Wakulla Springs Page 4

  “Here,” he said, pulling out a leather wallet. He counted out some bills, tucking them into the pocket of her uniform, and grinned again, like a little boy about to do mischief. “Insurance. In case we get caught.”

  “Oh, no, sir! I can’t—”

  “Call it a scholarship.” He put his hand on the small of her back and gave her a gentle little push toward the tent. “Umgawa! Girl change now. Swim with Tarzan.”

  Mayola walked over to the movie tent, as slow as if her feet were thinking. She liked to set with an idea a bit before she started off to do it, but there wasn’t much time for that. She glanced up at the porch. No one was looking. No one was paying any attention to her at all, except Mr. Tarzan.

  How many times a movie star gonna ask you to dance? she asked herself. That was what it felt like. Not some jook joint, as loud and hot and sweaty as working. Another kind of dancing, one she knew didn’t come round every day.

  Mayola wanted this dance.

  It was against the rules. Mr. Ball’s rules. She felt a little bundle of angry grow hot inside her. Mr. Ball didn’t make that beautiful water. He just bought the land. Under the law, that was all it took. But it didn’t feel right, under the moonlight.

  Ain’t nobody own the moon.

  She unbuttoned her gray uniform, stiff with sweat, and started to fold it up neat, then let it slide down to the ground. Mr. Ball’s uniform, too. She heard the pocket crinkle, and took out the money. A hundred dollars! More than eight months’ pay. She stood with it in her hand, letting the night air blow warm on all of her skin, then rolled the bills tight and tucked them into the toe of her shoe next to her lucky penny. Just in case.

  Mayola pulled on the baby-soft swimsuit and felt like a movie star herself. She looked down at her long legs and smiled, then stepped barefoot out into the summer night, to dance in the water with Tarzan.

  He was waiting by the platform in a pair of trunks. He whistled. “Girl pretty. Swim now.” He dived in with barely a splash.

  Mayola hesitated with one more moment of last-second thoughts, then took a deep breath and followed.

  After the heat of the day and the sweat and the closeness of the swamp air, the water was everywhere cool silk on Mayola’s skin. She swam hard, feeling the bubbles tickle back along her body, and when she came up for air a minute later, she was out in the middle of the deepest water.

  She could make out the twisted shapes of the cypress on the far bank, hung ghostly with Spanish moss, could separate out trees and ground and gently moving water. On the other side, across the dark grass, the flicker of the projector made the porch look like a glass cage.

  Mayola felt the water swirl around her before she saw him surface and ask in a quiet voice, “Can you open your eyes, under?”

  She nodded, before she remembered it was dark. “Yes, sir.”

  “Good.” Tarzan took her hand. “Dive now.”

  They went deep into the springs. The surface above her became a flat ceiling, backlit by the moon. The water was like crystal. She could see all around her, watch her hands move in front of her face, see the paler sleekness of the man swimming beside her.

  He tugged and pointed and she looked down. Her mouth opened in a surprised O that let out a stream of fat bubbles, but she didn’t let herself gasp water. Below her, the rocks of Wakulla Springs glittered with tiny lights. Almost green, almost—no color she could put a name to—they sparkled like underwater stars as she moved.

  The two swimmers came up to the surface like turtles, nibbling at the air, then sinking back down. He took hold of her feet, his hands big enough to close all around, and they turned circles under the water, just like in the movie. With every turn, every cascade of bubbles, Mayola felt a little bit of bed-making and laundry and sticky hot Florida leave her body and float up and away.

  Out here, the water that had looked so still from the shore was always moving, a slow current that eddied around her, over her, bobbing her from side to side. When she surfaced, treading water for a minute, she cupped her hands around the reflection of a tiny round moon; it skittered across her palm like a droplet on a hot stove.

  She didn’t know how long they’d been swimming, had lost count of how many times they’d come up for air and dived down again. They had swum and floated downstream from the deep springs to a stretch of pure white sand only six feet below the surface. Tarzan swam into a hollow log, came out the other side, and touched her arm. Tag, you’re it.

