1THE CHASE
It was nighttime in the orange grove, and the sound of helicopter blades beat overhead. Otherwise, it was dark, and the dark was quiet. No frogs chirped. No crickets sang. Not even a mosquito whined through the open windows of Jeff’s patrol truck. He blamed the smell for the quiet. The grove exuded the sickly-sweet scent of acetone. Pesticide. Of course it was quiet here. When the chak-chak-chak of the helicopter blades faded, it left only the hum of his idling engine and the sigh of his K-9 in the back seat.
Jeff’s CB radio crackled. He sat up straight, and so did his dog, a Goldador named Mack, dressed in his working vest and looking very official. They were ready to track down the poachers whose flashlights the chopper spotted from the air. But it was too soon, the crackle just radio chatter. Mack rested his chin on his paws.
This wasn’t Jeff’s first time on a detail, where a group of Florida Fish and Wildlife officers like himself would spread out on the edge of the Everglades and wait. When the time came, an alert would snap over the airwaves, and the trucks would come to life all over the county and close in around the suspect. Sometimes it was a small-time hunter bagging deer out of season. Other times, they were something more, endangered fern thieves, turtle smugglers. Jeff never knew what they were going to flush out of the swamp until it came.
But first he had to wait.
Jeff was fifty-three years old and coming to the end of his long career as a wildlife protector, so he knew there was no such thing as a usual day on the job. A lifetime ago, his family had moved from Guam to Colorado then down to the Everglades, replacing one kind of big sky for another. There in Homestead, the southernmost town before US-1 hops the southern glades and Blackwater Sound to become the Overseas Highway, he became a short-order cook and fell in love with the waitress who would become his wife. He fell in love, too, with the glades and the swamps, with the untamable backcountry that most people who don’t know any better revile, mistaking the grasses and tangles of cypress domes for wastelands when in reality they are the most abundant tracts on Earth, paradise within paradise. It called out to him. Soon he joined the Florida Game and Freshwater Fish Commission as a fisheries technician. His career evolved from there into game warden then patrol officer. For nearly thirty years, Jeff ventured out into that rough land determined to protect every scraggly inch, from the most charismatic flora and fauna—your orchids and your panthers, your sugar gliders and your black bears—to the crawling things and the slithering things, the fearsome, the slippery, the bug-eyed, the things it seemed no one loved except for him. He saw the beauty in them. He often wondered, Why can’t everyone else?
No matter how much he loved the wild, he was glad that his time as an officer was coming to a close. His black crew cut was beginning to salt. Smile lines touched the corners of his eyes. He had kept in shape, his five-foot-eight frame maintaining a martial boxiness. He ran, lifted weights, practiced tae kwon do and karate. Yet the aches of age had come all the same. He was anxious, too, for a chance to enjoy the wilderness he had fought so long to protect. Still, he knew he might have to move. As the only Pacific Islander on the force, he was recognizable, though no one could ever exactly place him. Hawaiian? they would guess. Māori? Never Guam, but that was okay by him. The better for his anonymity. Unless they had been in the military, most people whom Jeff talked to had never met anybody from Guam before. He worried that the men he had put in jail would come back to take their revenge. Retirement, and the choice to move or stay, was three years away. There were days when it couldn’t come soon enough.
Jeff sat with his thermos full of coffee, windows down, glad for the humid chill in the air and the lack of mosquitoes, even though he found the void of sound and the reason for it unsettling. While he waited, he contemplated the future, perhaps a cabin in the mountains, time to spend with his wife and son and his dogs, a stream where they might fish, the wild duck that would be their dinner, the trails they would hike, winding up through the oaks and hemlocks to a rocky edge overlooking the misty uplifts of the Blue Ridge and the valley below where the setting sun hit reservoirs and rivulets, turning them into molten gold.
But what did leaving mean, really? Sometimes it felt like escape, other times, like abandonment. The Everglades and the swamps around them were more than a place to Jeff. They were part of him. Sometimes it seemed he knew them better than he knew himself. He could identify every type of grass in a glade, every species of tree, every paw print in the mud, every plaintive hoot punctuating the usual music of the night. He saw himself as doing good for the people, too. He was quick to let folks off with a warning. He preferred educating them to slapping them with fines or worse. As much as he felt a strong connection to his job at FWC, Jeff knew not everyone at the agency felt the same way. When he left, they might replace him with someone who held the law in higher regard than he held humanity. That kind of thinking didn’t help anybody, and it certainly didn’t stop wildlife crime.
