Gator Country, page 26
Robin and Robert went to a spot they called the dam area, which everyone had joked about, saying things like, “Which damn area? That damn area.” “Well, damn.” “I’ll be dammed.” That is, before the mood of the expedition had turned so sour. The whole crew met up in the dam area later. Robert, Tommy, and CW went off to the side by themselves. Jeff could tell they didn’t want him to be a part of that conversation. They don’t want me to hear they’ve screwed up, Jeff thought.
Their previous egg collections had been supervised—a biologist (like David) accompanied the egg harvesters and made the call when he thought the crew had taken enough. The collection that day had been unsupervised, which per regulations meant that only a specific maximum number of eggs could be gathered.
“Let’s all go back to our staging station,” Robert said in a panic, “and try to figure this out.”
They hurried back to the property entrance. They hustled, sorting through the boxes of eggs, checking their viability, transferring them from one container to another. Robert stood back with the calculator on his phone, a strained and frantic expression on his face.
“How many eggs you guys have?” Robert hollered at Jeff and Tommy. They answered, and Robert jabbed the numbers into his phone. He asked the same of his wife and punched in her numbers, too. Then he ordered them to load all the boxes into Jeff’s truck.
It was then that the caretaker pulled up. She got out of her car. “How’d you guys do?” she asked Robert.
“We collected five hundred fifty-nine eggs,” Robert answered, “one shy of the permit.”
Jeff watched this conversation from where he stood leaning against his tailgate. He laughed to himself about Robert’s howler of a lie. The evidence was right there next to Jeff, nestled in crates in his truck bed.
Back at the farm, he examined it himself.
“Help me unload these eggs,” he said to Jeremy.
They brought them inside and counted them together. Altogether, the eggs tallied up to a little more than 700. They were 151 eggs over the mark, and they’d shorted Two by Four Ranch a significant amount of money. Jeff whistled at the magnitude. If he hadn’t been sure Robert’s crew was poaching before, he was now. And cheating people, to boot. They paid landowners for every egg they harvested. Years before, the sum had been as low as $5 a pop. But after the floods had ruined Louisiana’s wild alligator stock, prices were reaching as high as $60 per egg, and that was just what Robert had paid to harvest them. They had just robbed that ranch of thousands of dollars.
Was this the Robin Hood mentality at work or something else?
* * *
Jeff felt like the case was cracking open, but he worried his cover was, too. The crew was candling harvested eggs in the barn one day when Robin all of a sudden looked at Jeff and asked him where he was from. Jeff had gotten used to that question, because people of his ethnicity—a Pacific Islander from Guam—are uncommon in Florida. He was also likely the only Guamanian person employed by FWC, so knowing his ethnicity would be a dead giveaway. When he was making up his backstory, he decided to tweak his origins just slightly, but not so much that it was implausible. His story went that his aunt raised him in Florida, and that he was from Saipan, where he’d never been. Saipan is next to Guam.
“My aunt tells me I’m originally from—”
“Guam?” Robin blurted out.
His heart dropped. He collected himself as fast as he could. “Guam?” he said. “I have no clue where that is. I’m from Saipan, but I’ve never really been there. They tell me it’s an island out in the Pacific.” He needed to shove the conversation onto a different subject. This was inching precariously close to fearful territory. Did she know he wasn’t who he said he was? “So how many eggs are we at now?”
The conversation moved on easily. Still, his racing heart would not subside.
Later, Jeff watched the undercover video of that conversation, studying it to see if he’d missed a tell in her body language that indicated her intent. I can’t believe she said Guam, he thought. When he told people where he was from, the typical response was, Where’s that? Robin’s assumption had caught him off guard. Yet her body language on the footage didn’t suggest much of anything. His own, however, would have been a dead giveaway if Robin had known what she was looking for. He flinched when she said it. His eyes went wide for half a second before he composed himself again.
Had she seen that? Did she know he was lying?
