In 1938, Ervin T. Rouse and his lyric-writing collaborator, Earl, took a train all the way to New York City and recorded a song Ervin'd written, the "Orange Blossom Special," for RCA records. They'd stayed in a hotel that had menus in French and a drinking fountain in the bathroom that Earl liked but Ervin never trusted.
"I might get down'n my knees to drink whiskey, but not water," Ervin had told Earl. "Lord knows, somethin' ain't natural about that."
Staying in the hotel was a big deal because, since childhood, they'd been traveling with a flimflam preacher, playing music at minstrel shows, playing at tobacco warehouses and country bars, going by a variety of names. The Three White Ducks, The Redhot Smokin' Tarheels: The names changed as often as their numbers did, but it was always Ervin on fiddle, Earl on the single snare drum. They collected money in a hat. They slept in many a barn.
But in 1937, riding around Lake Okeechobee in an open white roadster, sobering up on beer after a long night of whiskey, Ervin came up with the tune and lyrics (Earl had passed out) of a song he would later say "just kept bangin' around in my head till it come out whole." That song was the "Orange Blossom Special," a fast fiddle piece so haunting, so demanding of the artist, it has been called the greatest train song in the history of bluegrass music.
Looky yonder comin', coming down the railroad track.
It's the Orange Blossom Special, bringin' my baby back…
At the time, though, Ervin didn't think the song was anything unusual. He and Earl had written hundreds of the damn things and nothing had ever come of any of them. But one afternoon, playing the song outside a Kissimmee barbershop, passing the hat, an Atlanta musical agent heard them, and the next thing they knew, they were on a train for New York, a recording session at RCA, and a stay at the hotel that had menus they couldn't read and a drinking fountain that Ervin, at least, refused to use.
They made the record, Ervin signed some papers, Earl pocketed a check for three hundred dollars, and it was mostly all downhill after that.
In the decades that followed, Ervin heard his song played on every late-night talk show by nearly every American country band. He heard it played on the radio. In bars, he heard it played on the jukebox. Once he turned on the public television station and a big orchestra was playing it, up there in that goddamn city, New York. The sheet music was easy to find, too. All the music stores in Miami carried it, and that meant every music store in the country probably had it. Miami was such a modern place.
Whenever Ervin got the chance, he would thumb through the bins of sheet music, or flip open the books until he found it: the "Orange Blossom Special"; music and lyrics, Ervin T. Rouse."
His name was always right up there at the top, plain to read. Trouble was, nobody in the music stores believed it was him when he tried to tell them. Same with the country-music stars, when he wrote them letters, putting on plenty of postage so the envelopes would make it clear to Nashville. Same with the country radio stations when he'd call the special phone-in lines.
"You want to request the "Orange Blossom Special'?"
"Nope, I wrote it. Just wanted you to know."
"Sure you did, partner, sure. That song's been around forever," they'd always say.
And Ervin would reply, "Man, I started young! What was I, seventeen, eighteen when I did it?" But they'd hang up before he had a chance to play the song for them over the phone. By the time he got the phone cradled so he could mount his fiddle under his chin and raise the bow, he'd hear click.
That song was just so famous, nobody'd believe it was him that wrote it. But if they'd heard him play it, they'd've known. Nobody could play the "Orange Blossom Special" like Ervin T. Rouse.
It was his old white liquor-making buddy, Tucker Gatrell, who pointed out that not being famous was the least of Ervin's worries. "You supposed to be getting paid, you dumb shit. Every time some big star makes a record of your song, you supposed to get a little somethin'."
Well, Ervin knew that. In fact, had always felt the three hundred dollars he had been paid was a little thin to cover a song that had become so popular. But it took Tuck, who didn't lack for gall or brains, to go to Miami and convince a fancy Coconut Grove lawyer to look into the matter. A few months later, Ervin received a Manhattan check for one thousand dollars. On the phone, the lawyer told him, "You don't need to thank me, Mr. Rouse. You just sign some papers, turn the royalties over to me. I'll make sure you get a nice check once, maybe twice a year."
