Every so often, the captain passed around a flask of purple apple moonshine, joking that he hoped it didn’t blind the men. Louis thought the captain’s hooch tasted like a mixture of Christmas cider and gasoline — it didn’t make his personality any stranger or corrupt his vision, but his smile shrank, and often he had to excuse himself very politely to run and puke over the stern. Louis still had a kid’s broad face, a farm face, but with a sharp nascent handsomeness lurking around his cheekbones — he had what you’ll hear described as a “lantern jawline,” with its presidential thrust, its hint of bedroom avarice. It would have been irresistible to a woman, had there been any such creature in the general environs. The last one Louis T. had seen was the cook’s wife, who had a tall and mannish figure with a dishlike face and mean little eyes, a dirty cloud of yellow hair. That must be the cook’s older brother, Louis T. had thought as he watched them embrace at Fort Watson. Why is the cook’s older brother wearing a dress?
“She’s stately, you bastards,” the cook had said, correcting for gossip.
So there was no woman around to tell Louis T. that he had become, quite suddenly, a handsome man. This had not been a foregone conclusion: in childhood, in Clarinda, he had been a bland, doughy creature. The only things that had foreshadowed this turn were Louis’s hazel eyes and the promising size of him. Louis T. wouldn’t know that he was in possession of this beauty until after his death, when he first appeared to my sister inside a pool of water and she told him so.
The dredge clanked downstream with the dipper handle swinging. For the first time in his short life, Louis had real friends, all sorts walking alongside him into the long glade — calm men, family men, bachelors, ex-preachers, hellions, white men, black men, the childen of Indians and freed slaves; Adams, who had kicked a coral snake away from Louis’s naked big toe and saved his life with a casual grunt; ex-army boys who followed the deer into damp hammocks; drunks who took potshots at the queer golden cats that stalked the perimeter of their camp, and missed; gamblers who took all of Louis’s money with a pair of jacks and then gave (some of) it back to him at the day’s end; all of them, every man was Louis’s friend. When there was light in the sky they waded forward. They surveyed the old section lines of the national forest during the workweek, and during the weekends they “rambled,” as LaVerl, the buck sergeant said: shooting, fishing, sometimes even gator hunting along the nests that filled the unused railway bed. The cook told Louis to collect two dozen leathery eggs from these alligator nests, and then he made the whole crew a dinner of fishy-tasting omelettes.
When the light expired, they slept. White-tailed deer sprinted like loosed hallucinations between the tree islands. Sometimes Louis fell asleep watching them from the deck and it worried him that he couldn’t pinpoint when the dream began: deer rent the mist with their tiny hooves, a spotted contagion of dreams galloping inside Louis. There were bad fires that blurred the world; in the summer months you could see smoke rising almost daily, wherever lightning struck the pure peat beds.
Louis heard from the other surveyors that men all over the country were “hunting a week for one day’s work.” Sometimes when he thought about this he felt so lucky that it almost made him sick to his stomach. Happiness could be felt as a pressure, too, Louis realized, more hard-edged and solid than longing, even. In Clarinda he had yearned for better in a formless way, desire like a gray milk churn; in fact he’d been so poor in Iowa that he couldn’t settle on one concrete noun to wish for — a real father? A girl in town? A thousand acres? A single friend? In contrast, this new happiness had angles. Happiness like his was real; it had a jewel-cut shadow, and he could lose it. Well, Louis Thanksgiving determined that he was not going to lose it, and he was never going back. The Depression was the best thing that had ever happened to him. He had a crisp stack of dollars, a uniform with his initials stitched in raspberry thread on the pocket, pig and grits in his belly.
Elated, wanting never to leave, he signed another contract, this time to dredge a canal clear across the swamp to the Gulf Coast for the Model Land Company. They were going to drain the swamp and develop and sell it, and they needed a team of skilled muck rats to do it.
But nobody had explained to Louis just how deep into the swamp they would have to go now, and how quickly their bosses at the Model Land headquarters in St. Augustine, Florida, would expect the crew to drain the floodplains with a single bucket arm — a Herculean task for any machine, especially for the ancient and fumey Model Land dredge, which made the government vessel look like some futuristic spaceship by comparison.
The dredge was there to dynamite the marl, spud down into the blasted muck, and spud up with a bucket of oozing crust. And this task in a swamp where you could sink a support platform through twenty-four feet of peat before hitting stabilizing rock.
And the crew had changed, too — none of the CCC boys had signed on with him. LaVerl was going back to his family’s horse farm in Savannah, and the lone Indian on the crew, Euphon Tigertail, who had survived subhuman conditions while working on the Panama Canal, decided that he couldn’t work in the swamp any longer. He’d been undone by minuscule foes, the chizzywinks, and the deer flies. “You sure you want to be a dredgeman for this outfit, Lou?” Euphon had whispered, both of them staring at the hulk of the dredge. Its digger arm was as tall as a house and sunk deep into a quagmire. A pair of enormous cast-steel feet gave the contraption a drunken, donkey-legged appearance. The stack slumped toward the saw-grass prairie, which looked like a drowned and shimmering field of wheat. For a second Louis thought of the distant Auschenbliss pastures and shuddered.
“You’d be better off gum tapping in the turpentine woods. It’s all soup doodly in those prairies, it ain’t like the pine rocklands. There’s nothing piney about it. No elevation, Lou. No lakes or trees or breaks. It’s just saw grass till you want to scream. You won’t have a dry day again for months. You’ll go in there and never come out.”
How could you make a mistake when you had one option? Louis felt that his hellish past exempted him from all regrets. But he was humbled by his friends’ defection — and a little shocked, hearing their complaints about the last months. Ultimately, Louis felt an almost romantic embarrassment, listening to the grizzled guys talk — it turned out that the same nights and routes that he recalled as heavenly had been, to the other CCC men, “godawful months, a nightmare” and “the valley of the shadow — only full of mosquitoes!” When the dredge anchor hit at Chokoloskee their whole CCC fraternity came loose like a knot, and he and Euphon and LaVerl all parted at the dock like strangers.
His first job on the dredge was described by the splinter-toothed captain as “involved”: he had to dive overboard with a knife clenched in his teeth and cut the slimy ropes of cattails away from the dredge’s wheel and shaft. “Removing detritus” was what the captain called this labor, which tasted like brine and sour blood. Dee-tree-tus. A name from a book, Louis T. figured as he removed the knife from his mouth and spit copper. He had split his lower lip. Five times his first day he’d had to jump overboard into that stinking gator marinade and hack at the weedy ropes.
“What do I do if there’s a gator?” Louis asked the first night at supper.
“You put that knife between the blamed scaly-back’s eyes, he’ll lay offa you. Or get the base of his neck, sever his spinal cord.” Ferguson, one of the cranemen, had gone gator hunting with some white glade crackers once and now claimed to be the crocodile expert.