Shark River

12

As I walked with Tomlinson to the marina to get the mail, he said, “All that stuff with the Rastas reminds me of something I’ve been meaning to bring up, Doc. Lately, more and more, the older I get, the things I did in my past really bother me. Some truly shitty stuff, man. I’d like just the two of us to sit down one day and talk about it, you don’t mind. About something I was involved with a long time ago, but it concerns you. I think it’s a talk long overdue.”

In some inexplicable and maybe perverse way, I’d been goading him when I brought up revolutionaries and bombings. I wasn’t certain why. Perhaps it was because I was beginning to have second thoughts about the deal I’d made with Harrington. But I said, “Sure, we can talk. Another time, though. Getting beaten up, getting shot, arguing with Ransom about my uncle. Little stuff like that, I’m kind of pooped out for some reason.”

“Okay. But soon.”

“Yeah, soon. A couple of weeks, a couple of months from now, when we both have some time. If you can help me get this business with Ransom squared away, that would be a good way to start.”

“Absolutely,” he said. “No worries.” He walked on in silence for a time before he spoke again. “I went through the stuff Tuck sent to Ransom. What a circus act that guy was. And what a romantic. He sent her drawings, which I know you saw, but also this cryptic letter.”

I said, “You read it. I’m not going to waste my time.”

“That’s my point. You don’t have to read it. I’ve already figured out where Tuck hid the six grand. It’s at his ranch. We’ve got to meet a guy there and he’s going to give us another letter. We can go get it tomorrow, you want. Or Sunday.”

“Make it Sunday. I’ve got at least a full day’s work in the lab, plus a lot of phone calls to make. The Aquaculture Lab at Gainesville has been working on reintroducing Gulf sturgeon south of Tampa Bay, and I’ve been doing research for the director. Then I’ve got to contact all the offshore stone crabbers I know and see if I can buy some of their old rope because of an order I’ve got for gooseneck barnacles. But first I need to check with Jeth, see how the fish did while I was away.”

Tomlinson said, “What?” already preoccupied with private thoughts. When I repeated myself, he said, “Did you hear what happened to Jeth? Between him and Janet?”

Jeth was one of the marina’s fishing guides, a huge, good-looking guy with a big heart and a slight stutter. Janet was Janet Mueller, who lived up at Jensen’s Marina on her little blue Holiday Mansion houseboat.

“What happened?”

Tomlinson’s attention had wandered again. “Huh? What happened to who?”

I stopped walking. Put my hand on his shoulder and turned him. “I gather that things didn’t go well with Nimba, did they? On your trip back from Guava Key.”

He laughed bitterly. “It couldn’t’a gone worse, man. It was terrible. A faithful woman who finally decides to go out on her abusive husband, but the guy she chooses can’t consummate the relationship. A woman with her religious background, it was like having God in the room telling her she was a sinner and damned to Hell. Like that was the reason He wouldn’t allow me to perform. The moment we got back, she threw her luggage in the trunk of a cab and headed for the airport.” He sighed. “I don’t blame her, man. She worked and worked on me, the whole trip down. Zamboni tried to rally a few times but never really made it across the blue line.”

“Maybe it’s time you spoke to a physician. I hear they’ve got drugs now for that. Some kind of pill?”

“I’m way ahead of you. I talked to Dieter today when he got back from lunch. He’s got his license to practice in the States now, which I really don’t give a shit about, but it means the drug companies give him all kinds of interesting samples. He gave me a pill to try.”

Dieter Rasmussen was a retired Munich psychopharmacologist who lives over on A Dock in his gorgeous Grand Banks trawler, Das Stasi. He’s a big guy with a shaved head, good-looking-judging from the reaction of local women-brilliant, rich, and he loves the kicked-back, happy life of Dinkin’s Bay. I hadn’t liked or trusted the man at first, but he’d done a good job of fitting in with the marina community, so now we played chess occasionally, or sat around on my deck at sunset talking science, genetics, natural selection-things that interested both of us.

“What’d he give you?”

Tomlinson was wearing baggy surfer shorts, no shirt, veins and ribs showing, his gaunt face serious beneath matted blond hair. He stuffed a hand into his pocket, and produced a small, blue, diamond-shaped pill in a blister pack. “Viagra,” he said. “It’s the only one he had left, but he’s got so much respect for me as a fellow scientist, he said what the hell. I had no choice but to accept. You know how I hate to use prescription drugs, but I’m desperate, man.”