He got those checks, too-sometimes for as much as five hundred dollars.
Ervin used the money to buy a piece of land in Pinecrest, a little lumber and gator-poaching settlement south of the Tamiami Trail, way back in the Glades, about midway between Miami and Naples. Him and Earl built a plywood shack up on blocks because of the rainy season, trucked in a stove and a generator, and lived pretty well. Pinecrest had a store that sold dry beans and canned goods, and there was a bar there, too. The Gatorhook, where everyone believed Ervin wrote the song because they heard him play it so often.
The one person who didn't care whether he'd written a famous song or not was the woman he married. His best friend, that's the way Ervin thought of her. A woman so smart and funny and bawdy that he could say any stupid thing that came into his head and she'd make sense of it. Got so he hated being in the house if she wasn't around. Hated coming around the corner, fearing her truck wouldn't be there because she was out shopping or doing some damn thing. When she left the house, it was as if she took the air with her and he couldn't breathe right until she returned. That's how much life that woman had in her.
But one day she left and didn't come back, and Ervin waited and waited, until he finally went looking, and he found her beyond the fence at the little Midway Airport, where she worked. Her truck was still running, but her heart wasn't.
That woman had a heart too big for just one person-that's what Ervin always said. But even it couldn't handle the strain of all that caring.
He wrote a song about that. He wrote a lot of songs for his wife.
When she left, she took his life with her, and then Earl died, and Ervin figured his career as a songwriter was finished, too-he hadn't been doing much with it anyway, what with so much time spent drinking and mourning and reading the Bible. But then Tucker Gatrell said he wanted to give it a try, become his new collaborator. If Ervin could make so much money on a single song, they ought to make a whole bunch more, Tuck said, once he got involved.
Tuck was always like that, real bossy. He wouldn't put up with anyone moping around when there was work to be done.
Tuck had spent a week with him in Pinecrest-too long by the standards of peace-loving Gatorhook patrons-and the two of them turned out seventeen songs, music and lyrics. A few of the songs were pretty good, Ervin thought. "If Jesus Rode the Range, I'd Saddle My Horse Right Now." "Hog Dogs Got My Girl by the Ear!" "Redfish Ain't Roses to My Darlin'." They'd have written more, too, if one night Ervin hadn't fallen off the roof of the shack and landed on his Jim Beam bottle wrong. He almost bled to death by the time Tuck sobered up enough to drive him to the hospital in Miami.
But when those songs didn't do anything, Tucker lost interest- the man didn't have a long attention span. And that left Ervin T. Rouse to live with the knowledge that, for him, there would be only the "Orange Blossom Special"-a song that dominated him, dwarfed him, and now had a life of its own.
This tragic knowledge might have driven lesser men into deadly or debilitating extremes: strong drink, religious fanaticism, depraved excesses. But fortunately for Ervin, his early lifestyle had hardened him. He had always liked strong drink, and his early years with the flimflam preacher left him cold on organized religion. There were no interesting alternatives left, so he contented himself with living alone in the Glades, hunting and fishing, and sometimes flying around stone lonely in his wife's beat-up old plane.
And almost every Saturday night, Ervin T. Rouse would stagger with great dignity to The Gatorhook, where he would play fiddle in return for free drinks, sawing out the "Orange Blossom Special" until the tears streamed down his face..
The day after leaving Mango, late in the afternoon, Tuck and Joe rode into Monroe Station, an old mess camp back in the late twenties when the Tamiami Trail was being built, but which was now a diner and fuel stop. Monroe Station was a solitary place with its two gas pumps and hand-painted signs: WILD HOG SANDWICHES! That stiff white house sitting alone on the highway, like an island, set among cypress trees at the edge of the asphalt and a whole horizon of saw-grass prairie beyond.
Tuck reigned to a stop in front of the station and looked up at one of the upstairs windows. As a boy, he'd bunked in that room a couple of nights, traveling with the crews as the dredge pumped its way through the swamp. Later, the house had been used as an outpost for state troopers. Then it became a little bar and dance place, a place Tuck liked.
