Wakulla Springs Read online

  “Umgawa!” he said to Boy. And without another word—for he was a man of few words—Tarzan took another step out onto the limb, flexed his powerful legs and—

  “Cut!” yelled the director.

  Johnny Weissmuller relaxed. He looked down into the crystal clear waters of Wakulla Springs for a moment, then cuffed little Johnny Sheffield on the shoulder, and the two actors climbed down the ladder hidden from the cameras on the far side of the tree. On the ground, his assistant helped him into his white terrycloth robe, its edges stained brown from his full-body makeup. Weissmuller was as tan as any man in Hollywood, but Tarzan had to be flawless.

  “Boy go for swim?” he asked.

  Sheffield shook his head. “I’ve got to do my schoolwork. Union rules.”

  “Swim tomorrow,” Weissmuller said, and ruffled his blond curls.

  A colored boy rowed them across the water to the movie encampment with its folding canvas chairs, tents, and trunks of equipment. Weissmuller slouched into the chair stenciled BIG JOHN, and watched as Little John ran across the manicured lawn and into the Lodge for his lessons.

  Cameras were mounted on a floating barge in the middle of the river. Beyond them, two stunt doubles now stood on the tree branch, and at a signal from Thorpe, the director, they dived head-first into the deep, clear water. One of them faltered and made a huge splash.

  “Crap!” said Thorpe. He turned to the swimming coordinator. “We have to shoot that again, Newt. Tarzan doesn’t splash, for crissakes.”

  “Can do.” Newt Perry waited for the two Tallahassee lifeguards to swim over to the platform. “He wants it again. Make it a clean entry, this time.”

  The smaller of the two boys grinned. “At fifty bucks a dive, I’ll go in any way he wants.”

  “Just dry off and get back up there. The sun’s almost below the trees.”

  Johnny watched from his chair. Even with the canvas umbrella, he could feel the heat of the sun on his back. Time for a cold one. He waited for the cameras to roll again and watched as two men carried a big wooden crate around the side of the hotel, struggling to keep it upright.

  With a grunt, they lowered it to the ground next to a big wire cage outside the prop tent. Weissmuller could hear angry screeches from inside the box.

  “What’s in there?”

  “Monkeys.” The man opened the cage door and jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Two more crates up there. Turtles and some kinda birds. Parrots, I think.”

  He pulled on a pair of heavy gloves while his partner used a crowbar to open the lid, splintering it. The gloved man grabbed the nimble little animals by the scruffs of their necks as they clambered out, and tossed them into the cage.

  “How’re you going to ship them back?” Weissmuller pointed to the ruined crate.

  “Don’t have to. One jungle’s the same as another. We’ll just let ’em go when the shoot’s over.” He closed the cage, rattled the handle to make sure it was latched, and headed back toward the hotel.

  “Quiet on the set!” the assistant director yelled through his megaphone.

  Johnny turned back to the action above the river.

  The next dive was as slick as a whistle, almost as good as he could have done himself. He flexed his shoulders. He hated the idea of a stunt double, but the studio demanded it. At two grand a week, he was too valuable to risk. He glanced at the thirty-foot diving platform over the deepest part of the springs. Thorpe had been away yesterday afternoon for a meeting, and Johnny had spent an hour diving off again and again, happy as a kid. The other guests at the Lodge had gathered around, applauding.

  That was okay, too.

  “We almost done?” he called to the assistant director after he’d yelled Cut!

  “Yeah. Losing the light.” The man walked over, looking at his watch. “I should remind Thorpe he’s got dinner with Mr. Ball in an hour. Coat and tie for the dining room.”

  And a direct line of sight across the lawn to the platform. No diving tonight. “Okay.” Weissmuller stood up, towering over the other man. “I’m going to change, drive into town.”

  “Thorpe says—” He paused. “—He says to keep it in your pants and go easy on the booze. You’ve got close-ups tomorrow. Ten o’clock call.”

  Johnny shrugged. “Tarzan have fun.” It wasn’t his idea to film in a dry county. He stepped over the tangle of cables and headed for his room in the Lodge. His robe open, his feet bare, he padded quietly across the terrazzo floor of the lobby, almost as silently as if he were the king of this jungle.

