Shark River

7

R ansom Ebanks asked me, “Why would our daddy lie about somethin’ like that? About you and me being brother and sister? You look at the papers I’ve been trying to show you, the ones back on the island, then you understand.”

In Tomlinson’s bungalow, in a small black backpack, she had a manila envelope filled with papers. Letters mostly, some legal documents and photos. I’d glanced at them long enough to notice that there was a drawing of some kind, too.

I said, “Tucker would lie because-” I almost said Tucker Gatrell lied because he was a fraud and a pathological liar, but caught myself.

Tomlinson was right. The genetics were unmistakable. The eyes, the vocal tones, even the way she turned her head and paused before speaking: all characteristics that reminded me of Tuck. Not that it was surprising my bawdy old uncle had sired a daughter down in the islands. He’d spent a lot of time in Cuba, the Bahamas, and Central America, drinking and carousing. I reminded myself that daughters tend to be sensitive and protective about their fathers no matter who they are. It wasn’t Ransom’s fault that she was Tucker’s daughter. No need to be cruel, so I started over.

“Tucker would lie because he was… let’s just describe him as an unusual person. He was theatrical. Prone to exaggeration, almost like an actor. That’s one way to describe him-the man would have been a decent actor. Which is what he was doing when he told you I was your brother. Exaggerating. Acting like it was true. His little way of having fun. Isn’t that right, Tomlinson? Tomlinson knew the guy. Oh, he was wild about Tomlinson.”

I was being facetious. Tucker’s common greeting when he saw Tomlinson approach was, “It’ll be a couple hundred more years before you hippie bastards should be allowed to mate with human beings. But that doesn’t mean I won’t let you buy me a beer.”

“Wild about me,” Tomlinson echoed. “Describes our relationship perfectly.”

I said, “My mother was Tuck’s younger sister. Much younger. She and my father were killed in an accident a long time ago. But you and I are fairly close to the same age. So see? It’s impossible. If we are related, Ransom, you’d be my cousin.”

She turned away then paused, that familiar cowboy actor pose. Toyed with the big gold ring on her right hand, thoughtful, then shook her head.

Why was it so difficult for her to accept?

We were aboard my twenty-four-foot trawl boat, dragging nets and culling the catch so I could finish my fish survey. Tomlinson and the woman had agreed to help because I was temporarily one-handed and couldn’t operate the trammels alone.

It was a winter-blue morning with a light chop out of the south. The breeze was balmy, scented with jasmine and mown grass. We were less than a hundred meters off Guava Key, both outriggers down, nets in the water. They created a brown swale that, if seen from above, would be an expanding vortex contrail as I steered us in wide circles and the rollers pressed themselves along the bottom.

I hadn’t called Harrington yet. For one thing, I dreaded it. Talk to a man about a one-night stand with his daughter? For another, my work took precedence-or so I told myself.

My trawl boat is a specialized vessel, built to drag shallow water, and ideal for collecting on the flats around Sanibel Island and the Gulf littoral. It is made of cedar planking and painted gray on gray, with a gray wheelhouse.

No, it is not built for style, nor is it maintained for looks.

I’d bought her used in Chokoloskee a couple years ago and single-handedly chugged up the inland waterway past Mango and Naples and Fort Myers Beach, and put her to work. It’d paid for itself in less than a year. When a university or lab sends me a big order for a species of plant or animal that I can’t collect by hand at low tide, or with a cast net, I fire up the net boat and rumble out into the bay.

“Rumble” is the appropriate word. It is powered by an old standard six-cylinder engine. The name brand is Pleasure Craft but it is actually made by Ford. Plugs and points, and no computer gizmos of any kind. In the little pilot house is a wheel, a throttle and the minimum of gauges-water pressure, oil pressure, and temperature. Above the pilot house, folded like the wings of a pterodactyl, is a complicated rigging of wires and steel booms to raise and lower drag nets, port and starboard. On the stern, a plywood culling table runs across the transom, with a twelve-volt light system so I can work at night. There are two huge live wells and a storage hatch on the port side built the size of a bunk, so I’ve got a place to doze if I get sleepy or just choose to lay out late, looking at the stars.

