I took two steps down and sat on the top landing. Brown remained where he was. He had a sawgrass bud in his left palm and was carving out the tender white part to eat with a short knife that had a distinctive curved blade. It looked too much like the blade I'd taken from Gunther's scabbard after the plane wreck and accidentally dropped into the mud of the glades.
"You ain't gone need that pistol," he said, finally looking up at me. I just stared at him, trying to see what might be in his eyes.
"I heard ya load it."
I took the gun from behind me where it was digging into my backbone and laid it on the plank next to me. In the rising light I could see the dark stain under Brown where water had dripped off his clothes. His trousers were wet through and there was a water line that changed the color of his denim shirt at midchest. Somehow he must have walked through the thick swamp from the west to my shack and found it in the dark. There had been no moonlight in the overnight storm.
"How about some coffee?" I finally said. "I was just making some."
"We ain't got time," he answered. The tone of authority that had struck me at the Loop Road bar was back in his voice. "We got to go."
I started to ask where, but he cut me off.
"It's the girl. The little one. You're gonna have to come git her."
Now I could see his pale eyes as he stood up and there was an urgency in them that seemed foreign to his face.
"The kidnapped girl? Where?" I said, unconsciously picking up my gun. "Where is she? Is she dead?"
"Yonder in the glade," Brown answered, barely tipping his head to the west. "She ain't real good. But she's alive."
"Who's with her? Is there anyone with her? Can we get a helicopter out there?" Now the urgency was in my throat.
"Ain't nobody with her now. An' ain't nobody now who can find her 'cept me. You're gonna have to git her," the old man said, his voice flat but still holding strength. "You alone. Let's go."
I walked back in the shack and laid the gun on my table and quickly dressed, taking an extra minute to pull on a pair of high combat boots I rarely used. I picked up Billy's cell phone and punched his number, got his answering machine and left a hurried message that I was heading out into the Glades with Brown and would call him back with details. I stuffed a first- aid kit into a waterproof fanny pack and strapped it around my waist. As I clomped down the stairs I put the cell phone inside too. Brown didn't object.
I climbed into the stern of the shallow skiff and Brown crouched on a broad seat built about a third of the way back from the bow. Using a cypress boat pole almost as long as the skiff itself, he pushed us down my access trail and onto the river.
"It'll be faster goin' up the canal with two," he said, heading upstream.
The old man seemed like a magician with the boat, poling and steering his way up my river at a speed that I could match only on my best days in the canoe. Sometimes he would stand erect, working the pole its full length but suddenly slip to his knees to duck a cypress limb and never miss his rhythm. I watched him bend down and noted the short leather scabbard on his belt where he'd holstered his curved knife. It was then that I remembered my 9mm. I'd left it on the table. I had also not thought to fasten Cleve's new lock on the door. I had not needed the gun for some time and I hoped I wouldn't need it now.
We got to the dam in twenty minutes, half my usual time, and I helped Brown hoist the skiff over. It was a flat-bottomed craft, made of marine plywood in a simple but efficient way. The techniques of both building and maneuvering such a skiff had been passed down through generations of Gladesmen. When Brown pushed off again I watched him as we slid past the spot where I'd found the wrapped body of the dead child. He never hesitated, never turned his head, either toward the spot in memory or away from it in avoidance. He just kept poling, his taut shoulders and back moving under the faded cotton of his damp shirt like the smooth muscles of a racehorse under its hide.
"I believe she will be fine" and "We'll be there directly" were his only answers to my questions about the girl.
I sat back in frustration and watched him. The sun was up full over the eastern horizon now, deepening the blue in the sky and slicing through the river canopy like light through cheesecloth. We passed the canoe park and I stifled an urge to call out to Ham Mathis at the rental shack.
In another thirty minutes we pushed through a shallow bog of cattails and green maidencane to a canal levee where a culvert fed fresh water to the river. Brown jumped out into knee- deep water and I followed as he tugged his skiff up the grass-covered levee bank with a half dozen lunges. I tried to push from the stern but wasn't much help and I was again awed by the strength coming out of a small man who we'd already determined was nearly eighty years old.
From the high berm I looked out over the open expanse of Everglades and tried to get a fix on our direction, but Brown had the skiff floating again and his silence screamed, "Get your ass down here." I knew we were on the L-10 canal and headed deep into the Glades. The canal system had been dredged eighty years ago to transport commercial fish and produce from Lake Okeechobee, the huge liquid heart of Florida, to the shipping centers on the coast. But I couldn't tell how far or how fast we were going. Now in open water, Brown used the full power of the pole and could push the skiff nearly a hundred yards with a single stroke. He worked silently, except the times he spotted an alligator lying in the grass at the water's edge or a snout like a floating chunk of dark-colored bark in the distance.
"Gator," he would call out, not in warning, but like a cop in a prowl car might say "crackhead" or "eight-baller" to his partner as they cruised a drug area. This was Brown's work sector. The neighborhood he knew. I was on his turf and at his mercy.
As the sun climbed up the sky he did not seem to tire or slow or even sweat. I had to admire his ability to grind. After more than an hour he suddenly stopped poling and steered to the side. No marker. No trail. No indication that this spot was any different than the miles we'd already passed. When he jumped down into the water I followed and we hoisted the skiff to the top of the berm. To the west lay acres of freshwater marsh, stretched out golden in the high sun just like I'd seen from the cockpit of Gunther's plane. On the horizon was a faint line of dark green rising like a ridge and bumping the skyline. We had to pull the skiff some thirty yards through shallow water and around clumps of grass the size of small autos until Brown found a serpentine trail of deeper water that spun out toward the faint hardwood hammock in the distance. He tossed me a quart of water in a clear Bell canning jar. It was sealed with a metal screw-on collar and a rubber rimmed lid.
"We'll be there directly," he said, stripping off his shirt to expose a sleeveless white T-shirt underneath. I had taken off my own shirt and draped it over my head and shoulders as protection against the sun. We pushed off again and this time Brown took up a spot on a smaller poling platform at the back of the skiff. He started us down the middle of the water trail and I straddled the center platform, alternately looking ahead trying to keep my bearings and watching him, standing above me, framed in the blue canvas of sky and squinting into the distance.
"Who brought her out here, Nate?" I finally asked, wondering if he would let go of it.
"Ain't for me to say," he answered, and I wasn't sure whether the response meant he knew but wouldn't tell, or that he simply wouldn't speculate. But somehow I believed that it had not been him.
In short time I lost track of the turns and directions we moved. I had no clue why he took one watery path over another. On occasion I would stand up on the platform, wobbling the boat, and see that we were gaining on the line of trees. Then I would sit back down and take a drink from the jar. The heat was rising and the sawgrass smelled warm and close, like hay in a summer barn, but the sweet odor of wet decay mixed with it to create an odd perfume. It was not like my river where everything was dominated by moisture. Out here the battle between a drying sun and the soaking water was waged in the six- foot-high envelope of space we were sliding through.