Nathan Holic

Nathan Holic is the author of Bright Lights, Medium-Sized City, a not-so-medium-sized novel from Burrow Press. He is also the author of The Things I Don’t See (a tiny but awesome novella, from Main Street Rag),and American Fraternity Man (a big big (yet equally awesome) novel, from Beating Windward Press), and is the Graphic Narrative Editor at The Florida Review. His traditional-text fiction has been published in The Portland Review, Iron Horse, and The Apalachee Review, but he also creates comics, some of which have been published in Booth, Saw Palm, Bridge Eight, and Redivider.

The Mangrove Man

For John Henry Fleming

1.

Sophomore year in high school, desperate for friends after my family’s move from Michigan to Florida, I got suckered into joining a club called Gulf Coast Cleanup, and spending my Thanksgiving weekend on a canoe collecting river garbage. An awful waste of a holiday weekend, I thought when I signed up, and so damn boring that no one worth having as a friend would let themselves get suckered into it, too. 

I was wrong about the “boring” part, though. I nearly drowned that afternoon. 

And while the truth of that afternoon remains elusive, foggy, I am almost certain that I watched a classmate die.

2.

This was thirty years ago, just a decade before the Bush-era condo boom transformed that stretch of coastal Florida into a wall of metal and glass and one-percenters. Back then, the Gulf Coast was still rough around the edges, Buc-O-Bruce and orange creamsicle jerseys for Tampa Bay, not the refined pewter of the Millennium and the housing boom years. You could still walk the beaches in Venice and find shark’s teeth. In Englewood, you could have a blue-collar job and still buy a house within walking distance to the beach. There were still ice cream shops in these coastal towns that were notKilwin’s, and didn’t use the word “creamery” in their name, and charged less than ten bucks a cone.

Thirty years ago, and that’s like ten Florida lifetimes. 

The way it feels now, Florida’s past is cute, commodified, its legends plastered on beer cans and bumper stickers and vintage t-shirts. I live in the Orlando suburbs these days, and my local beer joint serves a pale ale called Joyland, named after the first theme park in Central Florida from the ‘20s. There’s a Swamp Ape and a Florida Man Double IPA. There’s Florida Cracker, too, a term now warmly embraced, but if you’d called some redneck in ’93 a “cracker,” he wouldn’t have laughed.

And this past weekend, at a pub in the Hourglass District, I ordered something called the Mangrove Man. A red ale. “Full-bodied and hop forward,” I read from the menu: “Vicious, like the killer Mangrove Man, a tree among the others, who strikes without warning and disappears when his hunt ends. Pairs well with salt and vinegar potato chips!” 

“The Mangrove Man,” I said and stared at the image emblazoned onto the tap, a tall tree standing over a brown swamp. Red eyes. Bloody red fangs extending from the wood knots.

Was this a real Florida legend, or had it been imagined solely for the beer?

A quick internet search was unhelpful, as was the bartender. “Shit, brother, I don’t even know what a mangrove is. Haha.”

Clearly he’d never lived on the coast.

3.

Gulf Coast Cleanup: I spent my youth trying to forget that day. When you’re young, you shut your eyes tight and shout in your mind at the images burned there, as if by willpower alone you can wipe away trauma and reconstruct your life the way it had been prior. But then you get older, and you see news stories about other people’s boating accidents, and you see beer labels that evoke dormant memories inside you…now, when you try to summon those old memories you tried so hard to forget, you struggle.

Probably I’ve got it all wrong now. Back then, there were few online news sites pumping out content, no social media outpourings of post-tragedy support; this was the early ‘90s, AOL still just a curiosity, the world of information overload and immediate access not yet the rule of daily life. So all I’ve got are memories. 

And can I trust them? Can I believe the story I’ve told myself?

4.

Thirty years ago, my parents moved us from Michigan to Florida, and—to a boy from the frigid North—my new school was massively disappointing. Gulf City High was just a bunch of cinderblock buildings painted tan and forest green, the paint layered on thick but always chipped or peeling because the school was a half-mile from the water and was continuously battered by the winds, the storms, even the sand. It wasn’t uncommon to see seafoam drifting through the parking lot, and always there was sand and shell-bits underfoot, sand and shell-bits on the sidewalks, sand and shell-bits collected curbside, sand and shell-bits that you could sweep away but somehow always they came back. Days when red tide was strongest, you smelled the rot and the poison even behind shut classroom doors.

When my parents told us we were moving, we imagined Florida as a paradise, every day a vacation, but this place was weeds and sandspurs, undeveloped and unknown and damn satisfied with that arrangement. Not Tampa, not Sarasota, not Fort Myers, just this little spit of land five miles from the Tamiami Trail, a confusion of decaying drawbridges over canals, rivers, and the intracoastal. These days, it’s sunny and sparkly, condo-ified, big-box-ified in the steroidal style of the early 2000s, new drawbridges much taller and sturdier but made to look historic; back in my teenage years, though, it was still ‘50s homes and horse ranches and trailer parks and bridges you didn’t trust and there was no reason for anyone to move in from the outside world (except when, like my parents, Michigan had worn you down, and you spent your nights pointing to maps and imagining new lives). This was a town of Florida natives, Gulf City natives, and everyone we met seemed to hold this “nowheresville” mentality to heart, paradoxically proud to be a nothing town, and angry that the world didn’t recognize its existence. Paradise wasn’t supposed to be angry, but there was so much anger in this town. 

Anger in the high school, when we all had to run from building to building in thunderstorms, fifty kids huddling under one tiny awning and staring out into the crashing rain like it was an artillery-chewed landing zone and we had no choice but to charge into the gunfire. 