He pointed to the window and said to Joseph, "Remember what happened up there that one night?"
Joseph grinned for the first time all day. "Yep, I sure do 'member that."
Thirty years past, but Joseph could still look at the window glass and see the images of him and Tuck, both young men then, moving back and forth across the blank frame, dancing with the same friendly lady.
"Guess the restaurant's already closed. The gawldang television people was probably waiting on us but left."
Joseph patted Buster and looked away. Tuck had been talking about the television people all day. They had camped just east of Ochopee, and Tuck said the reporters would surely find them there, but they hadn't. Then he said the entrance to Collier-Seminole State Park was the place, but again no cameras.
By noon, Tuck was fuming. "I just don't understand it. Best news story in the state and not a sign of them muck thumpers. Maybe they got lost-I bet that's it."
Joseph thought, Lost on eighty miles of two-lane highway? But he didn't say anything. Back at the picnic place, if Tuck had only closed his mouth for a moment, he would have heard the reporters laughing at him. But he hadn't. Never noticed the looks they gave him-the kind of swervy-eyed look people gave drunks. There would be no more reporters. Joseph was pretty sure of that.
"Hey, I know what." Tuck couldn't stop thinking about it. "I bet they went straight to Ervin's place."
Joseph said, "Maybe so."
"You notice how some of them pretended not to know 'bout the song, like they'd never heard it? That was their way of bein' sneaky, trying to throw the others off the track."
"You'd know about that."
"Wanting to get to Ervin first."
Joseph shrugged.
Tuck said, "They'll show up, don't you worry."
"They do, I'll tell them about the water, just like you said." Trying to make Tucker feel better.
"There you go. Now you're using your noggin, Joe."
Monroe Station looked abandoned. At least, no one seemed to be around, so they found a spigot out back, where all the swamp buggies and airboats were kept fenced. They watered their horses.
"I was gonna have me a roast pork sandwich and a beer once we got here."
Joseph said, "Yeah, and some Vienna sausages. I like to drink the juice."
"Well, it's a hell of a disappointment."
"I don't care, just long as we don't have to ride on the highway no more. Them fast trucks gives me the spooks."
They remounted and set off down the Loop Road, Roscoe's and Buster's hooves clip-clopping on the dirt road. The trees moved in, forming a cool tunnel above them. Some had butterfly orchids growing in the shade. Within an hour, they came to the first of Pinecrest's few houses: simple one-story places, none built close to the other.
"Where'd The Gatorhook go?" Joseph was looking around, trying to remember the place. He hadn't been to Pinecrest in ten, fifteen years.
"Burned down a little while back. Maybe two months ago. The state people won't let 'em rebuild it, neither."
That was a surprise. Joseph didn't know how to react to news like that. Why would anyone stay in Pinecrest with The Gatorhook gone?
Tucker said, "Best thing that coulda happened. Only way to get Ervin to put down his fiddle and give up whiskey long enough to get any work done. Him and me went for a little airplane ride a while back. In that crop duster his wife flew, the two-wing job? Never woulda got him up there if The Gatorhook was still around."
Joseph had flown with Ervin once, and shivered at the thought of it. "I ain't goin' up in no plane with Ervin. You got that on your mind, you better tell me right now. He don't even have a license."
Tuck was peering ahead-it was dusky now, with thunderheads showing themselves over the trees, way east toward Miami. "He don't have a license to drive a car, neither. Or to fish and hunt gators, but that never slowed him. He does okay in that plane. Gets lost, he just flies around until he finds a water tower. Cities paint their names on water towers, and Ervin can read just fine. Say-" He was looking through the trees toward what Joseph remembered as Ervin's shack. "What is that, some kind of big tire? Leaning out backa the house."
Joseph knew what it was, one of those new antennas for a television. But before he could say anything, Tucker said, "I'll be damned, a satellite dish." He got Roscoe walking again. "Ervin musta got another check."
