July 2007

Pepperfish Keys

By Darryl Wimberley

The mise en scene:

There is a Florida that has nothing to do with Disney World. Nothing to do with palm trees or Holiday Inns. Tourists are neither courted nor coddled in this Florida, and you can go a hundred miles and never find a golden arch.

It had already been a long day by the time Special Agent Barrett Raines nursed his battered Whaler toward the pier extending like a pimp's pointed finger to Senator Baxter Stanton's decadently extravagant mansion. The Senator's immaculately maintained residence and surrounding grounds looked over a well-dredged channel of silver water that cut through the sawgrass off Pepperfish Keys, its attending pier propped on pilings set straight as a plumber's bob.

The dock was freshly painted, festooned with gaudy streamers, hung with lanterns and girandoles and otherwise accrouted to receive well-heeled guests, mostly out-of-towners whose launches berthed by the dozen, the ladies and their gentlemen being helped from runabouts and sleekhulled watercraft by college boys in sweat-soaked cottons, or by co-eds in skirts and blouses as diaphanous as the wings of mosquito hawks.

"Bear" Raines reflected that he was one of the few guests invited to this affair who was indigenous to the region. The Keys, after all, were part of Dixie County, just one county south of Barrett's home on Deacon Beach. And if Bear was one of the few locals invited to Senator Stanton's party, he was certainly the only African American. Bear felt like a fieldhand calling on the Big House as he approached the pier in a boat camouflaged in a collage of paint and primer, sloughing over the twin wakes of a twenty-eight foot Blackfin and some custom-built inboard that he could not identify, some sleek and timeless teardrop of mahogany and brass.

The first newcomer to the Keys was transient, a weekend executive from Fort Meyers with a condominium near Steinhatchee. Within months a dozen other waterside retreats were erected on a variety of stilts, their owners following the waterline up and down the coast. Those first properties eventually were sold, and then resold to persons more interested in permanent residence. It was mostly in response to these transplants that tracts of tangled flatwoods were burned or bulldozed for re-lanscaping into a faux wilderness dotted with EuroCracker architecture, tin roofs and wraparound porches painted in bright pastels of exterior Latex.

Then came the big money, St. Joe marketing thousands of formerly unproductive acres as the "Other Northwest" and before you knew it bonds were issued and taxes raised to pay for roads and bridges essential to accommodate an unsought colonization.

Some locals cooperated with the occupation more than others. Dixie County's elected commissioners were observed trading in their beat-up Fords and Chevys for Land Rovers and SUVs provided courtesy of investors pledging to "develop" the area.

One hand washing the other.

Oh, but the little man benefited, too, it was argued and sure enough, within months, Piggly Wigglys and Stop N' Gos sprang up along arteries of asphalt cut through the flesh of slews and hammocks fashioned by the retreat of an ancient sea. You could rent videos, now, without driving to Cross City or Perry. You could buy beer, even on Sunday. And satellite dishes sprouted like lily pads from spec homes and doublewides that skirted the newly developed tracts like stained lace on a gaudy skirt.

The modern and moneyed men coming to Pepperfish Keys did not share those memories and were not inclined to care. These men came to retreat, or debauch. They arrived from Jacksonville or Atlanta or Miami bearing trophy wives to their trophy homes and shoveling out the cash necessary to indulge in a second adolescence beside the sea and they had nothing in common with the population they displaced.

The poor blacks and cracker whites whose families had fished and hunted the region for generations found themselves increasingly peripheral to life on Pepperfish Keys. Left to pick up the crumbs from wealthier tables, native-borns adopted that attitude so common among displaced persons, on the one hand hostile to anyone with means greater than their own and on the other positively sycophantic when it came to courting the jobs and money that outlanders brought to the region. Local whites and blacks and, to a much diminished extent, Latinos took the money offered them resenting all the while the hands who doled it. Except for Baxter Stanton's hand. Of course.

Senator Stanton was well loved by his cracker constituency, a homegrown populist who declared often and publicly that he never forgot his roots. Here was a man who worked hard, beat the odds, got rich and then had the good sense to come back home and build his Xanadu right on top of his granddaddy's homestead. Right on the swell of land which was the only high ground known on Pepperfish Keys.