Could he leave that life? Even if he did, would it ever leave him? For that matter, did he want it to?
Though outwardly gregarious, Jeff was a big reader and a contemplative man. Waiting for the call from dispatch, he sank into thought, brooding about the fate of this wilderness, or what remained of it, after he left. This grove was wild no more. The rows of orange trees, taller than his truck and heavy with round, ripe fruit, were so long and straight—controlled—that they shrank into the distance, met the horizon, and kept going on into the dark. The cities surrounding Tampa Bay gave a faint, sallow glow to the lower edge of the sky. Jeff listened, hoping to hear a lonesome croak or yowl.
Nothing.
There had once been a time, twenty years ago when Jeff was a game warden, when more panthers prowled up to this latitude rather than remaining in their paltry preserve just north of the Fakahatchee Strand. While on patrol, he could cruise for miles without seeing any hint of human presence except the highway, his only company the ephemeral flash of orbs on the roadside, the spooked eyes of white-tailed deer raising their timid heads before they fled past the tree line, or, if Jeff was lucky, the lumbering boulder of a black bear or a glimpse of a tawny Florida panther tail as it slunk into the scrub. Such sightings were brief and rare, even then, like the glimmer of a comet seen through a telescope, there and gone. When Jeff looked into his rearview mirror, these atavistic figures would invariably have vanished, leaving him to wonder if he had seen the creatures at all or if they had been will-o’-the-wisps, tricks that swamp gas had played on his tired eyes.
Such was the state of this disappearing wilderness, even more so now than it was then: Sightings of some animals were becoming so scant that they had risen to the level of the supernatural, the extraordinary. Jeff knew there was a time before, when the swamps and humanity had lived with each other, before swamp had become a cursed word, before developers and vacationers and miners and factory farmers pushed the things that had crawled and dug and swum and flown there since time immemorial to the margins so they could take larger bites of a place they said they loved and would ultimately destroy. But Jeff hadn’t seen that time. No one alive had, not really. Only the oaks and cypresses had been there that long, and their numbers had shriveled, too.
Yet still, within his own memory, the night had once writhed with wildness, with songs and chirps and croaks and growls. That was why Jeff could recognize a bull gator’s guttural bellow. He knew, too, that a panther’s roar sounded almost human, close to a scream but more sharp-toothed and primal. These days, folks thought the woods were haunted if they heard such a fiendish noise out there in the dark. They had all become interlopers there, hiding along the coasts, disconnected from the shrinking wilderness just beyond their backyards, its dwindling night music fading to an echo of a vanishing chthonic past. Jeff admitted he had become one of them, living in a safe world of manicured yards and trappers capturing the wild things to keep them where they supposedly belonged.
The radio squawked once more, rousing Jeff from his ruminations. The chopper had spotted lights in the brush not far away, outside the little town of Wauchula. When the closest officer checked in on the man and his accomplice, they sprinted to their pickup truck, jumped in, and fled. That officer was in pursuit already, but the suspect refused to pull over. They had a car chase on their hands. Dispatch summoned all nearby units to join the pursuit. Sheriff’s deputies were on their way as well. So much for that quiet night.
“Let’s go to work!” Jeff exclaimed to Mack, and the dog perked up.
Jeff snapped his seat belt and flicked on his lights and sirens. They wailed into the silence of the grove, now lit a swimming blue. He peeled out and sped through the back roads, heading for where he predicted the chase would go. He swerved onto the county road, and there, ahead of him, a single set of blue lights was shrinking rapidly into the distance. Jeff floored it.
Speeding off in pursuit always got Jeff’s blood up. He felt alive, excited. He was doing something to protect that wild country instead of just thinking about it. But also, he admitted, he liked to go fast, to get out on a clean stretch of road, so straight that he could see the wink of oncoming headlights from miles away, and really open up his engine. He raced between the pines and cypresses, zipping around a semi-truck like a streak of light beneath the tufts of palm heads standing on their spindly trunks below a limitless sky and its splash of stars.