  Twenty minutes later, showered and shaved, his long hair slicked back and tamed with Brylcreem, he stepped out of the elevator and looked around the ornately tiled lobby. He’d been told the hand-painted designs on the cypress beams of the ceiling were Moorish, with a little art-deco Mayan, like Grauman’s, but they reminded him of the barns in the Pennsylvania Dutch country where he grew up.

  He smiled and strode down the hallway to the front door. It would have seemed unlikely to any observer that the man in the crisp, short-sleeved tropical weight shirt and knife-creased linen slacks had been swinging half-naked through the primeval forest an hour before.

  “Black Packard,” he said, tossing the keys to a colored boy.

  “Yessuh.” He brought the convertible around, chrome winking golden in the last of the afternoon sun, and held the door open.

  Johnny Weissmuller nodded his thanks, flipped the boy a coin, and got behind the wheel. He slid his sunglasses from under the visor, put them on, and angled the sleek car out onto the highway that led north to Tallahassee. Twenty miles between him and the admiring young co-eds of the Florida State College for Women. A good night to be a movie star.

  * * *

  The Wakulla Springs Lodge was a palace, out in the middle of nowhere, a private country club surrounded on all sides by gator-filled swamps and piney woods. It was only a few years old, and had been built to impress. White stucco and terra-cotta outside, with a tiled lobby, hand-loomed area rugs, and a wrought iron staircase with herons and ibis on the balusters. In the gift shop, the counter of the soda fountain was a single piece of marble, seventy feet long, chosen by Mr. Ball himself for its fine-grained pattern.

  It was the fanciest place Mayola had ever seen.

  She had been turned away at the front door, then at a side door, and though she saw none of the usual WHITES ONLY signs, she had figured it out by the time one of the dishwashers let her into the kitchen. He told her to talk to a Mrs. Yancey, pointed through the grease and smoke and clatter of pots a-stirring, through the god-awful heat, to stairs leading to a lower level, where at least it was cooler.

  Mrs. Yancey looked tired. She said that the hotel was full up with movie people, so she was hiring, and how old are you, child?

  “Sixteen,” Mayola said, and stood up straight to show her tallness. She knew she looked even older, but she kept her hands clasped together serious-like, so they wouldn’t shake with the lie. Just a bitty lie, ’cause she would be sixteen, after school started up again.

  Mrs. Yancey nodded and had her sign some papers with her true full name, then gave her a fast tour of all the fancy and told her where to come tomorrow to change into her uniform, eight o’clock in the morning, sharp. “Bennie Mae will show you what to do.”

  Vergie was standing in the shade of an oak across the parking lot when Mayola came out the kitchen door. “You get it?”

  “I did. Cleaning and folding laundry, just like home.”

  “’Cept you getting paid?”

  Mayola smiled. “Three dollars a week, like you said.”

  “I told you they was—Shooo-eee!” Vergie stopped talking all of a sudden, her eyes big in her head, and pointed to the front walk. A tall man in creased white pants stood under the awning. “It’s Tarzan!” Vergie said, excited. “The real life Tarzan.”

  “Tarzan ain’t real,” Mayola said. “He’s made-up, from a book.” She bit her lip. “Edgar Rice Burroughs,” she said, and thought in her head that
Miz Green would be pleased she remembered that whole name.

  “Ain’t neither. I seen his picture in a movie magazine at my auntie’s house, over to Jacksonville. That’s Tarzan hisself, standing right over there.”

  Mayola watched the man get into a long, shiny car and drive away, fast. Whoever he was, he was about the handsomest white fella she’d ever seen. When the dust had settled back down, she said, “I’m gonna go home. You coming with me?”

  “Maybe. Odell don’t get off work till six, but it must be close that. Let’s go see if he’s done, then he can go a piece of the way with us.”

  Mayola made a face, but since Odell working here was the only reason she had a job, and Vergie had come all this way, it would be rude not to return the favor.

  He was down on the dock, leaning casual against a post, wearing his brown uniform shirt with a wide, short tie. His boat-captain hat sat on top of the post. There was a little breeze coming off the water, and the air smelled green with moss and reeds and fish.

