Key Weird 01; Key Weird Page 13

  He took a couple of the tuber-looking things down from the rafters and had me cut everything up for another soup while he went out and quick-like caught a little snapper fish for the pot.

  I still was a little weak, so I went and sat down on my mat while the soup cooked. The old man usually stayed outside, but this time he sat down on the floor in the same spot where I had first seen him.

  “I sure do appreciate you helping me out here, Mr. Small, and letting me stay in your place and all.”

  The old man just sat there and looked at me with them intense little eyes of his.

  “I’m feeling better now, so if you could maybe give me a ride back over to my boat, I’ll see about getting her unstuck and be on my way.”

  Mr. Small didn’t seem to be much of a talker, so I went on, “My name is Taco Bob, and I was headed over to a place I aimed to camp out for a while called the Old Watson Place. Maybe you heard of it?”

  Mr. Small leaned over a little and started making a muffled coughing noise. I thought maybe he was having some kind of a fit, but then he came up with a big ol’ toothless grin and I realized he was laughing. Not understanding what he was laughing for, but not wanting to be missing out on any fun, I started laughing a little too.

  The old feller settled down, but was still sporting a grin. His voice was so quiet I had to lean forward to hear.

  “I’m afraid you missed out on staying at the Old Watson Place by a few decades, young man. The old house was blown away by a big hurricane a few years after the park people took over this part of the state. It was the last place left after they took out all the old squatter shacks the fishermen lived in along the coast. What they couldn’t burn, they carried off. Other than a few channel markers out in the mouths of the rivers, there’s not much sign of man left along this whole area.”

  I reckon that much talking at once was a bit much for the old man, cause he didn’t say anything after that.

  “So I take it, then, you don’t have much in the way of neighbors.”

  “Not in the last 30 years or so.”

  Mr. Small worked him up another gummer smile.

  “Plays hell with the dating too.”

  Then he got serious looking again.

  “You were very sick. The spirits came for you once, but they didn’t take you. You need to rest and become strong again. You are worried about your white boat, but it is safe, no harm will come to it.”

  He started getting that grin going again.

  “Besides, you have already reached your goal. When the great storm destroyed the house of Watson the Outlaw, I carried the lumber I found from the old place back here and built this cabin you’re sitting in now.”

  ∨ Key Weird ∧

  45

  Miami PI

  Tommy Arenas was a busy man, so it was several days before he got to the little job that had come in from his crazy aunt down in Key West.

  Before he started doing PI work, he’d spent several years as a bounty hunter, running down low-life bail-jumpers. Tommy eventually decided he’d had enough of dealing on a far too personal level with the floor sweepings of society. The final straw was a contract to bring back a career wife beater who’d cut town after his parents put their house trailer up for his bond.

  Tommy found the asshole across the state in Naples, where he’d followed the wife to her sister’s place. That night, Tommy waited outside the house by the guy’s car. When he finally staggered out, Tommy knocked him to the ground and cuffed him.

  He put the guy in the back of his car, then turned around and caught a tire iron across the mouth courtesy of the drunken wife, screaming, “Let him go! He’s my man and I still love him!”

  These days Tommy was trying to do more surveillance and research work for lawyers and insurance companies and less of the in-your-face stuff for the bail bondsmen. It was mostly boring work, but the pay wasn’t bad and he hadn’t needed any more expensive dental work lately.

  He got on his computer and accessed a couple of government sites he wasn’t supposed to have access to, and in 30 minutes he had a name and address for his aunt.

  ∨ Key Weird ∧

  46

  Carol in Paradise

  Days of dragging Jeremy around with her to the treasure museums and running down dead-end leads on treasure hunters had not improved Carol’s mood. It didn’t help for Jeremy to keep telling her he had a line on the crabber Sam had told her about, and that he expected to have some news for her any day now.

  Of course the little piece of walking crud wouldn’t tell her where he was supposed to be getting this information, and knowing Jeremy, he probably was looking in a crystal ball or something equally ridiculous anyway.

  Carol cut Jeremy loose one afternoon, went back to her suite, and had a nap. Then she went out to a bar and met some guy named André, who told her he was the manager of the motel with the most rooms in Key West. She acted impressed that he was in charge of the biggest motel on the island, and tried not to seem confused when told that it wasn’t actually the biggest motel, but it did have the most rooms.

  She liked André’s good looks and big hands, and invited him over to check out her suite. They did a thorough mattress check until three o’clock in the morning, when a sated Carol told him it was checkout time and to make sure to lock the door on his way out.

  ♦

  Carol had just invented a new chocolate that was not only incredibly delicious, but actually helped you lose weight, when Jeremy’s pounding on the door awakened her at nine o’clock that morning. Carol was not amused.

  She finally got tired of Jeremy’s muffled pleadings, and locked herself in the bathroom for a leisurely bath. While soaking, she again reviewed the list of things she planned to do once she had the power of the Chacmools. Amongst the debaucheries involving exotic men, stunning jewelry, fast cars, breathtaking homes, and great piles of cash, she left room for the slow and agonizingly painful death of a certain persistent, door-pounding little vermin.

