HALF-BRIGHT AND MUCH TOO EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, Cody and I stood in the parking lot of the elementary school where the Cub Scouts met. Frank, the pack’s leader, was already there with an old van that had a trailer hitch on the back. With him was his new assistant, Doug Crowley, along with Fidel, the boy Crowley sponsored through the Big Brothers program. As Cody and I arrived they were pushing the den’s trailer toward the hitch. I parked my car as three other boys were dropped off by mothers in several different stages of Saturday-morning undress and unawake. We all climbed out of our cars into the heavy humid heat of the early summer morning and watched as more boys arrived, shoved from their cars with their gear, and shuffling from one foot to the other as they watched their moms drive quickly and gratefully away for a weekend of boyless bliss.
Cody and I stood together, waiting as the other Scouts trickled in. I had a large helping of Rita’s coffee in a travel mug, and I sipped it and wondered why I ever bothered to go anywhere on time. It was clear that I was the only one in Miami who actually understood what those numbers on the face of the clock really meant, and I spent far too much of my dwindling liberty waiting for people who couldn’t quite grasp the notion of time. It should have stopped bothering me long ago—after all, I grew up here, and I was very familiar with Cuban Time, an immutable law of nature stating that any given hour for a rendezvous actually means, “plus forty-five minutes.”
But this morning I was finding the tardiness particularly irritating. I could feel Dexter’s Doom closing in, and I felt that I should be exploding into focused action, doing something clever and dynamically proactive, and not just standing in an elementary school’s parking lot sipping coffee and watching Cuban Time unfold. I hoped that whoever came to arrest me would be working on Cuban Time—or even Double Cuban. I could probably make my getaway while they finished a cafecita, played a game of dominoes, and finally strolled around to get me.
I sipped. I glanced down at Cody. He was staring thoughtfully across the parking lot, his lower lip twitching slightly, at where Frank and Doug were pushing at the trailer. Cody never seemed to get bored or impatient, and I wondered what he was thinking that kept him occupied so contentedly. Since I knew very well that he was like me inside, with his Shadow Guy and its Dark Longings, I could guess which direction his thoughts were moving. I just had to hope I could be half as good at steering him away from acting on them as Harry had been with me. Otherwise, Cody would probably celebrate his fifteenth birthday in jail.
As if he could feel my thoughts, Cody looked up at me and frowned. “Something wrong?” I asked him. But he just shook his head, still frowning, and went back to watching Frank and Doug play with the trailer. I slurped coffee and watched, too, which turned out to be the closest thing to real entertainment the day had offered so far. Frank was winding down the jack stand on the trailer, and as it took on the full weight of the trailer, it snapped and the trailer’s yoke thumped hard onto the pavement.
I could think of several very choice words that might have been appropriate, but of course, Frank knew he was surrounded by innocent ears, so he merely put both hands over his face and shook his head. Crowley, though, bent over and grabbed the yoke with both hands and, with a grunt that was audible all the way across the parking lot, he straightened, lifting the trailer up with him. He took two small steps toward the van, dropped the yoke onto the trailer hitch, and dusted off his hands.
It was impressive as well as entertaining. From the way it had dropped when the jack stand broke, it was clear that the trailer was quite heavy. Yet Crowley had lifted it and pulled it all by himself. Maybe that was why Frank had made him assistant leader.
Unfortunately, that was the last act of entertainment on the morning’s program, and forty minutes after our scheduled departure time we were still waiting for three final Cubs to arrive. Two of them arrived together as I finished my coffee, and then finally, with a cheerful and unconcerned wave from his father, the last boy climbed out of a new Jaguar and sauntered over to where Frank was standing. Frank waved his arm at the rest of us and we all gathered around for orientation.
“All right,” Frank said. “Drivers?” He looked around at the entire group with raised eyebrows, perhaps thinking that one or two of the boys might be driving. But none of them seemed to be holding car keys; maybe that was asking a bit much of a Cub Scout, even in Miami. Instead, I raised my hand, as did Doug Crowley and two other men I didn’t know.