Anger when we had to cheer for our losing football team, a bunch of undisciplined assholes who’d rather fight the other team than make productive plays. Anger when we had to chant the name of our mascot, the Jellyfish. I remember my first game, hearing a group of older kids in the bleachers making sarcastic comments the whole game: “Tentacle ‘em!” and “Jelly up!” and “The jellyfish are…very…slowly…coming to get you!” A lot of mascots are idiotic—what’s a Red Sock, what’s an Aggie?—but a gelatinous sack drifting slowly and sightlessly through the ocean, waiting to eventually wash ashore stupidly and die a dried-out beach death…that wasn’t exactly fear-inspiring. “Come close, entangle yourself in my tentacles,” our mascot whispered, “because that is literally my only advantage!” Gulf City needed something darker, meaner.

Of course, you go back to that town now, and—just the same as the clever beers at my pub—everyone’s wearing vintage-ironic Jellyfish t-shirts like they’ve always been proud of the dumb thing. But back in the Nirvana ‘90s, when teenagers hated everything except dirty uncut hair and smelly flannels? We rolled our eyes at “jellyfish.” 

The point is, the whole town was miserable, not the sort of place where making friends was easy, especially when you were from Michigan and your entire wardrobe was jeans and hoodies (lots of Red Wings hoodies, as if that meant anything to kids who’d never even seen an ice skate), and you were always sweating, always sweating. I didn’t own a surfboard. I needed so much sunblock my skin was white for days. “This fucking loser,” someone said during my first week of school, “is gonna be waiting a long damn time for his first snow day.

At my bus stop, another kid picked up a palm frond that had fallen in a late-night thunderstorm, told me to hold it by the long stalk that preceded the leaves. “Just grab it tight,” he said, and—seeing no reason to refuse—I obliged. But the edges of a palm branch are sharp, a series of steak-knife spikes, and as soon as my grip was firm, he yanked the frond forward, slicing my palm and that webbed skin between thumb and forefinger. I bled for hours. 

Welcome to Gulf City.

Another time, I was tricked into kicking a fireant pile, and I had red welts up my legs for two weeks. This one asshole, Terry Mullins, sat beside me in Geometry, saw me scratching the fireant bites. “This is a nasty place, Michigan,” he said. “Out-of-towners get spooked by the big stuff. The sharks, the bears, the gators.” (I had heard of the bears…the local news channel had interviewed some guy who’d filmed a black bear knocking over trash cans. And the gators were everywhere. Retention ponds, inlets, side of the road. It was shocking how quickly they were no longer shocking, how you learned to just stay away from ponds, or dark wet vegetation.) “Little secret,” Terry said, sitting close. He smelled like cigarettes, and the bubble gum he chewed to half-ass hide the smell. His eyes didn’t seem quite capable of opening fully, either, a detail I especially remember as he—months later—stood over me and watched my legs slip and kick blood trails across the boat’s floor. “Ain’t the big stuff that’ll get you. It’s the little things.”

“I get it,” I said, scratching.

“You know about fireants.” He smiled. “But black widows? Brown recluse? They’ll bite you, and you don’t even know until later, when your arm’s seeping pus.”

“I survived Michigan winters,” I said. “I’ll be okay.”

“Down here, mittens can’t save you. There’s shit under the ground down here.”

“Yeah?” I tried to convey skepticism in a way that wouldn’t get me punched.

“Sinkholes, dick-munch,” he said. “There’s shit that lives down there. You look around, you see holes everywhere. Things burrowing out, going back in.”

“I appreciate the warning.”

“This isn’t a normal place, is all I’m saying. You don’t even know the ways we’ve lost kids around here. Drownings. Boat accidents. Gators. At least once a year. Some kid goes missing, that’s all they say is missing. You’re local, you know the truth. This place isn’t just cursed. This place is the curse.”

On the bright side, I thought that maybe I’d had a meaningful exchange with another student, but Terry seemed to quickly forget who I was. A few weeks later, he came up to me and asked me to choose between the University of Florida and FSU. To which football team was I loyal? When I answered “FSU?”, he punched me hard enough in the arm that the next day it looked like I had two bruises. I’m not even sure I answered wrong. I just know that was our only conversation until we were pushed back together on the day of the coastal cleanup. 

The first two months of sophomore year, I huddled into my hoodie, just hoping the teachers would turn the AC low enough that I’d never have to take it off. 

5.

The question about “friends” was raised frequently by my mother. We lived in a dumpy old place on a long street of empty overgrown lots; it was a paved road, but saying it was “paved” was like wearing a swimsuit and flip-flops to a steakhouse and saying you were “dressed up.” The pavement was as ancient as the beach itself, and hotter than the sand, a runway of gashes and ravines out of which were growing the sort of thick weeds that would eventually overtake it completely. There were neighbors on this street, but we didn’t seem to know any of them, and certainly none had children. We were a block from the municipal airport, and while it wasn’t large or busy, it was noisy enough to make this as undesirable as the land out near the treatment plants.

So we were alone. My brother was seven years younger, an accident baby still in elementary school, and so he could make friends with kids who maybe hadn’t yet adopted the anger and resentment of the teens walking the halls at GCHS. But me?

“Can’t sit around on your Nintendo all day,” she said. “Making friends takes work.”

Yeah. Thanks, Mom. 

And clearly she didn’t trust me to do it myself, because she found a paper that had come home in my backpack for some campus organization called Gulf Coast Cleanup, and she signed me up. “First meeting is this Wednesday, after school,” she told me. “I’ll pick you up after.”

There was no arguing. My mother would wait outside the classroom in her car and make sure I’d attended.

But in all the times we later talked about what happened, she never said “I put you in that position, and I’m sorry.” It was always just “How unfortunate,” like this accident—this tragedy—was pre-determined. It would always happen to someone, this inevitable, awful, bloody series of events, and I was lucky I’d been the one to make it out alive. Legends need survivors just as often as they need victims. 

6.