Throttling back the single Evinrude driving his second-hand vessel, Barrett discerned the bulge of lawn rising beyond the dock and ascending in a gentle incline to the pier & beam foundation of Stanton's mansion and he felt the knot in his gut relax. The public ramp from where he launched at Deacon Beach was only fifteen miles or so from Baxter Stanton's private quay, but Bear remained afflicted with a fear of open water. People did get lost on the Gulf, even in good weather. And even after you got back within sight of land Senator Stanton's residence was not easy to find.

Deep inside Pepperfish Keys and secreted off a shallow bay the Senator's mansion overlooked a featureless channel of water that snaked indistinguishable from a hundred others through a prairie of sawgrass that split and split and split again before reaching the Gulf of Mexico. Oldtimers navigated to these invisible locations by instinct or the discernment of landmarks never certain in Barrett's eyes, and also by triangulating their position on the water from jerry-rigged buouys, cypress poles stuck at low tide by generations of local fishermen. Bear backed up his old Army lensatic compass with Loran, a handheld Magellan, a pair of marine-band radios, cell phone and waterproofed charts. Not to mention life vests, fresh water, and flares. That and lots of coffee.

A modern navigator, if not intrepid.

Looking past the pier and grounds Raines could now see the porch swing that Senator Stanton insisted be prominent on his acre-sized veranda. An icon of earlier and rural architecture, the porch swing allowed native voters to imagine that the Senator was still in touch with the common folk even though Baxter himself had long ago abjured porch swings and conversation for satellite TV and air-conditioning.

And other diversion.

The mansion's architecture jarred any tutored sensibility, a collision of gingerbread Victorian and Art Deco vying with Plantation influences and scale. But it proved a source of pride for locals who, seeing the uninspired and stilted boxes of the newly rich, would smile knowingly and say, "Yeah, but you oughta see the Senator's place."

Agent Raines was glad to be living in a modest Jim Walter ranchstyle with jalouised windows. He was glad that his home was a spit off the Gulf on Deacon Beach, The Beach itself a seaside village distant from any architecture worth mentioning. Barrett had always wanted to settle in his hometown, but was not exactly welcomed with open arms by the white community familiar with him from childhood. If it had not been for Ramona Walker, "Bear" as he was colloquially known, might never have got on the local police force.

Not easy to be a black cop in a white town. Many of the men, and women, whom The Bear nailed for drugs or theft or murder were people he had known since grade school. Some of the men he put in cuffs had at one time or another shoved him to the back of a schoolbus, or spilled his books in a hallway. Hard to keep a reputation for fairness or objectivity in that small society, and of course Barrett's family were not immune to the fallout.

A residue of resentment or bigotry affected Laura Anne and the boys in ways that had until fairly recently been subtle. Laura Anne, for instance, was an accomplished teacher and musician who could not get a permanent position at the local school. A written application was required of Barrett's sons before they could join the Boy Scouts.

And there were more quotidian prices exacted for living on The Beach. It was impossible to get a plumber, carpenter or electrician on time or sober for local repairs. There was no hospital, no clinic or EMS. Though the county subsidized a veterenarian, there was not a single doctor for human beings within twenty miles. The nearest supermarket was in Perry; Laura Anne spent half her free hours driving to get a pair of sneakers, a prescription filled. Everyday things.

Barrett drove an hour each day over two-lane blacktops just to get to his office. That trek took the lawman far inland to Suwannee County, a region where landowners hired immigrants to harvest their tobacco or rake their straw. The Regional Office of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement was installed in what used to be a redneck discoteque in the county seat at Live Oak; from that brick building beneath a generous grove of oak trees Agent Raines and a handful of colleagues coordinated criminal investigations ranging over seven counties and a hundred miles of coastline.

The FDLE's several Regional Offices took orders from a headquarters in Tallahassee, that bricked-in complex erected on the site of what had been, and still occasionally was described as, an asylum for the deranged. The mad hatters at Florida's Department of Law Enforcement had become indispensable to rural sheriffs in counties chronically short of cash and unable to afford the equipment, investigators, or forensic expertise necessary to investigate sophisticated or extremely violent crimes. Special Agent Raines answered to Captain Henry Altmiller in Tallahassee, the near-Calvinist Altmiller famous for recruiting the best and most tenacious investigators in the Southeast. It was Henry Altmiller who recruited the Department's first African American investigator, and it was he who had assigned The Bear his present and dreaded task.

