Strawman's Hammock Read online

  Barrett knew only too well.

  “Used to, a man with a box of Number Ones and some skill could feed his family off these woods. But now—now, hell, you got to be rich just to come out here.”

  Barrett watched as Linton Loyd kneeled to warm his hands in the fetid vapor that geysered from the gut bucket.

  “It’s cold,” he remarked.

  “As a well-digger’s ass,” Jarold agreed.

  The climate often turned bitter in northern Florida, but seldom this early in the season. It was not unheard of to have hurricanes in November, the sullen, persistent heat of Gulf waters encountering the capricious influences of la niña and a dipping jet stream. This morning, however, a stiff breeze and forty degrees felt Arctic.

  “Well. Guess I better be movin’,” the warden declared abruptly, pouring his coffee onto the fire in a careful stream, like a small boy pissing on hot coals.

  “Nice seeing you, Jarold.”

  The warden only nodded in reply. Barrett followed his solitary retreat. Linton had his buck gutted by now. The bladder had been removed without a single drop of urine contaminating the carcass. The skinning would come next. Linton would assign another hunter that task, returning himself only to dismember the choicest pieces of the buck’s meat from its entaglement of bone and sinew. “Here,” he nodded to his sullen son, and strolled past the bunkhouse to wash up.

  The Loyds’ bunkhouse was no more than a pair of thirty-foot construction trailers slapped together, the interior walls ripped out to allow a woodstove, tiers of beds, an overstuffed couch, and a card table. An open shed set some distance from the trailer provided a new luxury, a cold-water shower and washstand where Linton, bloodied to the elbows, now washed his hands with soap and sink cleaner. There was no latrine. You needed to shit, you walked off to the woods and found yourself a stump unencumbered with scorpions or patient spiders. You forgot your toilet paper, you made do with moss or something similar.

  There was a kind of verandah added on to the camphouse, an unfinished porch fashioned with plywood and mounted on cement blocks looking out over the firepit to the gallows or cruciform beyond. It was only after Linton had washed that he came to the campfire and the black man drinking coffee. “Morning, Bear. Been out yet?”

  Barrett Raines might fairly be described as a bear, with a great lump of neck and shoulder squeezed into a frame a shade shorter than a coffin. But it was the habit of sweetening his coffee with honey, locals knew, that gave Barrett his sobriquet. He was at it now, squeezing honey from a Pooh Bear decanter into his lacerated mug.

  “Not yet.” Bear replied to Linton’s question honestly enough, but the smile he offered was disingenuous. Barrett did not for a moment believe that the invitation to hunt with this members-only club was a simple gesture of sociability. There were no overt indicators to arouse suspicion of any other purpose, of course. Bunch of boys out to hunt. But Barrett could not forget that he was the only black man ever to set a foot that wasn’t running on Linton Loyd’s well-stocked grounds, let alone sit down with paying members at the massa’s camp.

  Barrett knew, as did everyone who came out here, that an invitation from Mr. Loyd never came without some expectation of reciprocity, some quid pro quo. Even the sickly son, Gary, the whelp who would one day inherit a fortune made on fertilizer and agricultural equipment, begged his daddy’s permission before coming to camp. The father’s largesse never came unless strings were attached. There was a nice ball of twine rolled up by now, taking in everything from stocks and bonds to holdings in timber and tobacco. And other things.

  Linton Loyd was well fixed by the time he was forty, but he didn’t flaunt his money. Not by any means. When not hunting or fishing he was most often seen in shirts and slacks from Sears, Roebuck. He was a compact man, shorter by a couple of hands than Barrett, and tightly wrapped. A streak of pewter ran off-center through raven hair still thick and worn long over a large dome of a forehead. His face was cut deeply into seams and lines that one might romantically assume to have derived from labor outdoors instead of from intrigues conducted behind a custom-built, cherrywood desk. Linton Loyd betrayed few emotions, except an abiding and furious prerogative over his son. He drank, but moderately.

  Linton loved to hunt. He loved the spoils that came with hunting: the hides and heads, racks of antlers. The walls of Linton’s study were littered with the photographs of slain animals. But whatever other passions the Loyd patriarch nurtured were kept private.