He sounded desperate. He had the same air of preoccupation and depression he’d been projecting for the last several months. It’s normal for Tomlinson’s personality to vary with his moods. I’ve learned to recognize his highs and emotional lows. When he’s down, in a funk, I know, for instance, to leave him alone, give him time and the black mood will pass.

But this mood wasn’t passing and it was beginning to worry me.

“I wasn’t aware that you had an aversion to any kind of drug,” I told him.

It was a friendly barb calculated to make him smile, but he didn’t smile. I listened to him say, “When it comes to pharmaceuticals, I’m an explorer not a commuter. You’re not going to see me on many subways. But if I find a space shuttle available? Look out. Plus, with prescription pills, I worry about side effects. Like this pill. Some folks say it can blur your vision and give you a slight headache, too. Doctor Dieter tells me about all that and immediately I think, Jesus, what a dangerous drug. First it screws up your vision, then it gives you a hard-on.” He made a sound of frustration and disgust. “But it’s worth the risk. I don’t have many options remaining. So tonight, after the marina’s party, I’m going to test the little blue pill and see if my goddamn pecker has an ounce of manhood left in him. Fortunately, I’ve found two humanitarian-minded ladies willing to participate in the experiment.”

That, at least, sounded more like the old Tomlinson. “Anyone I know? Or is it confidential?”

“You remember Barbie and Bobbi, the Verner twins who work at Hooters?”

I said, “Sure, the two redheads.” Hooters was where we went for cold draft beer and chicken wings after playing baseball.

“Barbie and Bobbi, they are two smart ladies. Both’re working their way through college, majoring in psychology with a minor in comparative religions, which is one reason we’ve become good friends over the last year. They’re not kinky, they’re not promiscuous, but those two girls have the instincts of surgical nurses. They’re familiar with the problem; they know I need help. I called and spoke to both of them before I came to your place. So guess what? Didn’t even hesitate; they both volunteered to get naked with me, bless their hearts. They’re coming to the party, then we’re going for a short midnight shake-down cruise on No Mas. ”

I was laughing now. I couldn’t help myself. “Then why are you so depressed? You ought to be grinning like you just won the lottery. You know how many men in this country who’d give anything to trade places with you? Two Hooters girls, for Christ’s sake.”

He shook his head from side to side, disconsolate. “They don’t know about this pill. What if it doesn’t work? If I can’t make it with two Hooters girls, I might as well stick my dick in the dirt and use it as a tomato stake. The worst thing, though, man-and this is what’s really bothering me-if the pill doesn’t put serious lead in my pencil, I’ll never be able to face those girls again. After something like that, where can we go to eat wings?”

Dinkin’s Bay Marina is three hundred yards or so up the shoreline from my lab. If the mosquitoes aren’t swarming, it’s an easy walk along the shell road. If you want to get to the marina by boat, you head north under the Sanibel Causeway, then turn left just past the power lines and run in close along the deepwater of Woodring’s Point. To get there by car, follow Sanibel’s Tarpon Bay Road past Bailey’s General Store, down the shell road, into the mangroves, and through the gate to the bay.

Lots of people come by boat and car and bike because Dinkin’s Bay is an unusual place.

Beyond the shell parking lot, there’s a community of old wooden buildings that extends out onto the water via a latticework of wobbly docks. It is a welcome anachronism on an island known for tourism, busy beaches, thousands of real estate salesmen, reclusive artists, designer homes, and elegant restaurants. There are plank tables for cleaning fish, a big wooden bait tank whose pump hisses twenty-four hours a day, and picnic tables beneath a tin roof so visitors have a place to sit while they eat the marina’s fried fish and crab cakes and chowder. There is a gift shop, too. It’s called the Red Pelican, and it smells of incense and imported cotton and silk. It offers blouses and dresses, sarongs and knickknacks from all over the world, plus paintings by local artists.

Next to the Red Pelican is the marina office and store. It’s a two-story building. Stocky, pragmatic Mack, owner and manager of Dinkin’s Bay, runs the office below. Jeth lives in the one-bedroom apartment above.

