The Gulf Hammock
by Jeffrey Greene
part 1
There was a reason why Jack Burden and Brent McCallister decided to get out of Gainesville that Sunday in March 1987 and drive to the tiny village of Suwannee, more than an hour southwest to the coast, if not the most important one: Altman’s-on-the-Water, the best seafood restaurant for miles around.
Jack, who’d eaten there once before, promised Brent that it really lived up to the hype, although he admitted there wasn’t much competition for decent food in Florida’s sparsely populated Big Bend. The view alone was worth the trip, he claimed. The Suwannee River emptied into a vast salt marsh so big you couldn’t even see the Gulf of Mexico from the restaurant’s picture windows.
The real reason was that they were bored single guys in their early thirties, restless, burned out from working at jobs they didn’t like and needing a change of scene. It was a slow Sunday.
The reservations were for six-thirty, but they’d deliberately left an hour early in order to take a short detour into the Gulf Hammock, which neither man had ever seen, so they turned south off of CR349, the only road into Suwannee, onto SR19/98, and headed into Levy County. Two guys Jack knew who regularly fished near the Hammock had made him curious about it, and he had talked a somewhat reluctant Brent into taking the side trip.
They’d agreed to explore for an hour or so, mostly just driving a few miles in and back and, if conditions permitted, cruising a short distance up any dirt roads they found, then head to the restaurant in time for dinner. It hadn’t occurred to either man to tell anyone where they were going.
“How big is it?” Brent asked as the car jolted over the much rougher grade of 19/98.
“Give or take a hundred thousand acres, bordered by the Suwannee and Lower Withlacoochee Rivers,” Jack replied. “Mostly private land owned by paper and lumber companies. About a quarter of it is wildlife preserve.”
“Remind me again why we’re doing this.”
“You know why. We need a dose of that big empty feeling.”
“Maybe you do,” Brent said. “I’m just here to work up an appetite for a fried seafood platter.”
Between the two settlements of Gulf Hammock and Lebanon Station, both of which appear on maps but don’t seem to actually exist, there is a ten-mile stretch of pitted, two-lane road in dire need of resurfacing, running through an unbroken forest that is dry in some places and swampy in others. It was around five o’clock by then, and still early enough in March that the sun was already touching the highest treetops.
They were at about the halfway point between the two alleged towns when Brent spotted a dirt road on the right that wound off into an apparently dry section of pinewoods. It had been logged in the recent past, and many of the young trees were bowed and twisted into skinny, tormented shapes, like mistreated prisoners of the dense palmetto thickets. They turned in and sat there for a minute, trying to decide whether or not to venture in without four-wheel drive. It had rained the night before, and the sandy dirt seemed firm enough.
As they idled there, a souped-up Plymouth Duster passed by heading north, going at least ninety. They heard a savage whoop as it blew by, leaving a thrown beer can it its wake. They had the windows down, feeling as much as listening to the silence that quickly extinguished the brief blaze of noise.
A wake of vultures, competing for a dead something a hundred yards or so up the road, and scattered into flight by the car, soon settled back down, blackly clustered on the weedy shoulder. Was it the Duster, or the derisive challenge of the driver’s rebel yell that decided them? Brent raised questioning eyebrows at Jack, who mimed a conspiratorial nod. Brent smiled and they started down the dirt road. Jack would remember that smile.
It was more a wide trail than a road, just big enough for one vehicle without the windows getting slapped by branches and palmetto fronds. They came to a sandy clearing, through which the trail continued, turned off the engine and got out of the car. The sand wasn’t hard-packed but seemed firm enough to drive on, supporting prickly pear, sand spurs, fire ant beds, stinging nettles and spreads of reindeer lichen. The stillness here was of another order than either man was used to; it felt portentous, as if every creature in the forest were holding its breath. Facing opposite directions, they listened, scanning the woods for signs of life, but there wasn’t sight or sound of fauna, and not the faintest breeze.
“Shall we go a little farther?” Brent asked.
Jack checked his watch. “Maybe fifteen more minutes.”
They had driven another half mile before noticing that the pinewoods were giving way to wetland dominated by live oaks, sabal palms and cypresses. By now they were splashing through deep, tannin-dark puddles, and still hadn’t found anywhere to turn around. The brush crowding both sides of what had narrowed to a hunting trail had gotten too thick even to try, and in places growing several feet above the car.
“We’ll have to back out the way we came, then turn around at the clearing,” Brent said.
Jack offered to get out and direct him. Brent said no, but after a short time backing up with his neck craned around, he changed his mind and asked Jack to guide him through the curves. They were taking it slow and easy, Jack carefully stepping around or leaping puddles, when they heard a dog baying somewhere off to the southwest, quickly followed by a loud rifle shot.