  In and out, out and in, up for air. Mayola felt like she was in a dream. She rose into the stripe of moonlight in the center of the river, and a moment later, he popped up beside her, his long dark hair fanning out with the current.

  “Race?” he said. He pointed to a fallen tree that angled into the water beyond the bulk of the boat dock. She nodded, and set off with a long stroke and a strong kick.

  She had raced the boys before, at the Sink and in the river—and won—but she had never in her whole life swum as hard as this. Nothing existed but the joy of her body in the water, legs and arms pulling all of a piece.

  She knew he must have held back some; he was the best swimmer in the world. But he didn’t let her win, either. They pulled up on the bank at the same time, panting and grinning to beat the band. He climbed up onto a little sandy ledge above the weeds and reached out for her waist, pulling her up next to him.

  Mayola lay on the sand, breathing ragged for a minute, feeling that good tired that comes from pushing against all the edges. The air moving across her wet skin was cool and warm at the same time, and she stretched into the comfort of it, one hand floating on the surface of the water, heels furrowing the sand.

  “Girl swim good,” Tarzan said. He lay inches away, propped up on one muscular arm. Rivulets of water dripped from his hair; in the moonlight, they made glistening silver trails across his smooth skin.

  She looked over at his face. He was smiling, his eyes crinkled at the corners. She smiled back, a feeling of dreamy peacefulness stealing over her. They were the only people in the world, and they had shared something beyond the telling of it.

  He lowered his head to the sand, facing her. “Girl happy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.” He stroked her hair, pulling him toward her. “Tarzan happy, too.”

  Mayola Williams lay her head on Tarzan’s chest, his arms strong around her. He pressed his lips lightly to her forehead, and she didn’t move, but closed her eyes and sighed deep into herself, listening to his heartbeat and the calm lapping of the water, the tranquil stillness broken only once by the wailing cry of a limpkin.

  2.

  The Beastie

  Underwater was the best. On the surface, sure, he gained some speed, but the sun was too hot, and with all the splashing he couldn’t see much above or below. If he slowed down or treaded water he was too easily spotted, at risk of a thrashing at best and, at worst, a call to the sheriff. When he was both deep and still, he might as well have been a rock, or a bass, or a mastodon’s jawbone, for all the notice he attracted from the kids above, the ones confined to the swimming area, the ones who didn’t live here.

  Levi liked to creep surefooted along the rock face—his toes seeming almost to stick froglike to the ridges, fixing himself there, crouched and bobbing—and watch the swimmers overhead, the girls especially. Against the sun-bright surface their shapes should have been featureless black cutouts, but the light seemed to shine through them, illuminate them from inside, the way the color photos of mossy trees and egrets shone brightly in their backlit brass frames on the Lodge’s lobby walls, getting brighter as the sun set and the wood and marble darkened all around them.

  In the H. G. Wells story the boy had read five times, light passed through a scientist and made him the Invisible Man. The boy didn’t know what kind of sun H. G. Wells had in England, but when Florida sun passed through the girls on the surface of Wakulla Springs they became more visible than ever before. Certainly more visible than they had been last year. The boy was
what his mama called “going on twelve”—which wasn’t as good as straight-up twelve but sure beat the hell out of eleven—and the light at going-on-twelve must be different somehow, because whenever two or more girls were overhead, he could not look away from their floating, somersaulting, shoulder-straddling, bubbling, dazzling blue-green brightness.

  As a result, almost without noticing, he was getting better and better at holding his breath. Not until the last possible moment did he allow himself to kick off from the ledge, across and down into the friendly cool rush from the cave mouth that propelled him forward, far beneath the floating rope that fenced the tourists. He had learned to stop kicking when the springs swept him up, to allow himself to be flung across the water, until he was only a few lazy strokes from surfacing amid the weeds on the far bank. There he hopped onto his favorite cypress stump—though its knees no longer fit his butt so well and its bulk no longer hid him so easily from the waterfront—and shook his head like Big Man Jackson’s coon hound, spraying underground water in all directions.

