Gator Country, page 13
Mermaid ivory, who would have thought. I was so excited to learn something new, even if it wasn’t the story I was chasing. I went to sleep in that blessèd air-conditioning, imagining what other new discoveries the next day’s adventures had in store.
* * *
The next morning as storm clouds darkened the skies, I made the hour trek from Chokoloskee to Naples, the closest city and my most realistic hope of resuscitating my car. By the time I made it back to the Ten Thousand Islands, a wet wind told me the storms would blow over. I called Kent. As the sun peeked out from behind the clouds, he insisted it was going to pour. If I was dead set on getting wet, he said, I could talk to someone else. But, he added, “Call me if you run into any trouble, and I’ll get you sorted out.”
I think he’s done with me, I thought.
So I called Jonnie Brown. Jonnie was one of Peg’s many sons, and so he had firsthand stories of that legendary poacher. If Kent had been the keeper of the tall tales, Jonnie was my closest hope to seeing past the tales to the real man who had inspired them. Though I’d talked to him several times on the phone, I hadn’t met him in person yet. I enjoyed the sound of his voice, a throaty drawl particular to the backwoods of Florida. He sounded like a large, imposing man. He reminded me of my father, especially when he checked in on me and said things like, “Everybody’s being nice to you, right?”—the implication being that he’d knock their heads together if they weren’t.
When the phone rang, he answered fairly quickly, happy to hear from me. I told him what was up, what I’d done the day before, and how Kent had canceled our plans and left me with the day open.
“You know he’s a bullshitter, right?” Jonnie said.
I had to laugh.
“I’m aware that Kent is an—expert embellisher.”
Jonnie laughed, too.
We’d gotten lucky, he said. He happened to be free all day, and we made plans to go out on an adventure. This time, thank God, we’d take his 4x4 truck.
Together we would delve into the Everglades and into the past, and I would come to see Peg as his son saw him, as a man of many opposites: a quiet man and a storyteller, a rough customer and a smooth talker, a moonshiner and a war hero, a poacher and an outdoorsman, an adventurer and a dad. Jonnie would also offer me a glimpse of the wild from the poachers’ perspective. Though far from legendary, he had followed in his father’s footsteps. Surrounded by the true places from the legends, I would become a part of their story in a way that I could never have predicted.
8
GOLDEN EGGS
Moths and beetles flicked around the yellow-tinged light above the barn door. Despite the season, winter by then, the night was always alive—especially the air, which teemed with every manner of biting and stinging thing. Jeff and Lieutenant Wilson ducked under that winged cloud and into the coolness of the barn. With its concrete-block walls, the air always felt a little wet, but it was welcome nonetheless. They chitchatted back and forth about what Jeff had been doing.
“How far have you gotten on your list?” Lieutenant Wilson asked.
The most crucial, but still frustrating, tool in Jeff’s arsenal was his list of names. They were people who’d applied for permits, people who’d once been arrested for alligator and alligator-adjacent crimes, and other folks who handled alligators, like trappers, who may have had ample opportunity to do some illegal sales or smuggling just by the nature of their jobs. Had they already? Who knew. It was Jeff’s job to find out.
“I’ve gone out with a few trappers,” Jeff said, “nobody I’ve seen doing anything illegal.”
Lieutenant Wilson nodded, his expression businesslike. “And the farmers?”
“That’s where I’m having some trouble,” Jeff said. “Lot of doors slammed in my face, both figuratively and actually.”
Jeff had started cold-calling the people on the list, working his way down. No one wanted to talk. On some calls, the person on the other end hung up immediately. After going through nearly the whole list like that, Jeff realized he needed a better plan.
“Do they suspect anything?” Lieutenant Wilson asked.
“Not as far as I can tell,” Jeff said. The possibility of being found out, the fear even, always lingered at the back of his mind.
“Well, keep trying,” Lieutenant Wilson said. “That’s not why I’m here tonight. I’m here to discuss a concern with you.” Oh shit, Jeff thought.
A previous visitor, a higher-up from FWC, had raised a potential issue: If the neighborhood kids climbed Jeff’s outer fence, then the fence around the pond, they could be killed by a gator. A death—anyone’s death—would put an end to Sunshine Alligator Farm and possibly to the investigation entirely.
As far-fetched as the possibility seemed, it started the gears of worry turning in Jeff’s brain. He’d been so focused on the gators that he hadn’t considered that anyone might want to break into an alligator farm. But “Florida Man Brandishes Alligator at Walmart Checkout Counter” has to get his gators from somewhere. While it was possible that teenagers might sneak into the farm, as teenagers in the middle of nowhere will be teenagers in the middle of nowhere, Jeff’s greater concerns were meth addicts, weirdos, and anyone else who’d wised up to the fact that the price of alligator eggs and skins was skyrocketing.
In the previous year, flooding along the Lower Mississippi Delta caused thousands of alligator nests to become unviable. Just as in Florida, Louisiana alligator farmers relied on permits to harvest wild alligator eggs to maintain their stocks of hatchlings. As the number of eggs and hatchlings coming in dwindled, Louisiana farmers turned to other sources and were ready to pay ten times what they had before for these now golden eggs. The rumor around the industry was that many farmers relied on poachers. But if they could prove they didn’t know the origin of the eggs, they could escape prosecution, even if their poacher—or thief—suppliers got caught. So poachers got in the habit of falsifying harvesting or farming documents, or bills of sale, and the most unscrupulous among the farmers stopped asking questions.
