with the lemmings. It still gave me a headache.
Cleve was at the boat ramp, looking up at the piled, sooty clouds that were now directly overhead. One good rip of lightning and the whole front would split open and the rain would drop “like pissin’ on a flat rock,” the old ranger would say. The humid wind from the east was being sucked west, pulling at our pants legs and shirtsleeves but doing little to dry the film of sweat on my back.
“Give me the willies,” Cleve said, still looking up at the coming storm but no doubt seeing the tiny wrapped body from this morning. “Wasn’t like that boy with the gator.”
Cleve had told me the story the first week I’d arrived. An eight-year-old had been canoeing the river with his family and they stopped along one of the drier banks to get out and stretch. The boy decided to cool off in a slightly deeper pool where the water swirled and spun back before continuing downstream. Whether the male alligator had already been in the hole or had been alerted by the movement, no one knew.
The animal got the boy’s head in its jaws and pulled the child under, trying to drown its prey. When the boy’s father realized what had happened he jumped to his son’s aid, clubbing the gator’s head and snout with a paddle until the beast let loose. It had taken too long to get the injured child through the wilderness to a spot where a helicopter could airlift him out. He died later at the trauma center.
Cleve had been at the pickup site, tending the boy’s head wounds while his family looked on.
“I’ve seen what nature can do,” he said, finally shaking himself from the past to look me in the eye. “But this one wasn’t nature and those boys knew it.”
He then told me of his trip up the river early that morning with Hammonds and his crime scene team. They’d barely said a word on the way out. Cleve knew how most people reacted to a trip out here, with relaxed conversation and obvious questions. Instead, Hammonds’ boys were quiet and preoccupied with a device they kept out of sight in the stern of the Whaler. They only engaged him with queries about access spots, where the headwaters started, the nearest roadways or bridges. And the location of my place and how often he saw me coming and going.
“You couldn’t see the channel to your shack, but I couldn’t lie,” Cleve said, cutting his eyes to gauge my reaction.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said.
When Cleve got them to the dam, he had to untether the canoe and float it on the upper river. It would only hold three, so Hammonds and one crime scene photographer climbed in with him. The wrapped body was right where I’d told them. The photographer snapped away as Cleve inched them up to the spot. The ranger saw Hammonds check one more time on the gadget he brought from the Whaler before they lifted the child’s body out of the tangle of cypress root. The men said nothing on the ride back, and never looked at the black, zippered body bag into which they’d slid the bundle.
“It was damned eerie,” Cleve said.
The rest of the team was waiting at the dock when they got in and loaded the body. Before they pulled out, Hammonds told Cleve they might need him again, without elaboration.
“I don’t see why,” he said, looking up at the heavy clouds and then helping me settle my canoe in the water. “They won’t need me to guide them to that spot again now that they got that GPS reading.”
I almost beat the storm back to my shack. I was well under the cypress canopy when the first muffled rumble of thunder tumbled out of the west. The first light wave of rain got caught up in the tops of the trees and I was just lashing the canoe to my dock when fat drops started smacking through the leaves. By the time I got to the top of the stairs the sound had risen to a rush.
Inside I stripped off my wet shirt and tossed my gym bag near the bed. The first time I experienced a South Florida downpour out here it scared the hell out of me. The roar in the trees mixed with the sharp drumming on my tin roof made me cover my ears. After several months I’d gotten