Sitting there with a cigar in his teeth, his flat Celtic face alight in the television's glow, Ervin T. Rouse said, "I'd come with you, but I got this now. It keeps me pretty busy."
Meaning the television: a nice one with a great big screen, like the kind Joseph had seen in the store windows at the Cypress Gate shopping mall the time he'd stopped to buy beer.
"Ervin, you promised me." Tucker was sitting in the rocker looking at him but not getting much response. Ervin had a glass of whiskey in his hand, a baseball cap on his head-it read FLORIDA MARLINS-and he was wearing an old Seminole jacket, all colors of rag ends tied into it-red, green, yellow, lots of blue. "You said you'd come along with us to Mango, help us get some publicity. You're the only famous person I know that's not already dead."
"You got a television?"
"Got a radio."
Ervin hooted. "Hell, I threw my radio out the window the day I got this. Heard my song played one too many times and just gave her a toss." He held the remote-control unit out, pointing it like a pistol. Talking to Joseph, Ervin said, "Watch this," and began to flick the channels, stopping only to explain them. "See this one? This here's Cable News Network. Goes all over the world. People in India probably watching it right now. Can't get that with an antenna! And looky here-hear those people talking? That's a foreign language. Could be Jewish folks, for all I know. Maybe French. Their cameras take a picture and radio it up to outer space. Then the satellite radios it back down here to the Glades. Hits my dish on the button, every time."
"You promised me, Ervin," Tucker pressed. "When we was flyin' back in the plane, that's just what you said. 'I promise.' "
"What I promised was, we'd probably get back alive. That's what I was talking about. Us being in the plane." Ervin sunk down in his chair, irritated. "Them ailerons creaking, the horizontal stabilizers corroded from being parked in the barn so long. Hell, I didn't mean nothing by it. I just thought it'd bring us luck." He began to flick channels again. "Besides, that was right after The Gatorhook burned down. I wasn't in my right mind."
"You give your song more publicity, you'll just make that much more money. Hey," said Tucker, "you could buy a bigger dish. And they'd want to buy the songs you and me wrote. Now those are some good songs. 'The Mango Tango'? That's a song people'd buy just to dance to."
Ervin said, "Uh-huh, I notice all the reporters crawling around here. What, they out hiding in the bushes?"
That was the wrong thing to say to Tucker. Joseph knew it and saw Tuck's expression change. "We missed our connections, that's all. But I guess a rich man like you don't need any more money." Not trying to hide his sarcasm or his anger; Tuck had a way of making his voice sound sharp, like a blade. "Sure was lucky, you having a friend smart enough to hook you up with that lawyer so you could get them royalty checks. Not that I mind doing favors-"
"Favors, hah!" Ervin turned his glass up and took a gulp. "Seems to me, I was the last one to do you a favor." He looked at Joseph, knowing Joseph would understand. "No radio, bugs in the cockpit, coulda been arrested for a hundred different reasons, and I can't even swim. 'Want to take a little trip,' he says!"
"How many years you been getting checks now? One little ride in the plane takes care of all that?"
"If it galls you me getting checks, you can breathe easy, because I'm not getting them no more. That's what this here is. An entertainment system, that's what it's called, and I signed a paper giving that Miami lawyer all the rights in trade."
"For a television?"
"Nicest one they had. Felt bad about all the money the lawyer had to pay for it, but you got to be tough when it comes to business."
"I'll be damned. Why didn't you just give him your house while you was at it?"
"I don't see that it has anything to do with you, Tucker Gatrell. Turns out that lawyer owned mosta the song, anyway-don't ask me how that happened. Figured giving him the rest for something nice as this was a pretty smart deal."
Tuck started to say something else, but Ervin cut him off. "Can't you close that trap of yours for two seconds? Joseph and me are trying to watch a show." Then to Joseph, he added, "Wait till you see the kind of Western pictures they make now. The women take their clothes off and the Indians almost always win."
