Acts of Nature - By Jonathon King Page 0,61

another young man, dressed the same as the other but missing the hat. He may have been older, his neck more filled out, shoulders carrying some meat. His hair was buzz cut and instantly reminded me of police trainee academy, or maybe one of those juvenile detention camps.

I started to say, “Hey, are we glad to see you,” but I held my tongue, some taste of wariness stopping me. It did not take me more than a couple of seconds to realize that by their positions, I was being flanked.

“Well, guys, I could be better,” I said instead and stopped my forward motion. In fact, I took a step back, not an obvious retreat, but at a slightly angled step so that it was not as difficult to see both of them at the same time with my peripheral vision. I want the move to come off as polite, not tactical.

“That was your airboat I heard,” I said, not a question, a statement. A question can put you in a subservient position, like you want something, like you don’t know as much as they know, like you’re not in charge. A street cop does not ever want to be in a subservient position to people he does not know. I learned this years ago, dealing with pimps and pushers and just plain assholes on my beat sector of South Philly. They are lessons best not forgotten and suddenly they were boiling up in the back of my head like the prickly sensation on my neck.

“No. That would be my airboat you heard, friend.”

The voice came from my right and behind, more disconcerting because I was more vulnerable and because the deep sound of it was older, more mature, more confident. I hid my startle this time and turned with, I hope, a normal, easygoing attitude.

This visitor was not wary. He planted his big palms on the deck, swung a leg up, and mounted the platform like a rodeo cowboy mounting a horse. He was athletic. His forearms were cabled with muscle. He was not as tall as my own six- foot-three, but he was easily fifteen years younger, and even more disconcerting than his boys, he was smiling. A smiling stranger in the middle of the Glades after a major hurricane trashed the area. I did not trust any inch of him.

I turned my head to check any movement by the others and noted that they’d held their positions. The smiling man took one step closer and offered his hand, reaching out as though respecting my space. He was acting friendly. He was being careful.

“Bob Morris,” he said in introduction and I reached out, holding my own spot, and took his hand.

“Max Freeman.”

“Pleasure, Mr. Freeman,” the man said, then looked out past me. “Come on in, boys, don’t be rude. This here is Mr. Freeman.”

I was checking the man’s eyes. They were a gray so pale that they were almost colorless, and unflinching. His shirt was canvas and washed too many times. When he took my hand I noted that his own was soiled in cracks and under the fingernails and now I saw the smudges of dirt along the hard muscle of his neck tendons. He had been out for some time in this swamp, handling dirty things. The other two scrambled up onto the deck with less grace but still the kind of lithe comfort that you see in farm boys, or in this part of the country, young boat hands.

“We was kinda surprised when you came out, Mr. Freeman. Didn’t expect to find nobody out here after that ’cane blew through,” the man who called himself Morris said.

I offered nothing. Let him tell it. Let me get a sense of it. Sometimes silence encouraged them.

“We, uh, own our own camp just up the way to the northwest there toward Immokolee and were just out to see the damage and, you know, she was hit pretty bad,” he continued.

I nodded knowingly. “It was one hell of a storm.”

“Yep, she was.”

Morris looked at the boys and they all nodded their heads in agreement that a hurricane that ripped down walls and sailed roofs away and flattened hundreds of acres of tough sawgrass was indeed a hell of a storm.

“So how’d you make out?” I said, matching the simplicity of their language, maybe leveling some playing ground here, trying to come off as nonthreatening. The boys cut their eyes to Morris.

“Oh, well, we got hit pretty good up there,” he