As I walked toward the office, I heard a woman’s voice call, “Hey there, Doc! You coming to the party tonight?” I looked to see JoAnn Smallwood waving at me. JoAnn is part owner of the soggy old Chris Craft cruiser Tiger Lily, one of Dinkin’s Bay Marina’s gaudier floating homes. She’s a skinny-hipped, busty woman who, along with her roommate and partner, Rhonda Lister, runs a very profitable weekly newspaper, The Heat Islands Fishing Report.

I stopped to talk with JoAnn for a while while the other liveaboards worked or washed their boats, or carried grocery sacks or coolers along the docks, everyone seeming to move faster than usual. Nearly every person who passed me had to stop, say hello, and ask why my arm was in a sling.

To each and every one, I told them, “Fell off a dock.”

To the few who said they’d met my sister, that she was gorgeous and charming and funny, I replied, “Funny’s right. That’s her little joke. She’s actually my cousin.”

It was Friday night, the official end of the workweek on the connected barrier islands of Sanibel and Captiva. Saturday and Sunday were the busiest days of the week, but Friday night is still the traditional gathering time for the liveaboards and marina employees, a brief quiet time before the weekend rush, when all the locals come together as a community to drink and laugh, to complain about the traffic and the tourists with no one around to offend.

It was nearly five P.M. JoAnn and Rhonda had hung Japanese lanterns on the stern of their boat, a sure sign that it was a party night. Music was already booming from inside the trawlers and sailboats and cruisers that lined liveaboard row. I could hear showers running; could smell the shampoo odor of soap mixed with the more common marina smells of diesel and rope and varnish. Could see that Mack and Jeth had already set out the big Igloo coolers filled with ice and beer. Could see Eleanor and Joyce and Kelly loading the picnic tables with food. Knew that, within an hour or so, Mack would walk out, close the steel gate and lock it, a necessary ritual that is also symbolic: The outside world could no longer intrude on our small marina stronghold.

Now JoAnn waved me closer and said, “Did you hear what happened while you were away? Between Jeth and Janet, I mean.”

It’s impossible to avoid marina gossip so I usually listen politely, then pointedly try to forget what I’ve just heard. I said, “Someone told Tomlinson, because he mentioned it. But no particulars.”

JoAnn has short copper hair that now looked bright red, perhaps because of the satin sheer pink dress she wore or the yellow hibiscus blossom behind her ear. There was a pleasant bounce of hair and cleavage as she made the waving motion again. “Then come aboard. You’re gonna need a beer after you hear it. It’s that damn sad.”

I looked at my watch: 5:10. Almost sunset time. Almost party time. It was the first day in weeks that I hadn’t worked out, and I still felt sick and sore from my run-in with Clare.

“A couple of beers, maybe that’s just what I need,” I told her. “But then I need to go talk to Mack about something.” I used my good arm to pull me up the old Chris’s boarding letter, through the railing gate.

JoAnn said, “Jeth and Janet, we all know they’ve had their problems. But what do you expect if you date someone from your own marina?” She gave me a meaningful look, sitting there in her party dress, one chunky leg crossed over the other, a margarita in her hand.

A knowing look because we’d both felt a long-standing sexual attraction for the other. We had come close to acting on that attraction a few times, but had been smart enough to defuse it on each occasion. JoAnn wasn’t beautiful or even pretty by general standards-which is to say the predictable and often perverse standards of New York advertising gurus. She had nice hair, a Rubensesque body and the kind of wide, plain face that I associate with corn-fields and small Midwestern towns. But there was a commonsense sexuality about the woman that I felt on a bone-and-marrow, abdominal level. Apparently, she felt the same for me. So we took pains never to be alone.

We were in deck chairs, sitting on Tiger Lily ’s stern, where we could look across the docks to the marina office and the shallow-water mooring where the fishing skiffs-the Bonefishers and Makos, the Aquasports, Egrets, and Lake and Bays-sat motionless on their lines, big outboard engines tilted upward like the wings of old fighter planes on a carrier. Through their silence, the engines implied velocity and a certain competence.

She’d brought me my standard drink: Bud Light in a big glass over ice with a squeeze of lime. I now took a sip and said, “Yep. It’s way too risky to date among the marina family.”

