Wakulla Springs Page 7

  “I’ll take that,” said Winnie, plucking the plate from the boy’s hands and fanning it in the air to dry. “Thank you.”

  “Yeah, thanks,” Ricou said. He shook his head in amazement. “Son, you are one fine swimmer. Anyone ever tell you that?”

  “Everybody,” Levi said, beaming. A safe distance out of the water now, he stared at Rico’s claws and fins and segmented green suit. “Everybody tells me I’m half fish.” On the makeup table, the Beastie’s sightless, detached head stared at him in an unsettling way.

  “Yeah, well,” Ricou said. “Once Winnie peels off my half-fish, I want to see what you can do. How long can you hold your breath?”

  “Three minutes.”

  “How deep you been?”

  “Almost to the bottom. More than a hundred feet, anyway. I like it down there. It’s fun to look up at the sun.”

  “Hold still,” Winnie said, kneeling beside Ricou. She used a putty knife to pry off each scaly segment and lay it in its numbered rack.

  “Swim here a lot, do you?”

  “Yep. All my life.”

  Winnie’s knife paused. She looked up at Ricou. They both stared at Levi.

  “Mostly at night,” Levi added. “Nobody sees me.”

  “That’s good,” Winnie murmured, and went back to work.

  “Hope you don’t swim by yourself,” Ricou said. “That’s never a good idea, you know. At Weeki Wachee we never dive without a buddy.” He flinched. “Ouch! Watch it, will you? I think some of me came off with the rubber that time.” He turned back to Levi. “Hey, kid, you ever done any hose breathing?”

  Levi solemnly shook his head.

  Ricou smiled. “We’ll just have to do something about that.”

  And so Levi the gofer became Levi the Beastie’s apprentice.

  * * *

  Saturday morning, Levi breached the surface, spitting and coughing, water streaming from his eyes and nose. His throat burned.

  He blinked until Ricou’s head came into view, with its now-familiar curly hair, wide grin, and ample nose. Ricou raised one clawed hand, latex webbing connecting the talons, and shook it at him. “OK, so what happened there?”

  “I breathed through my nose—” Levi gasped.

  “—and not through the hose,” the two said together.

  “That’s right.” Ricou nodded. “You know here that it’s mouth breathing only,” he said, tapping Levi’s head with his claw, “but the message hasn’t reached your lungs, when you’re underwater and fighting for breath. The body takes longer to train. I was the same when Newt Perry taught me, at Weeki Wachee.”

  “I can do it, I know I can,” Levi said. He pressed one nostril closed and blew snot out of the other, then reversed.

  “The Beastie’s head ready yet?” Ricou called.

  “Hold your horses,” yelled Winnie, yards away on the dock. Through the shoreline weeds, Ricou was visible to her, but not Levi. She knew the boy was there, all right, but no one on the film crew wanted to advertise the boy’s presence when hotel guests might be around.

  “Try it again?” Ricou asked.

  “Sure,” Levi said, and gave a thumbs-up that Ricou’s rubber claw tried but failed to return. Levi took a deep breath, another and another, feeling the pleasant swell of his ribcage, then ducked beneath the water again.

  The bubbling air hose lay on the shallow streambed at Levi’s feet as he sat down, hanging on to a cypress root to keep from floating upward. Ricou talked a lot about the need to achieve “neutral buoyancy” instead of just gulping air until you filled up like a balloon, which confined you at or near the water’s surface, but that was a lesson for another day. For now Levi was just counting seconds.

  One Mississippi, two Mississippi. When he got to sixty Mississippi for the third time, he reached for the hose. He had trained himself to do it calmly, slowly, as if holding his breath for three minutes was the most natural thing in the world, and brought the end to his lips, the rushing bubbles tickling his face. With his free hand he pinched his nostrils shut, though he knew this was cheating. Fighting the artificial current, he wedged the hose between his lips, so that he had only a few drops of water to swallow, and inhaled with his mouth. He really did feel like a balloon this time, letting his lungs fill with air. Elated, he let go of the hose, allowing it to thrash itself back to the bottom like a snake, and after another minute, broke the surface, exhaling loudly as he did.

  “Better,” Ricou said.

  “I did it!” Levi cried. “I did it!”

