Strawman's Hammock (3 page)

So when the invitation came to join Linton Loyd at his deer camp for the benefit of venison and good company, Barrett had been, to put it lightly, on guard.

Something was expected. What would it be?

Linton stabbed his long knife absently into the sand—the preferred way to clean a blade, to keep it from rusting.

“Question for you, Bear.”

“Certainly.”

“Want you to think about something for me. No need to answer just yet.”

Bear blew softly over the rim of his cup. “What is it, Linton?”

“You know Lou Sessions and me don't always see eye to eye.”

This was an understatement. Lou Sessions was the county's sheriff, the unchallenged authority in his jurisdiction. Lou Sessions hated Linton's guts. Linton held Lou in something much lower than contempt. The beginnings of the conflict were personal. Something to do with the fact that Gary Loyd had gotten the sheriff's daughter pregnant and then refused to marry her. Linton backed up his son. Didn't help that he also pronounced the girl a whore.

“Don't see how I can help you with the sheriff, Linton.”

“Not just me involved, Bear. He's bad for the county. Why, we got meth labs and marijuana growin' all over these woods!”

That much was true.

“But Lou, hell, he don't even want to look. Won't let
you
people look, and that's a fact. You know that, Bear. Hell, ever'body in the county knows it.”

Even allowing for personal bias, Linton's assessment of the sheriff's performance was not far off the mark. Lou Sessions was embarrassed early in his tenure when an FDLE probe uncovered a drug-dealing deputy in Lou's employ. The incident almost cost Sheriff Sessions his second election. He was now in his fourth term and so hostile to FDLE, or for that matter to the DEA, ATF, INS, or any other outside agency, that by now the sheriff was widely suspected of being guilty of something more than incompetence.

“I can't get between you and Lou.” Bear stated that fact firmly. “And I can tell you there's nothing like probable cause to make the FDLE go after the man. We are out of that loop, and you know it, Linton. You got a problem, best I can tell you is—go to Tallahassee.”

“I'm thinkin' closer to home,” Linton replied. “We got an election comin' up, you know. Next year. Qualify by July fifteenth. I'm thinkin' of backin' a candidate against Lou Sessions. I got the money behind me. I can get the votes. And I got a man in mind.”

“A candidate?” Barrett was mildly surprised. He had never known the Loyds to be involved in any honest contest.

“A name, at least,” Linton affirmed. “I'd be interested in your opinion.”

“Not sure I'd be the best to judge.”

“No one better. He's a good lawman. Solid record. Broad experience. And he's trusted. Ever' swinging dick in this county trusts the man.
I
trust him, and I got to tell you, Bear, there ain't many I trust.”

“So who is he?”

“He's you, Bear.”

The words took a moment to sink in.

“You think—you're thinking I should run? Against Lou Sessions?”

“I think lots of things. I think you want to be closer to Laura Anne and the boys. I think you'd like a way to be near to your home and people. I think you'd like to be the best damn criminal investigator in the state, too. And so I think if you chew it over, you'll see the best way to do all that is to be the sheriff.”

To be sheriff! It was sinking in. To be the head lawman in his hometown! His home county! To be able to rise with Laura Anne in the morning, see the boys off to school, and still get to work before eight o'clock. To end those endless commutes, canceled dinner dates, lost ball games and Sunday socials. To be able to throw Ben and Tyndall a ball every day after work, or go fishing. Sit beside them at homework. Hear their after-school tales! To be able to earn a living and be at home! That alone was worth considering. As for the other—

“It's a natural progression for you, Bear. Either you go on to a federal agency and kiss off ever having a family life or you come home, as sheriff, and make your career right here where you belong.

“You'll be the man, Bear. You can set your own course. Call your own shots. You can be the lawman you always wanted to be and have a life at home to boot.”

“Provided I could get elected.”

“Not a thing to keep you from it,” Linton assured him. “Not unless you got some deep, dark secret I don't know about.
Is
there anything like that, Bear? Any Lewinskis in your closet?”

“Nothing but clothes,” Barrett replied.

Not in his daytime closet, anyway. Not in any closet he could recall.

“But that doesn't mean I could beat Lou Sessions.”

