Dolores Simpson sat on the dock that led to her fishing shack and wondered how she’d ended up
here, alone, on the edge of the ’Glades with no one to talk to exc ept a nervous night heron. Nothing in
her life had gone right. She wasn’t even sure who she was anymore. Truth be told, she wasn’t even
Dolores Simpson. Her real name was Bunny Ann Mc Intyre. She always wondered what her mama had
been thinking when she wrote those words in the family Bible. Of course, when she became a grown
girl and was working as a stripper (she preferred “fan dancer”) in Tampa, Bunny was a perfectly
suitable name. At least she didn’t have to come up with something new and catchy like all the other
girls. The funny thing was, girls named Mary, Elizabeth, and Susan who became Safire, Sugar, or
Bubbles were annoyed that she was, in fact, an actual Bunny. Why this bothered them was a mystery
to her, but then women in general had always seemed more complicated than men. When she fled
from that life and moved back to the Everglades, she wanted a new name to go with a new life. On the
bus heading south from Hillsborough County, a lady in a tailored navy suit left a magazine on the seat
next to her. Dolores picked it up and flipped to a random page where she began reading about a
woman named Dolores Simpson who owned a six-bedroom home, an Olympic-sized swimming pool,
a maid, and even a Lincoln Continental. And she hadn’t done it by marrying some man. No, according
to the story, she had started her own business. She was even quoted as saying she didn’t need a man in
her life. Incredible! How she wished she could be that woman, and if she couldn’t, well, at least she
could borrow her name. Good-bye, “Bunny.” Hello, “Dolores.” But a lot of good it had done her.
She spat a stream of tobacco juice, taking care not to hit the pink bougainvillea that Robbie-Lee
had planted at the foot of the dock. Dolores had learned the hard way that bougainvillea, which was
generally quite hardy, would shrivel up and die if it had an unlucky encounter with tobacco spit. While
she wasn’t partial to flowers, Dolores couldn’t see the sense in ruining a perfectly good plant. Besides,
Robbie-Lee was fond of it, and she wanted it to be here looking purty when he came back. If he came
back. “Oooh, my son is gone. Gone to see the world,” she moaned softly. Adding, “Fool. Dang fool.”
She wished she could direct that nasty stream of tobacco juice right at the feet of the folks who had
created her problems. First was Jackie Hart, that trouble-making redhead from Boston. Robbie-Lee
had been doing just fine until Jackie came along. The boy had a promising future which he now had
thrown away. He’d managed to get hisself the rarest kind of job, one in which he didn’t get his hands
dirty. As the sole employee for Sears, Roebuck & Company in Collier County, he’d helped folks place
their orders from the catalog. It didn’t matter that the Sears Center where he worked was the size of an
ice cream stand. He wore nice clothes to work and he wasn’t going to age overnight the way most of
the menfolk in Collier did, either from the fishing industry or farming melons and sugarcane. But then
all of a sudden he left for New York City. Just like that. New York City! Inspired by that awful
woman, Jackie Hart, who put it in his head that he was missing something. Well, dagnabbit, if he
wanted to go north so badly he could have gone to Fort Myers, or Sarasota, or maybe even
Apalachicola. At least he would have still been in Florida. He’d have still been squarely on
Confederate turf. But why New York City? It wasn’t even part of the United States, as far as Dolores
was concerned. She looked over at the night heron. “Oh, just you wait and see,” Dolores said
mournfully. “Being a mother is hard. When they grow up, they gonna do what they gonna do. Your
young’uns will do the same to you that my boy did to me. “But he’ll be back one day,” she added, this
time to herself. “I know he will.” The second person who had messed up her life was Darryl Norwood,
exhusband of that little gal, Dora Witherspoon. She hoped she’d gotten
through to Dora. The telegram had worked to bring her back here. Maybe there was some hope
that the river could be saved. If not, she would have nowhere to go. “Things won’t be so peachy for
you, either,” she called over to the bird. “You’re going to be the last night heron in Collier County.
What we have here is a mighty bad situation. At least you can fly away. You can start over. I can’t.
I’m good for nothin’. I’m stuck.” Dolores examined her hands. Twenty-five years working in the
’Glades, and they looked like the skin of the alligators she caught. But that was the least of her
worries. Back when she’d been a dancer, the owner of the club had complained that her breasts were
too small. Unless she allowed liquid filler to be injected into her breasts, she would lose her job. She’d
gone along with it. Now they were lumpy, and hard, and hurt in ways she didn’t think possible. How
stupid she’d been when she was young. Some mistakes you pay for, forever. Her first mistake was
thinking she was in love. She was fifteen and had just finished eighth grade. When her belly started
swelling, she thought maybe she had worms, or possibly a hernia. But her mama and daddy knew
otherwise. They threw her out. She’d hitchhiked to Tampa on the back of a tomato truck in pouring
rain. She still didn’t know what was wrong with her or why her parents made her leave, but a stranger
on the streets of Tampa took one look at her and walked her to a hospital emergency room. Three
hours later she had her baby. The nuns convinced her she was racked by sin and not worthy to be a
mother. She never had a chance to hold the baby. She wasn’t even sure if the baby was alive or
healthy, and there were times when she wondered if she had dreamed the whole thing. She left that
hospital four days later on her own two feet, alone. She hitchhiked to the beach in St. Pete and
survived by stealing picnics from tourists. Being so young, her body bounced back quickly, and soon
she got herself a job at a nightclub. It was only after she showed up on her first day of work that she
found out she was to be a dancer, not a waitress. She went along with it, thinking she’d do it just for a
while, but “a while” turned into seven years. And that’s when she got pregnant again. The owner of
the nightclub suggested an option that would, as he said, “fix” the situation but Dolores was too scared
to consider it. One of the
other dancers—a sweet-faced girl from Alabama—had gone to an underground clinic and died.
