Red Thunder

“This is Dottle’s room,” Grace said. “She’s my eleven-year-old. The bathroom’s down at the end of the hall.”

“Oh, Grace,” Kelly said, “we don’t want to put your daughter out of her room. We’ll be all right just to-”

“Don’t you worry about Dottie, honey. She’s stayin’ over, slumber partyin’ with friends, and I’m sure they’re havin’ a ball. Probably all still awake. Y’all get some rest now, hear?”

She closed the door, and Kelly leaned close to my ear and spoke softly.

“I should have known nobody in the Broussard family would have only one child,” she said. We tried to laugh quietly since the walls were thin. It turned out there were eight bedrooms in the rear extension, one for each child, with Caleb and Grace’s bedroom in the original trailer. “Just added a room on every time a new one was born,” Travis told us later.

We sat on the bed and fooled around a little, then admitted to each other that we were worn out from the long drive. We got into bed, and I was asleep instantly.

BREAKFAST WAS RUSHED. Travis kept us all moving. Me and Dak and Kelly were bleary-eyed, Dak muttering that if he never saw another crawfish it’d be too soon as he carefully sipped at a glass of milk. Alicia was one of those hateful people who woke up with a spring in her step and a song in her heart. She hummed as she made one of her horrible concoctions in Grace’s blender, adding who-knows-what that [170] she’d brought along herself to whatever fruit Grace had handy, then even got Grace to taste it. Grace was either an accomplished liar or she actually dug the stuff.

Travis and Jubal had been up all night and didn’t look the worse for wear. They each downed cups of strong coffee while I nibbled on the buttered toast Grace had made when she couldn’t persuade me to let her get out her skillet. We all drank lots of coffee.

I got in Blue Thunder and Kelly sat in the back of the Hummer with Jubal. That was Kelly’s idea. We’d decided we didn’t want to leave the two of them alone u

When Caleb started his pickup it shuddered hard enough to rain flakes of rust down on the dirt. He put it in gear and started out… and the whole tailpipe and muffler and cat converter assembly fell off. Caleb sprang out of the truck, grabbed the pipe, and tossed it on the side of the road.

“Dak, that is the sorriest truck I ever saw that could actually move,” I said.

“He done used it hard, all right,” Dak said. “Especially when you consider it’s only four years old.”

I looked again, and saw he was right.

“Ru

We got under way as the sun was just breaking over the eastern horizon. I hoped we weren’t trying to sneak up on anybody, since Caleb’s truck with no muffler was now about as loud as an armored invasion.

We had left the Ferrari at the Broussards’ and I could soon see why. That Italian terminator would have high-centered out within the first quarter mile as we bounced over a deeply rutted road into the swamp. [171] Actually, further into the swamp, as daylight had made it clear that Caleb and Grace’s place was already well into it.

“Don’t worry about your car none, Kelly,” Caleb had told her as he climbed into the cab of the pickup. “Anybody looks at that whiz-banger crooked, Billy’ll wrap a gun barrel round his fool head. Slept out here on the porch last night with a shotgun ’crost his lap. Lucky thing a dog didn’t bark or he’d of blowed off a toe.”

Much of the vastness of the Florida Everglades is roadless, trackless, “where the hand of man has never set foot,” as the saying goes. The Jeep tracks that lead into it, like the one we’d used to reach the Broussard abode, tended to peter out in a few miles. Then, here and there, the passage of a few four-wheel-drive vehicles a week has made some informal routes along what little ground isn’t four feet deep in quicksand or gumbo mud. Some of them are indicated on maps, others aren’t. But we didn’t need any maps with Caleb leading the way. He knew them all, or claimed to.

This was not the Florida I knew. I could identify some of the plants from seeing tamer versions in people’s yards or in city parks. They grew differently out here. But I’m a city boy, don’t know much about plants even in town.

Don’t know much about birds, either, but this was the place to come if you wanted to learn. I never saw so many birds. They’d explode from the reeds and moss-hung trees when they heard us coming. Big birds, little birds, great big flocks of black birds, thousands of egrets or cranes or something like that who just stood there and watched us go by.

Me and Alicia both craned our necks the first time Dak pointed out a big old alligator su

Two miles later it was here a gator, there a gator, everywhere an alligator. Ho-hum. We actually had to wait for one to get out of the road in front of us. The gator probably thought of it as a gator track… and he’d be right. He was here first, he’d watched the dinosaurs come and go, and maybe he’d be here still once this critter calling itself “humanity” killed itself off.

[172] They say the Everglades are in trouble, what with the water being siphoned off up north, Miami advancing from the east, pesticides, global warming, I don’t know what all. And I believe them. But just driving through for the first time, I was in awe at the sheer numbers of the wildlife we saw.

Unfortunately, among that wildlife you had to count the mosquitoes.

Billions of mosquitoes.

Now we knew why Caleb had tossed a big plastic bottle of Off! on the front seat of Blue Thunder. We coated ourselves with the stuff, Alicia slathering it on Dak as he drove. Blue Thunder didn’t have an air conditioner-one of the few vehicles in Florida without one-but it wouldn’t have mattered, because we all knew we’d be out in the open soon enough, whenever Caleb got where he was taking us.

The repellent helped, but about one in a hundred of those critters seemed to think Off! was just there to oil up their bloodsucker, make it easier to slide it into the skin. It appears we’re breeding a better, stronger skeeter out there in the swamps, and when their kids grow up, look out!

OUR DESTINATION TURNED out to be the rotting remains of a dock, smack in the middle of nowhere. I know, because somebody had put up a sign: middle of nowhere. Redneck humor, I guess. The sign was about to fall over.

A flat-bottom Cajun pirogue could have made it through the shallow cha

Caleb and Travis pulled a big canvas tarp off a big lumpy thing sitting next to the dock and I wasn’t too surprised to see it was an airboat. Where the four-wheel tracks end, that’s where the airboat trails begin.

It was a wide, flat-bottom aluminum hull, extremely shallow draft, designed to skim over the water rather than cut through it. At the back was an aircraft engine mounted high in a safety cage. In front of it, almost as high, was a sort of crow’s nest seat for the pilot to sit in, way [173] up where he could more easily pick out his route. An airboat didn’t need much water under the hull. An inch was plenty. If you had a good head of steam and kept going, it would glide right over mud, too. Even dry land, for a while. “Don’t need no more water’n a skeeter can spit,” Caleb said as we boarded.