  Linton’s son, Gary Loyd, was a good bit younger than Bear, taller than his father. Probably not yet thirty. He had not been so fortunate as to inherit Linton’s thatch of hair, and partly in consequence spent too much time trying to wind stray survivors over what was a prematurely balding pate. The boy had, as they say, a reputation, having plowed quite a row for himself over a three-county region. And Gary never hesitated to drop his father’s name—another bone that stuck in the sheriff’s craw. But Barrett had been largely absent from the region during Gary’s hell-raising years and, since he was older, had virtually no memory of the man from school. Their orbits simply did not intersect. That was not quite the case, however, with Gary’s elder brother.

  Athletic competition provided the one arena in which a poor black boy and a rich white one might meet. Barrett was once opposite Gary’s older brother, Linton Jr., on a basketball court. He was the only black kid and the only freshman playing for Deacon Beach’s high school team. Junior was a senior, playing guard. Barrett didn’t remember too much of that elder brother. A good ball handler. Unselfish. Had, even as a youth, the beginnings of that trademark Milky Way streaking an otherwise glorious clutch of hair. Junior was killed in a boating accident. The family had always kept silent regarding the details. Drinking, it was said, however ambiguously, was involved.

  A small place like Deacon Beach, everybody kept up with everybody, and everybody’s business besides. When Barrett was a youngster that was almost universally the case. But he returned an adult to his boyhood haunts to see folks taking refuge inside air-conditioned modular homes. Porches and verandahs, once the ubiquitous meeting places of family and neighbors, the forums for argument, discussion, or simple recollection, were displaced now by dish antennas and TVs. Friends, kinfolks even, who used to be thick as thieves grew into jobs and habits that never seemed to touch. It was astounding to Barrett how people living in a place so small and intimate managed to be so distant from their neighbors. Ten miles might as well be a hundred. It was a change in the region that he did not like.

  On the other hand, some things Bear would have liked to see changed remained stubbornly the same. Deacon Beach and the county beyond was still not a region where a black man—or a Latin man, or an Asian man, for that matter—was accepted as equal. You still had to know your place here. And if you got respect, you had to earn it at twice the price paid by the sorriest cracker living.

  Barrett had paid that coin firsthand. If it had not been for Ramona Walker, he’d never have gotten his first job as a beat cop on the Beach. Even in the eighties, with a college degree and an honorable discharge from the reserve commission that had sent Bear rolling with artillery into a storming desert, he was not good enough to be considered for hire by Deacon Beach’s all-white council. White men did not want a black man in blues.

  Seven years later Barrett found himself one of only four black men interviewed by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. He got that job and made it stick. He was by now a well-known and respected lawman throughout the Third Judicial District, as well as on the Beach, but Linton Loyd had remained completely unimpressed. Their paths crossed often enough, at Rotary Club meetings, on football fields, or in the county’s consolidated gymnasium. Even Barrett’s recent transfer to the nearby field office in Live Oak, practically next door to the Loyd fiefdom, failed to evoke from Mr. Loyd the modest reception typically extended to homegrown boys done good.

  So when the invitation came to join Linton Loyd at his deer camp for the benefit of venison an
d good company, Barrett had been, to put it lightly, on guard.

  Something was expected. What would it be?

  Linton stabbed his long knife absently into the sand—the preferred way to clean a blade, to keep it from rusting.

  “Question for you, Bear.”

  “Certainly.”

  “Want you to think about something for me. No need to answer just yet.”

  Bear blew softly over the rim of his cup. “What is it, Linton?”

  “You know Lou Sessions and me don’t always see eye to eye.”

  This was an understatement. Lou Sessions was the county’s sheriff, the unchallenged authority in his jurisdiction. Lou Sessions hated Linton’s guts. Linton held Lou in something much lower than contempt. The beginnings of the conflict were personal. Something to do with the fact that Gary Loyd had gotten the sheriff’s daughter pregnant and then refused to marry her. Linton backed up his son. Didn’t help that he also pronounced the girl a whore.