First thing, though, was to dock his boat without fouling on turtleweed or nicking some other craft or otherwise making a fool of himself. Barrett ran up the tilt trim as he glided toward an open berth on the pier. He killed the Evinrude, leaning starboard to bumper the hull before looping a nylon line about the brass lanyard that would secure his craft, the awkward wobble attending these chores easily blamed on the roll of his aging launch.

He could see that the pier was crowded with the kind of people not used to waiting in line, the men in tailored, linen suits, dressed as boys from Eton for croquet, their wives or mistresses in sheer, summer skirts and blouses got in Paris or New York. Bear felt like a hick his off-the-shelf blazer, catalog shirt and crisply pleated khaki slacks. He snugged a Christmas tie before mounting the gunwale, timing the roll of his boat to rise onto the Senator's pier.

A few heads turned, the men scanning his boat and accoutrements, the battered hull, the ailing Evinrude, the Penn rod stuck in its ferule a lonely mast. The women who paused to note the latest arrival saw an African-American man just a smidgeon shorter than a coffin with boulder shoulders beneath an enormous skull. Hair cropped military short. Legs filling out slacks pleated and pressed to a knife's edge. They did not discern the bulge of a shoulder-holster hung inside the always-pressed blazer.

Barrett fished an envelope damp with perspiration from the breast of his Sears-bought blazer. Interesting that an agent from the FDLE was required to present in addition to his other credentials a manila invitation. A concern for security, he had been assured. The kids appointed to guard Baxter Stanton's sanctum were vetted by the senator's wife. Barbara Stanton selected the boys mostly on the basis of political connection, though she was always careful to include a token local boy at these affairs.

The co-eds, on the other hand, were selected entirely on the basis of their social affiliations at FSU. They were all sorority girls, naturally, unanimously sweet magnolias from Mrs. Stanton's alma mater. Babs often mentioned her days at FSU. "It was the '60s, but we Tri Delts didn't do daisy chains," she'd wink. "We like our men one at a time."

A bevy of sorority sweethearts now fussed over the attendees, young girls, full of juice, with waists like wasps and breasts sworn to be natural. They floated up and down the pier, those ever-smiling coeds, ministering to the visitors' every need, every visitor except the single black man standing like a domestic in their midst.

Finally a burr-cut kid in brilliant, white cotton pressed through the crowd.

"Mr. Raines? Mr. Raines, have you been helped, sir?"

Scanning a clipboard, tall and tan and dressed like Gatsby. It took Bear a moment to place the young man.

"Tommy, is that you? Tom Slade?"

"Yes, sir."

Barrett knew Tommy, of course. Knew everyone in the Slade family. Tommy's uncle was a highschool classmate who ran a repair shop in Deacon Beach. Bear and Rolly sat two desks apart in Mr. Hilton's Home Room. More recently Barrett had been forced to put Rolly's son behind bars, the teenagers crime connecting obliquely to a homicide that directly touched Bear's own family. It had been a terrible ordeal Laura Anne endured, a trial for which she had so far refused counsel.

Leaving her husband with a nameless burden.

"You up at Tallahassee, Tom?"

"No, sir. Gainesville. U of F. I'm a Gator."

"I won't tell. Need to see my invitation?"

"Oh, that's all right, Mr. Raines," the sophomore declined. "Tell you what, just follow me, I'll get you off this dock."

Heads turning, now, as the black man broke line.

Barrett offered eye contact casually with his better-dressed company. Heads snapped back to neutral as the grip of his handgun peeked briefly from its holster. Bear was returning the Senator's crested card to the pocket of his Sears & Roebuck blazer when the question came.

"How's Miz Raines doin'?"

"We're good."

The reply came abruptly.

"Thanks for asking."

