vast fields of water. Others were maimed in dynamite blasts. Some simply disappeared in an ancient Glades muck that could suck a boot, a leg, a worker’s torso down.
But when the road from Tampa to Miami was finally finished in 1946 and dubbed the Tamiami Trail, it had effectively bypassed the first attempted roadway. The original Loop Road would remain unfinished, a trail to nowhere. And a trail to nowhere, in the middle of nowhere, draws a unique breed of resident.
For half a century the Loop Road was little more than a jump-off point for alligator hunters, exotic plume hunters and not a few moonshiners. Even in the years when killing off endangered alligators and snowy egrets became illegal and prohibition kicked in, the Loop was still a jump-off for poachers and white lightning runners, bail jumpers and criminals who needed a place where few questions were asked and authority ignored.
“It has a long tradition of being a place apart,” Billy said. “The people who live there don’t like strangers, government, developers, and have a special disdain for the law.”
By the time Billy finished his history lesson I’d gotten off the I-95 exit to Southwest Eighth Street and headed west.
“I’m not sure I’d go out there alone if I were you.”
“Yeah. Thanks,” I said, punching him off.
Within a few miles I’d lost the city, the bodegas, the strip shopping centers, even the stoplights. Out here there were stretches of small orange and avocado groves, acres of tropical tree farms and open stands of slash pine. In some places the narrow roads ran under ancient stands of oak draped in moss whose limbs stretched across the roadway to form dark green tunnels that reminded me of my river. I had to cut farther south and by the time I found Loop Road the late-afternoon thunderheads were gathering in the western sky, piling up and tumbling east.
The Loop Road Frontier Hotel seemed more a backcountry Southern roadhouse than a hotel. When I found it I pulled into a shell-covered parking lot that was a quarter full with old- model pickup trucks, a few dusty sedans and a semi-tractor with its grease-covered skid plate exposed. I turned off my truck and sat listening to the heat tick off the engine, wondering if this was a mistake.
Off to one side of the building’s covered entrance three men, probably in their early twenties, stood in lazy conversation, bootheels up on the bumper of a dented Ford pickup. They were dressed in jeans and tight, dark-colored T-shirts and wore baseball caps with various logos stitched on the front. They were not unlike a hundred other groups of young and uninspired locals I’d moved off the street corners of Philadelphia in my years of foot patrol. I could see them cutting their eyes my way.
I got out, locked my door, and had started toward the building when the biggest of the trio called out: “Hey, Mr. Fancytruck. You lost?”
I know I should have ignored it. I know I could have walked on and let the laughter fall behind me. A life is full of should-haves and could-haves. Instead I stopped and turned to the group.
“I don’t think so.”
“Well, I think so,” the big one said and stepped forward as I knew he would. I’d seen it too many times.
He was my height but thirty pounds heavier and most of it fat. His chunky face was topped by a 1950s style crewcut but in his left ear was a tight looped earring. His brown eyes held an alcoholic luster. Get drunk or high so your reflexes are off and your oxygen intake is impaired and then go out and pick a fight. Idiocy knows no boundaries, I thought to myself.
“You a cop?” he sneered, moving within striking range, braver than I expected.
“No,” I said. “Do you need one?”
“We don’t need no fucking cops out here,” one of his buddies answered from his spot behind the big one. Neither of the others had moved off their fender.
“Good,” I said, turning to move on when I heard the big one suck in a quick snort of air.
Even professional fighters give away their intentions with breathing patterns. It is a natural instinct to draw in a snatch of air before expending the tight energy used to deliver a blow or make a hard move. Everyone does it. Amateurs are just louder and sloppier.
When I heard the whistle of air I turned and spun inside his first roundhouse punch, aimed at the