The semester’s first meeting for Gulf Coast Cleanup was held in one of the school’s two gyms. Many years before, the high school and elementary school had shared one campus, a quaint arrangement captured in 1960s yearbooks that I sometimes perused in the guidance counselor’s office: pictures where every young woman looks like a teacher in training, sitting with and mentoring second-graders through reading lessons. At some point in the ‘70s, they’d split, and a new elementary school had been constructed three miles away on former cow pastures, but remnants of the old two-schools-in-one concept remained. Two gyms, for instance. So there was a massive gym used for actual games, and there was an undersized gym from the elementary school days (the “north gym”) that was in a state of disrepair, and it was mostly used for PE, and for assemblies of the sort that couldn’t fit into classrooms.

So we sat in the old north gym, stagnant with the smell of unused lockerrooms that nonetheless still emanated the decades-old odor of dirty laundry and musty towels, and we sat on the floor because the bleachers had long ago broken down and could not be pulled from the wall. We sat cross-legged like 8-year-olds while Ms. Burton recited her start-of-the-semester speech. She knew we were responsible citizens, she said, not the type to trample sea turtle eggs, not the type to take rafts into the inlets, rafts that would inevitably get popped by cypress knees and mangrove roots and left shredded there in the vegetation, not the type to leave 12-pack rings on the beach (she said nothing of whether we were responsible enough to forgo alcohol at age 16). She told us about the four events coming up this year, the “four big ones,” she kept saying, and how collectively these would help us “get our hours.”

Ms. Burton seemed mostly annoyed with the meeting, with the gaggle of kids on the floor who she viewed as wanting something from her. She’d probably taken this advisor role fifteen years ago and now couldn’t shake it.

“We’re so responsible, yes,” said a boy leaning against the stacked bleachers. There were three or four of these kids, juniors and seniors who refused to sit because they were too good for it, too tough. Terry Mullins was one. And this one, the one who’d spoken, was Cody Sumter. His hair was smashed beneath a faded Braves baseball cap that he never took off; students weren’t allowed to wear hats indoors, but most teachers were exhausted with reprimanding him.  

“Four big ones,” said Terry Mullins, eyes still too tiny for his large face, smiling in a way that alerted us all to the crude joke coming, “but really, I already got two big ones here.” He looked toward his crotch, and together he and Cody snickered, a Statler and Waldorf duo in a dilapidated gymnasium.

“Mmhm,” Ms. Burton said, her weariness palpable. She looked as if she would join these kids in the shadows if she could, would spend the rest of her night making fun of us if only some other teacher would sign up to be faculty advisor.

In hindsight, how much might have been different had I understood the social dynamics at play before sitting on the floor? If only I had understood that I could stand back there, rather than sitting, and that maybe this would prevent me from sinking further into loserhood, lumped in with the frumpy girl volunteers and dorky male undesirables surrounding me?

But no. I sat on the gym floor, and beside me sat Timmy Green, a kid who seemed to barely push four and a half feet, a kid who coughed unexpectedly and often but who seemed otherwise okay, I suppose, just susceptible to the tiniest germ floating through the air, a kid who wore high white socks with Kmart shoes and would’ve been dismissed even in Michigan. At least I was new, with an excuse to be an outsider! This kid was born in this town and still couldn’t get his act together. 

“They do this every meeting,” Timmy told me.

“Why are they even here?” I asked.

“Community service hours. This is the easiest way to rack up hours.”

“They got in trouble?” I was thinking arrests, punishments.

“Theoretically, you can do hours to keep out of suspension.”

“But not them?”

“Nope. They need hours for college admissions. Scholarships.”

“Those guys?”

Timmy shrugged. “I’ve known them forever. They’re jerks, but they’re not as dumb as they try to seem.”

Terry burped and crushed a Mountain Dew can, and Cody laughed as if this routine was fit for an HBO stand-up special. Jury was still out.

7.

At our next meeting, Ms. Burton walked into the gym, said “Quiet.” with the sort of exasperation that made it seem like she’d already asked a thousand times. She held her forehead and pinched the bridge of her nose like she was fighting a hangover, but it was 3 PM. Years later, this is my lasting memory of all the Gulf City High School teachers, forever suffering migraines and unable any longer to deal with the bullshit. 

“I’m going to turn it over to Ms. Sandy,” she said, “who’s here from the Greater Gulf Coast Preservation Society, our partner for this year’s Thanksgiving cleanup.” She motioned to a frail middle-aged woman who—even standing still—appeared to be trembling. “I have quizzes to grade, Ms. Sandy, so…I’ll be next door.” 

“Oh,” Ms. Sandy said. She looked like a kindergarten music teacher deposited uneasily in high school, stood before us like we’d just been given woodblocks and triangles to play; she spoke in a brittle voice about “our Gulf” and “our waterways,” and “isn’t it so exciting how all of these animals co-exist” but “isn’t it so scary that people can damage and hurt the animals?” She spoke mostly in picture-book words, but followed “damage” with a pause like maybe she needed to explain what the word meant.

“Scary, yes,” said Cody Sumter from the shadows. 

“We don’t want the poor turtles to suffer,” said Terry Mullins. 

“Yes, well,” Ms. Sandy said, and she proceeded as if only now aware that teen sarcasm existed. “The sea turtles…the sea turtles are important…”

“Don’t want gators chomping soda cans,” Cody said. “Dying from ingesting a penny.”

“Why are we saving gators again?” another kid asked. His name was Redd, and it remains the only time I’ve ever met someone by that name.

Ms. Sandy could not control the boys in the shadows. She was a guest speaker, not our faculty advisor, and so their commentary continued unabated by any threat of punishment from a “real teacher.” Likely, she was accustomed to working with people who actually wanted to do this stuff. Volunteers at state parks. Old people. But somehow she’d stepped into a nest of water moccasins, this bitter high school, these venomous teenagers who wanted nothing to do with anything. Still, she meekly pressed on, telling us that the Thanksgiving cleanup was so incredibly important because of the inconsiderate holiday boaters who’d toss out their party garbage, etc., and she passed out a map with a series of sharpie-drawn boxes around various waterways. 

“Give us the intracoastal,” Terry said.

“We’re just doing sign-ups today. You’re, um, your advisor will determine”—she paused, backtracked—“your advisor will pick out your path.”