  “Don’t see how I can help you with the sheriff, Linton.”

  “Not just me involved, Bear. He’s bad for the county. Why, we got meth labs and marijuana growin’ all over these woods!”

  That much was true.

  “But Lou, hell, he don’t even want to look. Won’t let you people look, and that’s a fact. You know that, Bear. Hell, ever’body in the county knows it.”

  Even allowing for personal bias, Linton’s assessment of the sheriff’s performance was not far off the mark. Lou Sessions was embarrassed early in his tenure when an FDLE probe uncovered a drug-dealing deputy in Lou’s employ. The incident almost cost Sheriff Sessions his second election. He was now in his fourth term and so hostile to FDLE, or for that matter to the DEA, ATF, INS, or any other outside agency, that by now the sheriff was widely suspected of being guilty of something more than incompetence.

  “I can’t get between you and Lou.” Bear stated that fact firmly. “And I can tell you there’s nothing like probable cause to make the FDLE go after the man. We are out of that loop, and you know it, Linton. You got a problem, best I can tell you is—go to Tallahassee.”

  “I’m thinkin’ closer to home,” Linton replied. “We got an election comin’ up, you know. Next year. Qualify by July fifteenth. I’m thinkin’ of backin’ a candidate against Lou Sessions. I got the money behind me. I can get the votes. And I got a man in mind.”

  “A candidate?” Barrett was mildly surprised. He had never known the Loyds to be involved in any honest contest.

  “A name, at least,” Linton affirmed. “I’d be interested in your opinion.”

  “Not sure I’d be the best to judge.”

  “No one better. He’s a good lawman. Solid record. Broad experience. And he’s trusted. Ever’ swinging dick in this county trusts the man. I trust him, and I got to tell you, Bear, there ain’t many I trust.”

  “So who is he?”

  “He’s you, Bear.”

  The words took a moment to sink in.

  “You think—you’re thinking I should run? Against Lou Sessions?”

  “I think lots of things. I think you want to be closer to Laura Anne and the boys. I think you’d like a way to be near to your home and people. I think you’d like to be the best damn criminal investigator in the state, too. And so I think if you chew it over, you’ll see the best way to do all that is to be the sheriff.”

  To be sheriff! It was sinking in. To be the head lawman in his hometown! His home county! To be able to rise with Laura Anne in the morning, see the boys off to school, and still get to work before eight o’clock. To end those endless commutes, canceled dinner dates, lost ball games and Sunday socials. To be able to throw Ben and Tyndall a ball every day after work, or go fishing. Sit beside them at homework. Hear their after-school tales! To be able to earn a living and be at home! That alone was worth considering. As for the other—

  “It’s a natural progression for you, Bear. Either you go on to a federal agency and kiss off ever having a family life or you come home, as sheriff, and make your career right here where you belong.

  “You’ll be the man, Bear. You can set your own course. Call your own shots. You can be the lawman you always wanted to be and have a life at home to boot.”

  “Provided I could get elected.”

  “Not a thing to keep you from it,” Linton assured him. “Not unless you got some deep, dark secret I don’t know about. Is there anything like that, Bear? Any Lewinskis in your closet?”

  “Nothing but clothes,” Barrett replied.

  Not in his daytime closet, anyway. Not in any closet he could recall.

  “But that doesn’t mean I could beat Lou Sessions.”

  “Let me back you, you can beat the goddamn pope.”

  But what would be the cost, Barrett wondered? What would be expected in return?

  “Let me think about it.”

  “Surely,” Linton smiled, just as happy, apparently, as if Barrett had accepted outright. “You do that, Bear. You think it over. And when you get done thinkin’ you come to me.”

  Two

  Assuming you could find your way, Hezikiah Jackson’s cypress shack perched raw and primitive on loblolly stumps in the middle of Strawman’s Hammock. The Hammock, so named for its captured wetland and for the millenia of straw deposited by the last yellowheart pines to survive the timber barons, probably occupied no more than a thousand acres. Even an uneducated arborist could see the difference in the forest here. The loblolly or yellowheart pine was easily distinguished from the uniformly tall and narrow conifers hybridized to build houses or feed pulpwood mills. The trees in Strawman’s Hammock had survived for more, in some cases much more, than a hundred years. Their limbs—unlike the slash pine that grew close to tall, slender trunks in uniform rows over endless tracts of company land—spread out widely from thick, heavily barked trunks in stands of trees arranged only by the random deposit of conifers.