  After carefully dressing in a tasteful bustier and Versace jeans ensemble, Carol opened the door to find Jeremy sitting in the hallway holding an open skin magazine in one hand, and the shoe he’d been using on her door in the other.

  “Oh, I thought I heard someone at the door.” Carol slammed the door and retired to her bed. She hadn’t locked it though, and Jeremy burst in.

  “Shit, Carol! Where have you been? I tried to find you last night, but you weren’t here!”

  Carol looked up from examining her nails and yawned.

  “So?”

  “So I got the goods on the crabber’s niece. I got a name and an address for you!”

  Carol sprang from the bed and grabbed the little man by the ear.

  “Give it up!”

  Jeremy let out a screech.

  “Ack, that shit hurts! Let go, Carol!”

  She turned loose of his ear, but stood her ground and narrowed her eyes, starting a low growl.

  “Hey, I’m helping you out here! I just want to make sure you realize the trouble I went through to get you this important piece of information.”

  Carol growled louder and showed some teeth.

  “And I want to make sure you are willing to compensate accordingly.” Jeremy took a step backwards.

  “I want you to teach me the Black Eye thing.”

  “No way. You know the deal, give it up or you’re blowing bubbles in the toilet bowl.”

  Jeremy got a real hurt look on his face and gave her the sad eyes treatment.

  “Aw, come on, Carol, quit being such a hardass. I figured you’d be happy.”

  Carol was still feeling a little glow from the night before, so she relented, for once.

  “Okay, give and I’ll cut you some slack. But no Black Eye until I get the idol.” Jeremy thought about it a second.

  “Deal. I got it all written down here. She’s living on a boat in a marina at some place called Sanibel Island.”

  ♦

  The next day Caro
l flew out of Key West International Airport in a small 20-seat Air Keys commercial plane to Fort Myers. She looked out the window of the half-filled plane to the east and saw nothing but little dark green islands and miles more of green beyond that. She thought it was strange there weren’t any cities; maybe that was the Everglades swamp place she had heard about. Carol read a magazine.

  ♦

  It was a short drive over to Sanibel Island from the airport, and Carol pulled her rental car into the marina parking lot by early afternoon. She found the office and was told the person she was looking for was living on a boat just past the marine research place. As Carol walked by the old wooden building on pilings out over the water, she noticed a couple of older guys sitting on the porch, drinking beer and seriously checking out her stuff.

  Carol found the boat, a houseboat called the “Oar House”, stepped aboard, and knocked on the door. A tired-looking woman with graying hair and middle-age spread opened the door. Carol could hear Jerry Springer on the television. She didn’t waste any time getting the woman back inside and having her check out the eye with the black contact lens.

  An hour later, Carol left the houseboat knowing far more than she wanted about this woman’s relationship with her uncle Mikey before he disappeared two days before her fifteenth birthday. The woman remembered seeing a gold necklace and had been told there was plenty more where that came from. Carol also found out about an old abandoned house where Mikey would sometimes stay when he was working his illegal crab traps up along the coast in the Everglades National Park.

  ∨ Key Weird ∧

  47

  Mr. Small, the Swamp, and Taco Bob

  “Window screens have got to be one of mankinds all-time better ideas!”

  The next few days I ate a bunch of Mr. Small’s soup and tried to learn a little about my host and his life in the Everglades. Once, after finishing off a batch of particularly good soup, I was reclined on my sleeping mat, savoring a crossword I’d found in one of the weathered paperback books he used for starting fires. The old hermit came inside and I found out he was in one of his rare talking moods. I asked him about Key West, and it turns out he’d lived there for a while before moving to the swamp.

  “How long ago was that, you living in Key West?”

  “Many winters. Some men had built a railroad from the mainland through the islands the last time I was there. I couldn’t see any good coming of that, so I moved to the swamp. I wonder sometimes if Key West has changed much since then.”

  I was thinking SUVs, discount airlines, tour buses, and cruise ships the size of small cities disgorging hundreds of tourists at a time onto the streets of Key West. Bargain-starved tourists with cellphone cameras, walkmans, and email, filling the sidewalks, shops, and bars making purchases with Gold Cards.

  “Yeah, I reckon you could say it’s changed a bit since the railroad come in.”

  I was curious about the ol’ fella staying in the swamp so many years alone, living off the land. But he said there were other people living out there at one time, mostly pretty tough folks from what I gathered.

  “I hated to see all my friends leave when the government took this land, but the way things were going, if the Park hadn’t come, there wouldn’t be much wildlife left by now.

  “The first white settlers shot hell out of the birds for the plumes that were popular then for ladies’ hats. They nearly wiped out some species of birds. Fish, turtles, deer, gators all got hit hard back in those early days. Some of the old crackers still came in after the Park people took over and poached gators for the hides.”

  The old man talked quiet all the time, so whenever he’d pause, all I could hear was the skeeters buzzing outside.

  “There was no school for the young ones back in the early days. The children learned hunting and fishing as soon as they were old enough to work a trap or a net. People were living in little shacks with tarpaper walls and palm thatch roofs. Most of the early settlers didn’t even have screens on the windows, and had to burn smudge pots to keep the bugs from carrying them off.”