The blue lights in front of him grew until he was right behind them. He and the first officer had a quick exchange over the radio. The officer was pulling information on the license plate, but Jeff already knew who it was. He recognized the truck, a green Dodge with a topper. It belonged to a man named Clyde, a habitual poacher. The last time Jeff saw Clyde was when he sent the man to prison. That was several years ago. In the intervening time, Jeff had worked in the Florida panhandle. Even while he was away, landowners in Manatee County, his old jurisdiction south of Tampa Bay, called him up to shoot the breeze and tell him about any nefarious goings-on down there in the swampland. One had said Clyde had gotten out of prison and was back at it again, not only poaching but frequenting local bars and hangouts and bragging about how many deer he’d killed. Jeff was nothing if not meticulous. He wrote himself a note—he kept notes for everything—to check in on Clyde and others if he ever worked in Manatee again.
So when Jeff transferred back a few weeks prior, he began to investigate the leads from his notes. He asked around about Clyde but didn’t find anything. Now here he was, racing through the swamp with a growing herd of black-and-whites on his tail.
Clyde wouldn’t let up. The chase zagged from Hardee County down into DeSoto, deep river country beneath enormous live oak trees heavy with Spanish moss, before swinging into gladeland, back roads, sawgrass, and open sky. By two thirty in the morning, they had careened across three different counties, twenty-one miles. Their attempts to cut Clyde off or reroute him had failed. They reached speeds over a hundred miles per hour, going so fast that Jeff could smell his transmission burning. Now the Dodge veered onto a levee, lit from above by the helicopter’s spotlight.
He’s going for the canal, Jeff thought. If they got to it, the suspects could steal a boat—or perhaps hop into one that was waiting for them—and abscond into the alligators’ kingdom like many a fugitive before them, never to be found.
They had left the domain of so-called civilization behind and had entered the swamp. There, the primordial past still reigned, stubborn and unconquerable, rebuffing all the future’s attempts to push its way in. The swamp has swallowed whole planned subdivisions. A Space Race–era rocket facility sits abandoned in the southern glades, its warehouses and missile silos the prey of wet air, graffiti, and nature as the land takes itself back. Shot-up planes downed in cypress domes tell the story of cocaine cowboys and a lawlessness that lives on just out of sight. Skeletons of 1940s automobiles nestle in the saw palm fronds. People have dumped just about everything in the glades: cigarette machines, backhoes, pet snakes, dead bodies. In that country, it is easy to disappear. It’s almost hard not to.
Jeff couldn’t let them get that far. He sped up. The other officers followed suit.
Clyde’s passenger flung something out the window. Possibly a gun. Jeff only had a split second to note the location of where whatever it was flew into the scrub. The chase kept going. By then it had started to rain. They had drifted back into farm country. On a slick stretch of road, Clyde lost control of his vehicle. He hydroplaned, and no sooner had Jeff blinked than the Dodge had run off the side of the road. It hurtled past the ditch and crashed through a fence, sending posts flying into the air like Popsicle sticks. They rained down. Some stuck into the soft ground, standing straight up. The Dodge kept going through barbed wire. It finally stopped in a sod field, wheels spinning, stuck and flinging mud. The rain was really coming down by then. A witching-hour mist hovered over the grassland, and the air seemed colder than it should have been. It was a wet kind of cold that sticks in your bones and makes your jaw ache. In the swamp, the wet had a way of amplifying everything. It sharpened the cold, inflamed the heat, enveloped you, and made you aware of your skin and the heaviness of your body, that you were a corporeal thing, animal and fragile, and at risk in that wild country.
Clyde fumbled out into the slop and tried to run. He bent double, close to the ground, as if he could escape detection in the sawgrass. His passenger ran in the other direction. Like a snap, the officers ran after both. Jeff made for Clyde. He slogged over the wet earth, picking his knees up high with each step, but Clyde was almost to the tree line. Jeff drew his firearm and used the flashlight on its top to cut through the downpour. Seeing a suspect ready to wriggle out of his grasp, another officer might have shot. But Jeff had made it through his entire career without firing his weapon outside of training. He wasn’t about to start now. He kept the safety on. This wasn’t cops and robbers. Their pistols weren’t toys or props, despite how some yahoos treated them. Jeff wasn’t the kind to go out and act like a cowboy.
Instead he dug down deep in himself and found a burst of speed. He closed the gap between himself and Clyde, grabbed the man by the arm, and wrestled him to the ground, where they both got a mouthful of mud. Other officers closed in around them. As they read Clyde his rights and cuffed him, he looked over his shoulder and spotted Jeff.
“Buta, you’re back!” Clyde exclaimed, using a nickname that only Jeff’s intimates knew. After stalking this fellow through the woods for fifteen-some-odd years, Jeff supposed that made them familiar enough to be friendly even while on different sides of the law.
“Yep, I’m back,” Jeff said. “Now, where’s your gun?”
* * *
Jeff had first met Clyde some years ago, back when he was a new game warden in Manatee County. Jeff worked weekends and odd hours then, but on Sunday mornings, he took his son to catechism and followed along with Mass. In the pews next to him sat the same landowners who would call in tips about strange lights they saw in their woods at night. Next to these ranchers, unbeknownst to them, sat some of the same poachers whose spotlights had glinted among their trees.
On Sunday evenings, Jeff worked through the list of tips he kept in his black leatherette-bound notebook, some leads from conversations he’d had, others thoughts he’d jotted down. Jeff knew how to work a source. His greatest asset, he believed, was his mouth. Other bullet points were from the tip hotline. One tip referred to a man named Clyde, a convicted felon well known in those parts for getting drunk at local bars and boasting about his crimes to anyone who would listen, a veritable poacher tradition. Jeff followed the tip to an approximate location in the scrub. Soon he spotted lights bobbing among the trees. He chased the poachers down, but they made it to their truck before Jeff could nab them. A short chase ensued. While they sped through the backwoods, Jeff watched Clyde pass his rifle through the truck’s back window and lay it in the bed.
That was what Jeff had been there to arrest him for. Not only for poaching but for possessing a firearm while on probation for a felony. Clyde knew it, too. After ridding himself of the offending rifle, he banged on the roof, clearly telling the driver, his girlfriend, to pull over.
While Jeff was talking to them, the landowner rolled in and listened for a bit and then said, “Come to think of it, I did give old Clyde permission to hunt back here.”
The landowner and Clyde shared a look.
That night would have to be a catch and release.
It would take more work to bring Clyde in that first time, including some sleuthing to track down how he had come into possession of a rifle. After finding surveillance footage of Clyde’s girlfriend buying the gun for him, Jeff informed Clyde’s probation officer, who told him to put a warrant out for Clyde’s arrest.
That was how their odd sort of relationship started. They were adversaries. That was true. But they weren’t enemies.
By the night that long car chase had ensued, Jeff had already arrested Clyde twice and sent him to prison both times. Each time, on their way to the jail, Clyde sitting cuffed in the patrol truck, Jeff would give him what he called his come-to-Jesus talk.
“Why are you doing this to your mom and dad?” Jeff said the second time. “You need to grow the fuck up.”
Clyde nodded his head and said, “Buta, you’re right.”
Despite this seeming sincerity, Jeff’s talks never really stuck. Still, Clyde wasn’t a bad fellow, Jeff thought. He clung to the idea that even the worst criminals still had a grain of good in them. Most folks who crossed his path in the woods were one-time offenders. He’d try to educate them, make them understand what they had done, that it was more than breaking the law: Out in nature, even a small crime can affect an entire ecosystem. Jeff had decided long ago that he would rather do this and never see that person again than hike up his arrest numbers. Those didn’t matter. The people and the animals did.
When Jeff found a man out poaching to feed his family, he remembered what it was like to be poor. He had grown up on Guam in a large family who struggled to make ends meet. What a lot of people don’t realize is that in paradise, everything is expensive. What you had then were beautiful views and hard work. Jeff had never poached himself, but he could imagine the line of thought that brought a man to that place. It was one not of evil but of cold necessity. He felt for the people brought to that kind of need. Fines or court dates would just add more weight to their load.
Instead, he’d tell them to pack up, dump their catch, and go. “Just get out of here, man,” he would say. “Don’t do this again.”
To Jeff, helping his fellow man was the moral thing to do. So what if it let them slip through the cracks of the law. Doing the right thing was far more important, and maybe, he thought, doing that one right thing would make them do the right thing later: They would get the opportunity to poach again, but perhaps they would remember Jeff and how he’d let them go, and they would let their quarry go, too.
Then there were times when they didn’t. Like with Clyde. People were still people, imperfect. You could still be friendly with a man even if he remained on the wrong side of the law.
Copyright © 2023 by Rebecca Renner