After all these years protecting the wilderness, Jeff had learned to trust his gut. Now, it seemed he was taking any reason he could to doubt it. His gut said that someone had figured him out, that the trap he had set was fixing to turn against him. He had grown to like all of these people. He wanted to be wrong. He had let such softness turn him into a naive optimist, and yet, he wasn’t willing to let it go. There had to be a way to keep that empathy without risking his mission. If he couldn’t, then Jeff really would lose himself to Blackledge for good.
* * *
It was now August, and hatching season was just starting. Jeff had to admit that he was excited, but it meant that Robert and Robin were hanging around the farm far more often, a secretly tense situation after Robin’s question had set him on edge. They also brought their daughters to see the baby gators. The little girls marveled at the glossy-eyed hatchlings and asked Jeff questions, and while he answered them, his stomach started to sink. If these girls’ parents got arrested, what would happen to them? Where would they go if both parents went to jail? Even temporarily losing two parents seemed like a punishment they didn’t deserve. They hadn’t done anything wrong.
He had already met many of the others’ families out on egg collections. Some had invited him over to their houses. Once, a while back, Wayne brought his wife and daughter to Sunshine Alligator Farm to meet Jeff, and another time, he invited Jeff over for a lobster dinner, a catch he’d brought back fresh from the Keys. Jeff missed his family, and the companionship made some difference, but if anything, spending more time with them made Jeff feel uncomfortable. The state would come arrest them soon on his account. It was becoming increasingly hard to draw the line: He couldn’t get too involved in their social lives. That wasn’t fair to them. In the evenings, they needed to part ways.
He thought about his own family then, first of his mother, who had feared the worst since his transformation into Curtis Blackledge. She had taught him the Golden Rule: Treat others how you would like to be treated. It went beyond simple reciprocity. It had instilled in Jeff a loud conscience. Some people, it seemed, could ignore the little voice in their head that said, Thou shalt not. Jeff’s was anything but little. And it was beginning to speak up.
To do what was right, he would have to enforce the law. But his conscience knew that sometimes enforcing the law hurts more than it helps. Arresting these families would tear them apart. Without thinking, he put himself in their shoes. He imagined that he really was a poacher, that his wife and son had come out to help him in the swamp. He imagined his son, Chris, was still a child, and a wildlife officer came to arrest him and Sandy. He imagined the look on his little boy’s face as the officer put them in cuffs, on the verge of tears but too shocked to shed them.
There had to be another way. Jeff would have to come up with something fast. He wasn’t willing to uphold the law at the expense of his conscience.
* * *
For every time that Robert’s crew showed up at Sunshine Alligator Farm unannounced, there was another that they should have showed up and didn’t. When this happened one day during hatching season, it left Jeff—and luckily now Jeremy, too—running here and there across the barn, helping babies out of their shells and transferring them to their new tanks, the plastic kiddie pools. They set these in an open area on the side of the barn, where all the hatchlings would peep when they walked past. Jeff started calling the pool area Sunshine Daycare.
It was a wonder to see all the tiny alligators climbing over one another. They were anything but calm. They would pick fights for no reason, it seemed, but their inborn feistiness. Once latched onto a brother or sister’s tail, the hatchling might commence a death roll, a terrible fate in the jaws of a full-grown alligator made endearing and comical by their minute size and the ferocity of their angry squeaking.
“Quit that,” Jeff said, tapping a scaly baby on the head so she would relinquish her enemy’s tail. “Break it up.” Careful not to hurt them, he pried another pair apart only for them to bite each other’s tails again, forming a furious and ridiculous hoop. They would only settle down when he lowered the lid, an inverted kiddy pool cut with air vents, over them and put them to naptime in the cool darkness.
* * *
Jeff reached into one of the tubs toward an alligator egg. Bits of mud and bark sullied its white shell, a skin that bulged outward around the hatchling inside eager to break free. Jeff pressed his thumb through the skin at the same time the hatchling tore through it with his egg tooth. The little alligator, wet with amniotic fluid, wrestled himself free.
“Look at him,” Jeff said. “Isn’t he cute?” Jeff tickled the little alligator’s head, and it turned around and chomped down on his finger. Tiny teeth pierced his skin like needles. “Ouch, shit.” He gently shook the hatchling off.
