Canada, Christ.” Serge shook his head. “Our lake is a damn force of nature. I like to think of it as Florida’s moon.”
“How is it a moon?”
“Give me some latitude on this, Judge Coleman, and I will show the relevance,” said Serge. “Earth’s moon is an oddity of our solar system, far closer and proportionately larger than any of the other planets’ moons. So much so that it creates our ocean tides, affects the seasons and even stabilizes Earth’s rotation, doing nothing less than making life possible at all. On a smaller scale, same thing with our freakishly large lake. Most Floridians have never seen it, and even fewer realize the overwhelming effect it has on the rest of the state. First, it collects much of the watershed in Central Florida, from the Kissimmee River and other sources. Then below it, the lake feeds the Everglades. And the extensive matrix of canals that were dug to channel its runoff created entire agricultural industries and—even more mind-blowing—the very dry land that allows much of South Florida, from Miami to Fort Lauderdale, to even exist. Otherwise, all the residents would be tits-deep in lily pads and gators instead of blissfully working skimming nets to scoop leaves from their swimming pools.”
“I had no idea.” Coleman held his beer away from the pouch and looked down at his chest. “You’re not old enough.”
“But here’s the kicker, and it’s a beauty . . .” Serge slowed and tracked their position on a GPS. “The Okeechobee hurricane of 1928 is still whipping up changes in the way we live, even to this day!”
“How can a storm that old still be messing with us?”
“I’ll tell you!” The Plymouth slowed even further. “The three thousand souls that were lost made it the second-worst natural disaster in the nation’s history, behind only the Galveston storm in 1900. Nobody saw it coming. Everyone was always preparing for storm surges from the ocean, but then that monster storm made a direct hit on the lake. And if you ever doubt how big that body of water is, imagine a tidal wave covering hundreds of square miles, much higher than virtually every house. First the storm’s rotation flooded all the communities along the southern shore. Then the backside of the hurricane hit, pushing water north through the city of Okeechobee. After all the burials, the federal government stepped in to prevent such a tragedy. They built the enormous Herbert Hoover Dike, a thirty-foot-high, one-hundred-and-forty-three-mile-long earthen berm surrounding the lake. That’s why so many people crisscrossing the state above and below the immense body of water never see it; they just dismiss it as a long grassy hill and have such screwed-up priorities that they aren’t curious to take one of the access ramps to the top and marvel. That’s why I’ve decided to carve out time and make the lake the culmination of our tour. Zora led us here.”
“So we’re almost at the end?” asked Coleman.
“Actually just beginning, but time folds in on itself.” The gold Satellite pulled over on the side of an empty road without a sign of life. “I intend to drop anchor, explore the lake in every detail and get a bone-deep understanding of her people. It’s an amazingly disparate culture: the old-cracker cattle ranchers up north with their rodeos, western-wear shops and steak houses; the impoverished farmworkers to the south; and all around, the visiting bass fishermen hoping to land that prized lunker.”
Serge got out of the car with another large sheet of paper. He approached a green metal historic marker and began rubbing.
Coleman arrived with the ferret peeking around. “Where are we?”
Rub, rub. “Can’t you read?”
“My eyes are having that focus problem again.”
“We’re at Port Mayaca, a ghost town with ghosts.” Rub, rub. “Out in that field somewhere lie the remains of sixteen hundred victims of the storm. As usual, people finally realized they needed to erect this sign decades later.”