Surrendering another baby to the State of Florida was out of the question, as far as Dolores was
concerned. This baby was a ke eper, come what may. She had him at the same hospital as the first one,
only this time she was pr epared. She scooped him up and took off out of there before somebody could
thrust papers in her face and hand her a pen. She named him Robbie-Lee after a crop r eporter she liked
to listen to on the radio. A man who sounded nice, day in and day out, whether he was discussing the
worrisome possibility of a January freeze in the orange groves or warning listeners about a fierce
storm that had popped up over the Gulf on a summer day. Sometimes the friendly voice asked
questions which he quickly answered himself. For example: Did you know that Tampa is the lightning
capital of the United States? (Well, it is!) Or: Did you know that many historians believe our city gets
its name from the Calusa Indians, or the Shell People, because “Tampa” means “sticks of fire” in their
ancient language? (Well, it does!) So her radio announcer was smart as well as nice, a quality which
Dolores admired. Within hours of leaving the hospital, she fled the area with Robbie-Lee curled up
like a kitten under a silk scarf she’d snatched years earlier from a Canadian traveler, or “snowbird.”
She skipped out of Dodge without so much as a fare-thee-well to anyone, not wanting to alert her
landlord, who would have had her sent to jail for being late on the rent. Never mind that her baby
would be taken from her. All she could think of was to head back down to Collier County. That’s what
people do when they’re almost out of hope, right? Head home? She had heard through the grapevine
that her parents were dead, so at least she didn’t have to face their scorn again. And Collier County
was familiar. As for making a living, her granddaddy had hunted gators in the ’Glades back in the day,
and she thought, Well, heck, I can do that. I watched him do it. I helped him do it. Besides, she
figured, huntin’ gators couldn’t be any harder or more dangerous than working in some old strip club.
In fact, it might be easier. The years slipped by like the hidden currents in the river. She wouldn’t have
said she’d been happy—she wasn’t sure what that felt like—but she wasn’t miserable. She got by, and
folks left her alone. Most importantly,
Robbie-Lee had grown up handsome, clever, and nice, just as she’d dreamed. If only Robbie-Lee
had stayed away from that book club he would be here, helping her with the gators. She hated to admit
it but she had come to rely on Robbie-Lee to lend a hand with the big, unruly ones. Since he’d left,
she’d pretty much given up the gator business altogether. Especially after an odd thing happened: She
had started feeling sorry for the critters. She’d never sympathized with the big ones, which would just
as soon eat her up, but the little ones—the only kind she could now grab hold of these days— well,
they were almost cute! This had come as a shock to her, and she had quietly started retiring her gear.
She was living on fish she could catch from her dock. She sold grunts— minnows, the Yankees called
’em—to the bait shops, always setting aside a healthy portion for herself. She rolled the tiny things in
flour and fried ’em up whole, just like her granddaddy did, and served ’em with a mess of grits.
Indeed, there was nothing Dolores liked better than a big ol’ plate of grits and grunts. And now
someone wanted to take it all away. To some folks it probably wouldn’t have seemed like much. But
to her, it was a little slice of heaven. How could a man grow up in the ’Glades and fail to see its
beauty? How could he look at it and see only money? She’d run into plenty of men like Darryl in her
life. They thought of no one other than themselves. They weren’t any different from the school-yard
bullies who used to pick on Robbie-Lee, calling him “homo” and other names. Darryl and those just
like him, she decided, were evil. The person who was harder to understand was Jackie. She had a nice
home, a husband with a steady job, a couple of kids, and a Buick convertible. What else could a
woman want? If I had that kind of life, Dolores thought wistfully, I would be busy living it. I wouldn’t
waste my time creating problems and meddling in other people’s business. Dolores had never met
anyone from Boston and wondered if they were all like Jackie. First of all, that peculiar accent that
was near impossible to understand. Plus the bizarre urge to speak your mind and have everything
upfront and out in the open. And the worst Yankee trait of all, a missionary zeal to fix everything
Southern.
Not that Jackie was a bad person. She wasn’t evil like Darryl. She was just a Yankee and, typical
of the Northern born, couldn’t leave well enough alone.