Poor Mrs. Conroy, my landlady in Jackson. I can still picture her face when she saw the Western
Union man through the glass panel of her front door. Even under the best of circumstances Mrs.
Conroy was nervous as a rat terrier, and with the arrival of a telegram she was likely to need her
fainting couch. To her generation, a telegram was how they usually found out somebody had died, and
even though the modern era had arrived and you could make a long-distance tel ephone
call—especially to a city as large as Jackson— plenty of folks still relied on the Western Union man to
deliver urgent news. I couldn’t believe it was for me. I’d never gotten a Western Union in my life and
had hoped I never would. For a moment I was tempted to tear it up, unread, and toss it out the window
right into Mrs. Conroy’s Gulf Pride azalea bushes. But sooner or later, I knew I’d be outside on my
hands and knees searching for the pieces and trying to put them back together. I’d have to know what
it said. Mrs. Conroy was so worked up I thought she was on the verge of an apoplectic fit. She was
quivering like Aunt Pittypat in Gone with the Wind when the Yankees were shelling Atlanta. “Well?”
she shrieked, even before I could read it. “What does it say?” I didn’t answer at first. Finally, with my
voice all aquiver, I blurted out, “It’s bad news.” “I knew it!” Mrs. Conroy wailed. “Somebody died!
Oh, Lord! Sweet Jesus . . .” “Well, I don’t know about that,” I said, trying to calm us both down. “It
just says something’s wrong. But it doesn’t say what.” “Let me see that,” she said, yanking it from my
hands. “ ‘Big trouble. Come home now.’” She read the words aloud then looked at me. “What
does that mean?” “I don’t know,” I said. “Oh, Lordy, Lordy.” Poor Mrs. Conroy was wringing her
hands. I’d never actually seen anyone do that, but sure enough, that’s what she was doing. “Mrs.
Conroy,” I tried to sound respectful, but firm. “Could you leave me alone for a moment so I can think?
Just for a moment, please?” She left reluctantly. I heard her moving pots and pans around in the
kitchen. Then she began singing “The Old Rugged Cross,” which is a nice old hymn but not great
background music when you’re trying to figure out who sent a Western Union that upended your life
and why. The sender was none other than the stripper turned alligator-hunter herself, Dolores
Simpson. A horrible thought occurred to me: Maybe something had happened to her son, my friend
Robbie-Lee. But he was still in New York City and had just written to me that he was well and happy.
One thing was for sure. Whatever was going on was very serious. If there was ever a woman who
didn’t rattle easy, it would be Dolores. If she said there was trouble, you can bet grandpa’s pet buzzard
it was the Gospel truth. But what kind of trouble? Whose trouble? All of a sudden I wanted to go
home. I had to go home. And I hated myself for staying away for a whole year, even though it had
been a good year and I’d found out some things about Mama and her family that had turned my way
of thinking upside down. But I had been fooling myself to think that nothing would change in Naples
and that I could go back anytime I wanted and everything would be just as it was. Most likely,
someone had died, just as Mrs. Conroy feared. Since my social life had re volved around my book
club, I went over the list of members in my head. Besides Robbie-Lee there was Jackie Hart, who had
started the book club and was in good health as far as I knew. Jane Wisniewski, known to all as “Plain
Jane,” was a poet who made a living writing sexy stories for women’s magazines under the name
Jocelyn Winston. She was in her late fifties and had never mentioned any health concerns. Priscilla
Harmon, who at nineteen was the youngest member of our book club, was at Bethune-Cookman
College in Daytona Beach. Miss
Lansbury, the librarian who helped us choose our book selections and k ept the library trustees
from interfering, had gone off to live with her kinfolk, a tribe of local Indians. And then there was
Mrs. Bailey White, who, come to think of it, was quite elderly. Ten years older than God, as Mama
would have said. But why wouldn’t Dolores just say that in the telegram? “So-andso died. Come
home.” Instead, it said “big trouble.” Which led me back to Jackie. She’d been a newcomer to Naples,
having moved from Boston, of all places, when her husband was hired to work for one of our
wealthiest residents, Mr. Toomb. Jackie was glamorous and witty but she had a special talent for
upsetting the status quo. If they’d been able to get away with it, the town fathers would have had her
tarred and feathered and shipped back north. The book club upended the grapefruit cart, but that
wasn’t all. Jackie had also started a secret radio show she called Miss Dreamsville on WNOG,
“Wonderful Naples on the Gulf.” This was the first late-night radio show in Naples. I don’t know what
goes on in Boston, but in Collier County, Florida, a middle-aged wife and mother like Jackie had no
business having her own radio show, especially if it in volved the deliberate cultivation of a secret,
seductive persona (or to use Jackie’s favorite term, “temptress”). Then, Jackie came up with her
wildest idea yet. She volunteered to take care of a baby so that its unmarried mother—our book club
member, Priscilla—could go to college. Plain Jane and Mrs. Bailey White agreed to help. Now this
was an extraordinary offer that would have been considered an act of great Christian charity exc ept for
one thing. Priscilla and her baby were colored. Oh, that was more than enough to cause “big trouble.”
And yet it didn’t make sense that Dolores Simpson would send the telegram. She held a grudge
against Jackie. Why would she care if Jackie was in trouble up to her ears? Mrs. Conroy had moved
on to another hymn, “Up from the Ground He Arose,” never my favorite, but at the moment, hearing it
sung by Mrs. Conroy with her machine-gun vibrato, made me want to beg for mercy. Although I
could have borrowed Mrs. Conroy’s tel ephone I slipped out the front door and scurried to the phone
box on the corner. I thought I’d try to call Jackie since Dolores didn’t have electricity let alone a
phone. As luck
would have it, the long-distance operator could not get through to anyone in Collier County. A
storm had knocked down the lines in Lee County, north of Collier, and it would be another day or two
before calls could go through. So this is what I did: I borrowed money from Mrs. Conroy. And I took
one Trailways bus after another all the way back to Collier County. It was the same route I’d taken a
year earlier, only in reverse. The last stretch from Tampa to Naples on the Tamiami Trail was the
longest, or so it seemed. I asked the driver to drop me off at a little side road that led to an area known
as Gun Rack Village. It was a sorry excuse for a road, but the only way to get to Dolores Simpson’s
fishing shack unless you had a small boat with a shallow draft. The bus driver made me promise to be
careful. His warning that I better watch out for swamp things was good advice. I whistled and sang, or
banged my hand on my little suitcase, just to ke ep from catching any snakes or gators by surprise. I
found Dolores sitting on the st ep to the rickety dock that led to her two-room fishing shack. She was
whittling a stick into a small weapon known as a “gig.” At any other time and place I would have been
wary of someone crafting a spear, but seeing her there, knife in hand, made me feel downright
nostalgic. I realized I’d been gone too long. This was the Everglades, the River of Grass. To the
Seminole Indians, it was “Pa-hayokee.” To me, it was simply home.