Tampa Burn

TWENTY-EIGHT

The wind had calmed, as if suctioned through a hole in the earth’s atmosphere by the westwarding sun. It was orbiting low in the sky astern as I ran my skiff at speed across Hillsborough Bay, the sun’s color the smoldering yellow of a tropic moon. Its starburst rays touched the Tampa skyline-a random geometric, like a Wyoming geode-and it set ablaze canyons of tinted glass and steel.

I kept my eyes focused to the southwest: the tall navigational towers that marked the channel into the Alafia River, and the entrance to Gibsonton.

Earlier, during my trip up Bullfrog Creek, I’d paid attention to detail. I remembered what I saw there. I remembered the old trailer park where a woman had watched us while sweeping in her yard. Remembered that a large man had stared at us from the shadows. And I remembered the carnival wagon with the gaudy marquee that advertised a bear with three eyes and a dog named Dezi who could talk.

My son had written that the Cubs were hitting as if they had a third eye.

He’d also invented a discussion that he and I had never had concerning something Darwin didn’t write: the inability of certain mammals to talk.

That would include a dog named Dezi.

Lake was being held somewhere within the vicinity of that carnival wagon. Maybe in that very trailer. He couldn’t have described it to me more plainly.

Did he know that I’d been nearby? Had he seen me? Or had he somehow read it in Lourdes’ behavior?

I wondered.

I checked my watch: 7:15. There was still slightly more than forty-five minutes until sunset. I didn’t want to start searching the trailer park until after dark. But if Lourdes had a boat somewhere up Bullfrog Creek, I knew there was a slim chance of getting a glimpse of him exiting the mouth of the creek, heading for the Sunshine Skyway.

I’d be able to see if he was alone, or if he had my son with him.

I was running at a comfortable 4700 rpm, which is around 50 statute miles an hour. I trimmed the big 225-Merc slightly and ran it up to 5700 rpm, flying across Hillsborough Bay at close to 60 miles an hour, blasting a rainbow-colored rooster tail.

At 45 mph in an open boat, the eyeballs begin to flutter. At 55, they begin to get teary. I turned my head away slightly to spare my vision. Off to starboard, I could see a decrepit-looking freighter, rust-streaked, green paint peeling beneath a dusty coat of phosphate. It was riding low in the water, outward bound. It had just exited the Alafia River Channel. What Harris called the scariest three miles of commercial water around.

Two muscle-bound tugs had just released the vessel, from the looks of things. The tugboats Colonel and Tampa had their sterns to me, heading north toward the port as I planed closer to the phosphate ship.

All freighters have descending numbers painted vertically like measuring sticks on the outside of their hulls, a strip located forward, another amidships, and a third just forward the stern. These 6-inch numerals are called “draft marks.” Water was waking midway along the faded “29” on this vessel, so I knew it was drawing twenty-nine feet or so of water. I also noticed a pilot ladder hanging off the side of the ship-a solid-looking rope ladder with wooden rungs. Every fifth rung was a spreader, which is an extra-wide rung to prevent the ladder from twisting.

One of Harris’s Tampa pilot colleagues was aboard. It was his job to navigate this ship several miles offshore, and then, without the freighter stopping, he would skitter down that ladder and onto a local pilot transport boat, which would take him home to Egmont Key, an island five miles to the west of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge.

I crossed behind the freighter close enough to read the big gray letters on its stern: REPATRIATE MONROVIA, LIBERIA

An appropriate name, considering that country’s history. Maritime companies who own unsafe, outdated commercial vessels usually register them in countries like Liberia, where inspectors are more easily bribed-if there are inspections at all.

I waved at the wheelhouse just in case the American pilot was looking. A fellow pilot of his was doing me a hell of a favor.

I steered sharply east again, quartering the freighter’s long, rolling wake. Ahead, in the far distance, was a small sailboat, its sail a gilded ivory in the late sun.

It was about the size of No Mas, but I knew that it couldn’t be Tomlinson. It was much too early for my purist sailor friend to be arriving in Tampa Bay.

But it brought his image to mind. Brought back the talk we’d had early that morning, the two of us walking the beach toward Sanibel’s Lighthouse Point.

It gave me something to think about as I crossed the last three miles of open water to Bullfrog Creek.

Our talk had been more like a confession. Tomlinson’s confession.

He was right. What he had to tell me put our friendship at serious risk. Knowingly, what he told me also put his own freedom, even his life, at risk.

“We should have had this conversation months ago, Doc,” he said. “I feel guilty as hell, man, because I’ve been putting it off. I know it’s cowardly, but it’s because I’m scared. I know that what I have to say might change everything between us. Forever.”