  I felt like I’d had some recent personal life experience at what that must have been like.

  “There used to be Indians living out here too, but most of them moved further inland to the big reservations. It was a free but hard life for the people in those days. There was always plenty of fish for eating and selling though, and some even managed to grow some vegetables and fruit to sell in Key West.

  “The Park people grandfathered-in those of us who had been here the longest. That was a long time ago, I doubt there’s anyone left these days could find me out here if they wanted to.”

  I knew what he meant, too. His old cabin had been there so long the mangroves had grown up and around and over it so much, it looked like part of the swamp. You could be fifty feet away, and be looking right at the little shack, and not see it.

  He told me there was a place back up inland a ways, where he had a little vegetable garden and some fruit trees going on himself. Said he’d show me sometime if I wanted.

  “When people lived along here, some thought there was treasure. They said the pirate Jose Gaspar and others had treasure hidden along the Ten Thousand Islands because it was the wildest area, and the last place anyone would look.”

  He had a funny gleam in his eye, but he didn’t say any more, so I was about to ask him if anyone ever found any old pirate treasure, when he stood up and started spinning around with his arms straight out. I’d seen him doing that before out on the little front porch of the cabin, but this was the first time he’d done it inside, right in front of me. It was kind of weird to see this ancient ol’ fella spinning around like some kind of whirling dervish. He stopped after a bit and started doing some kind of stretching exercises.

  “Uh, excuse me for asking, Mr. Small, but what in blazes is all that spinning about?”

  He was really into the stretching thing and sat down on the floor and did some more before he answered.

  “It is for the body, to keep it young. My body was always telling me what it needed, but it took me a long time to learn how to listen.” He give me a big wink before answering the question I hadn’t asked.

  “I looked for treasure like the others at one time, maybe I looked harder than anyone. But I don’t look for buried treasure anymore; these days, I’m looking for the Fountain of Youth.”

  This was some news. I sat back and ran that around while he lay down on the floor and started arching his back up and down.

  “I met a fella in Key West, said he was looking for the same thing, Mr. Small. Said he was a descendent of ol’ Ponce de Leon, actually. Kinda strange sort, but a hell of a nice guy.”

  The old man stopped what he was doing and locked onto me with those intense little eyes over that.

  “Did he say where he was looking?”

  I had to think about that a minute.

  “Seems like he said something once about bogs and swamps. Man could juggle cats like nobody’s business too.” Mr. Small was giving all that some serious thought.

  “Swamps and bogs, he said?”

  While the old man was working that over, the realization come over me that we were ourselves currently sitting in the biggest swamp in the state of Florida.

  “I think your friend is right. In fact, I think the Fountain is close. Sometimes now, I see it in my dreams.”

  Which seemed to be all the man had to say on the matter, because he hopped up on his feet and was out the door before I could say anything else.

  ♦

  I finally got to feeling more like my usual ornery self, and Mr. Small told me it was time to go get my boat out of the mangroves. We got in his little boat, a hollowed-out log canoe like the Indians used to have, and slowly worked our way down the creek. It actually wasn’t much of a creek up by where the cabin was at, more like a shallow lake full of trees.

  It wasn’t much of a boat either. With me sitting in it, the sides weren’t but a couple inches above the water. I
figured that must have been why I remembered being tied up when he first found me, so I wouldn’t go wiggling around and flood the boat. Mr. Small stood in the back and poled us slowly along through the little creeks that mostly all looked the same to me.

  My boat was still there all right. A big heron was sitting on it and took off as we came up. I really needed a chainsaw, a winch, and a big helper, but settled for a rusty ax, some poles, and a little helper. It took me a couple of hours of chopping in the heat of the day before we got to try using a couple of mangrove poles to scoot the boat back in the water. For such a little old man, Mr. Small was sure strong. We had timed the high tide just about right, and had her floated again by late afternoon. I checked the motor, and she turned over but didn’t start. I didn’t press the issue because I didn’t want to run down the battery.

  I asked Mr. Small if I could stay with him again that night, and he said of course, I was welcome to stay as long as I wanted. I thanked him and let him lead the way back to his cabin. Those two boats were about as different as could be, but they were both built for poling, so we slowly poled our way back up in the swamp.

  ♦

  I decided to take Mr. Small up on his offer and spent a few more days hanging out with him and the critters of the swamp. Since I was pretty well back up to speed, he put me to work mending the roof of his cabin and helping him with the garden. I kept on sleeping on the mat inside, since the old man insisted, and I did sleep awful good there for some reason. He didn’t ever lie down in the cabin himself; he would sit there in that same spot in the corner and just kind of stop moving for a few hours sometimes. He spent most nights outside though, so I figured he must have another place to sleep.

  ♦

  I cleaned up my boat, and thankfully, got the engine running all right. Checked the boat out from one end to the other and did an inventory of what I had. I found my toolkit all in one piece, and since I still had my pocketknife, I give Mr. Small the little fold-out knife and pliers tool I had in there. He gave that thing a real good going-over, pulling out all the little tools in there, and got his weird laugh thing going again and thanked me. It made me feel good to be able to give the man something he might be able to use, since he’d helped me out so much.