Apparent Wind

Brash Books, LLC

LAND OF OUR FATHERS

Having conducted his evolutionary business with unprecedented success, mankind soon changed the face of the earth to suit his own purposes. He began by hunting the giant Pleistocene mammals to extinction, and later, after learning agriculture, he turned the face of the land docile and domestic. But not in south Florida. That region remained a swamp, hostile to human dreams and visions, because it remained submerged.

Juan Ponce de León, the psychopath, discovered Florida on April 2, 1513. Having fallen out of favor with the Spanish authorities in Puerto Rico because he was too crazy, Ponce sailed north in search of gold, since there was nothing like gold to ingratiate a fellow with the powers that be. He found in south Florida a fetid tangle of foliage, insect swarms so dense they cast shadows, reptiles with malicious intent, lurking, and heathen Indians living in a Stone Age state of gracelessness.

Ponce converted the Indians to Catholicism while he shook them down for their gold. They had never heard of gold, since there is no gold, no metals of any kind, in mangrove swamps, which was why the Indians lived in a Stone Age state, but Ponce suspected they were holding out on him. Peeved, Ponce hacked the noses off several hundred Indian faces as examples of the Wrath of God, and left. The indigenous tribes of south Florida vanished forever shortly after their initial contacts with Catholicism.

As events of great moment unfolded to the north, nothing much happened in south Florida for the next 350 years, until the Seminoles arrived. Refugees from the Carolina Creek wars, the Seminoles didn't know any more about living in swamps than Ponce, but they were a great deal more adaptive. As a result they flourished on the abundant fish and game, propagated and multiplied, blackening themselves with charcoal to stave off insects.

Blackened redskins propagating and multiplying within the nation's borders made President Andrew Jackson edgy, so he dispatched federal troops to exterminate them. The troops, however, found this harder to do than Old Hickory had reckoned. Those sneaky heathens didn't stand up and fight like men. Instead, they skulked in the buttonwoods and sniped off the troops as they marched along. Those that ducked heathen missiles were felled by a dozen different diseases. The troops died like monkeys in a hurricane.

The bedraggled survivors brought back tales of a great wetness, more water than land, where one's gun belts and boots mildewed overnight and rotted to goo in a week, where merely walking on the muck caused itchy impetigo shins — the troops were walking because thirty-foot-long crocs had devoured their chargers. It was a dreadful, pestilential place unfit for habitation by decent folks; only Indians could survive in such a place, because they didn't feel misery like white folks did. The decimated brigade staggered north in abject defeat, and Old Hickory called it total victory. Decades passed. Nothing happened in south Florida. Nature held sway.

The Civil War went down with barely a ripple.

However, by 1900 there had arisen in the North a new concept of life — vacation — and with it a new concept of land that would alter south Florida forever. After the birth of the vacation, land was no longer viewed as a utilitarian place on which to hunt, gather, farm, or homestead. Land became a parcel, a lot, a unit, a part of a portfolio.

It became real estate.

By 1920, when Prentiss Throckmorton's railroad arrived, south Florida real estate had become too valuable to remain underwater. Here was a tropical climate only two days' travel from February in New York. No longer would one need to brook the impertinent glares of machete-wielding Latin malcontents and rude Negroes to feel the hot glow of sunshine on sallow shoulder blades.

Christ, just imagine what this south Florida land would be worth if it really were land.

ORANGE BLOSSOM SPECIAL

Doom Loomis's lawyer, a man with spaghetti spots on his tie and a sardonic set to his jaw, used to say, "A stand-up guy is just another breed of asshole."

Doom couldn't help being a stand-up guy, but he wasn't entirely guileless, either. He pretended to conduct an animated conversation on the pay phone opposite Departure Gate 23 at LaGuardia. The 2:17 A.M. flight to Miami was already boarding when Doom spotted the high-heeled Lady in Black clicking down the inclined corridor.

Doom had never seen the Lady in Black before. They had spoken on pay phones. She said she would dress darkly and carry Ozzie's goods, gift-wrapped, in a Channel 13 tote bag. Doom said he would wear a blue serge suit over an open-necked shirt, but he had lied. He intended to look things over before he identified himself. That's why he had chosen this dreadful departure time. He would arrive in Miami about 4:30. Add another two hours' driving time to Omnium Key on Small Hope Bay, and he would get no sleep before his father's funeral. But it was worth it. At two in the morning he might make the tailers, lurkers, and malefactors before they made him, looking as they would for a chump in a blue serge suit. At the faintest sniff of the untoward, Doom would board his Florida flight like an innocent tourist, and Ozzie could find himself another stand-up guy.