Terry looked back with disgust in his eyes. “I’m getting the intracoastal.”

“There’s, um, there’s plenty of area to clean up,” she said. “It’s great to see your passion. Don’t worry. You’ll make a difference, no matter your route.”

“What’s the deal with the intracoastal?” I asked Timmy, there on the floor beside me. I actually wanted to ask “what is the intracoastal?” but didn’t want to sound like an idiot.

“That’s where they live,” Timmy said.

“They live on the water?”

“There’s money in this town,” Timmy said. He pointed to the map, to a long snaking section of the waterway. “The houses here? Three stories. Boats. Docks. And the houses over here”—he pointed to a thin island that I’d never even seen, let alone traveled onto—“aren’t even insurable. They’re rich enough that they can afford to just lose their houses if a hurricane comes.”

“Huh,” I said. Silly me, I’d thought everyone was as poor as my family.

“Rich kids. What you see is not what you get. Don’t let them fool you.”

8.

I don’t think I’d ever been in a canoe before that Saturday after Thanksgiving, and—while a thousand other memories have gone hazy—I know with certainty that I’ve never stepped foot into one again.

We began at the local state park only a few miles from the high school. Inland, it was one of those bug-infested places my parents had taken us when we’d first arrived in town as a way to “experience Florida,” all thick oaks and Spanish moss obscuring every path through the scrub palm, spiderwebs high and low with those terrifying crab-spiders waiting and watching. You felt something on your arm every few seconds, but when you looked, nothing. 

When I arrived that morning after Thanksgiving, there was a park ranger at the riverbank, unlocking a stack of canoes he’d wheeled to water’s edge from a nearby shed. Beside him, there was Timmy. 

“Am I early?” I asked.

“Right on time!” the ranger said.

“Where’s everyone else?” I looked around, suddenly worried. “I thought everyone signed up for this thing.”

“You should know by now,” Timmy said. “This school? Nobody wants to look like a go-getter.”

“Except Timmy. He’s an Eagle Scout,” the ranger said and winked. And he and Timmy slid a canoe from the stack. 

“I see.” Up in Michigan, Scouts were mostly losers. That fit the bill perfectly, and of course Timmy knew it.

Then the ranger handed me a map. “Here’s your route! Ya’ll are the first team, but with Timmy in charge, I’m sure you’ll be out longer than anyone.”

I swallowed. “Great.”

Timmy kicked the canoe into place on the sand, its nose dipping into water. I held the map of the waterways, and I simultaneously wondered why I wasn’t helping—Timmy was half my size, gripping and positioning a canoe by himself—and what the hell I’d even be doing if I did help.

Timmy tossed me an oar. “Climb aboard,” he said.

The floor of the canoe was wet with dew or old rainwater, and there was a roll of trash bags at our feet. I tried to get comfortable, but the wooden bench beneath me felt warped, and one side of me felt higher than the other.

“So what extra-curriculars do you do?” Timmy asked in that snotty, too-articulate voice as he climbed aboard himself, then held the oar as if measuring its weight to determine how he might wield it. Dear God, what kind of kid said “extra-curriculars” in conversation?

“I played hockey,” I said. “But you guys don’t have that down here.”

“Ya’ll,” he said.

“Huh?”

“‘Ya’ll,’ not ‘you guys.’ Do you want to be an outsider forever?”

Maybe he wasn’t an idiot.

“You don’t sound Southern,” I said.

“I hate the South,” he said. “I’m going to California for college. But say ‘ya’ll.’ Take little steps and you won’t sound like such a moron.”

I laughed. “I hate the South, too. Guess we’ve got something in common.”

“Almost forgot,” the ranger said, and he was gripping the edge of the canoe, ready to help us shove off. “Need life jackets?”

“We won’t be deeper than eight feet, if we stick to our route. Should be fine.” 

“You swim all right, son?” the ranger asked me.

“Perfectly,” I said.

I imagine, of course, that this laissez faire attitude has now changed, but in those days, canoeing through shallow waters did not necessitate liability forms. You could “forget” about life jackets and laugh it off.

“All right then, I’ll push you out,” the ranger said. “Just dig in those oars and help out. Ah, there you go!” I followed Timmy’s lead, sunk my oar into the water, jammed it into the dirt, and we glided from the banks and into the still waters of the river. Was it a river?

“Is this a river?” I asked.

“It’s a tributary,” he said, “and it slowly becomes an estuary.”

“The fuck does that mean?”

“Right here, it’s freshwater. An offshoot of the Mayakka, technically. But around the bend, it’s brackish water, part of the system of creeks and marshes that feed out to the intracoastal and the Gulf.” He was paddling with just one arm, motioning with the other to indicate the maze of water corridors and their interaction.

“I understand none of that.”

He sighed. “Don’t celebrate your ignorance. Even the meatheads understand how water works. We go to school on a manmade island, and you don’t even care to learn about the systems of water around us?”

“Manmade island?” I asked. 

He sighed again. “The intracoastal is a manmade waterway, a canal cut around the edges of the coast. Goes all the way to Boston. That’s the reason our high school is on an island. You cross those bridges every day, and you thought the intracoastal—this perfectly straight channel—was a natural river?”

God, I hated this kid.

“Such a gigantic feat of engineering, the intracoastal,” I said, “just so high schoolers can have cleanup efforts to satisfy volunteer hour requirements.”

“You got it,” he said, and it was spoken in such a nasally voice that I was sure he’d wipe his nose on his forearm, or sniffle and suck in mucus, but there was no other reason behind the irritating voice other than that he’d been cursed with an irritating voice. “First piece of trash!” He pointed toward what I learned was a cypress tree, a piece of vegetation that—through a Michigander’s eyes—seemed straight out of a fantasy novel, magical in a way that suggested elves and fairies.