Startled, Brent stepped on the brake but didn’t put the car in park, and Jack was hurrying back to the passenger side when a big wild boar crashed out of a thicket maybe two hundred feet to the left, and came right at them, emitting a porcine scream of rage and fear. They’d stumbled into the line of fire in a boar hunt. Jack glimpsed blood on its left flank, and went into a low crouch as he ran the last few yards to the car.
He was reaching up for the door handle when another shot boomed, he hit the ground, and in the same instant the driver and passenger windows shattered and glass rained down on his head and shoulders. He didn’t see where the boar had gone, but assuming it was nearby, he reached up and eased the door open.
Brent hadn’t made a sound. The bullet must have been a steel-jacketed round that passed through the driver’s window, his neck and the passenger side window. He was slumped on his right side, his face inches from Jack’s, mouth agape, his wide-open eyes so empty it was hard to believe they’d ever held an expression. Still in reverse, the car was slowly rolling toward a tree, and after a second’s hesitation Jack scrambled over his friend’s body, keeping low, shoved his legs aside and hit the brake.
Within these compressed moments moving at a crawl, it seemed, behind his thundering pulse, all he could feel besides shock was a sucking void in his chest. He’d just barely managed to stop the car before it hit the tree. He pulled up and straightened out, then began backing the car toward 19/98.
A crazy thought kept pushing up through the pounding murk in his head: Brent’s death wasn’t murder, it was a stupid, pointless accident, but if the hunter found out that he’d killed a man instead of a pig — assuming he’d heard the car’s engine — he or they might decide that it was best to silence the only witness before he could get out of the woods and back on the road. Even as he derided himself for his paranoia, the thought sprouted black wings, and he accelerated into a reckless backward flight up the trail.
He saw the blood on his hands and the steering wheel and, for the first time, realized he was covered with it. The bullet must have severed the carotid artery. Wiping his hands on his pants, he brushed glass from the shattered window out of his hair. He was sitting on glass, and could feel Brent’s blood soaking into his jeans.
He heard the dog’s distant baying but had no idea if the hunter was close enough to the trail to have noticed a car parked where it didn’t belong, and he couldn’t take his eyes off the trail long enough to find out. The brush was so high and the trail so twisting that the car was probably out of sight, and he was making good time. But it seemed to be taking longer than it should have, so long that he began to worry that he’d somehow missed the sandy clearing.
He was briefly distracted by a movement out of the tail of his left eye, possibly a large animal — the boar? — when he hit something hard and felt the car lurch upward. He tried going forward, then backing up, but he was stuck fast. He turned off the engine and got out to look, leaving the car door open. It was a low pine stump, and the back axle was hooked over it. This was bad. He wasn’t going anywhere. He couldn’t hear the dog now, and the woods had settled back into its now-minacious silence, but there was every reason to think that the hunter and his quarry were still close by. He hoped the pig was dead by now and the hunter too busy with his trophy to notice car tracks.
There was nothing he could do for Brent, and he needed to get the hell out of here and find some help, so he started walking back toward 19/98. He was wearing a light windbreaker, a long-sleeve flannel shirt and a t-shirt, and the temperature was falling. Figuring it was still a mile or so from the road, he went into a loping run, hoping to hitch a ride before the hunter spotted him.
But the hunter probably wasn’t even aware of him, and wouldn’t have found the car. Not yet. Or would he? No reason to take chances; he had to keep moving. The guy could be tracking him. And out here there wouldn’t be any witnesses.
He came to the clearing, and in another ten minutes had made it to the road, pausing, hands on knees, to catch his breath. Not a car in sight to the vanishing point in both directions. It was that lovely time of early evening between twilight and dusk, the darkness lurking in the thickets and under trees, the sky a deep, almost indigo blue marked by a star here, Jupiter or Venus there. But the beauty of the day wasn’t for him. He had no right to it. One of his oldest friends was lying dead in his car back up that trail he wished to God they hadn’t taken, and he’d left him there. He turned to begin walking north, without much hope of a ride, wondering if he’d be spending the night out here.
Loud crashing sounds through the brush a little south of his position froze him into a crouch, and then the wounded boar charged out into the road. He’d seen many feral pigs during the two years he’d rented a friend’s cabin by the Suwannee River, but this was his first good look at a wild boar. It was twice as big as any feral sow he’d ever seen, at least two fifty, maybe three hundred pounds. Curving yellow tusks jutted aggressively several inches out on both sides of the long, furry snout, the massive body, mounted on short, sturdy legs, was covered by mottled, yellowish brown fur, unlike the uniform black of the sows, and enormous testicles protruded grotesquely from under its angrily raised tail.
Copyright © 2023 by Jeffrey Greene