  “You sure did,” Ricou said, “and pretty soon you won’t need to pinch your nose, either.”

  “How did you—oh.” Levi had forgotten that Ricou could see him, even deep under the clear water.

  “Calling all Beasties!” Winnie yelled.

  Ricou waved one green paw. “I gotta go be a star now,” he told Levi. “You keep practicing.” He winked and walked away, finned feet flapping in the grass. He looked absurd above the water, just a man in a monster suit, but Levi watched him go with utter admiration.

  Still elated by his triumph as a hose breather, Levi watched as Winnie secured the front of Ricou’s mask. Seeing his friend slowly turn his head, looking at him with that strange froglike face, was eerie to the boy; he could believe Ricou had been transformed, right before his eyes, into something otherworldly and dangerous.

  “We’re ready when the Beastie is,” Jim yelled across the springs. As usual during filming, he was sitting in an inner tube tethered to the diving platform, adrift over the water’s depths. Scotty, the camera-crew chief, now strapping on the goggles of his frogman’s suit and adjusting his aqualung, would give Ricou his cues below the surface. The underwater camera and its two-man crew were already in position, about fifty feet down.

  “Ready or not, here he comes,” Winnie said.

  “Mmmmmph mmmmmph mrmm,” Ricou said, and flipped backward into the water. He instantly became a different, graceful entity, cleaving the surface in an effortless backstroke, leaving a wake as perfectly V-shaped as a motorboat’s. In the center of the lagoon, he righted himself, waited for the signal, then dropped from sight, like a man in a descending elevator. His mask held no breathing equipment, and the water closed over his head with scarcely a ripple.

  “Gosh, he’s good,” murmured Winnie, hands on hips.

  Scotty, goggles and breathing device in place, had years of experience on Ricou, but his drop into the water seemed, by comparison, as loud as a tourist boy’s cannonball.

  Levi slid into the water as noiselessly as he could, slipping across the river to the far side, hugging the bank, swimming just beneath the surface until he reached the place where he could dive deep. The springs were so clear that, even yards away, he could see Ricou getting his mimed cues from Scotty as the two camera operators treaded water beyond. The underwater camera was really two cameras bolted together, a necessity for the 3-D effect, with a frogman on each side pushing it forward.

  Levi stuck close to the submerged cliff face, so he wouldn’t get into the shot by accident.

  Though filmed relatively early, in the movie this would be the Beastie’s final scene. On Scotty’s signal, Ricou went into his death throes, his supposedly bullet-riddled body pluming black-dye “blood” from multiple plastic packets as he burst them. His twitching slowed, and he began to sink. The frogmen angled the camera down to keep him in focus as he dropped farther and farther, webbed feet first, his arms seeming to float listlessly but actually gently sculling, propelling him toward the bottom of Wakulla Springs, toward his next breaths of air, at the end of a bubbling hose held by another frogman. Levi watched until he thought his own lungs would burst, and then he kicked toward the shore, marveling that anyone could make death so graceful.

  * * *

  When darkness ended shooting for the day, Levi slipped into the woods, put on his dry clothes, and walked home to the three-room apartment in the employee dorm that he and his mother shared. He wasn’t surprised to find Jimmy Lee ther
e, too. For the past couple of weeks, the veteran was officially bunking with two of the boatmen on the second floor, but he mainly used that as a place of retreat whenever he and Levi’s mama had a falling-out, which was every couple of days. They weren’t fighting now, though. Mama was sprawled on the couch, in the fitful breeze of a slowly swiveling table fan, drinking lemonade and reading a book called The Day of the Locust. Tourists brought books on vacation then just left them behind, so Mama always had something to read on her day off.

  “And here he is,” murmured Jimmy Lee. He sat in a chair, leafing through a stack of mail, as usual, all of it politics. Jimmy Lee Demps got more mail every day than the Lodge itself.

  “Hi, baby,” his mama said.

  “Hey,” said Levi, pushing his head into his mama’s neck for the obligatory hug. She squeezed him even harder than usual, then held him at arm’s length for inspection.

  “You been bothering those movie people again?” she asked.

  “Ricou’s teaching me to breathe through a hose underwater,” Levi said, “just like the swimmers at the Weeki Wachee.”

  His mother shook her head and sighed. “Honey, they don’t need no colored mermaids at the Weeki Wachee. You got to get your mind back on school. Ain’t that right, Jimmy Lee?”

  “Mmm,” said Jimmy Lee. He opened an envelope and slid out a bumper sticker that said, DON’T BUY GAS WHERE YOU CAN’T USE THE RESTROOM.

  What good was a bumper sticker, Levi wondered, when you ain’t got a bumper, or a car neither?

  Jimmy Lee winked at Levi and nudged Mayola in the ribs, trying to show her the sticker. “We ought to go to this Negro Leadership rally one year, baby. It’s really something.”

  “I got another note from your teacher,” Levi’s mama said. She put her book down and gave him her full-on attention.

  Levi gulped. Mama was always going on and on about school, like it was holy as church, but she looked fearsome serious this time.

  “Daydreaming,” she continued with emphasis. “Falling asleep in class. Levi, I know it’s exciting, your very own monster movie right here at the springs, and I’m trying to be patient. There ain’t much for a growing boy hereabouts, I know that. But if you really want to get out of this place one day, you gotta concentrate on your studies.”

  Levi nodded, but said nothing.

  His mama took a long, slow drink of lemonade, without taking her eyes off him. “So here’s how it’s gonna be. If I get one more note about your sorry-ass ways, young man, you won’t be dipping a single toe into any kind of water ’cept a bathtub till you’re a bent-over, white-haired old man. You hear me?”

  “But Mama,” Levi said. “I got to keep swimming. Ricou says people can make a good living at it. Cameras are getting smaller, so lots more movie crews’ll be coming to Florida, and they’ll hire locals to help. Ricou’s thinking about starting his own business.”

  His mama put her book down onto the couch cushion and rubbed her temples. “Levi, you listen up, and you listen good. How many times I got to tell you, you can’t trust movie people?” She winced, squeezing her eyes shut. “They charm you,” she murmured, “and they tell you how great you are, and they make you feel like you’re something—special, real special. But then they go and pack right up and leave.” She rubbed her head again. “It’s just play-acting, Levi. Our lives ain’t anything to them.” She groaned. “Oh, Lord, I feel another headache coming on. Jimmy Lee, please do turn off that lamp.”

  “I’ll fetch you a potato,” Levi said. As he ran to their kitchenette, he felt relieved to escape from the whole subject of school, but ashamed at his relief. As he grabbed a good-sized spud and sliced it into discs, he wondered why every conversation with his mama, these days, made him feel guilty. Was that what growing up was all about?

  “A potato,” he heard Jimmy Lee repeat.

  “To lay on my forehead,” his mama said softly.

  Jimmy Lee laughed, but he cut it off quick—Mama probably gave him one of her looks.

  “It always helps,” Levi said, returning with a saucer of potato slices. He set them down at her elbow.

  “Bring Mama a handkerchief, too, baby.” She had her arm across her eyes now.

  “Yes’m,” Levi said.

  “No, here,” Jimmy Lee smiled. “Allow me.” He plucked a bright red handkerchief from his pants pocket and offered it with a small flourish, as if it were a bouquet of roses.

  Levi’s mama raised her forearm just enough to glance at the handkerchief through slitted eyes. “That won’t work,” she said, listlessly and automatically. She closed her eyes again. “Levi, honey, bring me one from the dresser, please.”

  “What’s wrong with this one?” Jimmy Lee asked, still holding it out.

  “It has to be white,” Levi said, and regretted it instantly. He stood there, his mama lay there, and Jimmy Lee sat there, all of them seemingly frozen in place.

  “White,” Jimmy Lee repeated. His voice was quiet, but a vein in his temple stood out and, without thinking, Levi backed away, hitting the washstand, which tilted and rattled but didn’t fall.

  “If the handkerchief ain’t white,” Levi’s mama murmured, “the healing won’t work. That’s what the root doctor say.”

  “Is it?” Jimmy Lee’s voice was even more quiet, and Levi’s mama opened her eyes. She frowned and slowly raised her head just enough to see him.

  “Jimmy Lee?”

  He was already at the door, his rejected handkerchief puddled on the floor where he had dashed it down.

  “Jimmy Lee, for heaven’s sake.”

  The door slammed and the framed cameo of Levi’s great-grandfather in American Expeditionary Forces uniform danced against the plaster wall, tap tap, tap tap.

