Lost in the River of Grass Page 17

  The last picture is of the python killing the alligator. Andy’s a blur in the foreground, but the life-and-death struggle behind him is sharp and clear.

  “God,” Dad says.

  Mom presses a hand to her chest. “I’d have died right there of a heart attack,” she says.

  …

  On the next Saturday, Dad and I drive south out of Coconut Grove to Macaw World, which is on Red Road. I’ve been there once when my cousin from Alabama visited, but that was when I was eight. I didn’t remember anything about it except a cockatoo on roller skates.

  If Dad didn’t have a connection with the owner, they would never have agreed to take Teapot. A mallard is neither exotic nor a draw for the tourist dollar.

  Teapot paces the interior of the box I hold in my lap. She’s doubled in size over this last week. Her breast and belly are losing their downy yellow feathers, replaced instead by tightly packed, waterproof adult ones. Her wings are still nubs, but stubby little pinfeathers, encased in gunmetal gray shafts, have begun to appear.

  If I thought walking out of the Everglades was the hardest thing I’d ever have to do, I was wrong. That was physical. Giving Teapot up makes me feel as if my heart is going to break. I’ve cried myself dry over the last few days, and my parents don’t know how to make this easier. Even now, Dad and I are driving there in silence. I’m glad. I just want to think about Andy, Teapot, and the Everglades.

  “Have you heard from Andy?” Dad’s looking at me, his face creased with concern.

  It startles me that he should ask just when I was thinking about him. “Yes. A couple of phone calls and a few e-mails from a computer at his school. He’s fine. On restriction until he can vote, but fine.”

  “Nice boy, but that duck’s got a better chance of making something of himself than Andy does, poor kid.”

  “What makes you say that?” My tone is snappy.

  “Don’t get me wrong, I’m not wishing failure on him. I just don’t think he has the initiative to overcome where he lives and his father.”

  I turn and stare out the window. “He knows nearly everything about the Everglades.”

  “That will only help him if he sinks another boat.”

  “He got me out in one piece.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I see Dad glance at me. “You know what I think?”

  “No.” I’m mad at him for talking about Andy like that, and for finding a place for Teapot. I want him to shut up.

  “I think that if he’d broken his leg, or got bitten by that moccasin, you would have walked out on your own.”

  “No way. I was scared of everything that moved out there.”

  “You weren’t by the time you got out, were you?”

  I shrug. “I don’t know. I guess I finally realized I was scaring them more than they were scaring me.”

  “That’s not the half of it. You’ve got guts, Sarah.”

  “I sure didn’t start out with any. Maybe I got them from a mosquito bite.” I try to smile. “You know,” I say after a minute. “We both did what we had to do to get out, and we did it by tapping into what we were each good at. We were a team.”

  I think again about the picture of Andy that I took. It’s in a little frame by my computer. I figured out why he looks like he’s from a different era. He has a kind face like Mr. Vickers. Not many of us do anymore.

  Teapot’s attempting to leap out of the box through the gap in the lid. I can feel her leave the bottom, fall, struggle to her feet and leap again. It reminds me of how I pushed myself to keep going. I wonder if Dad’s right. Did I always have what it took to get out of there, or does it seem that way because I made it? I try to think back on how many times I said, “I can’t,” yet every time I could, and I did. Maybe I’ve always underestimated myself because other people saw me as black and a girl, and made all kinds of assumptions about who I was and what I was capable of. I don’t see myself through their eyes anymore. I see myself through my own.

  I look at my dad’s profile. “I made the wrong choice to go in the airboat with Andy,” I say, “but I’m glad it happened. It’s awesome out there, Dad, and it changed me.”

  Each time Teapot hears my voice, she tries harder to get out.

  “How so?” Dad says.

  “You and Mom tried to load me with self-confidence, but when I was at Tucker, I never had to face competition or disappointment or disapproval. At Glades no one thinks I’m special—except maybe Mr. Vickers. And none of the kids want anything to do with me. Andy’s just the opposite of me. He’s had no one to tell him that he’s smart or brave or can accomplish anything he sets out to do. I’ve had all kinds of support from you and Mom, he’s had none, yet he rose to the challenge of getting us out of there. He lived up to what I expected of him.

  “I’ve wondered for days why he didn’t tell me he couldn’t swim. At first I thought it was stupid of him, but now I think it was because he felt obligated to save me— like he could will himself to swim. If he was ever afraid, he never let it show. All day, every day, he fought down the pain he must have felt to protect me. So you’re wrong about him. We both came out changed from the way we went in.” I stop and think of the minnows eating the skin

  I washed out of my socks. “I’m brand new.” I open the box and lift Teapot out. “And Andy is my best friend.”

  Dad takes his foot off the gas and steers to the side of the road into the parking lot of a fruit stand.

  “You can’t imagine what we went through. We thought we’d lost you.” He suddenly puts his forehead between his hands on the steering wheel.

  “Daddy?”

