“I’m not in sixth grade, Mike. You two shared a lot together. It’s sad if you can’t be friends. I trust you, and I hope you trust me. Give Stacey my best if you see her.”
“The truth is, I could use a good night’s rest.”
“Me, too. I think I caught a bug.”
* * *
My favorite photo of Stacey stared up from the lighted screen of my phone. I had taken the picture on a summer evening four years earlier while we were canoeing the famed Allagash Wilderness Waterway in northern Maine. Her dark hair was tousled. There was a sheen of perspiration on her cheekbones. Her eyes were the color of jade.
Stacey and I had lived together for close to two years, and everyone assumed we would get married. She was the daughter of people I already loved like parents. We shared a passion for the outdoors. She was intelligent, fearless, and capable. For a long time, I had believed she must be my soul mate.
In the end, it was the qualities we had in common that drove us apart. Where I was reckless, she was almost pathologically irresponsible. Where I was stubborn, she was unyielding to a fault. Where I was quick to anger, she stoked her rage with a red-hot poker. Our decision to separate had been no less sad for being by mutual agreement.
Stacey answered at once. “Well, howdy, stranger!”
“How did you know it was me?”
“I have you in my list of favorites. I’m looking at your picture right now. You’re in your field uniform, looking all brooding and handsome.”
“I don’t look like that anymore. I grew my hair out for my job as an investigator.”
“Just as long as it isn’t a mullet. So, listen, I’d love to catch up, but you caught me as I was walking out the door.”
Was it relief I felt or disappointment? “I’ll let you go then.”
“Not without telling me why you called. What’s up?”
“I’m in Florida.”
“No shit? Where?”
“West of Miami. I’m stuck in traffic on the 836. I just saw an exit for Sweetwater.”
“You have to come see me! You’ll regret it for the rest of your life if you pass this up.”
“Pass what up?” I asked, worried.
“We’re going on a wild python hunt.”
4
On the flight to Miami, I had passed the hours reading a natural history guide to South Florida. The book included a section devoted to imported reptiles—notably, Burmese pythons and Nile monitor lizards—that had either escaped captivity or been released by negligent pet owners. Without natural predators, these two invasive species had taken over the wet prairies, pine hammocks, and cypress swamps south of Lake Okeechobee. Biologists had found deer fawns, raccoons, wild piglets, marsh rabbits, and even alligators inside the bellies of the pythons. Out of desperation, the state was holding derbies with cash prizes for civilian hunters who killed the most and biggest snakes.
That afternoon, a hiker had reported an enormous Burmese python near a trailhead in the Big Cypress National Preserve. Stacey was joining a biologist friend in an attempt to locate and capture the monster snake before it swallowed someone’s toddler. She told me to meet her at a place called Fortymile Bend, ten minutes west of the Miccosukee Restaurant.
“It’ll be like old times,” she promised.
That was what worried me. We had brought out the worst in each other more often than the best. By ourselves, we were daredevils. Together, we were a pair of lunatics.
But how could I resist the adventure of hunting a serpent that reached lengths of twenty feet and could weigh as much as two hundred pounds?
The sun was setting, but I couldn’t see it for the black clouds boiling out of the Gulf. As I neared Shark Valley, I saw the first blue pulses of electricity lighting up the thunderheads from within. The wind blew palm fronds and palmetto fans onto the slick blacktop. By the time the sign for Fortymile Bend appeared in my headlights, the rain was pelting my windshield like bird shot.
A Land Rover with a canoe strapped to the roof rack flicked its headlights as I turned into a circular drive outside the Tamiami Ranger Station. I pulled on my raincoat and hurried across the surface of crushed white shells that seemed to be what road builders used here in lieu of gravel. The wet air smelled of swamp plants my northern nose couldn’t identify.
Inside the Rover, she pulled me close enough that the fumes from the bug dope on her skin knocked me out. She looked leaner, with the beginnings of wrinkles around her almond-shaped eyes. She placed a tanned hand on either side of my face.
“You’re all grown-up!”
“I like to think I was before.”
“Do you have a head net and bug suit?”
“I am an investigator. I was here doing background checks.”
She always became most beautiful when she laughed. “You really have no idea what you’re in for tonight. Florida mosquitoes are relentless. They make the Terminator look weak-willed.”
“They can’t be any worse than the blackflies back home.”
“That’s like saying death by hanging can’t be any worse than death by firing squad.” She handed me a small bottle of mosquito repellent. “You should buckle up. The drive to Gator Hook Strand is going to be wet and wild.”
She put the transmission into gear and skidded onto the back road that split off the four-lane, heading southwest into what looked like real backcountry.
“I can’t believe you’re really here,” she said, smiling again. “Stranger in a strange land.”
“You seem to have adapted.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure. Did my mom and dad make you promise to come see me when they heard you were visiting Florida?”
“Not in so many words.”
Charley and Ora Stevens had been heartbroken when Stacey and I split up. Ora had intuited that things hadn’t been great for a while. But Charley had nurtured dreams of grandchildren.
“Being so far from my folks is the hardest part of living here,” she said. “I keep inviting them down, but you know how my mom feels about planes.”
Ora Stevens had been paralyzed below the waist in a plane crash during a flying lesson from her husband. He’d walked away from the wreckage with nothing but a broken arm and a crushing weight on his conscience.
“Of course, my dad knows South Florida like the back of his hand from the months he spent here back in the aughts.”
“What?”
“The State of Florida hired him to help with an aerial survey, counting manatees.”
“He never told me that!”
She twitched her nose bewitchingly. “Charley Stevens, international man of mystery.”
I slathered bug dope behind my ears. It smelled like the liquid poison it was. “How is your job going?”
“Besides soul-crushing? We had forty Florida panthers killed in the state last year, up from the year before. We build fences along the highways and wildlife underpasses they can use to cross from one side to the other, but that doesn’t help along all the back roads, where people speed along at night at eighty miles an hour. Meanwhile, development keeps encroaching into their habitat because what’s the value of an endangered species compared to selling the next Del Boca Vista? And now we’re seeing a crippling disorder in some of the cats that inhibits coordination of their rear legs. Wasn’t there a crazy king who tried to fight the rising tide with a sword? That’s me.”