The cypress tree, he told me, can grow directly in water, as this one did, a giant trunk rising from the water. Often, the trunks of the oldest trees expanded outward but left a sort of hollow cave in the center, like the trunk was an “O” rather than a filled circle. The larger the tree, the larger its root system, too, and the roots would pop out of the surrounding waters, straight up. They called these cypress “knees,” fist-sized knobs that broke the water’s surface and peered out like wooden periscopes from some dark world underneath.

Incidentally, the cypress knees also snagged a great deal of trash, which was our concern this morning. For more than an hour, we canoed from cypress to cypress, bumping through the knees to collect plastic grocery bags and six-pack rings and chunks of deflated pool floats.

“Careful,” he said, as we maneuvered the canoe close to one cypress tree. “So much of the root structure is below the surface. Don’t want to get stuck.”

I looked overboard, and though the water was dark brown, thick with vegetation, I could indeed see the little periscopes down there, seemingly wavering in our tiny boat’s wake as we clanked forward. Scraping the boat’s bottom like a warning.

I peered closer. 

Was one of them moving, not just an optical illusion through the water, but bending like an arm of thick bark, the knob on top like underwater fingers—

“Hey,” Timmy said. “Open the trash bag.”

“Right,” I said. He’d leaned into the knees to snatch the plastic water bottle. He arced it my way and I alley-ooped the bottle into the bag. 

And then we canoed from this cypress tree to another, and another, more twisted plastic, more soggy grocery bags, more clumps of seaweed mashed with plastic forks and Taco Bell hot sauce packets and hair ties and sun-faded Frito’s bags, more and more until our first bag was nearly full.

Eventually we turned the bend in the river, and the waterway opened up into what I learned was the larger estuary, so much more complex than what I’d seen on the map. For starters, our map was not drawn to scale. We’d been paddling an hour and had moved two fingernail lengths to the river bend; and as we cruised through the brackish water, there were tiny islands that weren’t on the map, and streams and paths through the islands that almost gave the impression that someone was in there, someone might be watching us. Could a homeless man live on such a mass? Could a bear? Could the old Swamp Ape himself? There were chunks of vegetation that kind of looked like islands, too, but also kind of looked like they’d be swept away in the next storm, a map forever temporary.

“Won’t stop bleeding,” Timmy said, and showed me a cut on his forearm. 

“You got that from that last cypress?” I said. “Doesn’t look too bad.”

“It isn’t, but it’ll attract bugs. Gnats, mosquitoes. They’ll be swimming in it.”

“Pleasant thought.”

As we sailed past a small island of sad seaweed, other students from Gulf Coast Cleanup came into view, most of them paddling half-heartedly, their faces still stuck in the turkey coma from which they’d emerged this morning, each navigating to their own quadrant, their own “hours” to earn. Timmy didn’t wave, just watched the canoes move tiredly through the water, past us, around us, none acknowledging us, until they disappeared down faraway tributaries. 

9.

Finally we moved toward an island of indeterminate size: it was unclear where the land started, if there was shoreline, this long stretch of thin tree trunks—each maybe five feet tall, each six inches from the last, all rising out of the water itself, a wall extending perhaps the length of a football field. Emerging from the shorter trees was one taller tree, a sort of godfather. “Mangroves,” Timmy said. “They grow in the saltwater.”

It was unclear what were the trunks, what were the branches. Just a tangle of wooden limbs twisting in and out, upward, outward, bushy patches of green on top, over here, over there. Further, it was unclear how deep the water, how thick and how developed the underwater root system. Was this an iceberg situation? Were we seeing only the faintest traces of the true size of the tree island? Did they extend fifteen feet beneath us, thousands of looping roots below our boat unseen?

“So is that land?” I asked.

“Mangrove islands are their own thing, their own habitat,” he said. “And they spread. Worse for boats than cypress. You don’t wanna get caught in that. Pain in the ass. But a definite trash magnet.”

He leaned back into the water where he’d spotted some confluence of plastic matter. As he leaned, and leaned farther, stretching past the point where I would’ve felt comfortable, there was a cracking noise that came from within the branches, and Timmy—startled—nearly lost his balance and fell from the canoe. I grabbed his leg, managed to muscle him aboard without either of us getting wet. Still he held the garbage in his hand.

“What was that?” he asked. “We bang into something?”

“No fucking clue,” I said. I’d gotten the impression that little Timmy did not swear, and so I was making up the difference. “Something in the mangroves.”

“Sometimes you see turtles diving off branches. Falling into the water like rocks. That’s probably it.”

I looked into the trees. And listen, it sounds insane to say that I thought it was staring at me, that something about its position made it seem as if it had stepped closer…I get that it sounds crazy. I only know there’d been a crashing noise, and I grabbed Timmy, and I hadn’t pushed myself away completely, and suddenly there was laughter from fifty feet away, another canoe on the water, and Timmy and I looked at each other and I still had my hand on his shoulder and from a certain angle it looked—

“We interrupt something, ladies?” Cody said from his canoe.

I scooted from Timmy. “He almost fell in.” 

“If this boat’s a rockin’,” Terry said. 

“Playing grab-ass when you’re supposed to be doing community service,” Cody said. “What would Scoutmaster say?”

Timmy looked at his knees. He didn’t seem able to make eye contact with these two goons. There was history here, many years of cooked-in terror, Timmy forever twelve inches shorter, forever their victim. And, of course, I was now Timmy’s partner, his new friend by random pairing, and so it was determined that I should suffer alongside him, the two of us bound together as a single target.

“You, uh, found any trash yet?” I asked.

They paddled closer, but their expressions didn’t suggest friendship. The demeanor and direction of their approach felt menacing somehow, their speed too aggressive, and when they arrived, they knocked into us and laughed.

“Found trash, Terry?” Cody asked, face a study in nyuck-nyuck cruelty.

“Found these two,” Terry said. “Close enough, right?”

“Ya’ll find trash?” Cody asked.

“A little,” Timmy said, but it was a mumble.

“This shit sucks,” Cody said. “They gave us the worst route.”