  “I’m okay.”

  I leave my hand on his arm. After a moment he raises his head, puts his fingers under his sunglasses frame to wipe the tears away, then turns the key in the ignition. It makes a horrible grinding noise because he never turned off the engine. We look at each other and laugh.

  …

  The employee at the back gate of Macaw World takes one look at Teapot and her head snaps up. “That’s a mallard.”

  “Yes.” I say.

  “Why would you rescue a mallard? The only thing worse is a Muscovy.”

  “Because I ran over it with an airboat, killed its brother, and scared its mother away.”

  The girl looks blankly at me.

  I feel a moment of hopefulness. I’d be much happier taking Teapot back home. I glance at Dad.

  “Young lady, I’m a . . . business associate of the owner, and we have his permission to bring this duckling here.”

  Dad dressed up to come here today. It’s breaking my heart to see him pretending to be important for me and Teapot.

  “But aside from that, you apparently don’t know who my daughter is. She is the young woman who walked out of the Everglades, and this is the duckling she carried with her.”

  The girl’s eyes widen. “That’s Teapot?”

  I nod.

  “I’m sorry. That’s like totally different.” She holds the gate open for us. “My name’s Amanda.” She grins.

  My insides roil with swallowed laughter. “Hello, Amanda. I’m Sarah.”

  Amanda leads us along the path past cages full of colorful parrots, many of which fly to the wire and chatter at us as we pass.

  I leave the cardboard box in the car and carry Teapot in the folded-up hem of my T-shirt. My legs feel almost as heavy as they had trying to slog through calf-deep mud. Teapot trusts me to take care of her, to feed and protect her. She settles against my stomach and watches our progress with mild interest.

  We reach the patio above a lawn that sweeps down to the pond where flamingos are feeding. A beautiful girl with auburn hair is sitting at a picnic table with a chimpanzee on her lap.

  “She’s deaf,” Amanda says. “She and that chimp talk using sign language.”

  Both Dad and I smile at her. “What’s the chimp doing here?” I ask.

  “There’s a rehab facility in the northwest corner.” Amanda points off to her left. �
�That’s Sukari. She was rescued from a laboratory somewhere.”

  There are ducks resting on the grass at the edge of the water. They are all mallards. One female has six newly hatched babies. It’s amazing the difference two weeks have made. Teapot’s more than three times their size.

  When I put her on the grass, Teapot stretches, fluffs, flaps her wing nubs and shakes her pinfeather tail, then runs roly-poly toward the water. One of the male mallards gets up and charges Teapot, knocking her over.

  I clap my hand over my mouth to keep from yelling at it.

  Teapot rights herself and races up the incline with the male mallard, head low, right behind her. The adult duck draws up short when Teapot gets back to me and lodges herself between my ankles.

  “They’re not going to accept her,” I tell Dad.

  Amanda pulls on her chin like an old man with whiskers. “It may take some time. Let me go get some food and see if that distracts them.”

  I cuddle Teapot until Amanda returns. When she throws a fistful of cracked corn into the shallow water, all the ducks skid in and begin to dabble, some in water deep enough to upend. The mother duck and her babies stay on the edges of the frenzy, and it’s toward them that I walk slowly with Teapot beside me. I position myself between the five adult ducks in the water and the mother and her babies, then scatter a handful of corn just off the end of my flip-flops. Teapot goes right to work and is quickly surrounded by babies. The mother duck waddles in, ignores Teapot, and begins to eat.

  “This would be a good time to slip away,” Amanda says. “If you’ll call me tomorrow, I’ll let you know how she’s doing.”

  I feel Daddy put his arm around my shoulders, then the pressure of him turning me. As we walk slowly up toward the patio, I keep glancing back, waiting—wishing Teapot would look up and see me leaving.

  Andy told me a python can go up to two years without food, but after a while, it will begin to feed on its own muscles. I wonder if it hurts like this when the snake begins to ingest its own heart. Tears run down my cheeks. “I feel so bad.”

  “I know, Honey.” Daddy strokes my wild hair. “Love can sure knock the blocks out from under you.”

  I glance again at the deaf girl as we pass. Her expression is full of sympathy. She holds the chimpanzee so its head is pressed to her shoulder. “I know how you feel,” she says.

  I nod. “Thank you.”

  At the top of the hill, I look back. Teapot and the other babies are where the muddy, churned-up water laps at the shore. A sob catches in my throat. I turn and put my head against Dad’s chest.

  “Love lets go,” he whispers.

  I look back one last time. Teapot’s sitting on the beach, preening. “I hope she forgets me quickly.”

  “I doubt that she will, but I don’t think she’ll mind much. She’s safe here.”

  “I guess.”

  We start back past the cages of parrots.

  “You know what helped me keep going, out there?”

  He shakes his head.

  “Remembering how we used to hang out together. Why don’t we ever fish anymore, or dig turtle nests?”

  Daddy shrugs. “I thought you’d outgrown doing those things with your old dad.”