The trawler is slow, dependable, and about as graceful and easy to maneuver as a floating slab of cement.

But it’s functional-all I care about-and easy to use.

Tomlinson had been out with me enough to know how to set the nets while I steered. Ransom stood next to me in the wheelhouse, talking, not wanting to believe that I was telling her the truth.

She illustrated a component of the human quandary: When you have wholeheartedly accepted one vision of reality, it is very difficult to have that reality challenged, then replaced by another.

She was still shaking her head as if perplexed. “Whenever he mentioned you, I could hear the daddy sound in his voice, him telling me about the brother I had back in Florida. Like the sun rose and set on you. Tell me about how you so smart and big and strong, jes’ about the best at everything you did. From what I saw out there on the dock yesterday, the way you handle yourself with them bad men, sweet Jesus, he tol’ me the truth, he did. Get yourself shot and you act like, hey, it no big deal. Like you knew exactly what to do, zoomin’ around out there on that fast boat.”

That was surprising to hear. Tucker was prone to criticize and denigrate, particularly when he was drunk-which he usually was.

I said, “No matter what he told you, what he said, it doesn’t change the simple fact that I am not your brother.”

“Uh-huh, that what you keep sayin’ only I don’t understand the reason. I saw my daddy six, maybe seven times in my life, but I know he cared about me, and I know he cared about you. What so hard to believe?” She thought for a moment, making a show of it. Swung her braids for effect, red beads rattling, then touched an index finger to her face. “Maybe it because of my color. Yeah, maybe that the thing. Daddy, he used to tell me, ‘I got me a big ol’ ’Merican boy and a sweet little Island girl. Some white folk, they don’t like that. That the reason? You fault daddy for lovin’ a black woman, my brother?”

I groaned. She was as maddening as Tucker had once been, and seemed to have the potential to be as transparently manipulative. I said, “Oh, please. Tomlinson, would you explain it to her?”

He was standing, watching the trail of the nets, alert for unexpected snags. Hook an unseen engine block or sunken tree, and the entire superstructure could tumble down if you didn’t back the throttle.

He made a noncommittal wave with his hands-don’t put me in the middle of this. “Doc, all I’m going to say is, you two have exactly the same eyes. You and her both, the same color, just like Tuck’s. You didn’t realize that? Hah! No, I can tell you didn’t. It’s true. Take a look in the mirror, compadres. But a racist? Nope, Ransom, the label doesn’t fit. Racism requires lots and lots of dumb emotion, plus a dose of stupidity. Doc has a first-rate intellect, and the average rock has more emotional sensitivity. Your brother just doesn’t have the tools.”

“You’re so helpful,” I said. “Thanks a lot.”

Tomlinson nodded toward her. “Maybe you haven’t noticed, but this happens to be one of the rare, spectacular ones. Living proof that a controversial assertion of mine is accurate: The most beautiful women in the world are always over thirty-five. Always. Why? Because, like great art, beauty requires fabric and depth. When it comes to beautiful women, Doc, you know my motto: Ingratiate yourself any way you can, then do whatever it takes to win them over.” He touched his fingers to his lips. “You are stunning, Ms. Ebanks.”

That earned him a dazzling smile. She said, “Thank you, Mr. Thomas. You a very nice person and speak lots of pretty words,” before she returned her attention to me. “Know what you should do? When we get back to land, you read Daddy’s letter like I asked, then you understand. The one sent me last month by that attorney man, the one Daddy Gatrell used. Judge Lemar Flowers, he the one. When I stopped at the marina, your place on Sanibel, them friends of yours knowed right away who Judge Flowers was. He famous around that island. Took one look at the letter, the handsome man behind the counter, the one who got the stutter, he told me where to find you.”

She’d taken a Greyhound bus north, then sat around on the mainland, awaiting permission to board the private ferry to Guava Key. After several hours without a response, she’d borrowed a canoe and paddled the five miles alone.