  “That boy’s half fish,” Big Man had said in the boathouse one day, while the boy lay on the dock, eavesdropping beneath the window. Levi had flushed so hot and heavy with pride that he might have burned through the boards and dropped into the river hissing and steaming, like a stray coal from the stove. Now he perched on the knobby stump and screwed fingers into his ears to scrub out the water and heard the far-side swim-sounds—“Marco! Polo!”—and wondered, not for the first time, what a colored girl would look like suspended in the water between the Florida sun and the bottom of the springs.

  He knew, of course, what his friends looked like in the Sink. That’s where he’d first learned to swim, paddling around at an age when other younguns were just learning to walk, or so he’d been told. But Wakulla had a light entirely different from the Sink’s, and he could talk none of the Shadetown girls into dipping so much as a toe into these springs, not under cover of the new moon.

  “You gonna get your fool self killed,” they told him.

  But he wasn’t killed yet. In fact, he was hungry. Maybe Aunt Vergie would give him a piece of cornbread, if he looked dry and presentable and less like what the cook called “a naked Injun.”

  Levi crept through the woods on the western shore of the springs until he reached his dry clothes, tucked amid the branches of a fallen pignut hickory. This was no wad of clothing but a carefully folded square. Levi’s mama ironed his next day’s clothes every night, and she gave him strict orders not to walk around looking “chewed.” His daily disobedience of his mama’s sternest warning—“You stay out of that white swimming hole, you hear? I lose this job, we got no place to live, and you and me will be thumbing to Orlando.”—made him all the more determined to mind her other rules. She always said “Orlando” as if the town were the back of beyond, so Levi had a notion that his cousins there must be living in upended packing-crate sheds beneath the orange trees, and fighting the crows for food.

  He carefully unfolded the bundle and gently shook out his shirt and pants, looking for chiggers, before putting them on. Then he laced his shoes, propping each foot in turn against the hickory trunk. He brushed some bits of bark off his shirt and headed through the woods again, angling away from the water so he wouldn’t come out at the diving platform, as crowded as the Tallahassee train station, even during the off season. Instead he ducked beneath a stand of towering magnolias, their gnarled bottom limbs and great greasy leaves hanging nearly to the ground, and walked in a crouch along his cool secret path, shared by raccoons and other night creatures. He liked to imagine that swamp panthers crouched in the limbs overhead and watched him pass, not attacking because they knew Levi was their friend and would never bother them, or maybe because the heat of the day just made them drowsy.

  He emerged onto the entrance road and sighed with relief, both because the warmth of the setting October sun was welcome on his face and arms and because he no longer needed to be quite so furtive as he headed back toward the Lodge. Levi wasn’t nearly as dark as many of the Shadetown children—“high-yaller” was what they called his coppery skin, though not when Levi’s mother was around—but he was plenty colored enough that his breaching the surface in the middle of the swimming area would empty the beach as quickly as a sea monster.

  Out here, though, rich visitors off the highway were actually pleased to see a neatly dressed colored boy strolling along the shoulder of Mr. Ball’s newly paved mile-long drive. He was a part of the exotic Florida landscape they had traveled to see, like an ibis in the marsh or a gator in the ditch. They figured he was on his way to bus tables or shine shoes at the Lodge. Sometimes they stopped to take his picture and, less frequently, give him a nickel.

  But the road was deserted at the moment, it being a Sunday afternoon, so Levi was in his preferred state: alone with his imaginings. As he walked, he repeatedly pulled an imaginary gun on an invisible saboteur, pretending he was Herbert A. Philbrick, hero of I Led Three Lives—Levi’s favorite TV show—on assignment to infiltrate a Communist cell headquartered at the Wakulla Springs Lodge. It could happen. Famous people had stayed there—though his mama didn’t like to talk about them much—and weren’t those the most likely targets of Soviet assassins? Famous people? Ordinary people just got killed.

  Given this morbid line of thought, he was spooked when a voice called out behind him: “Big House, Mister! I got your Big House!”