Every route on the map looked similar to me, all the waterways just squiggles of different lengths and thicknesses, different names that—in black and white—meant nothing to me. Shane’s Creek. Tornio’s Way. What was a good route?

“Last year,” Cody said, as if in answer to the question I hadn’t spoken aloud, “we got to pick our own routes.”

“I remember,” Timmy said. “You picked the intracoastal segment.”

“Sure did, Timmy!” Cody said, and tapped his cranium. “Great memory.”

“So what?” I asked.

“He lives there.” Timmy’s face was red now, his jaw set.

“Ha ha,” Cody said, and lifted the bill of his Braves cap so we could see the look of victory on his face. “We docked at my house. Partied at my pool for hours.”

“Just emptied his recycling bins into trash bags!” Terry said.

“We had so much trash,” Cody said. “The park rangers fucking loved us.”

“Until little ratfucker over here spilled the beans.”

“I didn’t say anything!” Timmy said.

Cody shrugged. “Everyone came over and partied. Except Timmy. He was the only one who insisted on canoeing, collecting actual river-trash. Such a superhero.”

“Should’ve just let loose like the rest of us,” Terry said.

Timmy looked at me. “They wouldn’t have let me hang out anyway.”

“What’d you say, fuck-nut?”

“Nothing.”

“Anyway,” Terry said, and our canoes were touching, side by side, so close I could smell Terry’s awful cigarette breath. “What we’re saying is, we want your trash. We have a six-pack we stole from Cody’s dad, and we’re gonna drift and drink the afternoon away. And because we know Timmy’s such a hard worker, we’re certain he’ll collect more than his share.”

And as Terry spoke, Cody reached into our canoe, snatched our garbage bag, and said “Boink!” like a cartoon character, Shaggy stealing a Scooby Snack.

“Wait,” I said, with an impotence that still embarrasses me to this day.

Terry stabbed our canoe with his oar and pushed his own boat away. We knocked deeper into the mangrove roots while they sailed into the clean waters of the channel, ready to drink and drift on life’s lazy river.

“Good fortune, gentlemen,” Terry said from afar and saluted, and then they were paddling smoothly away.

Timmy was meanwhile jabbing his oar at the roots, his baby face as gnarled in anger as I’m sure it ever had been. “Damn it!” he said. He jabbed into the roots again, pushed, but we heard only scraping noises. We weren’t stuck exactly, but we were a pinball with only one path out of the tangle, and jabbing harder would do us no good if we weren’t directing our energy in the exact right spots. We needed to push slowly and carefully and follow the way we came in. 

“Calm down,” I said. Terry and Cody were still within sight, and Timmy’s anger was pathetic, like the punching swinging nerd held always a few inches from contact by the towering bully. 

“They’re gonna win!” he said, jabbing, making no progress against the roots.

“So what? There’s more trash,” I said. Just thirty feet away down the mangrove island, I could see plastic bags, a popped beachball, a six-pack ring, and…a dead seagull? I wasn’t going to touch that one, but this root system was a lint brush for drifting trash. “We’ve got plenty of garbage bags. Let them be assholes.”

“But they always win!” he said. 

“It’s a coastal cleanup, Timmy. There are no winners here.” Of all hills to die upon in this salty bitter town, I did not want to go down in defense of garbage bags and Timmy Green. When you’re a new kid, people tend to remember if you do something dumb. At my old school, I remember a new kid who—first couple weeks—got pantsed, and inescapably became “Peter Peter the Penis Wrinkle.” Try shaking that. 

“Someone’s gotta stop them.”

“And then what?” I asked. 

Timmy jabbed again, but harder and wilder, and now it did feel as though we were stuck. In fact, there were roots all around us, roots above the water curled like roller-coaster loops on every side as though we’d pushed into a nest, roots and wayward branches rising from the water without origin and without clear destination but nonetheless rising as high as the outer walls of our canoe, and as we jostled and Timmy jabbed, they spilled into the boat itself. 

“Let’s settle down,” I said. “Two seconds ago, we were fine. Now we’re all fucked up in here. I don’t want to have to get into the water and push us off.” 

“We’ll get out,” he said. But the farther he lodged us into the bramble, the more the roots spilled into our space. We were deep into it, this mangrove island. It was like we’d parachuted into a forest of briar tangle, and which damn way were we supposed to slice to get out? 

“Stop. Let’s strategize.”

“Shit,” Timmy said. “They’re getting away.”

“You still care about that? Are you gonna fight them? Over trash bags? They’re twice your size.”

“I just want my garbage back. It’s ours.”

“There’s garbage right there,” I said. But beside a two-liter, I now saw a dead turtle, belly up, its head an emaciated raisin.

“You don’t know what it’s like,” he said. “You don’t know. Always picked on. Having your backpack stolen. Your homework stolen. Your pencils stolen in fourth grade, fifth grade, sixth grade. They don’t deserve to win anymore.”

But now we were just inches from that one ugly godfather trunk, damn near in its embrace. It rose from the water like some saltwater monolith, knots across its surface like hundreds of bug eyes staring at me, a horizontal slit from one side to the next like a mouth in the bark. If we were still a pinball, this was the end destination, the final drop signaling that our run had ended. I was mistaken to think that we’d ever drift out. It was always leading here.

I looked over the edge, still dark brown water, but visibility was enough for me to see that there was some semblance of hard matter, root or rock, something I could stand upon, redirect us with the strength of my legs. It sounds dumb in retrospect, but I was a Michigan kid, dumb to boat life and salt life and all that. I didn’t ask, just kicked off my shoes, gripped the side of the boat, and swung a leg over.

“Stop!” Timmy said. “You’ll tip us!”

“Gotta do something.” The aerial roots were all around us. We wouldn’t escape with oars alone. “We’re too stuck to tip. I’ll guide us to that little clearing, and then walk the roots to land.” If there was land. I didn’t know. But it seemed like a good idea. An island this large had to have some solid land from which the trees had sprung, right?