“Exactly. Everyone agrees. But if anyone could make it work, it’s those two kids. Janet loves the big lug so much, the first time they had trouble, you know as well as I do, that’s why she moved her boat up to Jensen’s. Thought the distance might help, and it did. Since then, they’ve been doing great. Jeth stays on her houseboat when he doesn’t have a charter, and you know how often Janet overnights here. Hell, I think it’s been good for all of us, because now everyone at Jensen’s has gotten to be like part of our extended family. And they’re such a fun, crazy bunch.”

Jensen’s Marina on Captiva is one of the last of the old Florida fish camps. Run by three brothers who also happen to be raving individualists, walking into Jensen’s is like traveling back four or five decades. I said, “The guides up there, Dave, Bob Sabatino, and Jimmy, when they clean a female black tip, they’ve been saving the unborn sharks for me. And Janet, of course, she’s one of the few people I trust to take care of my fish.”

JoAnn nodded. “While you and Tomlinson were on Guava key, she was here every night helping Jeth. Until it happened.”

What happened was, the previous weekend, Janet and Jeth had had some minor squabble. In all human pairings, sometimes varying with the situation, there is a dominant member. Janet was the more forceful of the two, but never in an overpowering, offensive way. She was more goal-oriented than Jeth, much better with details, and so she tended to control the relationship. The argument had something to do with Jeth’s seeming lack of professional drive. How could he expect her to marry him, to produce a family for the two of them, if he continued working as a handyman around the marina and guiding only when he felt like it?

It was a serious subject as far as Janet was concerned. Marriage was important to her. It was her second try, and getting everything right was vital. There was a good reason. A couple of years back, Janet had come to Sanibel an emotional and physical wreck after quitting her teaching job in Ohio. She had had to quit her job because she was suffering anxiety attacks and depression so severe that she could no longer function. It took us awhile before she trusted us enough to tell us the story. It was not a happy story. Her first husband, the only man she’d ever loved, had been driving home late after work one snowy night. On the same road, coming from the opposite direction, was a woman who had no license because of her long history of alcohol abuse.

All that Janet could remember from that night, and the week that followed, was a highway patrolman coming to the door… and a nurse crying with her, at her bedside, because of the miscarriage she’d suffered.

It was a long, long time before she could bring herself to date anyone.

When she’d finally healed sufficiently, Jeth was a good choice. He has the looks and the build of a college line-backer, but he is one of the kindest, most mild-mannered men I’ve ever met. Even so, Janet’s prodding had finally pissed him off and he apparently told her to go find another man if she wasn’t satisfied with his professional aspirations or his income.

“That’s how it got started,” JoAnn told me. “It wasn’t a big fight. Nothing serious-at least, that’s what Janet told me, and she had no reason to lie, Doc. This was two days after it happened, and she was absolutely devastated. Broken-hearted. I don’t think the girl’s stopped crying all week.”

Coincidentally, that same weekend, Janet had been invited to an all-night bachelorette party in Sarasota. She and her girlfriends were to spend the evening going from bar to bar in a limo. Lots of drinking and dancing and harmless fun.

“But it wasn’t so harmless,” JoAnn told me. “The last thing Janet did before she got in the limo was try to call Jeth at his apartment. She tried a couple of more times before midnight. He still wasn’t home, which made her mad for some reason, so she stuck the cell phone in her purse and decided the best way for her to stop worrying about what Jeth was doing was to have a hell of a good time on her own. Which she did. There were five or six girls in the party. They went to a couple of bars, then to one of those male review strip clubs. That set the mood. Then, at Passe Grille, they happened to run into a bunch of local guys who were having their own bachelor’s party. Great-looking guys all of them, and one of them started hitting on Janet.

“You know how shy she is, Doc. I think she’s cute as can be but, let’s face it, she doesn’t have the kind of looks or the kind of body that guys tumble over. She wasn’t used to that kind of attention from a man so smooth. Plus, all the other girls had matched up with one of the bachelors, and there was a kind of screw-it, let’s-have-fun attitude. No one was gonna tell, especially the girl who was getting married ’cause it was her last night of freedom and she was behaving worse than any of them.”