Her determination, at least, was impressive. And Tomlinson was right: Ransom was physically spectacular, no doubt. She had a sprinter’s long legs and dense muscularity, but her body was unmistakably, sensationally feminine. This morning, she wore the same yellow canvas shorts, but she’d traded in her tie-dye for one of Tomlinson’s black, sleeveless Harley Davidson T-shirts. The black shirt lengthened her and lightened her skin, so that she looked as if she was made of very, very firm and sculpted pale chocolate. But I’d already identified too many of Tuck’s mannerisms and genetics to see her now separately, as her own attractive entity.

“I’m very glad I came to find you, my brother. The thing that surprises me, though, is you be so very stubborn.”

I sighed, held my hand up-we needed to stop talking while I did my work. Behind us, I could see that the catch bags at the end of the otter trawls were already engorged, which meant that she and Tomlinson had to help.

I said, “Time to bring in the nets.”

I shut down the engine, and used my right hand to crank in one otter trawl while Tomlinson cranked in the other. The nets were each eighteen feet long; woven funnels with heavy wooden doors at the mouth to keep the nets open, galvanized chain on the bottom to keep them down, plus rolling sea grass guards so they wouldn’t tear up the grassbeds. The rig was designed to shepherd everything in the boat’s path to the rear of the net, an expandable ball that was kept closed by a simple knot.

As I cranked, I listened to the steel cable creak with the weight of resistance, and watched the pod at the end of the net trail in and grow larger. Once I had the release-sack winched into the air, I reached up and, by hand, swung the boom over the boat. It hung there like a giant balloon, pouring seawater onto the deck, a hundred pounds or more of croaking, clicking, squeaking, popping sea life.

Anyone who says that the underwater world is silent has never been underwater.

As many times as I’ve hauled in trawl nets, I’ve yet to lose the feeling of anticipation and expectation before dumping that first strike from new bottom. You never know what might be inside.

I told Tomlinson, “Leave your net in the water. We don’t want to kill anything. We’ll cull mine, then yours.”

I pulled the string, and out gushed a wriggling, scampering mass of living protein. There were hundreds of fish, dozens of species: grunts, pinfish, flukes, cowfish, file fish, immature sea trout, croakers, gray snapper, lane snapper, thread herrings, immature female groupers, skipjacks, box fish, and southern puffers, the last two making rapid-fire inhalations as they inflated their bodies like miniature footballs. There were blue crabs and calico crabs, arrow crabs and hermit crabs. There were shrimp and sea horses, sea urchins, hydroids, and stingrays all buried among grass and gumbo that smelled of iodine and fresh sea bottom, which is one of the most delicate and compelling odors I know.

Ransom commented on how much we’d hauled in-“Man, I didn’t know that many kinds of things lived down there!”-then surprised me by adding, “What we got right there, them sea urchins, man, they something sweet to eat.”

I was rigging a tarp to protect our catch from the sun. Along the transom, made of PVC, was a raw water sprinkler to keep everything wet and cool. I said, “Help yourself, but you need to eat while you help me chart. We want to get everything back in the water as fast as we can.”

I’d already familiarized her with the four clipboards I had hanging in the wheelhouse. On each was a paper on which were listed many dozens of species by their common names. As Tomlinson and I called out animals and released them, she was to make a mark in the appropriate box.

I watched her grab a salmon-colored spiny urchin, crack the bottom with a knife, and scoop out the golden eggs. “Ummm, man, we shoulda brought a lime with us. Lime and sea urchin, that a very nice thing. A cool beer to drink, that make it better.”

I said, “If you want, we’ll put a few in the live well. You can eat them later.”

“Can we keep a couple of them horse conchs, too?” she asked. “I slice it up and pound it tender, then fry it real hot. It more peppery tastin’ than the queen conchs, but it something good, man. Down on my island, the vitch people-the voodoo people, I’m talkin’ about. The vitch people, they say a man got trouble with his short leg, all he got to do is eat some fresh horse conch raw. That make him stand up strong. Like a stallion horse, you understand?”

Tomlinson said, “Short leg?”

