On, to Everglades National Park down in Florida, where I was given a souped-up Plymouth Interceptor with siren concealed behind the grill and a big red light on the roof. Once again I found myself a traffic cop, a highway patrolman. Night shift. I wrote a few warning tickets, out of meanness, but spent more time careering down the Pine Island-Flamingo Park highway, late at night, lights flashing, to see what the Interceptor would do (115 mph). Sometimes I had to halt traffic on the highway for a few minutes in order to assist one of those eight-foot sawgrass diamondbacks across the pavement. A routine chore was checking doors at the visitor center, chasing skunks and drunks and alligators out of the rest rooms, which were left unlocked at night. But the best part of the job was lying in wait for ’Gator Roberts, the most famous alligator poacher in the state of Florida, maybe in the whole Southeast; a legendary figure, phantom outlaw, folk hero and a bone in the throat of Everglades park rangers. We hated him.

We had an informant, a waitress who worked at the Redneck Café near Pine Island; she had connections with the alligator underworld and would tell us from time to time (for a price) exactly where old ’Gator Roberts was planning to strike next. We’d stake out the place—some stinking, stagnant slough deep in the dismal swamp—and wait there through the night, sweating, cursing, scratching chigger bites, slapping mosquitoes, fondling our guns. He never appeared. Next morning we’d learn that sixteen skinned alligator carcasses had been found at the other end of the park, forty miles away, with a note attached: “You Smokies aint got the brains Gawd give a spoonbill duck, regards, Gator.”

One winter in that low-rent bog was enough. Retiring phase by phase from the law enforcement business I returned to Arizona and got myself a job as a fire lookout up in a sixty-foot tower on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. The good rim, where the Mormon girls come every summer to work at the lodge. Strictly forbidden all vices but one, those bountiful handsome girls always make the most of that one, which may be the reason Utah has the highest birth rate and the highest VD rate in the nation. Strict family types, those Utahns, stern believers in woman’s traditional role. “Woman’s place?” said Joseph Smith; “why woman’s place—is in my bed!”

I’d sit there in my lookout waiting for Kathy or Susan or Sharon—all those girls seemed to be named Kathy or Susan or Sharon—waiting for one or the other to come and climb my tower. As far as I can tell, it never did any of us harm. Although now that I think about it, looking over what I’ve written here so far, I’m not so sure. (Were you ever awakened at night by the sound of crashing brain cells, whole tiers and entire galleries of corroded gray matter coming loose and thundering like an avalanche down into the abyss of your cerebellum?)