The little gator squeaked angrily, and a chorus of hatchlings, newly emerged into the world, joined in.
Cute and born mad. Jeff could appreciate the fight in them. Once a swamp creature, always a swamp creature. They were stubborn through and through.
* * *
Late one night as Jeff and Jeremy scrubbed out pools, cutting at the scum of alligator poop with bleach, they looked at each other, as if the sheer depth of the drudgery demanded they share a moment. Nothing bonds you to another fellow quite like shared misery. And despite all the times Jeff rallied, telling himself he had a grander mission, that he was there for a reason, to protect the wild, they had plenty of misery, and much of it stank.
“This is something only you and I will ever know,” Jeremy said. “How tough this operation was, you know, when it’s all over.”
Jeff thought back to everything the farm had put him through before Jeremy showed up. The long days that turned into nights. Sometimes a drizzle turned the air to mist, humidity so dense that it collected on glass and pilled into droplets even when it wasn’t raining. Those days, it was hard to tell if your shirt was wet from perspiration or ambient dankness, though likely it was both. He’d stand in front of the enormous fan in the barn, its breath turning the sweat to salt crystals across his skin, unmoving enough to practically fall asleep. Having lived in Florida so many years, Jeff was used to the weather, but not doing hard labor in it with no real avenue of escape. He spent those days wet to the bone, wet to the core, wet to his very soul. Other times, he’d dug through nests made of gator feces and leaf litter infested with fire ants, longing for the days when the air felt like bathwater, because at least then he wouldn’t feel quite so rank. He cringed just to think about it.
“Yeah, man,” Jeff said. “This shit is hard.”
Truth was, Jeremy had taken on more than just half of Jeff’s burden with the farm. He had alleviated the burden of his loneliness. Jeff came from a big family. Before the investigation, they always got together, had cookouts, and played major parts in one another’s lives. They spent hours on the phone, checking in, gossiping. Coming from that to spending most days holed up on the farm like a hermit came as more of a shock than he liked to admit. By the second year of the investigation, Jeff was stir-crazy. He needed to talk to someone about everything that was going on. He needed to talk to someone he wasn’t also lying to. Despite their differences, Jeremy’s addition to the team came with an immense sense of relief. Finally, Jeff didn’t feel quite so alone. And yet it had been a tough adjustment.
Jeremy had arrived thinking he knew everything. He started in with the bad habit of disregarding Jeff’s advice, and that always made Jeff bristle.
“You’ve been an officer for what, five years?” Jeff said one time, confronting him. “We’re not gonna do this.” He meant their disagreements, going toe to toe. They were allies, and they had to act like it. That didn’t change the fact that they were two stubborn people, separated by generation and experience, and so both seemed to know that one would never concede to the other.
Jeremy had his idiosyncrasies, too, ones that didn’t quite fit with his character. And ones that Jeff didn’t quite agree with. For one, he brought his own refrigerator to the farm and kept it stocked with foods Jeff thought of as fussy.
One morning, Jeff sat down to breakfast with a plate of eggs and bacon, and he looked across the table to Jeremy. He studied the spread the junior officer had laid out before him: six strawberries on a paper towel, a cup of yogurt, and a spoon.
“What the hell are you eating?” Jeff said.
“What’s it look like?” Jeremy said.
“You can’t be eating like that in front of the guys.”
“Why the hell not?” Jeremy bit into a strawberry.
“It doesn’t fit with your character,” Jeff said.
“Maybe my character wants to take care of himself,” Jeremy said pointedly. “Maybe his body is his temple.”
“Maybe he oughtta watch what the other guys do and try not to stand out so damn much.”
“Nobody’s paying that much attention to what I’m eating,” Jeremy said.
“You don’t know that. Even something little can tip somebody off.”
That didn’t stop Jeremy. When they went to lunch another day with Wayne, Jeff ordered a hamburger and fries. Whatever Wayne ordered, Jeff tended to copy.
The waitress asked Jeremy what he wanted, and he asked her about the bread. Was it stone-ground rye or pumpernickel?