  Resin seeped from those ancient trunks like maple syrup. The pinecones were large. They reminded you, when opened, of pineapples. Even the straw was different from the straw of slash pines, bursting from pods of pinecones in circles or starbursts of heavy needles, a rambunctious and native parallel to its polite and manufactured cousin.

  The hammock itself had so far remained unspoiled only because a private landowner refused over the years to sell his acreage to St. Regis, or Buckeye, or any of the other pulpwood mills coveting the acreage. It was rumored that this would soon change, that a probated will would see the land awarded to heirs only too happy to plant the land in regular rows of domestic pine and exploit its value on the market. When that happened Hezikiah Jackson would be forced from the land whose usufruct she had enjoyed, some said, for more than ninety years.

  Hezikiah’s homestead squatted deep inside a tract whose boundary was no more than five miles as a crow would fly from Loyd Linton’s comparatively modern hunting grounds. But unless you were a crow that wouldn’t help you. A single, twisted sandy rut of road wound a serpentine path along the periphery of the Hammock, but did not penetrate to the hammock’s interior. Contemporary hunters lazy with their deer blinds and truck-mounted towers seldom hunted on foot anymore, and so seldom ventured anywhere into Strawman’s Hammock.

  You had to have a good reason to come here. A better reason yet to risk the snake bites, quicksand, and mantraps that threatened pilgrims wending their treacherous way to Hezikiah’s stark homestead. Locals said the place was haunted, the ghost of a slain Creek or Seminole chieftan, Billy Bowlegs, say, or Osceola remaining to torture the souls of Spaniards or U.S. calvary. Hezikiah’s shack was situated on what had surely been the mound of some ancient Indian or marauding community. When rain was plentiful you could see, exposed from the sand, arrowheads or occasionally the rusted crest of alien armory.

  A clearwater spring fed a limestone aquifer that extended east and away from the mound’s ancient site. Hezikiah drew water cold as ice from that underground cistern with a hand-jacked pump. Even her dwelling was anachro
nistic, a completely unvarnished throwback to the days when cypress-shingled roofs, shotgun halls, and outdoor privets were the common denominator of regional architecture. The shack leaned dangerously to one side now, which suited Hezikiah fine, her bed now canted on an upslope grade. Good for the rhombisis, she’d say, and the sinuses.

  Let ever’thang stretch and drain.

  The single and characteristic breezeway that split the shack in half gave access on the one side to a pair of rooms, one of which housed a single, molding trunk and an unmade poster-bed, the other room doubling as kitchen and what Hezikiah described as “a settin’ place.”

  A man was sat down there, now, in the sitting place, his knotted arms anchored akimbo with leather straps to the rests of a home-crafted chair. The chair was made of cypress, its joined limbs bent when green to take the shape, its leather-lashed armrests now arresting a Latin man, brown and sunbeaten and bathed in sweat before the ancient crone who limped in from her kitchen.

  The settin’ room was completely unsegregated from the kitchen. The Latin American strapped to her childhood furniture could see clearly the cornucopia of herbs and medicinals that Hezikiah had collected over nearly a century of shamanlike administration. Shelves of dog fennel and deer tongue dried open to the air while alongside were arranged murky Bell jars filled to the brim with the heads of moccassins and bullfrogs, the gizzards of chickens.

  The hearts, locals whispered, of babies miscarried from their mama’s wombs.

  The migrant and Latin workers recently come to the northwestern isolates of Florida called her a curandero, which for these Spanish-speaking newcomers connoted something more than a medicine woman. Something only slightly less remarkable than a witch.

  “Done got yo’sef a nasty ’fliction.”

  Hezikiah spat some variety of tobacco through one of the many long creases that separated her floorboards.

  The man sweated exposed on the precipice of her chair.