During the closing months of his sentence, Ozzie Mertz prattled unceasingly about the goods he had stashed on the outside. "Just picture it, boys. Florida. Sun, surf and turf, sipping pina coladas with a financially untroubled psyche." Ozzie would sigh theatrically, while everybody else groaned with tedium. "But one must remain ever discreet. They will be watching. Discretion — that's the ticket."

"Then shut the fuck up," one or another bored con would suggest. The cons liked Ozzie. He had a warm and generous spirit, but he was stupid.

Approaching, the Lady in Black seemed free of tails, and there seemed to be no suspicious gatherings, no men in clean-up clothes leaning on brooms or knots of guys in pilot uniforms, no thugs trying to look like geeks, southbound, in Disney World sweatshirts. In fact, there was no one at all.

Then, however, Doom got a look at her face. He barely suppressed a gasp. Her face had been beaten black and swollen. Her right eye was pressed into a visionless slit by inflamed flesh, and her lips were puffed. Glancing neither right nor left, she marched to the waiting area and sat down as planned. She placed her Channel 13 tote bag on the floor between her shoes and waited sullenly.

That did it. Doom hung up the dead phone and headed for the check-in desk. The last of his fellow passengers had already boarded. He watched her out of the corner of his eye as he handed his one-way ticket to the attendant and asked for a window seat. But then he glanced at her again, sitting hunched and sore in the pathetic plastic chair, and Doom melted. His lawyer would have grinned sardonically and shaken his head at human folly if he had seen Doom sit down beside the Lady in Black.

"It's me," he said. "Blue serge suit."

She turned and looked him up and down with distaste. She was probably about Ozzie's age, fifty-five, but it was impossible to tell from the wreckage of her face. "When you see Ozzie, you tell him he owes me," she slurred. Then she stood up and walked away, leaving Ozzie's goods on the floor at Doom's feet.

"We're boarding now, sir," said the flight attendant.

THE VISIONARIES

Look how wet it is," said shortsighted visitors. "It's a useless old swamp." (Technically, they were incorrect; it was a mangrove forest, a variety of coastal wetland, not a swamp, but nobody cared about that.)

But men of vision reasoned, "If we drained off the water, the stinking swamp would shrivel and die" Evicted fauna would crawl elsewhere or die. So would the insects. So would the colorful birds, and that was a shame, but hell, the man of vision could import even prettier ones from Brazil or somewhere. Once he had the bushes on the run, then he would need to pump the land up above the high-tide surge and rainy-season floods. And there hed have it, dry land where once there was only water. The man of vision would thus have made himself a parcel of tabula rasa real estate.

It wouldn't be quite that easy, of course. He'd lose twenty percent of his work force to moccasins and malaria and God knows what all. But more labor could always be imported from Alabama or somewhere. Busy uprooting a twelve-thousand-year-old ecosystem for fame and fortune, the man of vision couldn't let human misery stand in the way of new real estate.

Yuletide, 1920, two men of vision — Colonel A.C. Broadnax and the railroad tycoon Prentiss Throckmorton — bobbed serenely at anchor aboard the Oseola, Throckmorton's 85-foot motor yacht. Their journey had taken them from Grand Central Station on Throckmorton's own railroad to its terminus at St. Augustine, where they boarded the Oseola for the voyage down the Matanzas into the Indian River, with a side jaunt into the Banana River lagoon, thence south in the ocean to Biscayne Bay, which led through Card Sound to Barnes Sound south into Small Hope Bay, a near wilderness at that time.

Colonel A.C. Broadnax and Prentiss Throckmorton were birds of a feather, and that's why neither trusted the other. They lounged side by side in canvas deck chairs on the fantail, arms folded across ample bellies, heels propped on the gleaming mahogany transom. Their feet were beginning to fall asleep due to circulatory impediments. It was sunset, 72 degrees, and buttery light rolled on the serene surface of Small Hope Bay.

"Beautiful, isn't she?" said Prentiss Throckmorton.

"She is that, Throck," replied Colonel Broadnax, "but between ourselves, I wish she'd move more."

"What? Move? Oh. No. Not Delilah. Florida. This spot right here"

"Oh"

"Anyway, how can she move all trussed up like that?"

"I like it when they struggle. And squirm"

Throck was growing weary of this Broadnax. Strictly lower order. Sometimes, however, grand ambition demanded dealing with Neanderthals. A spoonbill called twice from the shallows beneath primeval red mangroves.

"What was that?" the colonel wondered. "An alligator?"

"I don't know. I guess so."

"I understand they can chop a man in twain with one bite. Now that would be a sight to see." Maybe if they remained here long enough some hapless Seminole would go for a wade.

"This spot is known as Small Hope Bay. Of course I'll have to change that. Too defeatist."

"I've got to admit one thing, Throck. We'd be freezing our bollocks off back home"

"Sublime climate. And look at that light. You won't see light like that back home. That light is serene. That's what Id call it. Serene. Makes a man feel God's in his heaven, all's right with the world."