Jeff shot him a look like, What the hell are you doing? You might do this in your real life, but you’re not playing that life.
Then Jeremy asked her what type of mustard they had.
“This guy thinks we’re at a fancy restaurant,” Jeff said to Wayne to cover, but Wayne just grunted. He didn’t seem to suspect anything was amiss.
But after a while, Jeremy got the hang of it. He started dressing sloppier, wearing flip-flops, T-shirt untucked. Jeff and Jeremy came to respect each other. Jeff wanted to help him have a good career by sharing his experience. Sometimes, they would drive into town for a bite to eat and have a talk. They would work out together at the bench press they had in the yard, and Jeff even convinced Robert to take Jeremy along for some of his expeditions.
There was always more to someone, Jeff knew, than his first impressions.
* * *
Although Robert’s crew not showing up left Jeff and Jeremy with more work, their absence also had its advantages.
Early on, when Jeff learned that CW had been poaching an excess of nests and bringing the eggs to the farm, and Tommy had been, too, Jeff knew that simply setting the eggs aside wouldn’t be enough to maintain them as evidence, especially as multiple poachers were involved. So he devised a scheme: When the eggs hatched, he needed a way to mark the baby gators that would set them apart from the others. His handlers at the agency gave him an idea.
He mixed glow-in-the-dark paint with waterproof superglue, and on the days when CW’s hatchlings finally came out of their shells, Jeff and Jeremy would mark them. They had to do it fast, before the superglue could harden. If the hatchling belonged to CW, Jeff swiped a line of paint along the tail. If it had come from Tommy, Jeremy marked down its leg. If the crew was there, they had to hustle, flicking the paint over the scales before anyone could see. But when no one else was there, they could be more methodical. The little gators squirmed as if the swabs tickled.
Afterward, Jeff hit the lights to see if their sticky scheme had worked.
In the shadows, Jeremy and Jeff stood over the hatchling pools, watching tiny glowing tails and feet flicker and slide among the rest of that black mass like glowworms. Jeff looked down then and found the outline of his hands glowing in the dark.
* * *
Despite his initial evasiveness, Robert was also starting to open up to Jeff. Jeff had spent hours at his and Robin’s house, getting to know them, building trust—like a real business partner would. He learned that Robert grew up nearby in a fairly prominent family—not that they were rich, but that everybody knew them. In college, he had a scholarship playing golf. He had wanted to work as a medevac transporter. He was smart, learned from everything he did, and advanced, but he remained quiet about it. As a quiet man in a sea of loudmouths and braggarts, his sober reticence came off as lofty and enigmatic. He was organized but didn’t want to trouble others with the minutiae of his spreadsheets. He’d even bought a mobile home for his mother when she was about to be evicted.
One afternoon as they sat on the floor of the barn candling alligator eggs, Robert let a name slip that he’d never mentioned before. Benny.
“Who’s that?” Jeff asked.
“Oh, Benny Cenac,” Robert said. “He’s the guy who owns Golden Ranch Farms.”
“Who and the what now?”
Robert explained that Golden Ranch Farms, an alligator farm in Louisiana, was where they’d be taking the hatchlings. They’d been paying Robert to find the eggs, hatch them, and get them ready. Cenac also wanted to start an offshoot of Golden Ranch in Florida, and Robert wanted the job of farm manager, an extra motivation to do well besides the money.
Jeff sat thunderstruck, reeling from all this new information. This changed everything. They were poaching, then transporting the ill-gotten goods across state lines. I might have to get the feds involved, he thought.
Throughout the operation, Jeff had noted the way Robert threw money around, like when he leased the helicopter to spot the nests from the air. Initially, he thought the money had come from the dissolution of his business with Brother Parker. Then as the legality of their affairs became murky, he’d thought, Maybe this dude’s cleaning all his money. But now Jeff understood—it wasn’t Robert’s money. Cenac had employed him to legally harvest Florida alligator eggs, hatch them, and transport the hatchlings to Golden Ranch in Louisiana. Just like all the paperwork he sent to FWC, everything Robert was sending to Golden Ranch made his operation seem aboveboard.
