Lost Man's River(247)

“So I says, ‘My, my, that sure is a purty little hen you got in there!’ ” Speck nodded a little at this memory. “Well, you fellers know somethin? Darn it all if I ain’t went and hurt his feelins! Cause he hollers out, ‘No, no, no, no! That ain’t your purty little hen! Ain’t her at all!’ Speck nodded more. “That’s the way we left it, cause she didn’t have no pedigree nor nothin.” He shook his head over life’s vicissitudes. “That feller had him a good head for the croc business, is what it was. That’s how you get you one of them big Cadillacs, I reckon.”

Watching the others laugh, Speck remained somber. “If crocs was rocks, Christ could of walked acrost the water on some of them coastal bays east of Flamingo. I guess I could still find a few crocs in the Park, but I’d have to hunt for ’em. Today any crocodile you show me in the Park, I’ll take you outside and show you five.” He spat into the flames. “I told them so-called scientists, ‘You’re worried about them crocodiles but you’re the ones to blame, cause you went down there and went messin with the nest. It’s just like birds, you keep messin with the nest, they’re goin to leave it. You went there and caught them crocs, put beepers on ’em, electrical fuckin apparatus to where you can hear ’em fart two miles away. It’s like a horse, you tie a kerchief to his tail, he’ll run hisself to death trying to get rid of it. Can’t find no crocs to hang beepers on no more, but you still got the guts to wonder what become of ’em!’ ”

Back in the forties, a man could see crocs from his car window on the Key West Highway, Whidden commented, poking the fire. When Andy teased him—“Probably gators!”—Whidden laughed, saying crocs weren’t all that hard to tell from gators. Their range was coastal, and most were a green-gray color that was rarely encountered in a gator, even those that wandered down around salt water. True, the few crocs that turned up on the mangrove coasts north of Cape Sable were mostly the same black-brown color as the gators, so one had to look for the narrow snout and the big teeth protruding from both mandibles.

“Pertrudin from both manderbles, you said?” Speck’s jeering was a reminder to his son-in-law that there was a real croc expert in this outfit who did not need these half-ass interruptions. “I might not know much about manderbles,” Speck said, “but I do know that to see a croc today, you got to organize a damn safari, and even then, you got to night-light ’em, and even then, all you might get is a puff of mud or a little far-off ripple out acrost the water. Them big old crocs are few and far between, and they ain’t the only critters that are disappearin. Look at your sawfish, sea turtle, your manatees! Them big kind of wild critters was dirt common all around these rivers in our daddies’ time! And plume birds—egrets! Since the Park took over and messed up the water, they are more few and far between than what they was back when they had the shit shot out of ’em by every cracker in south Florida! It’s like I told Parks, If you go on like this, you’ll have a big dead country on your hands, dead, dead, dead!—just dirty water and dry mud, and nothin stirrin in the saw grass and the mangrove, only wind.

“Us fellers finally give up on the poor fishin, give up on tryin to make a livin obeyin all them laws put through by them outsiders. Them fools love the heck out of Mother Nature, but they don’t know nothin about the backcountry, and never give a hoot in hell whether us damn natives lived nor died.

“We felt real bad when we had no choice but to go back gator-huntin, cause it’s gators that digs the water holes that sees the fish and birds and snakes and turtles through the dry season. Trouble was, with the terrible drought brought down on ’em by all that drainin, even them scaly dinosaur damn things was startin to die out, so they shut down our markets for the hides. So us poor raggedy-ass home fellers, we had to go back to the midnight export business, same as our daddies and granddaddies done, bird plumes and liquor. Today it’s mostly ordnance, munitions, tomorrow it might be marijuana dope—hell, it don’t matter. The law can’t catch us back amongst these mangroves and it never could.”

Moving sideways into the sea grape to relieve himself, Speck kept an eye on them, not in modesty but because in his swamp nature, with its wariness of a concealed presence, or anything approaching from behind, he would never be caught unaware out in the open.

Andy whispered, “Know something, Colonel?” He had intuited Lucius’s torn mood. “I do like that ornery sonofagun, I just can’t help it! I got to like just about anybody these days who cheers me up! But I never took him for a good man, cause he ain’t.”