It was no surprise then that other farmers across South Florida had seen an influx in alligator thieves. By night, camouflaged shadows would cut fence wires and duck in. Hunters in their normal lives, they would sneak by the light of headlamps to grab eggs by the tray and baby gators by the dozen. They already had all the equipment they needed for backcountry espionage. They had the waders and the guns and the ammunition. They had the boots. They had the false foliage to lay over themselves, becoming part of the brush. More often than not, they were also packing enough desperation to do something stupid in the name of quick cash in their wallets. Learning this, Jeff knew he couldn’t be too careful.
On that visit, Lieutenant Wilson helped Jeff devise a series of listening and recording devices to place around the farm.
“You won’t be seeing as much of me anymore,” Lieutenant Wilson said as he was getting into his own truck to leave. “I’ll be dropping information packets in your mailbox. Otherwise, you’re on your own.”
* * *
The next day, Jeff put up game cams, also known as trail cams: small, weatherproof surveillance cameras made to record outdoors. They were especially useful at night, when they were designed to pick up the smallest movements on a dark trail. He stationed them so they observed the exterior doors, and then he put one at the gate so that it might track movements out there, even cars that pulled in to turn around. It all served to keep him wary. He never knew when the short flash of a pickup truck might be thieves casing the place for later. He became vigilant about break-ins and keenly aware, in the quiet of the night, just how alone he really was out there. The cameras could only do so much. The real deterrent was him, his lights on in the camper, his silhouette against the dark, his dog barking from inside, the low growl that warned about its ready jaws.
* * *
As the farm grew, his work there became less and less of a charade. He finagled an official permit for his alligator farm, evading the inspector (a man whom he knew from the agency) in the process. Get recognized by just one person from your old life, and the mission would be over. He disguised his voice over the phone like some cartoon villain. He made excuses not to be at the farm while the inspector came around. Now on to the little details. He needed it to look like a real business. He made business cards that said SUNSHINE ALLIGATOR FARM, along with the farm’s contact details. He concocted a website. He got into designing the whole thing, exactly, he felt, like a real business owner would. He wanted T-shirts, mugs! Calm down, Jeff, he told himself. Don’t start bleeding money before you’ve gotten the show on the road. So instead, he did the sober thing and drove around town, tacking the card to the community boards at the feed stores and the Tractor Supply. He wanted people to know the farm existed. He was open for business, no trap set yet. He needed to get a lay of the land first.
And just like that, Sunshine became a real alligator farm. The perfectionist in Jeff grated at how haphazard the farm looked, but as he invested deeper, he came to understand how the farm’s imperfections weren’t flaws but, oddly, details that made it look more real. The more perfect it seemed, the less realistic it would be. So finally, flaws and all, his farm, his set, had come to fruition, complete with real bills to pay.
The agency wasn’t about to cough up for any of that: They couldn’t. It wasn’t just that such a paper trail would have blown Jeff’s cover, and paying in cash would have raised suspicion; the agency didn’t have any money to spare.
What he needed more than anything was help from people who knew better. If he could make a connection with an alligator farmer, just one person who knew how to make this all work, he could overcome all the worries he had about taking care of his gators and really start digging into his investigation in earnest. Such help, however, had not appeared.
As one would expect in a subculture so entrenched in the moneyed Old South, the alligator industry was not exactly welcoming to outsiders. Jeff continued to reach out to farms, cold-calling them or chatting up their managers at meetings the state held to apprise the farmers of the current state of the wild alligator population—and how many eggs the law entitled them to harvest that season. They would smile and shake hands, ever polite and cordial. As my father, in his life an old southern man himself, would say: They had cultivated a talent for so gracefully telling a man to go to hell that he left looking forward to the trip.
Desperate to make connections, Jeff began frequenting local bars. While he wouldn’t exactly have called himself a city slicker, these weren’t the kinds of establishments he was used to. A man of Jeff’s age greatly preferred his own backyard or a family cookout to the watering holes in Arcadia, with their Western-style saloon signs, polished wood paneling, and colored-glass lamps that hung over the tables. The crack of billiard balls punctuated the laments of country songs on the radio.
Jeff didn’t do any drinking. Things got tricky if you let your faculties fog over with even a few beers. Still, he had to make it look real. He’d order a longneck and nurse it, making conversation and taking mental notes for a while. Then he’d head to the bathroom, taking his beer with him. He’d pour it out and replace what he’d spilled out with water. Always a little on edge, he’d look around again then head back to his conversation. If he was there long enough, he’d have to imagine the alcohol he hadn’t drunk loosening his tongue. Talk too much. Make it realistic. But always be ready with an ear for someone to divulge his secrets.
Still, for all that work, the leads he found this way dwindled into nothing.
