Gator Country, page 24
“Why?” I asked. By that point in the day, I had doffed my journalist hat for one of pure curiosity, as if they were estranged uncles I’d just met that morning, eager to show me around the world that I had missed. I asked why because I genuinely wanted to know. Why would that happen? Why would conch shells be getting thinner? Was it something in the water? Ocean acidification? Was there a reason they would have less calcium to use to fortify their shells?
“Don’t know,” Mac said. “I think it has something to do with water pollution.”
“There you go again,” Jonnie said, smiling and shaking his head. “You did, you’ve turned into an environmentalist.”
Mac gave him a look. “Everybody cares about clean water,” Mac said. “Especially you. You’re a damn fisherman. Look me in the eye and tell me this doesn’t worry you. You’ve seen it, how things have changed. You probably know better than I do.”
Jonnie looked thoughtful for a moment. “Fine,” he said. He’d noticed the change on other shells, too. It had come slowly, like the movement of the mangroves. He mused that perhaps they were connected. “You know I care. But that doesn’t make me an environmentalist.”
“She’s laughing at us.” Grinning, Mac pointed at me.
“No,” I said, laughing. Jonnie was shaking his head at both of us and laughing himself.
“Well, Miss Writer, do you know why this is happening?” Mac gestured at the shell.
“I could hazard a guess,” I said. “But I don’t rightfully know, no.”
So many things in their world were like that, changing around them as the influx of visitors grew, the tourists never wise to the idea that the Everglades they saw were not the same as they had been just twenty years before.
“Maybe you could figure it out for us,” Mac said, and I thought, What the hell do I know? I’m just as blindsided as you are to see my world so changed.
They moved on to other knickknacks, pictures, and displays. We passed a shadow box of shells laid out like rings in a jewelry store. Jonnie pointed to something behind the glass. “I recognize that,” Jonnie said. “I found it.”
I peered down at it. “What in the heck is it? I’ve seen a million of those, and I don’t know what they are.”
“It’s a scute,” Jonnie said.
A scoot? I thought.
Mac unlocked the case, removed the scute, and handed it to me.
“One of the plates on an alligator’s back, under the skin,” Jonnie said. “I found that one down in the water, on the beach.” I wondered how it had gotten there, and as if reading my mind, Jonnie said, “This one’s sort of fossilized. So, long time ago, the gator probably died, and the pieces of him went with the tide.”
I examined the porous, bony scale. I had seen those things all my life, and yet I had never thought to ask what they were. The more time I spent in the glades, the more I realized that was true of so many things back in that wild place where I was from: The extraordinary had become ordinary. I had listened to people deride my home for so long that I lost my ability to see its wonders. What else had I missed?
“Those bones are shrinking, too,” Mac said, nodding at the scute. I held it out to him to give it back, and he shook his head. “Keep it. That way you’ll remember to figure out what’s going on.”
I nodded, solemn, as if he had bestowed a weighty task upon me.
Later, I would learn that the reason the conches and other shells were thinning was twofold. Over the years, as the pH of the ocean has decreased by what would seem the tiniest of measures, shellfish have become increasingly sensitive to the water’s acidity. The acid isn’t dissolving their shells. Something more complicated is happening here. The rise of carbon dioxide in the ocean has made calcium more soluble, and so the biological mechanisms that shellfish have used to compose their shells for millions of years no longer function as they once did. The process of converting calcium into shell is now slower. Population dynamics are at play, too. Conches with thicker shells are older ones. If we’re only turning up young conches, it means something is happening to the others, likely increased predation or predation by another name, overfishing.
I slipped the scute into my pocket and followed them onward to the far aisle. There, we reached the final display.
A shallow, square-cornered skiff bore the tools of a hunting expedition: a rifle, an ax, jugs, a bedroll. My great-grandfather had one of those boats, I realized. It was a pitpan in the Peg stories, but we’d never called it that. This was yet another revelation that my home was worth having a place in stories after all.