Ransom had a busty, bawdy laugh. “The little god ’tween your legs I’m discussin’.”

Tomlinson stood motionless in thought for a moment, then I watched him bend and lift two mahogany-colored horse conchs out of the pile, turn, and place them elbow deep in the wells of aerated seawater where I store animals I need to transport alive.

He dried his hands on his paisley surfer shorts, saying, “Sounds delicious.”

Speaking rapidly to Ransom as I dropped fish overboard, I said, “That makes five… six… seven French grunts… yeah, that’s all of them. So now we’ll start on file fish and sea horses. There might be a couple of pipe fish in there, too. That should be.. . Clipboard C. Ready?”

She was looking at the chart. “No, man, no, you wrong, that make nine French grunts. You miscounted, plus there’s one right there by Mr. Thomas’ knee. I can see the tail.”

Tomlinson and I were down on the deck, using our hands to cull through the thigh-high piles of grass and clumps of tunicates, searching for more life. My left arm was feeling pretty good. The more I used it, the better it felt.

“She’s right,” said Tomlinson as he held up the candy-colored fish. He slid it back into the water and watched it swim away. “Nine French grunts it is.”

I told her, “Good job, way to keep track. Tell us when you’re ready for the sea horses. That’ll leave the tunicates and the soft sponges, then we’re finished for the day.”

Not finished with the survey-my contract called for three seasonal replicates, all to be done with cast net and otter trawls like the two I was using. I refuse to use threepanneled trammel nets anymore because they are too deadly, too destructive and there’s too much chance of them being lost, sinking and killing fish for years afterward.

Over the years, I’ve refined my own survey technique: Count the number of fish and the number of species from several specific habitats around an island-I’d already documented 237 different species around Guava Key. Calculate respective totals. Then use aerial photos to measure the various acres of habitat in the adjoining water space, and multiply acreage by the number and species of animals found in similar areas.

Much of it is subjective judgment. You have to make considerations for mechanical biases: The size of net mesh, the speed of the boat. For instance, my slow trawler with its large meshed net is never going to catch a mature tarpon nor a microscopic tarpon larva-but that doesn’t mean they don’t both live in the waters around Guava Key. They certainly do.

Once I consider all the data I’ve collected and match figures from other regions, it’s not difficult to make an objective summary about the health of a body of water and its sea bottom.

From everything I’d seen over the last week, the bays around Guava Key were still healthy enough to be productive, but there were some danger signs. The water seemed unusually murky for February-it had a green turbidity, not the tannin-amber color normally associated with mangrove back country.

Curious, I’d checked the local telephone book. There were more than a hundred public and private golf courses listed in the county that adjoined the bay. My Florida atlas was more specific: Of those one hundred courses, more than a dozen of them were boundaried by brackish water rivers and creeks that flowed directly into the bay.

I’d thought the numbers must have been a misprint until I called several fellow biologists around the state. It turned out that most coastal counties in Florida have at least that many courses, and some of the bigger, tourism-driven counties have far more.

Nothing against golf. I’ve played enough to appreciate the artistry of a well-designed course, and I wish I had the coordination to be good at the game. I also agree that golf courses are correctly considered green space preserve areas by state planners-but the problem is, what does it take to keep them green?

In Florida it takes fertilizer. Tons and tons of inorganic nitrogen and phosphorus. Much of that fertilizer is not absorbed by fairway grasses. It washes off into water hazards and the water hazards drain into creeks, the creeks into rivers, and rivers drain into bays. In all brackish and saltwater live, suspended, myriad species of microscopic plant life, or phytoplankton. Microscopic plants react to fertilizer in the same way Bermuda grass does-they turn a bright, rich green.

That’s great for a golf course, but terrible for a bay. When water turns murky, the depth that sunlight can penetrate is reduced. If sunlight does not reach the sea bottom, sea grasses cannot grow. Sea grass is the perfect habitat for the shrimp and crabs on which game fish such as sea trout, redfish, and snook depend. Filtering species such as tunicates and sponges also use sea grass as a necessary anchor.