It had to do with the realization that he’d suffered a severe memory loss earlier in his life. Tomlinson told me that no one seemed to take him seriously when he said he couldn’t remember writing One Fathom Above Sea Level, but it was true.

He said, “Look man, I realize I’m a figure of fun around the marina. That’s fine. I dig the role. Hell, I play the role. But when I read One Fathom, I went into a kind of identity shock. Some of the stuff I’d written all those years ago, it was so powerful. Some of it was so pure. It scared me. How could I possibly have created something so beautiful, yet have absolutely zero memory of doing it?”

Tomlinson added, “I began to wonder, and fret: What other important events in my life had totally disappeared from my memory. And why? It had to be more than the drugs, man. Not even I used that many drugs.”

As we walked the beach, he told me about it. He was so troubled by the mystery that he began to do research into his own personal history. Finally, as I knew, early the previous winter he disappeared from the islands without telling anyone where he was going, without saying goodbye. He’d was gone for nearly four months, and then returned without explanation.

“I went to try and find out what happened to me,” he said. “I went back to my old university. Hung out with some of my old friends. I wanted to pick up the trail because it was during college, during that time of my life, that I lost my own personal trail. I lost my path, and I also lost great big chunks of my memory. It didn’t take me long to figure out what’d happened.”

On the beach, he had stopped abruptly, lifted his scraggly hair, and pointed to a burn scar on the side of his head. The scar was shaped a little bit like a lightning bolt-ironic because he’d gotten the burn as the result of lightning.

“Electricity did it to me. Wiped parts of my memory bank clean, and it also screwed with my personality. Maybe for the better. Because, from what I discovered, I was a serious candidate for Asshole of the Decade before it happened.”

I said, “Before you got struck by lightning? That was only a few years back.”

“No. The memory loss, the personality change, were both caused by the electroshock treatments. I’ve told you about it. The ones I got a year or so after writing One Fathom. It was just after the bomb that killed the sailor at the San Diego naval base.

“The guilt, man, seeing those smoking bodies on TV. I went insane. No other way to put it. They gave me shock treatments when my father had me institutionalized. Strapped me down on the table every day for weeks. I think they way overdid it. I was so screwed up, I’d write letters and sign them ‘Sincerely as a fucking loon.’ And I meant it.”

He continued, “It took me a while, but I tracked down the physician who’d administered the shock treatments to me. The zapper. The guy went on to become a brilliant psychiatrist, a great healer. I have something I want to show you. To explain what happened to me. He wrote me this letter.”

Tomlinson handed me two pages typed on the personal stationery of a California physician. We were standing on a section of dune near the Sanibel Beach Club. This early, people were already up there playing tennis, hanging out by the pool. I adjusted my glasses and read the letter quickly, skipping some of the more detailed portions: Dear Mr. Tomlinson: I must have administered electroshock to at least a thousand patients as a resident. I detested doing it. I apologize to you now. I wish I could apologize to them all individually… The nurses would bring the patient in on a rolling cot, get an I.V. going, and I would put in sodium amytal. I remember that many of the patients had severe halitosis and I had to hover over them, close as a lover, and I felt guilty and obscene… Then I would place the electrodes on their heads, two shiny steel plates, about 1.5 inches in diameter, fastened tightly above the ears, and add a gel sticky with saline for good contact… When all was ready, I took a rubber doorstop, usually red, sometimes brown, shaped like a wedge and wrapped with sterile gauze. I placed that thing in their mouth so when they bit down they would not break their teeth… On the electroconvulsive therapy machine, there were two dials. One was the strength of the current and the other was a timer for the duration of the shock. I set the parameters according to the age, sex, weight, and medical condition of the patient. I would then give a couple of whiffs of oxygen to the patient, inject Anectine, and watch until the patient stopped breathing. That meant all the muscles were paralyzed. I would then reach back behind me, hit the contact switch, and watch a small muscular tremor in the patient that indicated electric current passing through his brain. The usual course of “treatment” was two weeks, every other day. Judging from the severity of your memory loss, however, Mr. Tomlinson, I suspect you are one of the few who received a far more aggressive course. Some doctors insisted on administering ECT twice a day for as long as it took to get the patient to be incontinent. Those people became zombies. Again, Mr. Tomlinson, I apologize. It was my duty as a resident to carry out the orders of those above me. If I objected, my residency would have been over. It was the accepted treatment of the day. I have many stories of things that happened. Some horrid, some funny, always poignant. I enclose an article from a medical journal concerning memory loss caused by ECT. You may find it enlightening.

I folded the letter, handed it to Tomlinson, saying, “He sounds like a good man. Like he genuinely regrets what he did.”

Tomlinson handed me the copy of the magazine article, saying, “Me, too. Regret it, I mean. Except that it changed me from Asshole of the Decade to who I am now, apparently. Wait until you read this.”