An entire Totch Brown exhibit occupied the far end of the museum, and that pitpan was part of it. A video of Totch telling a story played on a boxy television perched in front of mismatched chairs. Memorabilia piled around that. Why is this all Totch and not Peg? I wondered. I felt somewhat slighted by this display, as if Totch had not only lied but also succeeded in stealing someone else’s glory and had gone down in history as someone he was not, all because he had befriended Peter Matthiessen, while the real legend of Peg Brown was at risk of being forgotten. I wanted to hate him for this. He was a glory hound and a story thief, and that made him exactly what people expect from Florida, a con artist. I had heard all the Peg Brown stories. I had read Totch’s book, which contained some tales that were too close to Peg’s but told as if they’d happened to Totch. That seemed to me like a dirty betrayal, made all the worse because they were brothers. I needed to know once and for all: Who was the real poacher, and whom should the stories have been about, Totch or Peg?
“Okay, serious question,” I said, and Mac and Jonnie both turned to listen. “I don’t know how to put this, so I’ll just come out and say it: These aren’t really Totch’s stories, are they? Is Totch a liar?”
I had expected them to meet that question with either confusion or indignation, but both Mac and Jonnie smiled knowingly.
“Every single one of Totch’s stories is true,” Mac said.
“They just didn’t all happen to him,” Jonnie said.
“Well, doesn’t that make you mad?” I asked, becoming indignant myself.
“Why would it?” Jonnie asked.
“Because he stole your dad’s stories,” I said.
“And other people’s,” Mac said.
“Then why are we celebrating him and not, you know, the truth?” I asked.
A tourist who had been sitting at the exhibit watching Totch weave a yarn gave each of us, in turn, a critical look before getting up and walking out the back door without a word.
“Totch was a storyteller,” Mac said. “He collected people’s stories and spoke with the real voice of Chokoloskee. Peg knew what he was doing, but he wasn’t the fame-seeking type. Sure, he was legendary, and he’d tell a story or two to friends, but he wouldn’t have wanted all of this.”
“He was a quiet man,” Jonnie said. “Not a big talker. Hearing his stories told was glory enough for him.”
“Then do you want people to keep believing that all of this was Totch?” I said, feeling disappointed and vaguely defeated in a way I couldn’t put into words. “Do you not want me to write this story?”
“Oh, no, no, nothing of the sort,” Mac said. “We’re tickled that you’re interested in all of us.”
“We don’t need to give old Totch the boot,” Jonnie said. “But it’s been nice to remember my dad, too.”
In other words, I had things backward. Centuries of enmity with humanity had taken their toll on the Everglades, and within their lifetimes, Mac and Jonnie had seen their world diminished in ways they struggled to put into words. The damage was already done, and if nobody cared, it would keep getting worse unseen in those remote reaches of the tropics.
Stories made people care. Stories showed people from outside the Everglades that the place wasn’t a wasteland, that there was something down here—myriad things—worth saving. Not just for the animals, not just for the tourists, not just for the people who live here—for all of us.
Curiosity will save the glades. Curiosity will inspire scientists to investigate its mysteries. Curiosity will bring visitors, who themselves will take stories home, igniting more curiosity. My hope is that this curiosity will be the kind that listens. Instead of the destruction we have visited upon the obsessed-over places and cultures of our past, we should come with openness, leave no trace of our presence, imbibe their stories with wonder, and admit when we have been wrong.
I was wrong about Totch.
Perhaps he had been Chokoloskee’s original bullshitter. Perhaps also, I could admit, I might not even know about Chokoloskee if it weren’t for him. Matthiessen had cared. Totch recognized that. He let Matthiessen in and told him stories. More celebrities took interest, and so on. River of Grass had already kicked off Everglades fever, but it was Totch who made sure the stories weren’t about an empty place, but one where people already lived. Those people cared before you ever got there.
To Mac and Jonnie, telling stories like this was more important than ever. As the outside world shouted louder and louder, it had become nearly impossible for one voice to rise above the fray—until it did.
To them, the world had room for plenty of stories. Trickster thieves, noble outlaws, curious writers, conflicted lawmen, alligators, and gator poachers—they could all fit. The secret was in the telling. So they had to let the right people in.