  “Well, now,” Odell said when he saw Vergie. “Hey there.” He was most twenty, with a slow, soft way of talking and conked hair that had started to kink up again after the heat of the day. A trickle of oil shone on his neck.

  Vergie walked so that her front self stuck out at him, and he was noticing every bit of it. “Hey, O-dell.” She tiptoed over, baby steps like her shoes pinched, and he was just about to put his arm around her waist in a way he hadn’t ought to when he saw Mayola and put his hands in his pockets instead.

  “Evenin’, Mayola.”

  “Odell.”

  No one said a word then, until a frog jumped off the weedy bank with a splash and made enough noise to shoo away the silence.

  “You done here?” Vergie asked. “If you is, you can walk me home.”

  “Not tonight, darlin’.” Odell tossed a flat coil of rope into the boat. “I got to take movie folks out for a sunset cruise, every night this week.” He pulled a rag out of his pocket and polished an invisible speck of dust from the shiny brim of his cap.

  “When you gonna take me out for a boat ride?” Vergie pushed out her lip in a little-girl pout.

  “Next week, sometime. I promise. Purty as any picture out there in the moonlight.” He smiled, showing all his teeth, and started to give her part of the speech he made for visitors. “WAH-kulla springs. One’a nature’s paradise…”

  Mayola let him go on for a minute, then said, “I got chores at home, Vergie.”

  “I reckon it’s ’bout time.” She flounced her skirt a little, so Odell could see her bare knees, then turned and walked off the dock, the soles of her Keds flap-flapping on the damp wood. She hooked her elbow through Mayola’s. “Nothing more to do here.”

  * * *

  Mayola left her house at seven every morning, walking from the Shadeville Road through the cut to Wakulla Springs. The air was warm, but the sun was barely over the trees, so it was mostly shade, and she listened to birds waking up and starting their day. Sometimes she even whistled back. She liked the Lodge all right. The other girls in the kitchen and the laundry were nice and showed her what to do. They sang songs from the radio when no one was around to hear and told stories about the movie people in giggled whispers.

  “I was toting lunch down to them crew folk,” Annie said, “and one of the men was taping big crepe paper ears onto that elephant. I give Steve—he’s the prop boy—I give him the picnic box, and asked him, what for he doing that? You know what he said?”

  Mayola shook her head.

  “He said that was a Injun elephant, and they got itty bitty ears. But Tarzan, he live in Africa, and elephants there have big ol’ floppy ears. So they making it a costume. A costume for a elephant!”

  Mayola like to bust up laughing. “Movie folk are plumb nuts.”

  But the work wasn’t too hard. No more than she was used to, with four brothers and sisters. It was just chores, for more people. Bennie Mae said she picked up the routine quicker any girl she’d had before, which made Mayola feel good inside. By her second week, she was cleaning rooms by herself, unfolding the crisp white sheets that smelled like flower soap, wiping off all the nice smooth sinks and commodes, and dusting the tops of the walnut chiffoniers, careful not to move any of the hairbrushes or wristwatches, not even an inch.

  The hotel maids got twenty minutes off for lunch. Most of the girls sat outside the kitchen door to smoke and flirt with boys. But Mayola had discovered a hedge on the other side of the building, where she could sit in the shade and read her book for a bit without anyone bothering her. She looked up, now and then, and watched the movie people playing make-believe.

  They had lots of fancy equipment—cameras and lights, and machines she could not imagine the names of. Some were stuck into the ground, and some were on a big raft right out in the river. The boss man sat in a folding chair under a striped umbrella and gave orders to a second boss man, who shouted through a big red cone. “Quiet on the set!”

  They had a bunch of animals she’d only seen pictures of before. The elephant, of course, and a cooter turtle the size of a truck tire, and a whole lot of bright-color birds and little brown monkeys. Her favorite was a big monkey they called Cheeta that must have been real smart. It walked upside-down on its hands, and did somersaults, making faces, screeching and hooting like it was trying out people-talk. It liked to jump up onto Mr. Tarzan, and Mr. Tarzan would laugh and take it for a ride. One day she saw Mr. Tarzan give it a cigar to smoke, like it was one of the boys.