“Let me back you, you can beat the goddamn pope.”

But what would be the cost, Barrett wondered? What would be expected in return?

“Let me think about it.”

“Surely,” Linton smiled, just as happy, apparently, as if Barrett had accepted outright. “You do that, Bear. You think it over. And when you get done thinkin' you come to me.”

Two

Assuming you could find your way, Hezikiah Jackson's cypress shack perched raw and primitive on loblolly stumps in the middle of Strawman's Hammock. The Hammock, so named for its captured wetland and for the millenia of straw deposited by the last yellowheart pines to survive the timber barons, probably occupied no more than a thousand acres. Even an uneducated arborist could see the difference in the forest here. The loblolly or yellowheart pine was easily distinguished from the uniformly tall and narrow conifers hybridized to build houses or feed pulpwood mills. The trees in Strawman's Hammock had survived for more, in some cases much more, than a hundred years. Their limbs—unlike the slash pine that grew close to tall, slender trunks in uniform rows over endless tracts of company land—spread out widely from thick, heavily barked trunks in stands of trees arranged only by the random deposit of conifers.

Resin seeped from those ancient trunks like maple syrup. The pinecones were large. They reminded you, when opened, of pineapples. Even the straw was different from the straw of slash pines, bursting from pods of pinecones in circles or starbursts of heavy needles, a rambunctious and native parallel to its polite and manufactured cousin.

The hammock itself had so far remained unspoiled only because a private landowner refused over the years to sell his acreage to St. Regis, or Buckeye, or any of the other pulpwood mills coveting the acreage. It was rumored that this would soon change, that a probated will would see the land awarded to heirs only too happy to plant the land in regular rows of domestic pine and exploit its value on the market. When that happened Hezikiah Jackson would be forced from the land whose usufruct she had enjoyed, some said, for more than ninety years.

Hezikiah's homestead squatted deep inside a tract whose boundary was no more than five miles as a crow would fly from Loyd Linton's comparatively modern hunting grounds. But unless you were a crow that wouldn't help you. A single, twisted sandy rut of road wound a serpentine path along the periphery of the Hammock, but did not penetrate to the hammock's interior. Contemporary hunters lazy with their deer blinds and truck-mounted towers seldom hunted on foot anymore, and so seldom ventured anywhere into Strawman's Hammock.

You had to have a good reason to come here. A better reason yet to risk the snake bites, quicksand, and mantraps that threatened pilgrims wending their treacherous way to Hezikiah's stark homestead. Locals said the place was haunted, the ghost of a slain Creek or Seminole chieftan, Billy Bowlegs, say, or Osceola remaining to torture the souls of Spaniards or U.S. calvary. Hezikiah's shack was situated on what had surely been the mound of some ancient Indian or marauding community. When rain was plentiful you could see, exposed from the sand, arrowheads or occasionally the rusted crest of alien armory.

A clearwater spring fed a limestone aquifer that extended east and away from the mound's ancient site. Hezikiah drew water cold as ice from that underground cistern with a hand-jacked pump. Even her dwelling was anachronistic, a completely unvarnished throwback to the days when cypress-shingled roofs, shotgun halls, and outdoor privets were the common denominator of regional architecture. The shack leaned dangerously to one side now, which suited Hezikiah fine, her bed now canted on an upslope grade. Good for the rhombisis, she'd say, and the sinuses.

Let ever'thang stretch and drain.

The single and characteristic breezeway that split the shack in half gave access on the one side to a pair of rooms, one of which housed a single, molding trunk and an unmade poster-bed, the other room doubling as kitchen and what Hezikiah described as “a settin' place.”

A man was sat down there, now, in the sitting place, his knotted arms anchored akimbo with leather straps to the rests of a home-crafted chair. The chair was made of cypress, its joined limbs bent when green to take the shape, its leather-lashed armrests now arresting a Latin man, brown and sunbeaten and bathed in sweat before the ancient crone who limped in from her kitchen.