“You step out,” Timmy said, “your feet are gonna get chewed up.”

“Chewed up? The roots have teeth, do they?” Betraying my own nonchalance, I glanced at the godfather mangrove just inches away, at that mouth-like slit which…had it opened further?

“Oyster beds,” Timmy said. “There are oyster beds all around. They’ll cut through your feet.”

“You worry too much,” I said, and for balance I pressed my palm against that godfather trunk, swung my other leg over the canoe’s lip, and stepped barefoot onto what I thought would be solid, unbending root.

“Don’t!” Timmy tried, but I was out.

My first foot did hit root, sturdy enough, just six inches under the water, but also slippery, and so I perhaps held the trunk tighter than I ought to have, and its bark cut into my palm as bad as when I’d been tricked into grabbing the spikey stalk of that palm branch. The pain was intense, unexpected enough that I shrieked and pulled my hand away, and too quickly put my second foot underwater. Without the balance of the mangrove trunk, I slipped hard. Maybe it was the angle of the root. Maybe it was the slime and algae, which I hadn’t expected. Or maybe the root itself had moved, defying my expectation of where it might stay. 

But I splashed into the water. 

And in seconds, somehow I was wrapped up in the mess like a grocery bag, like that dead seagull, that turtle. I tried to grab for the mangrove trunk, but somehow it too had drifted away. Nothing was where it had been. Is that crazy? Was I just panicked?

Timmy yelled for me, but when my head surfaced, he was—how could it be?—ten feet away, at least. I kicked wildly for something to stand upon, and when my bare feet came down, they hit something hard but sharp, something thin and vertical, and yes—here were the oyster beds Timmy had warned me about, a giant underwater field of razorblades that I’d dismissed moments before but which were now shredding my flesh the more I kicked my legs and stupidly attempted to find purchase.

And that’s when I heard Timmy screaming for help. He had his arm in the air reaching out, but—even in the water, my vision clouded with salt and pain—it looked the picture of futility, this tiny little booger with a three-foot arm trying to reach twenty feet. 

He yelled, I flailed, and my feet were icy with pain, but at some point I looked to my left, and there were the goons, Terry and Cody, canoeing toward us. Paddling at warp speed toward me. Our tormentors. Our saviors.

“Fuck happened here?” one of them said.

“He slipped! Hit the oysters!”

“Grab the oar, kid,” one said.

Even then I was aware that they only knew me as kid, and there was a deep part of me that said (especially if I was in danger, if I was dying) call me by my name! You motherfuckers cut my hand with a palm frond, made fun of me for stepping in a fireant pile. Don’t pretend you don’t know my name! But I reached out.

“Timmy!” one of them shouted, and he was shouting past me, at something unseen. From far away, I heard a splash, a rattling of branches. I couldn’t understand it immediately, the logistics of what was happening, but it quickly became apparent that Timmy had fallen in, too.

“Grab it!” Cody shouted, and now there was an oar smacking my face, and so I fumbled for it, gripped it, and he pulled me toward their canoe, my legs behind me trailing blood through the water. It sounds odd, that a fifteen-year-old who was a decent swimmer could suddenly become so inept and so close to drowning, but—perhaps the same as with a slippery bathtub—there was nowhere to put my legs, nowhere to put my hands without getting sliced to bits, nothing I could do to reposition myself, to turn my flail into a swim, and I knew even in that moment that Cody had saved my life.

He and Terry grabbed me by the shirt and lifted me, the canoe tipping dangerously as they leaned, but they heaved me inside and I slapped onto the floor, feet sliding along the metal, blood smears with every kick, and I now saw my feet. Flaps of flesh, deep purple slices that bloomed with blood.

“Take off your shirt, kid,” Terry said, eyes only half-open as usual, no fear in his face. “We have to wrap your feet.”

“Timmy,” I said, my lips quivering even though it was 85 degrees and sunny.

“I don’t see him,” Cody said.

“What do you mean you don’t see him?” Terry asked. “Did he get to the banks?” 

“In the last five seconds? I don’t even know if that’s solid ground.”

“Well, he can’t be underwater,” Terry said. “Kid’s an Eagle Scout. Probably gives swimming lessons to kindergarteners.”

“I don’t see him,” Cody said. “Anywhere.”

“That little numb-nuts didn’t drown,” Terry said. “That is not happening.”

My legs shook. Probably I said something during this time. Probably I’ve got it wrong, the things they said. Recollection of these few minutes is choppy, a collage of fact and misremembered memory and outright imagination. But it’s the best I can do.

“Paddle closer,” Terry said, and he and Cody sat up, left me to wrap my shirt around my right foot, my hands trembling the entire time. They had saved me, but now they’d lost interest in me. Not that I could blame them, of course—they were off to save someone else, paddling directly into the mangrove patch, the school bullies suddenly a couple of action heroes. How unfair is that? 

But then the rapid progress slowed, and I could hear the scratching noises of the mangrove roots and oyster beds beneath the canoe bottom; what had ensnarled my canoe was now threatening the same for the rescue mission.

“Stop!” I said.

“The fuck, kid?” Terry said.

“Oysters,” I said. I couldn’t manage a full sentence through chattering teeth, so I pointed shakily to my feet, then overboard at the opaque brown water.

Cody rammed his oar into the water until it clacked against a root or a bed, braking the canoe and turning us 90 degrees, where we remained motionless, facing the mangrove empire, the godfather tree that—how can I explain this—had changed shape, I was certain of it. Could a tree smirk? Could it look satisfied? Could its branches cross like arms over its chest? I imagined Timmy far below the water, root-limbs pulling him ever deeper until he was inside it all, little hands grasping, tree tendrils pulling him under the mangrove island, to be stored there like an insect in a spider’s web.

“We got stuck,” I said. My shirt-bandage was red, but the flow was slowing.

“No shit,” Terry said. “Your canoe’s still in it.”

“You pushed us into there,” I said, my anger burning through the pain.

