Shark River

9

R ansom said to me, “You don’t want me as your sister, okay. But here’s what I don’t get, man. Why don’t you want to be richer? That’s what I really don’t understand. Ev’body loves money. And Daddy left us a nice chunk of it. Just out there waitin’ on us to go find. So why you bein’ so stubborn, man?”

A bunch of money. Right.

In his letter to Ransom, to be delivered only after his own death and the death of at least one of his many enemies, Tuck had written: “Follow my directions, and you and your big brother will find more than six thousand dollars cash greenbacks, which I got from the recent sale of fifty head of prime Brangus beef cattle. Along with the money, there’s some old-timey letters and pictures I collected on the trail. You may get a hoot out of the stuff if, being an uneducated island girl, any American ever takes the time to learn you to read.”

My sexist, condescending uncle. The letter was in his familiar block script; lots of phonetic spellings: Fallow my directions amp; you and yore big brother… Tucker implying that someone else was too dumb to learn to read and write. The man never recognized nor admitted his own ironic view of the world.

He’d also written: “I’d leave the cash money to you the regular way, keeping it in a bank, but I don’t trust no damn bank, plus there’s some local talk of a white man and a big Indian robbing the Miami loan shark that stole money from them first. Being Italian and not trustful, this foreigner kept a list of serial numbers from every hundred-dollar bill he left out open in the till like bait to test his runners and pimps. Which is why it’s a good thing I got your money selling prime beef and hid it away so’s the wop couldn’t prove it from that paper full of serial numbers.”

Because I was making every effort not to speak badly of her father, I didn’t tell her that the white man was obviously Tuck and the big Indian was Joseph Egret, a genuinely decent man who was my uncle’s best friend and partner for many decades despite Tucker’s constant criticism and racial insults. Why Joseph tolerated the old fool, I never understood. I suspected they stayed together out of habit, like an old married couple, and because they’d come to rely on one another during long and rugged lives spent mostly just outside the law.

Money, though, I could talk about. I tried to make her understand that her inheritance wasn’t really that valuable-not easy, because she came from a section of the Bahamas where the average annual income was less than what an average American makes in two weeks.

Not an unusual disproportion in poor regions around the world.

I’d pointed it out before, and now I reminded her again, “Even if he did leave you six thousand dollars, which I doubt, it’s not that much money. Not in the States, it isn’t. Not most places in the world. If you had fifty times that much, you couldn’t call yourself rich. Think about it. You come all the way to Florida from the islands, invest all the time and expense, you’re not going to end up with much profit. Which is why I want you to have what money there is. All of it. Take everything you find, plus I’m going to give you what’s left of Tuck’s ranch. You arrange for an attorney to do the work; I’ll sign the papers. All I ask in return is leave me out of it. Go without me. Take Tomlinson. The guy’s brilliant when he’s not falling down stoned. If anyone can figure out Tucker’s directions, it’s Tomlinson.”

Ransom already trusted Tomlinson, I could tell. Not surprising. I’d seen more than one crippled bird or malnourished stray dog thread its way through a dockside crowd to nudge attention from Tomlinson’s hand. Same with people. He attracted the shy, the damaged and the frightened ones. They were drawn to him like a lantern attracts moths, as if he provided a lighted safe haven. Abused women have haunted eyes, like a small creature peering out from a hole, and mannerisms that are nervous, self-conscious. Many times I’d watched Tomlinson work his magic on them. The soothing voice and kind words. Mostly, though, it was his touch. He would wrap their hand in his, or hug them, and you could almost see the fear and pain being drained from their bodies. You could watch the darkness pass from their eyes.

Not that Ransom was a damaged woman. No. She was strong-willed, smart, transparently manipulative and had a gift for turning arguments around to emphasize her opponent’s guilt, which she then tried to use as leverage.

Now, for instance, she made a guttural noise of irritation, jammed her fists on her hips, and said, “You’re startin’ to piss me off, my brother. My friend Mr. Thomas not here to speak for himself and you callin’ him a drunk like he some bum you find in Nassau town, eating outta the garbage pails at the Straw Market. Then you call Daddy a liar, sayin’ he never left us no money. If Daddy such a liar, how come I got this?”

She reached into her pocket and pulled out a worn gold coin about the size of a fifty-cent piece. Held it in the light so that I was staring at an image of some long-gone Spanish king struck deeply into the metal. On the coin’s smooth field were the words FERDINANDUS DG HISP REX and the date 1751. Apparently the king’s name from that period was Ferdinand.

Struck on the coin’s back was a complicated shield and the words NOMINA MAGNA SEQUOR. My Latin is imperfect. Something about a name… a charter and… Sequor? I didn’t have a guess.

It wasn’t the first time she’d used a doubloon as proof of Tuck’s veracity. Yesterday, after dragging the nets, and after my conversation with Harrington, she’d sat me down in the kitchen of Tomlinson’s bungalow, and dropped four gold coins on the table-a theatrical effect that Tucker would have appreciated. One of the coins was smaller than the others, but all had a surprising weight and density to them. They were cool to the touch.

“In the papers the attorney man sent, our daddy told me where to find these nice things. They right where he say I find ’em. On my island, Cat Island, they hidden ’neath the stone cross in a monastery that were built by a crazy ol’ hermit, Father Jerome. It sits up there alone on the mountainside, and Daddy Gatrell had to climb that mountain, then stuck them away. All four of ’em in a leather bag. You got any idea how much these baubles worth? Two of ’ems yours, but I sell my half, I could buy me one of them satellite TVs if I wanted. Or air-conditioning for my little house on the island. Man in Nassau offered me three hundred dollars each for ’em. What I’m tellin’ you is, he left more money out there. All we got to do is go get it.”

Then she’d slid Tucker’s letter in front of me, both sides of an old sheet of legal notepad covered with his handwriting.

I read the letter. Looked though the folder, at all the old photos, and I read the papers in there, too.

There was a photo of a much younger Tucker Gatrell holding a caramel-colored child on his lap, a stunning black woman at his side-Ransom as a little girl, and her mother.

There was also a photo of Tucker in his jeans and Justin beaverskin cowboy hat standing with me. I remembered exactly when it was taken, the uneasiness of him being there. It was a few minutes before the final match of the high school state wrestling championships, my junior year. I was wearing my singlet, the weight class sewn on the hip-189-white on green.

Looking past my shoulder at the photo, Ransom had said, “My, my, you still got the shoulders and that skinny lil’ butt. But them glasses you wearin’, the black rims, they make you look like a hooty owl with muscles.”

She was surprised that I wasn’t interested in the photo or Tuck’s letter. Then she seemed stupefied when I refused to accept two of the four coins. She’d yelled, “Man, you don’t want to help me? Then I don’t understand why the hell I lied to help you!” and stomped off.

That night, I had dinner with her and Tomlinson at the Tarpon Lodge, but she’d recovered her composure. Didn’t mention the subject once. Spent the evening holding court in the bar, telling funny stories, flirting with the waiters. Wearing that black skirt with her long legs sticking out and a white blouse that illustrated well why she didn’t need a bra. Then Leo sat down at the piano bar while Ransom took turns dancing with every man in the room until jealous wives began to intervene and lead their husbands home.

Now it was Friday and we were in my trawl boat, skiff in tow, puttering home to Dinkin’s Bay. Tomlinson had paddled the rental canoe back to the mainland at first light, then loaded his backpack onto his forty-two-foot Morgan No Mas, along with Nimba Dimbokro and her five big suitcases for a farewell cruise to Sanibel before he called a cab to take her to the airport the next morning.

Our stay on Guava Key, we’d both decided, was over. For Tomlinson, it was because he wanted to help Ransom go find her inheritance.

For me, it was because of what I had been forced to promise Harrington.

When I said to Tomlinson, “Is Nimba mad because she has to leave a day early?” he shook his head, disconsolate. “It’s gonna take me five hours to beat my way to the marina, and she says she’s going to oil herself up naked and give me one last try. Then she’s sleeping aboard, and I know damn well she’s gonna try again. Ransom staying over last night brought out a competitive streak in Nimba that her Zen instruction didn’t touch. The pressure, man, it’s really starting to take its toll.”

Meaning Ransom had to ride with me.

Ransom said, “Know what the feeling is I get? From reading Daddy’s letter over and over, I get the feeling he may have stolen that money, which is why he had to hide it. Him and someone else, the big Indian he mentions. The doubloons back on Cat Island? It took me awhile to admit it to myself, but same thing. Daddy stole that gold from a very mean man there, and had to hide it away in the monastery ’cause he couldn’t get off the island with it.”

For some reason, I found that hilarious, and had to fight back the laughter as I replied, “Tucker Gatrell a thief? Well… I guess it’s something we have to consider… yes, as upsetting as it may be to you. That Tucker would send you off to find stolen money… now that you mention it, uh-huh, we have to admit it’s a possibility.”

Stealing money, stealing horses, pigs, chickens, small planes, and the lyrics from country-western songs-there wasn’t much that Tucker hadn’t stolen at some stage in his life. I didn’t share that with Ransom, but I was thinking: Finally, she’s catching on.

We’d crossed Charlotte Harbor and left the Intracoastal markers off Bokeelia on Pine Island and cut in behind Patricio Island, running back country. Running doesn’t seem like an accurate word to describe a rattling, rumbling twelve knots, but at least we were moving steadily over the bottom. It was one of those low-pressure-system lulls we sometimes get in winter. The air had a summer density but the sky was Rocky Mountain blue. On the far curvature of earth and sea were borders of cirrus clouds. The clouds were a fibrous silver: crystalline illustrations of wind sheer, adrift, like sails.

We’d picked a good day for passage. In a chop, my flat-bottomed trawler pounds miserably. In a squall, it’s borderline dangerous. Today, though, the bay had a gelatin texture, lifting and rising with the slow respiration of distant oceans and faraway storms. The air was balmy, scented by the tropics and syncopated with cool Midwestern gusts of wind that touched the face, then vanished.

From my elevated spot at the wheel, I could look down and see the bottom slide by. Could see the floury white sand pockets and meadows of sea grass-individual grass blades leaning in the tide as if contoured by a steady breeze. Could see crossing patterns of spooked redfish and sea trout, pushing expanding wakes through the shallows. Could see table-sized stingrays explode from the marl, could see the astro-shapes of sea stars and brittle stars isolated in their own paned universe. Could see anemones and comb jellies and drifting medusoids, their tentacles angling downward and behind, like storm clouds dragging sheets of rain. There is something intimate about sea bottom, when you have the opportunity to see what exists there, a sense of an unclothing, which makes it personal, private.

“Are you hearing what I jus’ said?”

I answered, “Huh?”

Ransom was shaking her head, smiling. “I keep talking, I get the feeling you not listening, my brother. The fish and things, them sea creatures, you get a real happy light in your face when you look at them.”

It was true that she’d been talking right along. Not the maddening, nonstop meaningless chatter of a neurotic. Talking with passion, though, about Tucker and his letters, which is why I wasn’t listening. I much preferred to concentrate on the sea bottom.

She was sitting in the captain’s chair beside me, barefooted, feet propped up on the bulkhead. She was wearing the yellow canvas shorts again, but with a pink tank top, on the front of which was printed: