Wakulla Springs Page 9

  “Look, Sam, right there at my toe, face-up, is a 5, lying there as pretty as you please. Now, I bought a 78, not a 5. But if a 5 gets drawn, what’s to keep me from throwing mine down, picking that up and hollering, ‘I got a 5, I’m a winner’?”

  “Maybe nothing,” Sam replied, smiling in a way that made Levi’s neck prickle. “Pick it up and see.”

  Levi hesitated, because he didn’t like the look in Sam’s eye, but he leaned over and picked up the 5—then couldn’t straighten up. One powerful hand gripped his forearm; another clamped the back of his neck. He feared he could feel his bones grinding together in each spot.

  “Drop it,” said a man’s voice, “or I break your arm.”

  “It’s dropped!” Levi said, and it was. A patent-leathered foot kicked through the numbers, burying the 5, and both hands let go of Levi. Dizzy with terror, he slumped against the wall to steady himself and looked around for his assailants. He saw only the same crush of betting men, several of whom looked strong enough, but no one paid him the slightest attention, now that he wasn’t stealing a number.

  “You see how it is?” said Sam.

  “I sure do,” Levi said, rubbing his arms. “Anyone standing beside me could be working for the house. Spies everywhere.”

  Sam laughed. “You dummy, the house don’t need no spies. Any customer in the place would kill a cheater soon as look at him. You walk out honest, or you don’t walk out. You want a Nehi?” He turned and scanned the crowd. “Hey, Jo!”

  A waitress shifted her tray and looked down. “Hey, Sam.”

  “You got any Blue Cream?”

  “No Blue Cream, sugar,” she said. Her skirt was even shorter than Mae’s. Jo wasn’t much older than the boys, but she loomed over them; her chest was about level with Sam’s eyes. A small scar descended from her left eye like a tear. “Got Orange, Peach, Ginger, and a few Wild Berry left. They’re warm. Nobody gonna leave for ice and miss the toss.”

  “I like my Nehi hot,” Sam said, winking at her, “but Orange is for crackers. Gimme a Wild Berry.” Looking bored, she held her hand out, palm up, and he dropped coins into it. “One for my buddy, too,” Sam said, “and keep the change.”

  “My fortune is made,” she drawled. She turned to Levi, who had finally registered her high heels. No wonder she was so tall: She was practically on tiptoe. “You want a Wild Berry, too?”

  “No, ma’am. Orange is fine,” Levi squeaked, his voice cracking. “How do you walk on those things?”

  She grinned. “Like this.” She turned and sashayed away, demonstrating.

  Levi gaped.

  Sam’s elbow jabbed him. “See what you been missing?” Sam was only a year older than him, but Levi could tell he was right at home here. “Ain’t this great?” Sam hollered.

  Even face-to-face conversation had to be hollered now, over the crowd and the din. All the men were sweaty, and all smoking. The top half of the room was a pungent gray haze, and Levi was glad to be below it.

  A nearby group of men roared with laughter over something, and one of them smashed a bottle against the wall for emphasis. Another yelled, “If that ain’t a show, I’ll kiss your ass!”

  Sam pulled him over to one of the windows. “They’ll draw a 9 tonight,” he said.

  “How do you know?”

  “I dreamed about a wild hog last night. It was ruttin’ in the back parlor of my grandma’s house, and no one paid it any mind, like only I could see it. Then it caught me lookin’ and chased me out of the house. A crazy kind of dream. The Black and White Luck Book says when you dream about wild animals, you should play a 5, a 7, or a 9, and they already drew 5 and 7 this week. Hey, there, baby.”

  Jo sashayed back into view, their Nehis on a tray. Someone already had popped the caps, and the drinks were flat on top of being warm, but Levi gulped his, feeling the sweet syrup gurgling inside his chest as Jo looked him up and down. A thought came into Levi’s head, one that he’d give anything to chase back out. Was my mama like these girls?

  Jo opened her mouth and said something else, but the room had erupted in such a roar that Levi didn’t hear a word of it. Everyone cheered as the middle of the room cleared to make room for the fat man and the skinny woman. She carried a tray of numbered balls, the man a croker sack.

  Levi frowned at Jo and cupped his ear, miming, “What?” She leaned forward, said something else that Levi lost entirely, then reached up to his chest and twisted his left nipple, right through his shirt, winking as she did. He cried out in pain and surprise. Then she turned and slipped into the crowd, disappearing as completely as an envelope through the mail drop at the Lodge. Levi turned to Sam—for help or confirmation or he didn’t even know what—but Sam had eyes only for the couple in the middle of the room.

  “Ladies and gentlemen!” squawked the fat man. “May I direct your attention to my lovely assistant’s tray, featuring balls numbered 1 to 78. Please take a moment, you folks standing closest, to confirm that each number is fairly represented.”

  A dozen people leaned forward to look, nodding their heads.

  “And please note, you folks nearest me, that my sack is entirely empty.” He made a big show of turning it inside out and back again, stretching the neck wide for all to see. Then he held it out to the skinny woman, who tipped her tray and poured the numbered balls into the sack. The fat man swiftly tied the neck of the sack into a knot, then stepped a few feet away and threw the bulging sack to the woman. She threw it back to him, and the back-and-forth continued, across a wider and wider space. The crowd surged closer, everyone shouting their favorite numbers at the tops of their lungs.

  Levi had had enough of the noise, the heat, the smoke, the greed. He dropped his empty Nehi bottle, feeling sick to his stomach. His nipple ached, and he half dreaded—although a small, unfamiliar part of him also half hoped—that the scarred waitress would reappear at any moment on her teetering deer’s legs to claim him. “I’m gonna go,” he said to Sam, who was oblivious.

  Hugging the wall, unnoticed, Levi sidled toward the exit as fast as the crowd would let him. He stumbled alone into the cool night air, around the building and into the clean freshness of the piney woods that stretched, unbroken, for seventy miles west from Crawfordville.

  The Apalachicola National Forest, the largest in the state of Florida. His teacher said it was almost a thousand square miles, most of it unexplored swampy wilderness, the kind a person could get lost in, never to be seen again. The idea was not without its appeal, right then.

  Levi walked in a ways, far enough that the noise of Cooper’s was just a drone, no louder than the cicadas and the frogs, found an old loblolly pine stump, and sat down to breathe the stink out of his lungs and gather his thoughts.

  But his thoughts all bounced around between Jo and Mae and his mama and Jimmy Lee and the white man—whoever he was—that was his daddy, and suddenly Levi was doubled over, vomiting a stream of warm Orange Nehi. When he was emptied out, his throat raw and sour, he took three chest-spreading breaths, as if he had just returned to the surface after a long, deep dive.

  He wiped his mouth with his shirttail and started to sit again when he heard a thump, somewhere off in the darkness behind him and then another, off to his right. Levi vomited again, though this time nothing came up but thin bile.

  When they learned about the Apalachicola woods in class, a boy named Emmit said that he knew for gospel that a wild creature lived in the swamps far back into this forest, hair all over his body, bigger even than a Skunk Ape. It smelled of rotting meat and howled when it was hungry—for human blood. Emmit was dumber than a bag of hammers, but his daddy was a hunter, and knew as much about this part of the world as any man, so Levi thought there was likely some truth to the tale.

  After what he’d seen and heard tonight, he didn’t know what he believed any more.

  Levi began to walk back toward the road when, deep in the darkness far behind him, something howled, long and low, raising every hair on Levi’s body and putting
his feet in a mood for some serious running.

  He crashed through the underbrush, feeling a tug on his shirt, then a ripping sound, but he didn’t care about his clothes, not one bit. He ran faster, his sneakers crunching over twigs and stirring up leaves, making enough noise to scare the devil himself—he hoped—and headed for the lighted bulk of Cooper’s Big House.

  He finally stumbled around the corner, and leaped back just in time to avoid being splattered by a fat man pissing against the cinderblocks.

  “Well, hey there, Jackie Robinson,” said Henry the taxicab driver, zipping up. “You a runner too, now?”

  “Nossir.” Levi gulped air, trying to loosen up a stitch in his side. “Can you take me home?” He’d had enough of the grown-up world and wanted to be back in his own bed more than anything he could remember wanting. “Please?” He heard his voice crack with the pleading.

  “Sorry, son,” the cabbie said. “I got paying fares leaving this joint for the next three hours, going all over the county. But it’s a nice night for a walk, a strong boy like you.”

  “Yessir,” Levi said, his shoulders sagging. “Thanks anyway.”

  As Levi walked home, keeping to the shoulder of the road and the edge of the woods, he slowly tore his number 78 into tiny pieces that he dropped behind him like a trail of breadcrumbs in a story. Bad luck? Maybe. But the farther he got from Cooper’s, the luckier he felt.

  * * *

  The sun was barely above the horizon when Levi trudged up the long winding driveway. Almost home. At the Springs, at least. Home was where he’d catch holy hell, but not just yet. He cut into the woods and walked straight to the lagoon, shedding clothes as he went, some of the Big House stink falling behind with each piece. He emerged a few yards from the diving tower.

  That was where he had always stopped, as a child, at the edge of the swimming area restricted to tourists, where water creatures that looked like him were forbidden. But in the dawn of a new day, Levi Williams stood on the grass, naked as the day he was born, and fear of Mr. Ball and his laws—or his mama and her rules—fell away like the dried-up used skin of a canebrake rattler.

  He put one foot onto the concrete steps of the tower, then another, and then he was climbing up and around and up again until he stood at the very edge of the topmost platform, thirty feet above the springs. Levi stopped there, watching the pale light play across the surface of the water, feeling a little ball of fierceness grow inside him. This was his water, as much as anyone’s.

  Levi took a deep breath—one, two, three—and launched himself into space, diving hands-first into the deepest part of Wakulla Springs. Water roaring in his ears, he plunged twenty, thirty feet down, thirty-five, until his natural buoyancy took over and he began to rise again. The exhaustion of a long night disappeared and he pushed the water behind him with easy strokes, propelling himself forward, a school of gar disintegrating in a thousand directions as he swam through it.

  He swam underwater, coming up for air at two-minute intervals, moving to the far side of the lagoon, unnoticed by the film crew beginning to set up for the day’s shoot. His head barely breaking the surface, Levi watched from afar as Winnie encrusted Ricou’s long, lean body with Beastie scales. He watched from afar as Ricou joked with her and with a blonde Weeki Watchee girl, a stunt double in a high-cut white swimsuit, who donned a black wig just before she jumped into the water. He watched from afar as the crew lowered the camera into place, as Ricou and the stand-in lazily swam into position.

  Then: Action.

  Levi dived deep again, down to a rock ledge, holding on with his toes, and looked up. Silhouetted against the sun, the girl in the white swimsuit swam on the surface. Beneath her swam the Beastie, mirroring her movements. And now beyond them—unseen by either swimmers or cameras—swam Levi, matching Ricou kick for kick, stroke for stroke.

  When the girl straightened, rested one foot against her opposite knee, and turned a lazy cartwheel, the Beastie backed off, watching her from a thicket of underwater ferns. Levi watched him watching.

  Now the girl hung suspended in the clear water, her head above the surface, her long legs slowly scissoring. The Beastie swam up close, stretching a clawed hand out for her feet without ever quite touching her. Across the lagoon, Levi reached for both of them.

  The layer of cooler water beneath him seemed tangible, something Levi could almost stand on. He hung there, feet slowly churning, as if riding a unicycle through molasses. His arms floated upward, and he held his right hand in a reverse C, as if framing a picture, and the Beastie seemed to swim right into Levi’s palm.

  If the cameramen turned around, trained the lens in Levi’s direction, he would be captured in their machine, like the egret on the lobby wall. Would he be recognized? At this distance, would he even look human? Maybe, if only for a few seconds, they’d mistake him for some fabulous swimming creature: the legendary fish-boy of Wakulla Springs.

  But the two frogmen on either side of the twin camera were focused on the latex monster and did not maneuver in his direction. Unnoticed and unbound, Levi Williams just treaded water, out of the range of capture, and after a moment’s hesitation, regretfully lowered his hand, freeing the Beastie to swim on toward the girl, toward the light.

  3.

  Monkey Business

  Isbel was so tired she could barely sit up. She’d been working on the last section of her senior thesis for two solid days, running on caffeine and Snickers bars from the vending machine. At four on a Thursday afternoon, she sat on the La Brea bus, almost nodding off as it crawled through rush-hour traffic, jerking upright every time they hit a pothole, which in that part of Los Angeles was at least once a block.

  She wished she could just call Mr. Gleckman and cancel, but the fact was, two of her studio sources had backed out at the last minute, and this was her final chance to add some really original material to bolster the library research she’d been doing since the beginning of the semester. The kind of initiative that looked good on grad school applications.

  Her thesis, “An Examination of Reel vs. Real Post-Colonialism: Tarzan Movies and Imaginary Geography,” was tailored to her double major in Film and the newly established Ethnic Studies department at UCLA. It was the culmination of months of work—and years of day-dreaming.

  Saginaw, Michigan, her hometown, was not the sort of place anyone made a movie about. Her parents had both worked the day shift at the GM plant, so she’d been on her own after school. Her only babysitter was a man named Captain Muddy, who hosted two hours of old black-and-white movies on the local TV station. Isbel watched them all—the Three Stooges, Lash LaRue and his bullwhip, parades of stiff-legged men in monster and robot suits—but she fell completely under the spell of Tarzan the first time she saw him swing through the trees. She wanted nothing more than to escape her small gray city for the paradise of the jungle and the mysterious escarpment beyond which always lay treasure.

  After two years at Michigan State, she had transferred to UCLA, and was thrilled to discover that the films’ principals were still alive. She’d been trying for more than a year to get an interview—on the phone, in person, she didn’t care. She’d written to the publicity departments at MGM and RKO and gotten form letters in return. She sent off queries to Johnny Weissmuller’s agent, but he never replied. Maureen O’Sullivan’s agent hung up on her when she called. Johnny Sheffield no longer needed an agent, and two weeks ago she’d actually managed to talk to him directly—at least for the thirty seconds it took for him to tell her to buzz off.

  Isbel had a transcription of that phone conversation. It consisted entirely, on the part of the no-longer boyish “Boy,” of: Hello? Yes, that’s me. and You’ve got to be kidding. Not a chance. She doubted that was even enough for a footnote, much less the highlight of her paper.

  Cheeta was all she had left.

  At least Mr. Gleckman claimed his chimp was Cheeta. “Sure, he’s the real deal. Did all the Tarzan movies,” he’d said on the phone. “In the first tw
o, he was just the other ape’s understudy, but they promoted him for Tarzan Escapes. That was 1936, and he’s worked steady ever since. Weissmuller, Bela Lugosi, Ed Wynn—all the biggies.” It sounded like a sales pitch, composed and rehearsed, but Isbel was desperate.

  “You want an interview?” Mr. Gleckman had asked after ten minutes of reciting the monkey’s credentials. “Yes, please.”

  “He’s a performer, no free shows. A hundred bucks?”

  “I can get it,” Isbel said. She’d hung up the phone before she could be sensible and change her mind, then gone to the bank, gutting her account, leaving just enough for groceries—if she ate mac and cheese until Thanksgiving.

  The bus lumbered north on Sepulveda as Isbel fingered the five bills in the pocket of her jeans and shifted the knapsack on her knees. The snoring fat man next to her flopped a meaty arm in her direction. Draped across his lap was a copy of the Times. POLICE: LABIANCA, TATE SLAYINGS UNRELATED. Oh, that’s reassuring, Isbel thought. Two different maniacs roaming the city. She sighed, watched the fast-food landscape slide past, and stroked the fringe of her purple buckskin vest, a nervous habit she was trying to break.

  The address Mr. Gleckman had given her was right on the border of Encino and Tarzana, which seemed almost prophetic. She alighted with a wobble, her right leg all pins and needles, and looked at the piece of paper where she’d scribbled the address. 807-C Ventura Blvd. She looked up and down the street, seeing nothing but gas stations and vacant lots, then noticed a sign for Shady Glen Mobile Home Estates half a block down.

  A trailer park? Really? Cheeta was a movie star. All right, it was a long time ago, and he was a chimp, but still. Maybe he’d spent his savings on bananas. Isbel laughed out loud, hearing the giddiness of exhaustion, and wanted nothing more than to go back to her dorm, crawl under the covers, and sleep for a week. This was a terrible idea. What had she been thinking?

  She headed toward the sign.

  Beyond a peeling stucco arch she saw rows and rows of neatly identical aluminum-sided trailers. Fifty feet to her right was a fenced-in, open-air pool. A very tan muscular guy in T-shirt and sweats was sifting blue crystals into the water amid a swirl of orange hoses, a panel truck backed up to the pool gate. The guy looked up and nodded.