If murky water kills the sea meadows, then shrimp, crabs, and fish are eliminated as well, along with the very filtering animals required to make the bay clear and healthy again.

It is a hugely destructive intrusion that needs to be taken seriously, yet state bureaucrats spend far more time and money thwarting private homeowners from building docks (which provide excellent underwater habitat) and trying to implement such pointless boondoggles as manatee idle zones. The idle zones can’t be enforced and, worse, will have negligible effect on manatee fatalities because of the simple fact that the draft of a vessel is often more problematic than a vessel’s speed.

There are many fine, intelligent state-employed bureaucrats and biologists working in Florida, but the mandates they receive, and the objectives with which they are charged have, historically, been tragically shortsighted or misdirected.

The woman said, “We get back, I’m gonna fry up some of that conch, what you men think? Catch me a nice snapper, I’ll make that, too, with johnnycakes and some good fish gravy.” Ransom was talking while she studied her clipboards. Apparently, she was adding up numbers without having to be told. I liked that.

Tomlinson was still shoveling his hands through mounds of grass. “How ’bout you let us buy you lunch at the Tarpon Lodge? That old restaurant on the hill.”

She smiled, still calculating. “Oh man, I like the sound ’a that, but I don’t have no clothes for a place so fancy. I got me a pair of jeans, a lil’ ol’ black skirt, but nothing good enough for rich man’s place.”

Tomlinson said, “Oh, baloney-excuse my language. See what I’m wearing?” He touched the sleeve of his tattered, hibiscus-pink Hawaiian shirt before plunging his hands back into the pile. “We’re on an island. This is considered formal wear. Pair of flipflops and cutoffs, you can go anywhere but a funeral, which they don’t have out here anyway. They don’t have funerals because the rules don’t allow members to die while on club property. So when we get ashore… awwww-OUCH!”

Tomlinson’s scream was oddly high-pitched, so feminine that I would have laughed had he not tumbled hard over onto his side, holding his right hand as if he’d been stabbed.

The woman and I were both immediately beside him, helping him up. He was breathing hard; seemed a little dazed and was still holding his wrist. “I just got the shit shocked out of me! Like there’s a fucking 220-volt line in there!” He was staring at the last pile of grass and gumbo, but wary of it, keeping his distance.

I looked at his hand. No puncture wounds, no blood, but it was streaked with red.

“Damn, that hurt! ”

I was on my knees again. I had the little wooden-handled dip net, searching through the grass. At first, I thought he’d grabbed a saltwater catfish or stingray-unassertive animals with painful defensive systems. A stingray’s spine has serrated edges and two groves that run the length of it, venomous glands in each. A thin layer of skin called the integumentary sheath covers the spine, and a complicated proteinous toxin is released when that sheath ruptures upon penetration. I stepped on a small stingray once, and it took all my resolve not to sit down and bawl like a baby.

Saltwater catfish are almost as bad. Their dorsal and lateral fins are serrated like double-edged saws, and the slimy venom secreted from axillary glands in the sheaths of their spines is an extremely painful protein-based poison. Because there was no puncture mark on Tomlinson’s hand, though, I figured he’d grabbed some kind of jellyfish-the stinging nematocysts of a Portuguese man-o’war, in sufficient number, are potent enough to hospitalize a grown man.

I saw that it was neither. Lying on the deck, beneath the gumbo, was a banjo-shaped animal that was a little less than two feet long. It had the round body of a ray, but the truncated tail of a fish. Its milky gray body was covered with peculiar triangles, circles and semicircles that were suggestive of military camouflage or some weird alien, computer coding. An unusual and highly adapted animal.

“What the hell is that thing?”

I touched it gently with the tip of the wooden handle. The fish moved ever so slightly, its black eyes indifferent, gill clefts moving rhythmically, secure in its own defense system.

I said, “It’s an electric ray. We don’t get a lot of them around here, but when we dragged along that sand beach? That’s probably where he was.” I used the handle to lift it slightly, then amended. “Sorry, where she was. The way you tell is, they’re kind of like a shark. The males have elongated claspers.”

