Gator Country, page 22
After everyone had been properly introduced, Robert issued his instructions, and the small army of alligator egg hunters split up to commence their search. Robert paired Jeff with Tommy again and assigned them a zone to survey. Before they left, Tommy puffed up his chest and told Robert about the nests they’d spotted last night on their impromptu survey. They’d run into Robert not long after the game warden left, and they’d given the boss a rundown of the night’s events—save Jeff’s justified paranoia and the heat he had been packing. Robert had seemed concerned about the game warden’s presence. The slight change in his facial expression dinged the alarm bell in Jeff’s head. Something was off. He doesn’t want the game warden poking around, Jeff had thought. Why not? The expression of concern dissipated as quickly as it had appeared, and Robert said he would take care of the camping situation. He told them not to worry.
Small clues were starting to pile up, and Jeff could no longer write them off as mere coincidences. Something was going on. He had to keep his eyes peeled now to figure out what.
Jeff and Tommy parted from the group and cut down a trail to go deeper into the swamp. Wet earth stuck to Jeff’s flip-flop soles. The foliage around them shivered with latent raindrops, a peaceful patter, and the land itself exhaled the scent of petrichor. It wasn’t quite enough to cover up the smell of piss exuding from the hot, wet flop of an alligator nest. But Jeff had to take it as it was. As they had before, Jeff and Tommy set to work. They located a nest. Jeff went to mark its location. But Tommy was already kneeling next to it, opening it up.
“What are you doing?” Jeff asked.
“Checking if there are eggs in here,” Tommy said. “What’s it look like?” Tommy pried up the top, glanced in, and then, noting the eggs, he closed it back up again. What the hell are you doing? Jeff thought. As if in answer, Tommy said, “Robert said we should see if they’re full, then wait to open them for when the biologist comes around with us. You know, that way we don’t waste any nests for ones that are empty.”
That ain’t legal, Jeff thought. He wanted to say something, but he bit his tongue. His suspicions had been right. Robert’s crew was poaching. Now the question was: How much and for how long? To figure that out, Jeff had to stay the course. Don’t break character. Just keep watching.
Jeff kept a vigilant eye on the trees for angry mother gators. This time, too, he was wary of the presence of men, of the poachers he may have discovered and what they, in turn, had discovered about him.
* * *
They returned to the camp for lunch. Jeff dug out a bottle of antibacterial soap and scrubbed himself down like a surgeon prepping for the operating theater. Only then did he join the others around the unlit fire. With the woods as wet as they were, you’d have to import dry wood from elsewhere if you wanted to get a spark. Nonetheless, the fire circle had become the camp’s unofficial center.
The food Jeff brought was part of his character: a can of beans and franks and a packet of saltines. In his regular life, he loved to cook; the food he made ranged from homestyle comfort food to game meat prepared in a way some might consider gourmet. Blackledge, on the other hand, was useless in the kitchen. Being the easygoing fellow that he was, he didn’t pay much mind to his diet. He just ate whatever. And since he’d been poor for so long, up until his aunt passed away and left him all that money, he had a taste for the refined in the sense of refined carbohydrates, Cheez Whiz, processed crap.
As he sat down to his beanie weenies, he watched Robert break out a can of Spam, and as if some unheard signal like a dog whistle had issued from it, half the crew lined up to get some. Robert sliced off a hunk thick enough for a sandwich, and Tommy held out his hands. This is like goddamn Oliver Twist, Jeff thought. Even though the scene seemed mundane enough, the absurdity of it struck Jeff, and he couldn’t let it go. Tommy left the line with his Spam slice and went to the next part of the conveyor belt to grab some Wonder Bread to make a sandwich. The line kept going like that, Robert diligently slicing off Spam hunks and gently placing them in the hands of his hunters; complex and quiet Robert as the schoolmaster, his laborers the wee Victorian children asking for more.
“Want some?” Robert called. He’d seen Jeff staring. Maybe he was calling him out on it, or maybe he genuinely wanted to feed everyone.
“Nah, I’m good,” Jeff answered. But he was overwhelmed by the strangeness of all of it. He turned to the person next to him as if they might share a look of understanding. It was David. He sat with his hands folded in his lap. “You a Spam guy?” Jeff asked. David responded with a look that said, Sir, do I look like a Spam fellow? That made Jeff grin. “You not eating anything?”
“No, I’m fine,” David said.
“You should at least drink some water or something,” Jeff said. “’Bout to have a long day in the heat.”
“I’m used to it,” David said. “I used to be the head wildlife biologist for the Virgin Islands, the American ones.”
“Must’ve been mighty interesting,” Jeff said.
David perked up a bit. “Oh, it was.” Soon, they got to talking, and David told him about how his research specialty had been mongooses. David smiled, happy to expound to an interested listener. It was clear he realized he had misjudged Blackledge. That quick shift, the ease with which David could overcome his preconceived notions, made Jeff like the guy almost immediately.
It was a good thing they bonded, too, because after the lunch hour ended, the old biologist joined him as his airboat passenger, and together they zipped over the marsh. Intrepid and experienced though he was, David hung on tight, one hand gripping the noise-blocking headset to his ears, the other latched to the underside of his seat. They careened through the spartina grass and the rushes. Snowy egrets lifted up in flocks to escape the startling noise of the airboat’s massive propeller.
They met Robert, CW, and Tommy out there on the grass island. By then, the storm clouds augured by the morning’s bright sky had begun to gather overhead. Thunder rumbled in the distance.
Robert looked up at the sky. “We may need to make this quick,” he said.
The hunters went to the egg nests marked on the map. David followed with his clipboard. Robert, too, kept his notes, the enigmatic aluminum box tucked under his arm, always with him. They’d been to these nests before. Did David know? Jeff hoped he didn’t. Lo and behold, there were eggs inside, and the hunters set to digging them out, checking their shells against the light, nestling them in their box for the next leg of their journey. A wet wind blew over the marshes. It smelled like ocean. The storm had traveled far to get to them.
Jeff and Tommy finished their nest. Then they hiked over the marsh island to reach the others, who were doing the same as they just had. David stood, observing.
“What kind of bird is that?” Tommy said, pointing to a great blue heron. Jeff knew it. But Blackledge didn’t know squat.
He smiled at Tommy. “Gray one? Definitely a gray one.”
“Which bird?” David asked, and Tommy pointed it out. David cleaned his glasses, which the dense humidity had fogged up. He squinted through them. “Ah, that is a great blue heron, Ardea herodias, I believe.”
“You must know everything there is to know about animals,” Jeff said.
“Hardly,” David answered.
The sky darkened and they retired to the airboat to wait for the others. From there, they spotted more birds, identified and talked about them, and Jeff forgot himself again. He loved the swamp and the things that lived there. For once, he was in the presence of a kindred spirit. He let his knowledge shine through.
“You know quite a bit about animals yourself,” David said.
“Me?” Jeff said, grinning. Shit, what did I say? “Nah, I don’t know anything about anything.”
“Certainly you do,” said David. “Frankly, I’m surprised you couldn’t identify that heron. Perhaps you need to clean your glasses as well.”
How can he be onto me already? Jeff thought. This fella’s too smart for his own good.
“I guess I just watch too many nature documentaries,” Jeff said. “Love to have a beer and turn on National Geographic. Who doesn’t?”
“Well, perhaps you’ve missed your calling,” David said. “You’ve surely retained a great deal of that information.”
What are you trying to say? Jeff thought. You know, don’t you. Is my cover blown? No, it can’t be. Even if you knew, would you tell somebody? Are you on my side or theirs?
After a while, their conversation fizzled out, and David, unbothered by his surroundings, clasped his hands over his stomach, leaned back, and went to sleep. Watching David sleep made Jeff wonder if he was being paranoid. David clearly meant him no harm. Their conversations, too, had shown Jeff just how jumbled his identities had become. At that moment, he felt like he was losing both of them, Jeff Babauta and Curtis Blackledge. They had tangled into a new person who was both and neither. Although as Jeff Babauta he had never poached before, through the eyes of Curtis Blackledge, he had seen into the other side. He had witnessed the gamut from casual lawbreaking to perhaps what might turn out to be an elaborately contrived scheme. He would never be the same. Now he knew that even the most clean-cut and religious veneers could hide the sordid, the illegal.
As good a judge of character as he thought himself to be, Jeff reminded himself he couldn’t read someone’s heart or their mind. You’re not being paranoid, he thought. Lightning jolted overhead, accompanied by a gut-shaking boom of thunder. Jeff swore. He wasn’t usually scared on the job, but sitting in a metal boat during a lightning storm would have that effect on anybody. David shot up, wide-eyed and awake. The others came running down to their airboat as the sky opened up and a veritable deluge flowed over the swamp. Time to haul ass, Jeff thought. He cranked up the propeller, and they were out of there.
The crew stayed at Cecil Webb for another couple of days. During that time, it became clear to Jeff that David didn’t know he was an undercover officer. He found himself regretting that rather than rejoicing in it, because from the evidence he’d gathered in those same days, Jeff believed David was complicit in the poaching as well. He saw what Robert and Tommy were doing, and he looked the other way. Jeff wanted to set David straight before he could dig himself in too deeply. He just had to figure out how.
When their time in that swamp drew to a close, Jeff, Tommy, and the other central spokes of the crew sat up on the levee with flashlights, counting eggs. It was nighttime, totally black out as the clouds had failed to disperse after the storm. A fog of mosquitoes fell down upon them to feast. While the others broke camp, Jeff, Tommy, and their crew candled the eggs, a process that told them if their eggs were viable, if they could one day hatch into baby alligators. A viable egg would have an opaque white ring around its center. Unviable ones, which Tommy had started calling light bulbs, would only show as translucent, a view into a simple yolk and nothing more When they noticed one that wasn’t viable, its finder would make note of it, then fling the dud over his shoulder, unceremoniously disposing of it in the marsh below.
“Another light bulb,” Tommy said and sent his egg sailing into the dark, where it landed to a rustle of spartina.
All told, their army of hunters had collected 488 viable eggs, many from nests Jeff believed twice or thrice opened, a detail the crew, of course, did not put in the official reports they rendered to FWC.
* * *
The crew moved on from one slice of wilderness to another, crisscrossing the state according to whatever permit they had in hand. Many collections happened on public land, but others were on privately held tracts. Jeff soon discovered that the woods harbored strange things, separated from the public and the outside world by just a thick stand of trees, things that even he had no idea existed just out of sight.
Come mid-July, their itinerary took them to Rum Creek Ranch, only a hike from Cecil Webb, but it might as well have been in another world. Past unassuming fields where cowbirds by the dozens stalked like miniature raptors, past the sentinel oaks that stood watch over rain-soaked fields, ten-foot-tall fences cut through the shade of the woods. There, a well-guarded gate opened for the crew, and the caretaker led them inside the secret wildlife sanctuary.
When they stopped at a staging area to collect themselves and prepare to venture into the bush, the caretaker issued a warning. “No photography here,” he said. “Not even on your cell phones. What we’re doing here isn’t illegal, but we don’t want anyone to know we’re here, got it?”
Got it.
“What are they doing here?” Jeff asked once the caretaker was out of earshot.
“They’re breeding exotic animals, like endangered ones,” Robin said. “It’s like Africa in here.” She held her camera bag awkwardly. Seems she had hoped to take some pictures, and now she was hesitating about whether or not she would comply with the caretaker’s order. Robin and Robert already knew him, so it wasn’t like they’d face too much trouble if she snuck a picture or two. The caretaker viewed the others, including Jeff, David, and another of Robert’s visitors from out of state, with suspicion.
If people are breeding something in captivity, odds are you can find that something in Florida if you know the right unmarked country road down which to venture. In the Everglades alone, you can find monkeys, camels; everyone already knows about our tigers. Florida is fertile ground for fertility. But Rum Creek wasn’t one of those exotic dog and endangered pony shows. Nor was it some rich guy’s private menagerie. A billionaire indeed funded Rum Creek, but in the name of conservation and achieving the impossible. As of 2016, the ranch’s official report to FWC put its exotic animal population at 1,275 individuals across twenty-four species. “It has, for example, 35 white rhinos, 62 impalas, 338 Javan Bantengs (a species of wild cattle) and about 100 Eastern Bongos, a large forest-dwelling antelope facing extinction in the wild,” Mike Vogel wrote for Florida Trend.
“I’m sorry, we’ll be hunting eggs where with what?” Jeff said. He was used to standing guard against alligators, but looking out for rampaging rhinos had never come up in all his wildest dreams and nightmares about this investigation.
The caretaker gestured for Robin and Tommy to follow him. They were going to collect eggs in the rhino preserve. That left Jeff with Robert’s out-of-state guest and David. Part of the property was marshland and all but underwater. Avoiding that area, they started collecting eggs along the levee. Every so often, a gazelle would bound by. Jeff would see it, return to his work, then immediately look back up, because Damn, that was a gazelle! The peculiarity of it all, and the suddenness of the sightings, cast a surreal hue over their work.
But Jeff couldn’t let himself get distracted. Without David going into the rhino preserve with Tommy and Robin, none of the nests they opened there were properly supervised, leaving them all kinds of room to sneak eggs out unaccounted for.
David never said anything when they left him behind. Each time it happened, Jeff felt more certain that the venerable biologist was complicit in their scheme. But a feeling was just a feeling. He needed to know for sure.
* * *
After that, Robert’s crew split up. Their egg collections took place all over the state, as far south as parts of the Everglades proper, and as far north as Paynes Prairie just south of Gainesville. Robert, Robin, Tommy, and CW drove up there to complete that job. Jeff tried to join them, but their car drove past him going south on the highway, the opposite direction. They had left before he could get there, and they hadn’t bothered to tell him, either. Evidently, they didn’t want me to be a part of this operation, Jeff thought. Jeff called Robert, holding his cell with one hand, on speakerphone. The line rang hollowly. Thankfully, Robert picked up.
“Hey, I’m coming to meet you,” Jeff said. “I’m on the highway right now, and I swear I just saw you going the other way.”
“We’re headed to Gainesville,” Robert said. “We got David with us. Go ahead and head back to the farm and start with the hatching.”
Something about this made Jeff uneasy. They had kept him out of too many conversations. They were doing this on his farm. It wasn’t like he was just some farmhand. He was a business partner. He deserved to know what was going on.
Whoa, Jeff thought. He had slipped into Blackledge without thinking. Those were the kinds of things Blackledge would want. Jeff Babauta needed to be in on their conversations, sure, but for a totally different reason.
Unsettled by them and unsettled by losing himself to the character, Jeff pulled a U-turn and headed for home. Not home, he thought. The farm. The farm is not your home.
14
SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF
Mac disappeared and a few minutes later, his boat swung around the bend. It was a broad, long split-hulled boat, a powered catamaran with an excess of seats in the bow for tourists. Mac, among other things, was a tour guide. He wore an affable smile and a Columbia shirt, and he seemed to take great joy in showing off the islands and telling their stories. Mac pulled alongside the dock, and Jonnie, helping out, towed the boat forward until it bumped along the wood. I stepped down onto the deck and chose a seat that faced forward. With Mac at the boat’s wheel a few seats behind me, and Jonnie leaning beside him, I knew my position would make interviewing them awkward. I told myself I was there to experience, to witness. I could ask them follow-up questions later. The tableau of nature is often fleeting. Who knew what miracle might unfold before us, a brief glimpse, there and gone.
“Ready?” Mac asked.
As a way of saying yes, I brandished my pen—a waterproof Sharpie.