“Okay,” Frank said. “We are going to Fakahatchee State Park.” One of the boys snickered and repeated the name, and Frank looked at him wearily. “It’s a Native American name,” he said ominously, looking at the smirking boy for a long moment until the kid felt the full weight and power of confronting something Native American while wearing a Cub Scout uniform. Frank cleared his throat and went on. “So, uh … Fakahatchee State Park. We’ll meet at the ranger station, in case, you know. If we get separated or whatever. Now,” he said, raising his eyes up above the boys to adult level, “we’re gonna leave the cars, and the trailer, right there at the ranger station. It’s perfectly safe; the rangers are right there. And then we hike in two miles to the campsite.” He smiled, looking like a large and eager dog. “It’s gonna be a great hike, just the right distance, and we’ll have lots of time to get those pack straps right so they don’t chafe, okay? And the rangers will give us all a book that tells us all the cool things to look for along the path. Because if you keep your eyes open you will definitely see some great stuff. And if we’re really lucky, we might even see”—Frank paused very dramatically and looked around the circle, his eyes gleaming with excitement—“a ghost orchid.”
The boy who had been last to arrive said, “What’s that? Like a flower that’s a ghost?”
The boy next to him shoved him and murmured, “Idiot,” and Frank shook his head.
“It’s one of the rarest flowers in the world,” Frank said. “And if we see one you have to be very careful not to touch it. Don’t even breathe on it. It is so delicate, and so rare, that hurting one would be a true crime.” Frank let this sink in, and then gave them a small smile and went on. “Now remember. Besides the orchids. We are going into an area that has been kept just the way the Calusas left it.”
He lowered his eyes to the boys’ level and nodded at them. “We talked about this, guys. This is a primitive area, and we need to respect its purity. Leave nothing behind except footprints, right?” He glanced at each boy to make sure they were properly serious; they were, so he nodded and smiled again. “Okay. We’re gonna have a great time. Let’s get going.”
Frank assigned each boy to one of the cars. Along with me and Cody, I had room for two; one of them turned out to be Steve Binder, the boy Cody had said was a bully. He was a big kid with a single eyebrow and a low hairline—he might have been Detective Hood’s child, if you could only believe that any woman alive would have the poor taste to submit to Hood, and then keep the result.
My other passenger was a cheerful kid named Mario, who seemed to know every scouting song ever written, and by the time we got halfway to the park he had sung all of them at least twice. Because I had to keep both hands on the steering wheel, I couldn’t really turn around and strangle him, but I didn’t interfere when Steve Binder, at the point in the song when there were still eighty-two bottles of pop left on the wall, finally gave Mario a hard elbow and said, “Cut it out, stoopit.”
Mario sulked for a full three minutes, and then started babbling happily about Calusa shell mounds and how you could make watertight shelters with palmetto palm fronds and the best way to start a fire in the swamp. Cody stared straight ahead through the windshield from his place of honor in the front seat, and Steve Binder glowered and twitched in the backseat and every now and then glared at Mario. But Mario babbled on, apparently without noticing that everyone else in the car wanted him dead. He was bright and cheerful and well-informed and almost everything a Cub Scout should be, and I would not have objected too much if Steve Binder threw him out the window of the car.
By the time we got to the ranger station at the park I was gritting my teeth and clutching at the steering wheel so hard my knuckles showed white. I pulled in and parked next to one of the other dads who had gotten there first, and we all got out and released Mario into the unsuspecting wild. Steve Binder stomped away to find something to break, and once again Cody and I found ourselves standing in a parking lot and waiting for people to show up.
Since I no longer had any coffee to sip while I waited, I used the time to pull our gear out of the trunk and make sure it was all carefully packed into our backpacks. My pack held our tent and most of our food, and it was already starting to look much bigger and heavier than it had when I first packed it at home.
It was a good half hour be
fore the last car arrived at the ranger station—the battered old Cadillac filled with Doug Crowley and his group. They had stopped for a pee break and to buy some MoonPies. But ten minutes after that we were all on the trail and hiking off to our Wonderful Adventure in the Wild.
We didn’t see a ghost orchid along the trail. Most of the boys were able to hide their bitter disappointment, and I kept my mind off my shattered hopes of seeing the rare flower by adjusting Cody’s pack straps until he could stand up straight enough to walk. The trick, as we had learned in one of our den meetings, was to get the weight onto the hip strap, and then keep the shoulder straps tight, but not so tight that they cut off circulation and made your arms go numb. It took a couple of tries to get it just right as we hiked along the trail, and by the time Cody nodded at me that he was comfortable, I realized that my arms had gone numb, and we had to start all over again. Once the feeling came back into my arms and we could walk normally, I began to feel a burning pain on my heel, and before we were even halfway to the campsite I had a wonderful new blister on my left heel.
Still, we staggered in to the campsite in good shape and relatively high spirits, and in no time at all Cody and I had our tent set up under a shady tree all snug and comfy. Frank organized the boys for a nature walk, and I made Cody tag along. He wanted me to go, too, but I refused. After all, the whole purpose of getting him involved in scouting was to help him learn how to act like a real boy, and he could not study that hanging out with me. He had to get out there on his own and figure out how to cope, and this was as good a time as any to start. Besides, my blister hurt, and I wanted to take off my shoes and sit in the shade for a while, doing nothing more than rubbing my feet and exercising my self-pity.
And so I sat there, back against a tree trunk and bare feet stretched out in front of me, as the voices faded into the distance; Frank’s eager baritone calling out fascinating nature facts over the higher-pitched sound of the boys joking around, and the overriding noise of Mario singing “There’s a Hole in the Bucket.” I wondered whether anyone would think to feed him to an alligator.
It got very quiet, and for a few minutes I sat there and enjoyed it. A cool breeze blew through the trees and over my face. A lizard ran by me and up the tree at my back; halfway up he turned to face me and puffed out his throat, the crimson skin rolling out as if he was daring me to stand and fight. Overhead a large heron flew past, muttering to himself. He was a little awkward-looking, but perhaps that was deliberate, a kind of camouflage to lull his prey into underestimating him. I had seen his kind on the job in the water, and they were lethal and lightning-fast when they went to work on the fish. They would stand very still, looking cute and fluffy, and then slash down into the water and come up with a fish impaled on their beak. It was a great routine, and I felt a certain kinship with herons. Like me, they were predators in disguise.
The heron disappeared into the swamp, and a flock of cattle egrets went by in its place, wings rattling. Almost as if it was caused by the birds’ passage, the wind riffled through the trees and blew over me again, and it felt very good on my face and my feet. The blister on my heel stopped throbbing, I started to relax, and even all my troubles with Hood and Doakes and my Shadow faded into the background just a little. After all, it was a beautiful day in the primeval forest, in the middle of wonderful, eternal nature, complete with birds. This had not changed in thousands of years, and it might very well stay just like this for another five or six years, until somebody wanted to build condos. Beautiful wild things were killing each other all around me, and there was something soothing about sitting here and feeling like I was a part of a process that went on practically forever. Maybe there really was something to this whole Nature business after all.
It was relaxing and wonderful and lasted almost five whole minutes, and then the nagging worries began to seep back in and batter at me until all the lush feathered scenery might as well have been painted on a ratty old postcard. What did it matter if the forest was timeless? Dexter was not. My time was ticking away, draining off forever into the Long Dark Night—what good was a tree if it grew in a world with no Dexter? Even as I sat here admiring birds in the wild, my Goose was being Cooked back in the real world. With luck and skill, I might just survive the attack by Hood and Doakes—but without luck and some inspired cleverness, it was all over for me. So unless I could find a way to defuse them, I was going to end my days in a cell.
And even if I dodged their bullet, my Shadow was still lurking with unknown menace. I tried to recapture the sense of quiet confidence I’d woken up with the other day. So much had happened since, and instead of handling it with the sure-footed competence I used to display routinely, I was sitting under a tree in the swamp and watching birds, without a single thought about what to do. I didn’t have a plan. To be honest, I didn’t even have a glimmer of real thought that might turn into a plan. But there should have been some small comfort in knowing I was out here in Nature, where predators are respected, which really ought to count for something.
Sadly, there wasn’t any comfort, none at all. I could see nothing ahead of me except pain and suffering, and far too much of it was going to be mine.
“Hey, you didn’t go either, huh?” said a cheerful voice behind me, and it startled me so badly I almost threw a shoe. Instead, I merely turned around to see who had so rudely interrupted my reverie.