We were all three crouched over it now. I turned the misting water spray on the ray to keep it cool, and still it did not react.

Tomlinson’s eyes were wide, very excited. “Its skin was really smooth when I first touched it. Then it was like he flipped the power switch. Zap! Serious voltage that went straight to my brain, then arched down to my toes. Awesome! Like a bright red light flashed on behind my eyes and I could see a wiring schematic for my entire nervous system. Far out, man!” He paused; was looking at the ray, thinking about it. “Hey… what happened was, it hurt like hell, yeah, but it also gave me a kind of weird high. It wasn’t just painful, it was… interesting. In a chemical-electric way, I’m talking about. A really far-out sort of rush.”

Ransom said, “Lordy, Lordy, some pair, you two white men. My brother, he have a bullet cut his arm, it don’t even bother him. Mr. Thomas get a shock, he like the feeling.”

“No, no, what you don’t understand is, I am a scientist, Ransom, a very dedicated karma explorer. Pain and pleasure-they’re not that far removed. Or maybe I… what it could be is, I’ve been desensitized by some very high voltage.” He lifted his hair and pointed to the tiny lightning bolt scar. “Mother nature zapped me once. I also spent a couple weeks doing a little table dance which some Freud-geeks used to describe as electroshock therapy. Didn’t have much choice about either one, but this, yeah, it wasn’t too bad.”

I said, “This is what they call a lesser electric ray. It’s got chemical tissues”-I pointed without touching-“there and there on its body which can generate something like forty volts. Maybe not even that. But it’s got a relative in the Atlantic-I’ve found a couple in the Gulf, too-an animal called ‘torpedo ray,’ maybe because of its shape, but probably because it packs such a jolt. A torpedo ray can knock you on your butt. It’ll produce a lot more than a hundred volts.”

Before I could consider stopping him, Tomlinson reached out and touched the ray again, then looked at me, still holding his fingers to the fish, breathing fast and shallow. I watched his expression transition gradually from pain to exhilaration and then studious delight as he began to speak as giving dictation. “Not bad… not bad… whoa, got a little surge there! Yes, a very natural high. Yep, beginning to move through the cerebral cortex down into limbic Happy Valley. There… there… yes! My plumbing’s now on-line! Doesn’t really hurt, man, once you…” His eyes widened. “Oooh-lah-lah! Man, this is like a neurological cleansing!” He yanked his hand away and sat back heavily. “Phwew!”

He was suddenly concerned. “I didn’t hurt the fish, did I? Like drain it or something?”

I began to lift the ray by the tail-it couldn’t shock from the tail. “No, it’s fine. They spend all day cruising the bottom, shocking sand worms, then sucking them out whole. Long pink worms almost exclusively, I can’t remember the Latin name. Shocking things is what they do.”

“You’re going to release it? Doc, why don’t we keep it? You study the fish, then I’ll drop by every now and again and I’ll let the fish do little experiments on me. When I was touching it? I could feel every part of my body come to life. Every part of my body-if you catch my drift.”

I lowered the electric ray into the water, skated it back and forth a few times to make certain it was healthy, then watched it flap away with birdlike grace. “He’s always joking around, Ransom.”

He threw his hands up-the ray was gone. “Man, I wasn’t joking!”

The woman was kicking dead turtle grass and goop toward the stern, cleaning up to go. Same as with calculating the clipboards-she knew what to do without having to be told. I was already starting to like her despite the fact I didn’t know her and had been convinced I didn’t want to know her.

“You two coconut-headed men, it gonna be fun going with you and getting daddy’s money.”

She’d asked and asked, but I’d yet to give her an answer.

“We’ll talk about it,” I said. “I’ll look at the things Tucker sent you, then come up with a solution that’s acceptable. Something to make you happy.”

“Uh-huh, that good, man. What I want right now, though, is to get myself cleaned up. Gonna bathe myself, put on my little black skirt, and let you buy me that expensive lunch just to celebrate.”

I told her, okay, but first I had a phone call to make.