Agent Raines followed his escort off the crowded pier and onto Senator Stanton's regal grounds marveling at the ways a man could waste money. An enormous, ice-carved Aphrodite dominated the center of Stanton's lawn, that statued harlot melting over magnums of champagne. The barbeque pit was as long as a boat trailer, wafting mesquite that had been corded in Texas and trucked in for the occasion.

There were tables and tables of ribs and brisket and boiled shrimp. A twenty-piece band. A half-dozen open bars. Lots of scenery.

"Get you anything, Mr. Raines?"

"I'm fine, Tommy. Thank you."

"Might keep your invitation handy. Just in case."

In case, what? That a badge and gun were not sufficient?

But Barrett kept that thought to himself as he plunged past the icy goddess of love into throngs of mortals come to worship a different sort of diety. He would estimate that a couple of hundred of Baxter's closest friends were convened to mix and mingle, their money prominently displayed on a variety of necks and wrists and fingers, a bracelet of jade set in yellow gold from Bulgari, rings by Cartier or Vera Wang. The men favored watches with big faces and lots of hands, Hublot or Diesel or TagHeur.

They roamed the grounds as if they owned the place in printed silks and cool linens got from some atelier in Miami or Paris sampling liquor and brisket served by African-Americans sweating over cole slaw and condiments in tuxedos of polyester. Many of the black people sweltering at their domestic labor were familiar to Barrett. Some were friends. Neighbors, even. But Barrett did not greet his community openly, not in this setting. Instead, there was an exchange of silent acknowledgement-- a lifted chin, a smile-- as though any other salutation were an offense to the Massuh or his guests.

Though there was one voice uncontained.

"That you, Bear?"

This bold query coming overtly from an aging black man in stained coveralls. Barrett knew Clarence Magrue, of course. Clarence was the nearest thing to a handyman you could find in Pepperfish Keys, a local scrounging jobs for half the wages anybody else would demand. The aging Magrue was also a first cousin to Corrie Jean Raines, the woman once married to Barrett's brother. Before all that business.

"Clarence, how you doin'?"

"Sweatin' like a fresh-fucked fox in a forest fire,"

Bear smiled. "Hope they're paying you."

The older man settled a toolbox to the ground.

"Heard Corrie Jean got hersef a job," the older man volunteered that non-sequitur. "Indoors. Wal-Mart. Over in Perry."

"That's good," Barrett felt a tug of guilt. Corrie Jean needed a job. She had two girls to think about.

"That's real good," Raines repeated.

"We been missin' Laura Anne," Clarence broached that topic with lowered voice. "Nobody at church kin play a piano like that girl."

"It's just the restaurant," Barrett lied. "Work and all. It'll smooth out."

"You be sure and tell her we thinkin' of her."

"Thank you, Clarence, I will."

"Reckon I better git back to work," the old man bent over stiffly to retrieve his tools. "House like that? But they ain't three pipes of plumbing you kin depend on. See you, Bear."

Barrett parted ways with the handyman to turn down the cobbled drive that had become a tarmac for a caravanserai of news vans sprouting masts and dishes on the far side of the grounds. Reporters from CNN or ABC or FOX scurried like rodents over cables and generators, urgent to interview Florida's favorite Senator. Barrett was happy to pass unnoticed among these newshounds, the Invisible Man. But there was one reporter he could not avoid; he could see her now, even through the tangle of equipment and technicians. Head and shoulders above the rest.

"How much time, Dew Drop?"

Sharon Fowler juggled the feed-interrupt at her ear.

Barrett steered a course toward Sharon and her frazzled engineer, avoiding cables and pop-out reflectors and Keno lights that you'd think were completely unnecessary at four in the afternoon. He noticed that a fair number of the out-of-town talent were checking out The Keys' local reporter. A bevy of Reese Witherspoon look-alikes all . . . . .coveting ratings in lip gloss and highlighted hair.

Agent Raines on the other hand had risen to notorious fame by the route of public humiliation when his widely publicized investigation of Senator Baxter Stanton completely and ignominiously tanked. Sharon Fowler had been only too happy to chronicle that debacle for the viewing public. She latched onto the Stanton investigation as though it were Watergate and never let go, and now Barrett was summoned for what he knew could only be a televised spanking.