JoAnn noticed that my glass was empty. She stood and got another beer from the little on-deck fridge. Stopped to exchange pleasantries with two of the guides, Javier Castillo and Neville Robeson, then took her seat again, sipped her drink, and turned her face toward me. Said, “We’ve had some great talks, you and me, Doc. Someone like you, I feel like I can say any damn thing that comes into my mind, and it’ll be okay. One thing we’ve never talked about, though, it’s something that most men don’t know or even suspect about us women. It’s not all the time, and the mood has to be just right. But it happens. What it is, when women get together in that kind of situation, sexuality can be… well, contagious. I’ve felt it myself plenty of times. It’s like being part of a pack. You all get horny as hell at the same time, and there’re suddenly no rules at all ’cause the whole group’s doing it.” She paused for a moment, considering what she’d just told me. “You’re a scientist. You think there could be some kind of biological reason for feeling that way? Herd instinct, maybe?”

I didn’t feel like smiling-intimate stories about friends told by a third party make me uncomfortable. But I smiled anyway. “I’d prefer not even to guess about something like that. So what happened at the party?”

Janet and her friends had drunk a lot and they’d kept drinking is what happened. Janet and the handsome guy she’d met ended up alone in the back of the guy’s Mercedes. She wasn’t too drunk to know what she was doing. It was consensual, it seemed safe and fun at the time, and it was very, very passionate. She’d never done anything like that in her life. Didn’t think she was capable of doing something like that. I had a hard time believing it myself… but, in a way, it made perfect sense, too. Janet’s one of the plain, doughy-looking ones. Round face, mousy brown hair, legs and thighs prone to heaviness. Very quiet and competent and dependable. Good with computers and bookkeeping. She’s in her mid-thirties now. Probably seldom in her life experienced the overwhelming flattery of a certain kind of man who’s very good in bars.”

JoAnn said, “Janet told me it was like being temporarily insane, and I know exactly what she means. She wouldn’t let the guy go all the way. But they got stripped down and real sweaty. Completely dropped all her inhibitions probably like she never had before-”

I interrupted. “Please don’t tell me she confessed all this to Jeth. I hope to hell she was smart enough and adult enough not to try and get rid of her own guilt by laying it all on-”

“She didn’t confess,” JoAnn said. “She didn’t have to confess. Remember that cell phone she put in her purse? In the back of the Mercedes, every time they’d move a certain way, she’d squeeze up against that purse and hit the redial button accidentally. Jeth’s recorder will tape messages up to three minutes long. He was out to almost two ’cause he had to tow in Duke Sells, who’d broken down about seven miles off the lighthouse. Got back to his apartment exhausted, got his first beer of the night, and played his messages. Stood there and listened to fifteen minutes of his girlfriend making love to another man.”

I felt sick myself just hearing it, and I didn’t doubt it for a moment when JoAnn added, “When Janet got back the next night and realized what’d happened, she went to him and actually got down on her knees outside the door of his apartment and begged him to forgive her. Jeth wouldn’t let her in. Never even opened the door. That was six days ago. He hasn’t spoken a word to her. Says he never will again. I saw Janet yesterday. Remember the way she looked when she first came here? After her husband was killed in the car wreck? Shaky, gaunt, all the horror in the world in those pretty eyes of hers. Clap your hands behind her and she’d jump out of her skin. That’s the way she looks now. She can’t eat, can’t sleep, and can’t stop crying. She thinks she’s cursed. I mean, really believes it. Or that she has some destructive badness in her that keeps screwing up her life intentionally. I had the worst feeling when I left her houseboat-a feeling that she’s not gonna make it this time. It’s too much after all the stuff she’s already been through.”

I stood, placed my mug on the teak table. Said, “Mind if I use your phone?”

“What’re you going to do, Doc?”

There was a wall phone on the control console bulkhead just to the left of the helm seat. “What’s Janet’s number? I haven’t called her in a while.”

Now JoAnn was standing, her expression dubious. “Hey… wait a minute, big fella. You’re way too smart to put yourself in the middle of something like this. Give them some time; they’ll work it out themselves.”

I held the phone away from my ear. “Do you really believe that?”

She sighed, thought about it, then sighed again. “No. No, I don’t believe it. Not for a minute.”

“You know how stubborn Jeth is. If he’s been telling people he’ll never speak to her again, you can bet that’s exactly what he’ll do. As in never again. You think she’s strong enough to deal with that?”

JoAnn shook her head slowly. “Janet’s at the end of her rope. That’s what I believe. After something like this, she may end up one of those crazy hermit spinsters. A bag lady, who knows? I think she’s about to completely lose it. But what the hell can we do to help them?”