It was more than just an unwillingness to reveal trade secrets. It was that Jeff was not one of them. He was an unknown commodity. An outsider. And no matter how kind and hospitable you are to an outsider, wisdom said not to trust him—that is, until he showed you who he was. The more doors shut in his face, the more Jeff began to wonder if they detected, even if they couldn’t put it into words, that something was off about him. People were perceptive that way, Jeff had learned after a lifetime of studying them in his encounters with poachers and hunters in the field. It was the same way a doe might scent a threat on the wind, a hunter watching in a blind, still as can be yet human and alive and breathing.
Jeff wasn’t who he said he was. There was something off about him. And when it came down to it, he couldn’t go any deeper, couldn’t slough off his memories, his duties, his former life—could he?
The next weekend, Jeff went home, and as they always did, he and his wife, Sandy, traded war stories, tales from the trenches of their jobs. She detailed her students’ antics. He talked about how he was up against the impossible, and he had even more work now that Lieutenant Wilson wanted him to not only keep a log but file a report on nearly every move he made.
“Wipe your ass?” Jeff joked. “Write a report on it.”
Sandy laughed. She was chopping vegetables for their dinner as the dogs ganged around their feet and the parrot squawked in the living room, knowing it was nearly dinnertime.
“What’s worse is that he expects me to do it all on this damn thing,” Jeff said, gesturing to his state laptop where he sat at their kitchen island. “But I’m not allowed to keep it at the farm. Oh no, they’re not allowed to make things that easy on me. Instead I have to waste my precious time with you doing this.” He would have preferred to be cooking with her instead of sitting around typing.
“It’s all right,” Sandy said. “But what if—you did bring it with you?”
“George said I can’t,” Jeff answered, referring to Lieutenant Wilson by his first name. They had become that familiar by then. “Somebody might find it.”
“You’ve hidden a bunch of other things,” she said. “Why not that? It’s not like he’s there looking over your shoulder.”
She was always his voice of reason. He’d already thought of bringing his computer, of course, but had balked at this small act of disobedience. Turned out, all he needed was a little push.
When Jeff returned to the farm, he snooped around for another “hidey-hole,” as he called them. He hollowed out a section like a shelf behind a pegboard wall and tucked his laptop inside. Guilt nagged at him about disobeying Lieutenant Wilson like that, but every time he needed to write a report and the computer was right there, pragmatism and relief won out, and he shooed the guilt away.
Over the months, he and Lieutenant Wilson had developed an increasingly complicated relationship. Jeff liked the man and trusted him completely. He could say that in all honesty. When this was over, and the lieutenant was no longer his commanding officer, he could see them being friends. Yet as the operation went on, it became apparent that they didn’t see the world the same way. Lieutenant Wilson saw things as black-and-white, the “good guys” versus the “bad guys.” Jeff knew reality fell in shades of gray, that the “bad guy” you met in the woods could be a decent fellow having a bad day. Lieutenant Wilson expected unfailing perfection. As perfect as Jeff wanted to be—and he strived to do everything in his job and in his life by the letter—reality often reminded him of his martial arts training: The strongest men are like bamboo. When adversity pushes against them, they bend, because if you don’t bend, you break. The agent who had come before him in the operation had broken and then failed. Jeff couldn’t be like him. He had to bend. So he hid the computer. Even though he went home less and less as the investigation picked up, the time he spent there was his lifeline. Without having to write reports, he could be fully present. He could remember who he was. Jeff Babauta.
On the other side of that coin, he could be fully present at the farm, too. He could inhabit the essence of Curtis Blackledge. That was increasingly important, as Blackledge really had some work to do. Running a farm was a never-ending cycle. As soon as money came in, it seemed to go out.
If he didn’t think of something, he’d have to dip into his own funds to feed his gators. As an alligator farmer, he did have one option. He could legally go out into the swamps and harvest alligator eggs, but that was risky without anyone willing to teach him. His best resource ended up being an episode of Dirty Jobs, a show that revealed the greasiest, the muddiest, the filthiest, and the grittiest careers America had to offer. As he hunched in the glow of his laptop screen in the camper, watching the show’s host wade through the filth, Jeff looked on the bright side that at least now there wouldn’t be any surprises. Or so he hoped. What choice did he have?
When the summer months came, Jeff woke on a misty morning, when sawgrass pierced those earthbound clouds, humidity so thick in the air you could drink it, and condensation beaded on the cold camper panes like the outside of a glass of iced tea. It was finally nesting season. He packed up his truck and headed low into the wetlands, whispers of the night’s rhythm parting for the new day’s pulse, the nocturnal chorus giving way to solitary singing somewhere high in the loblolly pines from a seven-story vantage over the savanna, a lonesome sentinel to the daybreak.
Permit in hand, Jeff joined two plainclothes officers, and together they worked methodically over the marshy terrain in search of alligator nests. This had to be careful work. Despite all that ambient serenity, danger hovered, too, at ground level with the mist. There were your usual hazards: wild boars, poison ivy, rattlesnakes shivering out a warning from their hideouts in the brush. A checklist of these occupied a space at the back of Jeff’s mind, not a worry so much as a readiness. He knew from years of practice that the swamp only posed a threat to the uninformed, the unprepared.