  “Maybe I did for a while, but in the Everglades, I kept remembering those times and I realized how much I missed them.” I take his hand.

  Amanda from Macaw World called today. Teapot’s fine.

  I wait another week, then ride my bike there to see for myself. Amanda lets me in the back gate and then leaves me to sit alone at one of the picnic tables. If Teapot wasn’t the odd-sized duck, I wouldn’t have recognized her. She’s doubled in size again.

  All the ducks are used to people, so none look up when I sit down. Teapot is a little apart from the mother duck and her babies, but she’s clearly become part of that family. I try to will her to look at me.

  The flamingos are feeding, walking in a group of about twenty, all with their heads upside down, bills sweeping from side to side. A little boy runs by me and down the hill toward the ducks. His arms are spread like he’s trying to take off. I jump up protectively, but Teapot and the others waddle unalarmed into the water and drift just out of reach. It’s when I’m standing on the hill that Teapot looks directly at me, and there is a moment of recognition, like I’m someone from her past she can’t quite place. I get that a lot. People have seen my picture in the paper but think they actually know me. Teapot is still watching me when the little boy’s mother heads down to fetch him.

  “Stay out of the mud,” she says.

  He laughs and begins to stomp up and down just at the water’s edge, elbows flared.

  The mother duck leads her babies into deeper water. Teapot turns and follows them.

  …

  Maybe there’s a patron saint that takes care of lost causes, but all the things that were wrong at school aren’t anymore. I made friends with a girl who’s on the swimming team with me, and the AABCs—Amanda, Amanda, Brittany, and Courtney—act like we were friends before I became the school celebrity. But the best change is in Andy’s father. This month, when he came to Miami to see his parole officer, he brought Andy with him. We didn’t do much, just wandered in and out of the shops at CocoWalk and went to see a movie where we held hands, and when we were walking back to where we were supposed to meet his dad, he put his arm around my shoulders.

  “Dad got a job.”

  “That’s great, Andy.” I love the weight of his arm.

  “One of his buddies is fighting cancer, so Dad leased his boat for the stone crab season. I’m helping him on weekends. Maybe you’d like to come out with us one day.”

  “I doubt your dad would go for that.”

  “I ripped that flag down, Sarah, and he never said a word.”

  “He didn’t?”

  “Nope. I think he figured out what a jerk he was and is trying to change.”

  “Well, I hope he makes it.”

  “I’ll be sixteen in a couple of months, you know. Then I can drive myself over.”

  “We’d better not tell my parents. They may not want me dating an older man.”

  Andy looks at me, then grins when he realizes I’m kidding.

  …

  Teapot turned out to be a boy.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I was a pitifully poor student in school, partly because of some vision problems, but mostly because I hated certain subjects, like English and foreign languages, but loved others, like science and math. History and social studies were okay, but it says something that I remember the names of only two of my middle-school teachers, both of whom were—in my memory—fantastic. One was Ms. Andrews, my eighth-grade algebra teacher, and the other was Mr. Vickers, my seventh-grade science teacher. It may not be too much of an exaggeration to say they saved me from completely abandoning my education. While I accomplished only Cs and Ds in other subjects, I made As in math and science. The importance of those As would influence the course of my life from then on. No matter how poorly I did in middle school and later in high school, I knew I had the ability to do better. In other words, I wasn’t lacking the intelligence; I was lacking the maturity to tackle subjects I didn’t like. That’s a very important distinction.

  As mere coincidence, Mr. Vickers was on one of my flights some years later when I was a flight attendant for National Airlines. I didn’t tell him what I just told you. I didn’t know it then. I hadn’t gone back to school yet. That didn’t happen until 1977, when I enrolled in University of Miami, so I didn’t know enough to thank him. For years, I wished I had. I wish I’d told him then that he was a wonderful teacher. I wished this so much that a few months ago I called my middle school to see if anyone there remembered him. By that afternoon, I was in contact with his daughter and his son-in-law, and by the next day in touch with him. I finally got to say thank you. It felt wonderful.

  I also wish to thank the members of my writing groups: Norma Watkins, Katherine Brown, Maureen Eppstein, Katy Pye, and
Jeannie Stickle. They are the most recent of my helpmates. There were dozens of classmates in graduate school who also had a hand in shaping this story as far back as I can remember. In fact, I’ve been noodling it for years, first as the true account of my husband’s experiences walking out of the Everglades, then in the fictional form it now takes. The first person to critique this was Nobel Prize–winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer, who taught with Lester Goren at UM in the early 1980s. “Dis is real writing,” he said. So, like Sarah and Andy, I slogged on.

  Thanks also to Suzanne Byerley’s editing skills, and Ralph Bellman, who knows the ’Glades like the back of his hand, and Teresa Sholars, who traveled to Florida with me when I was finishing up my research and got her feet wet.

  Thanks always to Laura Dail, my fabulous agent, and to Andrew Karre, an editor worth his salt.