Acts of Nature

the wind machines catches you on its freeway at high speed. The safe part is that the raw, ripping sound of an airboat engine at full throttle can be heard a quarter mile away, which gives you plenty of time to ease your canoe off into the sawgrass to avoid being swamped or run over. Today, it was silent.
    There is something of a physical hush in the tall grass here. I believe it is the heat, the slow simmer of the Florida sun trapped in the quiet water, and the smell of wet stalks and green lilies. On occasion the wind will pick up and there is a brushing sound just above our heads and then the call of an anhinga or wood stork passing on wings above.
    “What is it that you like so much about being out here, Max?”
    Sherry’s voice was no louder than the bird calls above. I pondered the question for a few seconds.
    “I’m never in a hurry out here,” I finally said. “All those years on the street, always in a hurry, even when you were doing nothing but surveillance, the anticipation made you feel like you were in a hurry. Maybe it was just my nerves.”
    I took a long, hard pull on my paddle and looked up at Sherry as I followed through with the stroke. “Why? You don’t like it?”
    She looked back with that grin that shows more in her eyes than it does on her lips.
    “It’s way different from anywhere I’ve been,” she said. “Maybe a little too innocent.”
    “It does have that quality,” I said, thinking of the term as a positive whereas I was sure she was still unsure of her own definition. We lapsed into silence again. If you took a deep breath down here, the must of growing grass and decaying humus was sweet and ancient. If you stood, just the altitude of a few feet changed the aroma like a lingering perfume that only interests you when the woman wearing it passes by but intrigues you as it drifts away.
    “I think Jimmy would have liked it out here too. He liked innocent. That’s what got him killed.”
    If it were possible to sound both wistful and bitter at the same time, Sherry had captured it. Her husband, also a cop, had been killed in the line of duty. He’d answered a robbery in progress at one of those convenience stores every cop hates and often call the Stop & Rob, letting the humor cover the anxiety. Jimmy had caught a glimpse of someone running from the store as his partner pulled the squad car up, and he bailed out of the unit and then chased the subject into a dead-end alley.
    “You really think that, Sherry?” I said. “He was a good cop from what I’ve heard. A holdup. A routine traffic stop. You know the statistics. It wasn’t like he was cowboying.”
    She took another two strokes before answering.
    “I’m not saying he wasn’t careful, or that he was naïve, really. But he had a certain trust in people, especially kids.”
    When Jimmy had closed in on the runner trying to scale a ten-foot wall at the end of the alley, he realized it was just a kid, a skinny-armed eighth-grader wearing sneakers too big for his feet. He relaxed. His weapon was still holstered and he was giving the boy one of those “come here, kid” gestures, his fingers bent, palm up like he’d caught him sneaking candy from a bowl. That’s when the child pulled a 9mm from his baggy shorts and fired a round into Sherry’s husband’s heart. Freak tragedy. Never should have happened. It’s something you never forget if you’re the loved one left behind. All that crap about closure and moving on doesn’t remove the memory cells that live in a human brain. I’d seen Jimmy return in Sherry’s eyes a few times since we’d been together and I was still at a loss for how to react. Maybe she was thinking of him, what she was missing. Maybe she was thinking of what it would be like to be with someone who was the opposite of him. So I stayed quiet. Let her enjoy it, or shake off the vision on her own. Some things we handle alone.
    I nodded when she looked back at me. The grin was back in her eyes and for the next hour we talked about our favorite bakeries, about Tuscany cannoli and key lime pie and why nobody in the country can make a Philly cheesesteak sandwich the way they do in the city because of the bread from Amoroso’s. We were on to the delights of fresh stone crabs straight off the boat at the docks in Chokoloskee when we suddenly broke out of the high grass and slid out onto several acres of open water and the change caused Sherry to stop midsentence. On flat water the sunlight was