15
BACKUP
Late one night after an egg collection, when the rest of the crew had gone home, Jeff stayed to tidy up the barn. While he swept the workroom’s concrete floor, his phone rang. The screen said GEORGE, Lieutenant Wilson’s first name.
“Evening, sir,” Jeff answered.
“How you holding up?” Lieutenant Wilson asked.
“I’m keeping it together,” Jeff said. Egg-collecting season had started a week prior, and the work hadn’t stopped since. Even sweeping in the draft of the night breeze through the open door felt like a break.
Over the past year, Jeff’s relationship with Lieutenant Wilson had shifted. Maybe it was because some days, especially now that he was too busy to go home, it felt like Lieutenant Wilson was his only link to the person he used to be. The tenor of his periodic calls had shifted, too, from all business, checking in on his “asset,” to friendliness, until Jeff could read a tone of genuine care in his voice.
Lieutenant Wilson asked about Jeff’s progress, and he answered with a tale of his days in the swamp.
“Wait, wait, wait,” Lieutenant Wilson said. “What did you say?” He sounded stunned. But why?
The events of his story had blurred together for Jeff. What could I have said to make him sound so shocked?
“How many nests did you open?” Lieutenant Wilson asked.
“All of them,” Jeff said.
In the brief pause that followed, Jeff imagined Lieutenant Wilson’s expression: wide-eyed and taken aback. Such a reaction made Jeff realize how complacent he’d become. He had grown so used to seeing Robert’s crew break the law, he hadn’t anticipated that the simple facts of his days could elicit shock.
Nobody else is seeing what I’m seeing, Jeff thought.
“You guys aren’t skipping any nests?” Lieutenant Wilson’s voice grew. His tone was unreadable. Was that anger? Horror? Excitement? Some mutant combination of the three?
“No, George, listen to me,” Jeff said emphatically. “We are taking every frickin’ egg out of every frickin’ nest that we find.”
“Every nest?” Lieutenant Wilson repeated quietly. “Robert and them? What the hell happened? I thought these guys were aboveboard!”
“So did I,” Jeff said.
It had been a gradual change, the fudging of a few numbers here, opening and closing nests there, whispering out of earshot. And then it was like something happened, something in the background that Jeff couldn’t see, and their infractions went from little mistakes and misdemeanors to a deluge of poaching, plain and simple.
Had there been signs? None that Jeff remembered. Except maybe that one time Robin glared at him outside the gas station. Or when Robert kept lying, telling him again and again that, yes, of course he’d call back; they’d make plans. So determined to see the good in people, Jeff had chalked all of that up to coincidence. He still wanted to. There had to be a reason they were doing all the things they did. If he could figure it out, he thought, maybe he could find a way to show them reason, to navigate his maze of identities without revealing them, and save Robert’s crew from themselves.
“And that’s not even the half of it,” Jeff went on. “I give these guys the combination to my gate. Then I’ll come back at nine, ten o’clock at night, and there’ll be boxes here. Full of eggs. I don’t know where the hell they’re coming from. So I need a second guy here.”
“You know we’re running this operation on a shoestring,” Lieutenant Wilson said.
This wasn’t the first time Jeff had asked the agency to assign another agent to help him. Every other time, he had taken their negative or noncommittal answers. This time, he insisted. His scare in the swamp had pushed him over the line from want to need. And now all of this.
“There are going to be times,” Jeff said, “when I just can’t be here. Who knows what’ll happen then.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Lieutenant Wilson said.
“Please,” Jeff said, “I need this. And the investigation won’t wait on him, whoever he is.”
Even in his desperation, Jeff worried another agent would blow his cover. Blackledge had been conceived, been born, and lived an entire life in the matter of a year, coming to a crescendo as a fully-fledged human being whose thoughts, feelings, and desires were unlike Jeff’s own—initially—but had become increasingly hard to shake. Jeff was Blackledge even when he was alone. Could another person catch up in time?