Tucker stood abruptly. "If you can't get your mind off that television long enough to talk about this, I guess I can find a way to do it." Going out onto the stoop, letting the screen door bang closed behind him.
"Let him go," Joseph said. He was watching the screen now, hoping Ervin would flip the channel. He wanted to see one of those new Westerns.
Ervin yelled toward the door, "Don't you touch that dish!"
"Ain't gonna touch it. I'm gonna shoot it!"
Ervin got slowly to his feet-he weighed more than two hundred pounds-then went toward the door in a hurry. Looking through the screening, he said to Joseph, "He's going through the packs y'all brought. He got a gun in there?" Then he hollered, "I'll call the law on you! Lordy, Lordy"-he was talking to Joseph again-"he doesn't mean it, does he? He's not going to hurt my dish?"
Joseph said, "The way I put it together, he mighta been the one who burnt down The Gatorhook."
"No."
"Seems he's pretty serious about this."
From outside came Tucker's voice. "I heard that! I heard that! I never did it! I'd never burned down The Gatorhook!"
Ervin said, "Damn if he doesn't still have that white-handled pistol of his. Uh-oh, he's gonna do it-"
Joseph got up quickly and put his hand on Ervin's shoulder, trying to get him away from the door. "Let's get down behind the couch. He could hit the house, the truck, anything. Maybe us, the way he shoots." That made Joseph think of something. He turned his face toward the screen and hollered, "Tuck, you hit Buster, I'll… I'll cut your head off and hide it!"
"No sir, by God, I'm not going to let him!" Ervin pulled away from Joseph, pushed open the door, and stood looking at Tucker, who had the cylinder of his revolver open, putting in cartridges. In a quiet voice, but deadly serious, Ervin said, "Tuck, I believe you've finally gone around the bend. I believe your brain's finally gone crazy."
Tucker looked up at him and said just as quietly, "That may be, Ervin T. It may be my brain ain't as healthy as it used to be. But by God, you promised."
Ervin T. Rouse stood in the silence for a while. Finally, he said, "I never pictured you in the water-sellin' business. That flimflam preacher used to take me around, he did a little of that. Called it medicine. I just figured never to go back to it. What he did to us boys…" The way his voice trailed off, he sounded sad to Joseph. Far away and sad. The only other time he'd heard Ervin sound like that was when his wife died.
"I ain't that preacher, Ervin T."
"True enough. Reckon if you was, I'd kill you. Shoulda done it back then."
Tucker said, "And you ain't no boy no more."
"Nope. I'm sure not no boy." Ervin cleared his throat and put his hands in his pockets, looking around. "Welp, if you're that set on it."
"I am. I plan to get this thing done."
"I see that… I see that." Then after a long time, as if he was listening to the crickets and the owls, Ervin finally said, "I'll go. But I'll drive my wife's truck, you don't mind. I don't have a horse, and I'm sure not riding that steer."
It took Ervin a few days messing around Pinecrest to get ready. "I've got affairs to put in order," he said. What he meant was, his fiddle was broken and he had to wait to pick it up at the repair shop in Miami.
That was okay with Tucker and Joseph. Tuck had things to do, and Joseph finally got to watch one of the new Westerns Ervin had described. The women didn't take their clothes off, but the Indians did win, and that was almost as good.
The only thing Tucker wanted to watch was the news. He kept calling the stations from Ervin's wall telephone, but no one wanted to talk to him.
"I don't get it," Tuck kept saying. "They know who I am."
Joseph thought, Yeah, that's the problem, but he kept his mouth shut.
Mostly, Tucker used Ervin's truck and drove different places. "Getting ready," he explained. "I know what we've been doing wrong now."
They never did see themselves on the television.
On a Sunday morning, the first of November, they finally got going. Tuck had Ervin's truck fixed so that there was a flashing orange light on the roof ("Make it easier for the cement trucks to find Buster," he had chided Joseph), and he bolted a big hand-painted sign to the truck's bed. The sign read: