Acts of Nature

her driveway, but it was too far to tell.
    They were silent and drove out to Eighth Street and spotted Marcus sitting on a bench under a bus stop shelter. He jumped in back when they pulled over and then squirreled his way up until he was hunched between them.
    “It was her, dudes. I watched her go right up into the garage.” His voice was excited, like he was describing some kind of sports play he’d watched in the game while they’d been out pissing.
    “Man, you guys were just around the corner.”
    “She see the van?” Buck asked.
    “Didn’t see you pull out, no. Maybe seen your ass pull ’round the next street if she was payin’ attention.”
    “Doubt that,” Wayne said.
    “That’s why we switch the tags. Every time, boys.”
    The two young ones nodded. Learning from the man.
    “So what’d ya git? Huh?” Marcus said, taking a quick inventory behind and around himself but wanting to hear it.
    “We might get a thousand out of it,” Buck said dryly.
    “What? With this big screen? And that’s a brand-new Bose with the multiple changer, dude. That’s like nine hundred retail,” Marcus whined.
    “What we do ain’t retail, boy,” Wayne said, deepening his voice to mock the phrase Buck always used on them. Both of them laughed and even Buck let a grin tickle the side of his mouth.
    “An’ what’s this?” Marcus then said, reaching out to pull at a piece of turquoise silk that was now sticking out of Wayne’s side pocket. “This here somethin’ valuable, Stubby?”
    Wayne looked down and slapped at his friend’s hand, blood flushing his cheeks and then cutting his eyes to Buck, who’d glanced over and then lost the grin.
    “No, but this is,” Wayne said, recovering and leaning forward to reach under the seat to pull out a bottle of Johnny Walker Black he’d found in the den while Buck was upstairs.
    “All right! Stubby. Lust and liquor, dude,” Marcus said. “Crack that dog.”
    Buck heard the childlike tone in their voices and probably could have found some of his old self in there if he’d had a mind to. Instead he kept driving along the Tamiami Trail toward the west coast home. Get back to where they belong. Safe. Fuckin’ teenagers, he thought. Gonna get me killed.

FOUR
    There is no specific way to know how old the river is that I live on. We know the larger cypresses that define the place have been growing for more than two centuries. The long, gauzy strands of Spanish moss and strangler fig that wrap themselves in those trees could be three to ten years. The bright green pond apples, each slightly larger than a golf ball, that hang on branches at the edge of our first bend are only from this season. The tea-colored water, opaque and sometimes sluggish, sometimes swift depending on the rain amounts in the Glades, is only today’s.
    In the area near my shack the river runs through a shady tunnel of green. The cypress and water oak boughs mingle and meet and often form a roof above. When the water is high it floods out into the surrounding vegetation and the place looks more like a forest that is hip deep in dark water than a river. You have to watch the current closely, see where the strings of bubbles and the ripple of moving water are most obvious in order to stay midstream. My first several months here, when I was paddling hard and trying to burn the street images of Philadelphia out of my head physically, I must have looked like a madman bouncing off nature’s walls as I tried to make my way from one end of the river to the other, careering off felled tree limbs and bumbling into dead ends of marsh and giant leather fern. In time I learned the route by memory and then started paddling it at night in the moonlight until I knew it by feel.
    Sherry used a strong paddle in the front, her back and shoulders flexing each time she reached out and grabbed at the next purchase of water and pulled it back, the strings of muscle in her triceps and forearms tight as cable. But she was still a novice. She steered the canoe like she was on the inner- city streets or in a pursuit chase, looking ahead to the next obvious turn in the river and then heading the bow in a direct, point-to-point line. I could tell her a dozen times to watch the current and just let the boat flow with the water, sometimes down the middle gut of the stream, sometimes in the deeper water running stronger near the edge. But it was like telling someone how to drive, a strong-willed someone. She had stopped