"It's just that there's an awful lot of water."

"Wet, I don't deny it, Colonel, but suppose there was just enough water to be, well, aquatic without being submerged. Suppose it were just right vis-à-vis water."

Colonel Broadnax wasn't really a colonel, but he had invented the rapid-fire toggle-cam mechanism for machine guns; customarily, a man responsible for so many deaths was accorded honorary military rank. Colonel Broadnax could see it coming. This Prentiss Throckmorton was supposed to be so shrewd, with his gerrymandering and interlocking directorates, but Broadnax wasn't impressed. The man was transparent. Broadnax stretched and yawned to indicate idle interest and said, "Say, Throck, you wouldn't be planning to make yourself a parcel, would you?"

"Funny you should mention it. A man attains a certain station in life where further wealth is no longer the goal. A man yearns to do something great, something that will outlast him. Sennacherib made land in Nineveh. So did Claudius in Italy. There's fine company for a man to keep at the close of his threescore and ten."

"But let me ask you this, Throck. Suppose you made yourself a parcel or two, and nobody wanted to buy it?"

"First you make the land, then you create the demand for it. All a matter of public relations."

"Public relations? What's that?"

Prentiss Throckmorton prided himself on his PR prowess. He had damn near invented the art in his spare time. His luxury hotel in St. Augustine, the Ponce de Leon, proved that. Throck promoted the myth that Ponce explored those shores in search of the Fountain of Youth. He presented Ponce as a rotund and lovable Don Quixote figure on a quest for that which everyone wants, especially aging millionaires, and he dressed his help in cute Ponce suits that he had designed himself in his spare time. Throck had better sense than to name his luxury hotel after a lunatic looking for gold in swamps, who hacked the shit out of raggedy-assed Indians when they couldn't come across.

A sweet breeze wafted in from the sea, riffling the tops of the red mangroves in which perched hundreds of snowy egrets like fluffy Christmas-tree ornaments, and that gave Throck another idea. Instead of letting all those birds fly away when he killed their roosts, he might be able to mount buckshot cannons on boats and shoot down the birds in droves to defray expenses. All he'd need to do was create a new demand for plumed hats through public relations. "What if I leave the technical details to you, A.C.? The machinery and such."

"I'm pretty busy these days, Throck"

"Hypothetically, then. What would you need for a job like that? Rip out the swamp, put up something the right kind of people will like."

"Well, you're talking about a big job. You couldn't just rip up those trees — what do you call those trees?"

"Mangrove trees."

"You couldn't just rip out the mangrove trees. You'd only have yourself an expensive sandbar when you were done. I mean, look how low all these islands are. First gale'd sink you again. No, you'd have to pump up the land, make it higher."

"And how would you do that?" Throck wondered.

"I'd drive steel plates into the bottom, make kind of a corral around the little islands, see? 'Course the corral would be full of water. Then what I'd do is I'd pump the water out of the corral back into the bay. And at the same time I'd be pumping material from the bottom of the bay into the corral. Get me?"

"You'd be making land."

"You could make the land any shape you wanted just by the way you configured your steel plates. You could make little heart-shaped islands, you could make them look like alligators, birds, anything."

"What would you want in the way of heavy equipment?"

"I'd want pumps, big gushers with a couple miles of eighteen-inch reinforced rubber hose. As far as the heavy gear, Id want a couple crawlers, a front-end grabber, rooters, maybe even a blaster if the going got tough. A peat-puller wouldn't hurt. Big job, tearing out a swamp and making something nice."

"How many Negroes would you need?"

"Two thousand to start. You'd lose half of them."

"That many?"

"They'll drop like flies."

"I hadn't considered that."

"You've got to consider everything."

"It's a shame you're so busy. You sound just the man for the job."

Like Claudius and Sennacherib, Prentiss Throckmorton and Colonel Broadnax both recognized that the man who made the land could define the look of it. The land could reflect the values of its maker. Colonel Broadnax was thinking he could make it look like Venice, with canals and gondolas. Or like Morocco, with minarets and eunuchs. First he'd make the land, then decide. After the real work was done and paid for, then he'd figure some way to cut Throck right out of the picture.

Back in his nautically appointed cabin, Colonel Broadnax tied Delilah to the four-poster with brightly colored scarves. She wore only her black stockings and garter belt. Once she was spread-eagled, her sweet pink nipples pointing at the ceiling, A.C. said, "He wants me to do it."

"Do what?" Delilah asked, alarmed.

"Make some land."

"Oh, that," she said, relieved. "Well, sweetie, I'm sure you'll be tip-top at making land."

"Would you mind struggling this time? You know, squirm and kick. Money is no object."