“We didn’t do shit,” Cody said softly, but there was the empty canoe before us, under the low shade of the mangroves, held there by a tangle of branches. Only a bag of garbage where Timmy should’ve been.

Terry peered over the canoe’s edge. “Can’t see anything,” he said. “But I’m not diving into there.”

Cody sighed. “End up with hamburger feet like homeboy here.”

“I was trying to push us out,” I argued.

“Like a buffoon. Standing on oyster beds? You still bleeding?”

“My other foot,” I said. My left was bare, blood still flowing. I couldn’t hold them both.

“We gotta get him bandaged,” Terry said. “Probably needs stitches.”

Cody tore off his own shirt, then ripped the sleeves clean off, dropped them to me to use as bandages. Then he slipped back into the shirt, now a tank top. These guys were assholes, but I still remember this moment, how decisive he was, how vital the help. 

Cody looked into the prop roots. Our empty canoe sat there, rocking from our wake. “Timmy, man. Hope you climbed out.”

“There’s a trail back there, gotta be,” Terry said. “That whole island probably connects back to mainland. Little bastard knows the trails. He’ll pop out somewhere, another bag of trash from the island.”

“I mean, why the hell would he have gotten out if it wasn’t dry land?”

Unless he was pulled out, I wanted to say.

“If it is dry land in there, might make a nice drinking spot,” Cody said.

“For sure.” 

“Looking at his feet,” Cody said and motioned to me, to the bloody shirt sleeves wrapped around my feet, “ain’t no way I’m swimming into oyster beds, searching for someone who’s safe and sound somewhere.” 

“Say goodbye to basketball season,” Terry said, “your feet get all sliced.”

Cody nodded, and it was agreed. We would head back to the docking site. The action heroes had convinced themselves that heroics were no longer necessary. And the bonus was this: after such a rescue operation, no one would question if they cut their cleanup efforts short and still claimed however many hours they wanted.

So we paddled back through the water as quickly and smoothly as we’d come, leaving the nest of mangroves behind, leaving the empty canoe, and Cody and Terry—these two assholes who would for the rest of my days at GCHS still find reasons to insult me—carried me out of the canoe, over the dirt, to a picnic table where a park ranger opened a first-aid kit and doused me with peroxide and wrapped me up and gave me various instructions that I’ve since forgotten. My parents would arrive sometime later and drive me to the E.R. for a more formal assessment, and I’d sit on the couch for days, trying to ignore the throbbing in my feet—took a full week off school, if I remember correctly.

Other things were happening concurrently, of course, because Timmy hadn’t returned. There was no trail through the mangroves, we learned. It was impassable, and it certainly was not connected to the mainland. Nor was there any sign that Timmy had emerged from the mangroves, anywhere.

They sent crews into the mangroves, and they questioned me relentlessly even while I was on pain meds. They’d found chunks of what appeared to be an old canoe, beaten and battered and ripped apart, as if by some old storm, but it couldn’t possibly have been ours…was I sure I’d left it where I said? Cody and Terry corroborated. No one trusted those two fuckers, but the accounts never changed. By the giant damn tree, they said, the one rising above all the others. But even that did not check out, as there was no such landmark they could find. Roots everywhere, yes, and oyster beds, and shorter mangroves, but no “godfather tree” as existed in my memory. 

There were divers. There were search parties. But no sign of Timmy. Was I sure?

Memories are unceasingly frustrating. My parents have passed, but later conversations cemented in my mind only the essential facts: canoe accident, oyster beds, rescue, Timmy in water, Timmy gone. Newspapers reported those sparing details, too, as well as the immediate termination of the park ranger who’d failed to hand out life jackets. Weeks later, there were scraps of clothing that washed up in the park, but even Timmy’s own parents were unsure if the scraps belonged to their son.

I remember an aching sadness that I couldn’t shake, but all of my world was filtered through the fog of pain medications, weeks of what felt like solitary confinement as I lay in my bedroom watching daytime game shows and ‘70s sitcom reruns. No one offered counseling, not that I remember. The words “he’ll come around” were used often.

By the next school year, no one spoke of Timmy Green, and it seemed eerily true to Terry’s prophecy that every year there was a kid who just…disappeared. Boat accident, people would say, if anyone asked. Drowning. Ordinary explanations, and life went on.

10.

I’ve stayed in Florida, though—as I said—I now live in the suburbs of Orlando, a place that is still weird but without the danger and viciousness of that old coastal town. From afar, I wonder whether anyone in Gulf City remembers Timmy, the boy he was? I wonder whether he’s down there still. For how long has he been reaching skyward, face preserved in terror, a boy who wanted out of a shitty salt-speck on Florida’s Gulf Coast, but who is condemned to haunt the waters forever? 

Forever.

Such an odd word, here in Florida. What is “forever,” after all? Where have all those bitter natives gone, now that condos have transformed the coast? And where do the legends go when the high-rises come? The Swamp Ape. The Mangrove Man. The ghost of the drowned boy.

Beer labels, I suppose. 

Now, we drink the Mangrove Man Strong Ale. We drink the Slim-Necked Seagull, named after the awful deformity resulting from heads stuck in six-pack rings. We drink the Swamp Ape Double IPA. We casually drink the Skyway to Heaven, the label a heavy-metal-style oil painting of the Sunshine Skyway disaster of 1980, when a barge crashed into that steeply ascending bridge, took out a chunk of road, and cars—unable to see the looming emptiness before them—sailed off the edge one by one. We drink as if Florida’s past is all some fantasy world that never existed, just because we weren’t here yet. We wear the jellyfish on t-shirts, and make them into cartoon characters. Nobody cares what was real, what wasn’t, who died to birth the folk tale. 

Is there a place in the New Florida for the real Mangrove Man, the real Skunk Ape, the real People of the Sinkholes, or are they all reaching out, hoping they aren’t forever lost? No. I want to believe that they’re still here, the monsters, and the ghosts of those they took from us.