  It was just Policy Sam, hurrying to catch up. As usual, he paid little attention to where he was going, focused instead on re-counting the dozens of strips of paper he clutched, plucking them out of one fist and sorting them between the fingers of the other. As he ran, stumbling once or twice, the strips fluttered in the breeze like tails of Spanish moss. “Oh, it’s you,” Policy Sam said when he caught up. His disappointment was obvious: He knew Levi’s mama would whale both of them if she ever caught her boy wasting good money playing the numbers.

  Policy Sam had been simply Sam when the boys were growing up, but Levi hadn’t seen him at the Sink for more than a year, since Sam had been hired as a runner for old Cooper, up at the Crawfordville Big House. Every boy in the area knew that once he was old enough to do the math, he could earn pocket money running numbers. Young boys were easy to overlook and hard to apprehend; they also were easy to hurt if they got caught pocketing more than the five percent due them. After a few weeks, once they realized the boss expected them to hawk numbers to everyone they met morning, noon, and night, most boys tired of the racket. But Sam always had been a motormouth, and the twenty-four-hour sales pitch suited him. Now everyone called him Policy Sam, and Levi could seldom get him to talk about anything else.

  “Good day today?” Levi asked.

  “Middling,” Sam replied. “But no interesting numbers. Everybody’s playing 19 and 53, for the year, or 18 because it’s 1-9-5-3 added together, or 5 because the Yankees have won five straight series, or 16 because that’s how many series they’ve won total, or 13 because the Yankees won game six 4 to 3, or—”

  “Okay, okay, I get it,” Levi said. “Hard to surprise you with a number these days.”

  “Folks ain’t even trying,” Sam said. “The dull ones, they play the same number every day. Your Aunt Vergie, I know you love her, but it’s always 3 with her, ’cause her little girl was three when she died. Ain’t that the sorriest-ass reason for picking a number you ever heard? Some policy, betting on the age of a little dead girl?”

  “Three’s a lucky number, too,” Levi said.

  “Not for her,” Sam replied. “You been in swimming?”

  “Yeah. How you know that?”

  “You digging in your ears like there’s water in there,” Sam said. He laughed. “And I know your mama didn’t give you no bath, ’cause it ain’t Saturday.”

  Levi shoved him, but laughed, too. “Get out! My mama don’t wash me. I do that myself.”

  “Yeah, washing in Mr. Ball’s water. I bet you pee in it, too.”

  “I do not!�
�� Levi said, although he had, some times.

  “You know the white people do,” Sam said. “When you’re paddling around in there, and the water gets warm all of a sudden, that’s what it is. You just swam through some white girl’s pee.”

  “Shut up!” Levi said, shoving him again. This time Sam shoved him back, his paper strips fluttering, and the boys continued to laugh and pummel each other, all the way down the drive to the edge of the parking lot, then through the pyracantha hedge to the cigarillo-smoky picnic table where the dishwashers hung out. In an instant, Sam straightened up and resumed his chant, ready to do business. Levi shook his head and went on into the kitchen, which was loud and crowded and so dinner-hour crazy that he could sneak up on Aunt Vergie, reach around her considerable bulk, and snatch away a biscuit before she was able to bust him one.

  “Boy, I declare!” Vergie yelled. “You’re going to draw back a nub one day.”

  “Can I help?” he asked, perching on a stool and biting off half the biscuit.

  “You better, if you’re going to wait here till your mama’s done. She’s got extra rooms to do tonight. Go bring me a fresh butter brush out of the rack back yonder. This one’s losing whiskers.”

  Levi wedged the biscuit’s second half into his mouth as he hopped down on his errand. The first half of a biscuit was to gulp; the second half was to savor. He dodged a half-dozen kitchen employees on the way across the room, saying hey to each, snatched up a brush, and dodged all the same people on the way back, as they said hey to him in return.

  “Here you go,” he said, resuming his perch. “How come the extra rooms?” But all Vergie heard was a mouthful of biscuit dough, so he swallowed and repeated himself.

  “Movie people,” she said, spreading melted butter onto a fresh tray of biscuits. “Some of them here already, and they’re eating biscuits like they never saw one before. Maybe they ain’t. No telling what they eat in California.”

  Levi’s eyes went wide. “What movie people? Are they famous? Are they making another Tarzan movie?”