A Visible Darkness - By Jonathon King Page 0,3

a home base for studying the surrounding ecosystem. It then lay abandoned for years, until my friend and attorney, Billy Manchester, somehow obtained the lease and rented it to me when I was searching for an escape from my Philadelphia past.

The only change I’d made was new screening and the installation of a wondrous trap Billy had found for the tiny gnats that could slip through the smallest barriers. One of his acquaintances, and Billy had hundreds, was a University of Florida researcher who’d cobbled together a CO2 contraption to kill the no-see-ums. Knowing that it is the CO2 that lures the insects to humans and other air-breathers, the researcher had configured a bucket-shaped container coated with a sticky oil and then inverted on a stem pedestal. Threaded with a CO2 line, the stem emitted a small trail of gas, less than what two people talking would emit. The bugs came for the CO2, got trapped in the oil, and I lived nearly unbitten on the edge of the Glades. I was ruminating on the simple genius of the idea when the rattle of my boiling coffeepot sat me up and then the electronic chirping of a cell phone made me curse. I went to the coffee first and then searched for the phone.

“Yeah?” I answered.

“Max,” said Billy, his voice straight and efficient. “Max. I need your help.”

3

In the morning I packed a gym bag with civilized clothes and a shaving kit and loaded my canoe. The sun was just beginning to streak through the high cypress cover, spackling the leaves and slowly igniting the greenness of the place. I untied and pushed off toward the river. The water was high from the rain. Dry ground was rare here, and the effect of the omnipresent water gave one a constant sense of floating. My shoulders and arms began to loosen after ten minutes of easy paddling. By the time I reached the open water I was ready to grind.

Billy had spent an hour on the phone explaining in his thorough and efficient way why he was making an uncharacteristic call for help. Billy is the most intelligent person I’ve ever met. A child chess prodigy from the north Philadelphia ghetto, he graduated top of his class at Temple’s law school. He then took a second degree in business at Wharton.

He was an intellectually gifted black kid who grew up in one of the most depressed and depressing areas of the country. I was an unambitious son of a cop who grew up in the ethnic, blue-color neighborhoods of South Philly. Our mothers had met and formed a quiet and unusual friendship, one that we had only begun to decipher as men. We did not meet until we made contact on new ground in South Florida, where, for our own reasons, both of us had fled.

I learned early to trust Billy. I also learned to listen carefully to his advice and his stories. He rarely said anything that wasn’t thought out and worthy. I had kept that in mind last night as he spun through his reason for calling and I worked through the pot of coffee.

“You know it was Henry Flagler, Rockefeller’s Standard Oil partner, who brought the first train down into South Florida?”

“No. But I do now,” I said. “Go on.”

“It was Flagler who pushed his tracks down the east coast to Palm Beach, where he built the largest winter resort in the world at the time for the rich and powerful New Yorkers like himself.

“Tough old guy,” Billy said. “And pretty ballsy too.”

There was reverence in his voice when he told how Flagler then took his rail line to Miami when it was just a fishing town, and then took on the superhuman task of building the overseas rail line from island to island all the way to Key West.

Some of this history I knew. Billy had been my lending library, passing on books about Florida’s past, Audubon guides when I stared dumbly at a species I didn’t know and maps to give me a larger idea of where I was. He rarely gave tutorials. But this felt different. My friend was a lawyer, he was building a case.

“Flagler employed thousands of southern blacks, free men who left their birth homes in Georgia and Alabama to hack his trail down the coast. They were the ones who piled the sand and gravel for a roadbed and then laid the ties and rails to carry Flagler’s class to the