  Levi’s mama burst into tears.

  “Don’t, Mama, please don’t,” Levi said. “Here, see? I got your potatoes, there they are—don’t that feel better? Lemme get that handkerchief, you hang on, just don’t cry. Please, Mama. Levi’s here. Don’t cry, Mama. It’s you and me, just like always.”

  When his mama finally got to sleep, Levi went for a ramble in the woods.

  He went down to the riverbank and walked along the south shore of the Wakulla for a few hundred yards. He stopped to listen to every rustle, every crackle, every slither, every thud of something dropping from the trees into the mulch of the forest floor, every plop of something long and heavy sliding into the water, and especially every chilling wail of the limpkin: Kw-E-E-E-E-E-E-ah!

  Familiar as it was, the limpkin’s nighttime cry always seemed weird—alien too. It raised goosebumps on Levi’s arms. Although if he turned his head, he could see the boathouse, the bathhouse, and the water fountains, only a few minutes’ walk upstream, as he stood in a pitch-black thicket, watching the dark streaks of gators crossing the moonlight on the surface of the river, Levi could easily imagine that he was in some faraway jungle. Left to his own devices, he would creep through the woods every night, listening for monsters.

  Florida was chock full of them; all the old-timers said so. Employees at Wakulla Springs came from all over the state, and brought their stories with them. The men who had hung out in the St. Marks bait shacks talked about Old Hitler, the thousand-pound hammerhead that cruised north from Tampa Bay to torment fishermen by shredding the lines, eating the day’s catch, and butting holes in the boat. They said the shark was more than a hundred years old—how else could it have grown so big, and as smart as a man? Levi believed every word, but wondered what it had been called before the Nazis came along.

  People who lived at the mouth of the Apalachicola said a snakelike thing lived in the river. Bigger around than a cypress trunk, the creature swam against the current like an inchworm, each stinking mossy hump rising so far above the surface that it once splintered beams on the John Gorrie Bridge.

  Howard, the pantry chef, hunted coons in Tate’s Hell Swamp. Several of his friends had staggered out, swearing their missing dogs had been taken by black panthers that lay silently along
high oak branches, motionless and drowsy, until scenting the hounds—and the men, for which they had acquired a taste during the Civil War.

  And everybody in Florida talked about the wilderness-dwelling Skunk Ape. Taller than a man, it shambled along on its knuckles, reeking of sour cabbage, harrumphing deep in its chest, woomp, woomp.

  Levi believed in all of those creatures, believed in them utterly and completely, because they had been seen and described and attested to a hundred times over by grown-ups, and because he was half-convinced that he had seen and heard them on his own walks. Every night, it seemed, he heard and saw things even stranger and more awful—and therefore better—along the whirring chirping grunting splashing midnight shore of the Wakulla River, which he knew as well as any gator.

  Besides, who would want to grow up and live in a world where every living critter was known and explained and catalogued, or penned up in a zoo or alligator farm or serpentarium? Levi was even willing to believe in the Clearwater Monster, which had famously churned up the sand a few years back and been declared by experts as something like a giant penguin, even though a giant penguin in Florida seemed a lot less likely than even a Skunk Ape. Levi’s mother said anyone who would believe in a giant penguin waddling down Clearwater beach was dumb as limestone and probably jake-leg drunk to boot. But Levi still believed.

  On this night, Levi stared at the moonlit river more intently than usual, almost desperate for something out of the ordinary to happen, and was eventually rewarded when a big black shape glided past, accompanied by a repeated plunk like water being displaced by a paddle. For a moment, Levi was certain it was the phantom Indian brave that the Seminoles believed patrolled the river at night in his stone canoe, keeping the waters clear and the air free of evil spirits, then realized it was Old Joe. Eleven feet long, the Springs’ most famous alligator played second fiddle to no dead Indian. The plunk was Old Joe’s massive tail cleaving the water as he swam. Levi fancied that Old Joe looked his way as he passed, one river creature acknowledging another, but who could say for sure? Late at night along the mysterious Wakulla, all certainty flowed eastward with the current, as Old Joe’s sidewinder motions sent little waves lapping over Levi’s toes, and the limpkins’ screams pierced the silence of the woods, and something a ways off went woomp, woomp.