The settin' room was completely unsegregated from the kitchen. The Latin American strapped to her childhood furniture could see clearly the cornucopia of herbs and medicinals that Hezikiah had collected over nearly a century of shamanlike administration. Shelves of dog fennel and deer tongue dried open to the air while alongside were arranged murky Bell jars filled to the brim with the heads of moccassins and bullfrogs, the gizzards of chickens.

The hearts, locals whispered, of babies miscarried from their mama's wombs.

The migrant and Latin workers recently come to the northwestern isolates of Florida called her a
curandero,
which for these Spanish-speaking newcomers connoted something more than a medicine woman. Something only slightly less remarkable than a witch.

“Done got yo'sef a nasty 'fliction.”

Hezikiah spat some variety of tobacco through one of the many long creases that separated her floorboards.

The man sweated exposed on the precipice of her chair.

She turned absently to gather a rolling pin under the rank pit of one arm. A rolling pin. A hardwood cylinder fashioned to roll freely between lathed handles. She might have been making biscuits. That thought must have occurred.

“Gonna make me some hoecakes after,” she declared. “You want some? Be good. Hoecake and mayhaw jelly. Pussome lead back in yo' pencil.”

His Spanish was slurred in reply. “(Mother of Jesus, protect me from this crazy woman. Make her hand quick. Heal me.)”

She inspects him briefly.

“Same girl?”

The man nods silent assent to her reproach. And then—

“(I kill her! I cut her fucking heart! Slit her guts!)”

Hezikiah offers an uncomprehending smile to that threat. She sees before her a strong man, strong as a bull, barrel chested, thick forearms. A twist of muscle knots along the trapezoids that anchor his neck and shoulders.

“Better start usin' some kinda protection,” she counsels. And then she comes to him. Drags with a bare foot a stool before him, a milkstool, its cool, metal plane only slightly lower than the Mexican worker's exposed crotch.

“Wont some more whiskey?”

“Sí,”
he nods.
“Andele! Andele!”

She scoops up a jug from the floor with sudden dexterity. Offers it to him. He slurps the hooch down. Her nostrils flare to see his throat constrict with his stomach. He has an erection fully risen now.

“Ain't you somethin'?” She murmurs admiration.

She takes the jug away, reaches for the rolling pin.

“Next time use some protection,” she offers once more, pulling him hard and flat along the stool's cool, metal pan.

“Will this…? Be bad?” he gargles the question in English.

She smiles. Reaches up to slip her unwashed rainment free. A bony shoulder thrusts from beneath that flimsy shroud. Then the remains of a breast, a dug dried hard and gnarled as a raisin.

“Take it.”

Her eyes shine wet and bright.

“See who lets go first.”

*   *   *

A silver knife on a silver belly opened a black mullet stem to stern. A tall, vital woman cleaned the fish, raking its innards into a slop-sink braced with two-bys on a wide porch. A flight of gulls fluttered white as ashes across the face of a setting sun that settled into the Gulf of Mexico. She was bent at the waist, this woman at work, her bare back rippling sinuously with activity. The chill that surprised folks on the first of November had reverted by week's end to temperatures fueled by the Gulf of Mexico.

It was a sultry afternoon, an Indian summer's day shot with humidity. Her skin caught the setting sun in a sheen of perspiration. Locals speculated too often regarding the etiology of that skin, its remarkable tone and color, rich as it was, a deep milk chocolate. The skin of a Nubian. Her hair was full of body, hard to tame. Black as a crow's. A short row of metal tines pulled back those wiry strands like a handful of hemp to reveal a proud face. It was a tourist's gift, the barrette, a comb of copper set in lapis lazuli.

The mullet went immediately to ice in a tub filled with fish. You wanted mullet to stay sweet, you'd better not let him warm. Laura Anne hefted her aluminum tub onto a wide hip and banged through the steward's door that led to the kitchen behind. Other restaurateurs would keep the mullet untaken by customers and refrigerate it for two, three more days or longer in an effort to avoid a loss of inventory and profit, but Laura Anne would rather buy sparingly and tell a customer, “Sorry, folks, we're out,” than to give them a mullet gone stale.

That kind of integrity, of course, was one of the several things that made folks drive to the coast from Lake City and Tallahasee or further to dine on hardwood plates at Laura Anne's restaurant.