  Seemed like every day, Mr. Tarzan was up to some kind of prank, hiding one lady’s clothes, or putting a piece of wet moss on the second boss man’s chair, then laughing his head off. He was a grown man—a big grown man—but he acted just like a little kid, sometimes.

  Maybe it was because he was a movie star. They had different ideas about manners, Mayola decided. Except for a handful of pretty white ladies in robes and swimming suits, the cast and crew were all men. Some of them were all dressed up like Florida was for-real Africa, in round white helmets and khaki shirts with lots of pockets. But the rest walked around in undershirts, or no shirts at all, and didn’t seem the least bit embarrassed to be out in public like that, even in front of the ladies.

  On the Wednesday of her second week at the Lodge, Mayola sat under her shrubbery, nibbling on the cornbread and syrup her mama had wrapped up in wax paper for her lunch. She heard a big splash and a lot of shouting, and looked up from her book to see three colored boys swimming just off the dock. Fools, she thought. The whole hotel was Jim Crow, and they were going to be in a world of trouble, jumping in that water in broad daylight.

  Then she saw Mr. Tarzan swimming with them, ducking them under water, diving down after them. She guessed it must be okay, if he wanted them there. Maybe they were playing at being Africans, like the elephant. That made sense, Mayola thought. Africa was where most colored people come from, to begin with.

  The boss man yelled “Cut!” and a minute later, Mr. Tarzan and the boys climbed up onto the dock. Two of them flopped down like they was bone-tired, but the third came up onto the lawn and headed for the drinking fountain next to the changing room, not fifteen feet from where Mayola sat.

  She skooched back farther under the leaves, making herself invisible, because that was asking for real trouble.

  And sure enough, he was just bending over the fountain when one of the gardeners, a Shadeville man named Daniel, looked up from weeding a flowerbed and saw him.

  “You, boy! You get away from there!” Daniel jumped up, real fast for a big man, and in two shakes he had grabbed the boy by the scruff of his neck. “What you think you’re doing, taking a drink from there?”

  The boy looked up, and Mayola sucked in her breath when she saw that he wasn’t colored at all. He was one of the lifeguards from Tallahassee who liked to tease the kitchen girls, all done up in greasepaint like a minstrel show.

  He pushed Daniel’s hands away. “Get your dirty paws off me, boy,” the lifeguard said,
louder than he needed to.

  Daniel backed up a step and, after a moment, took his felt hat off. His bald head was dark and shiny with sweat. “Sorry, suh. I didn’ mean nothin’ by it.” Daniel had gone to the A&M for two years, studying to be a teacher until his daddy lost their farm, but he could sure talk field-hand mushmouth when he had to, Mayola thought. The big man continued. “I thought you was, well, suh, I—” He faltered, and wrung his hat in his hands.

  The manager of the hotel, Mr. Perry, walked up just then. “Is there a problem?”

  The boy’s mouth was tight and angry, but before he could say anything, Daniel did.

  “My mistake, Mist’ Perry. I didn’ recognize the young gen’l’man in that makeup.”

  “Thought he was one of your boys, drinking where he shouldn’t?”

  “Yessuh. ’Zactly that. I’se just about to give him what-for when I seen he was in the right place after all.”

  “Hmm.” Mayola watched Mr. Perry think on that a bit, then turn to the boy. “Get back to the set, Joe. They’re ready for the next shot. I’ll have someone bring you a Coke.”

  The boy hesitated, giving Daniel the hairy eyeball, then shrugged and walked off with a swagger, like he had more important things to do.

  Daniel worried his hat between his hands, sweat beaded on his forehead.

  “There’s four young men in costume today,” Mr. Perry said. “You’d best be careful.” He turned to go back to the dock, but stopped in mid-turn and pointed a finger at the drinking fountain. The faucet was smeared with what looked like shoe polish, one side of the porcelain bowl blotched with an inky handprint.

  “And clean that mess up, Danny, before one of the guests sees it.”

  Daniel replaced his hat and, after a pause, pulled a red rag from the pocket of his bib overalls. “Yes, sir,” he told Mr. Perry’s retreating back, saying it clearly as two words. A bit more clearly than strictly needed, Mayola noticed.