Besides, the agency had other problems. In addition to scrounging up the money to pay this new undercover’s salary, things were happening so fast with Robert and his crew that FWC needed to find an agent in less than a week without blowing the case. So they started looking outside the agency. They couldn’t trust the case’s veil of secrecy to remain intact, even among the officers of FWC.
Jeff thought back to when he was ferrying fish guts to feed his new gator stock. It was a lifetime ago, and he had needed that lifetime to become one of them. He remembered the guts spilling everywhere. He had been green. Now after every egg hunt, when the crew loaded the egg crates into Jeff’s truck bed, he would drive carefully through the darkness, minding the turns and twisting the wheel with a contemplative gentleness of the sort he should have used from the beginning. If he’d been deeper, like he was now, those kinds of clumsy mistakes could have cost him. He and Blackledge had become one and the same. So he as Blackledge, he as himself, would park and one by one heft the tubs of eggs inside into a barn that had become as pristine and precise as Robert’s old place. Now he had the skills to care for the eggs like a true alligator farmer, checking the temperature inside the barn, making sure that every single tiny, nascent life had the optimal conditions in which to be born. Could backup do that?
The next day, Jeff opened the door of the camper to find a truck parked outside the barn. He hadn’t heard it drive up. It looked familiar, but still—when the hell did it get there? Apprehensive, Jeff crept inside the barn.
“Hey, Jeff!” Tommy called from the end of the barn where the egg tubs were stacked.
“Hey, yourself,” Jeff said. “Whatcha doing here so early?”
Tommy gestured to the tubs at his feet. “Got some more,” he said. “Spent all night out there hunting, and I got a big haul. Where should I put ’em?”
“Man, is that even legal?” Jeff said, finally unable to contain the words that had been playing through his thoughts like ticker tape since egg-harvesting season began.
“You worry too much, Jeff,” Tommy said.
Jeff glanced at the table beside him. The boom box with the covert recording device sat in the middle, facing Tommy. Jeff couldn’t have set it up better if he tried. With one surreptitious move, Jeff turned it on. Good gracious, Tommy, he thought. Even though he sometimes found Tommy grating, Jeff felt both victorious and guilty about catching his illicit delivery on video. It seemed too easy, un-sportsmanlike. Yet the voice of Jeff Babauta that remained in his head said, How you act when you think no one is watching—who you are in the dark—reveals your truest self. I shouldn’t feel guilty for turning on the lights.
“The guys’ll get it all taken care of,” Tommy went on.
In all the days of this investigation, after having it drag on with nothing for more than a year, Jeff never would have imagined that receiving such blatant evidence as a confession of intent on video would have him reacting this way: irritated, frustrated, conflicted, and wanting to parent this guy, because somebody needed to. He sighed and shook his head. “You can leave ’em here, but don’t do any more of that, all right? You’re gonna get me in trouble.”
“Don’t worry so much,” Tommy said. He clapped Jeff on the shoulder. “Like I said, nobody’s gonna know.”
Over the next few nights, Jeff’s wariness spiked. Tommy slipping in during the misty hours of morning spooked him. If he had done that so easily, there wasn’t much to stop others who might wish him harm.
He texted Lieutenant Wilson and asked him again about backup.
Wilson: I’ll tell you when I have something for you.
In the meantime, Jeff beefed up his security, added more cameras, now up to four, one out by the trees near the gator pen, another at the entrance gate, and one outside his camper to protect himself, too. Robert’s crew commented on them.
“Watching for coyotes or something?” Tommy said.
“Gator could take a coyote,” CW asserted.
“Bet,” Tommy said.
“I think they’re a good idea,” Robert said, joining them around the camera. “We don’t want anybody coming in and making off with our hard work.”
Rumors of alligator thieves had spread across the state. Because breeders were willing to pay an all-time high for the eggs, they’d become a hot commodity, worth risking life and limb to steal. More willing to face the dangers of the state’s most lethal biped than to cross the seldom-armed fury of the prehistoric lizards themselves, alligator thieves had started breaking into alligator farms and egg-napping. Cameras and motion detectors were a decent defense, so even Jeff’s slapdash security system had an alibi.
