Ten thousand isles

Three

I spent the next three days working fourteen hours a day, trying to fill the order from Mote. I was up every morning before first light, cruising the beaches of Captiva Island and Gayo Costa, looking for spawning snook. They are a hardy species but delicate in their way. Most conventional nets will injure them, so I had to use a castnet. A castnet is a circular web of monofilament with lead weights seeded along the perimeter. It is ancient in its design and very effective. Three thousand years before Christ was born, men wading in water were throwing castnets at fish, and we still throw them pretty much the same way.

I'd had this net custom-made just for snook. It was huge: twenty-four feet in diameter. It was woven of much heavier, finer mesh than most nets. Because there was more mass and resistance, the net required twice the lead weight to make it sink fast enough. Throw a castnet properly and it will open like a parachute, trapping everything beneath. Throw it improperly and it will spook every fish around. A standard bait net weighs maybe fifteen pounds. This monster weighed nearly thirty pounds dry, and so, good throw or bad, it was like tossing a small refrigerator. And I was making forty to fifty throws a day, without much success.

It's tiring enough to spend all day in the heat of a September sun, poling a boat, stalking fish, anchoring and re-anchoring. Add this man-killer net to the equation and you are toying with debility.

So, at the end of each day, when the work was finished, I would limp up the steps to my little house, strip off my sodden, filthy shirt and shorts, and stand under the outdoor shower for half an hour, my muscles quivering, threatening to cramp. Then it was into fresh clothes, maybe some snapper or grouper on the grill if I could manage, or else hobble over to Timber's Restaurant for dinner. After that, I would sit on the porch, my feet propped up on the railing, beer in hand, and wait for sunset, because it is inappropriate for a grown man to go to bed before it's dark, and I do have some pride.

A couple of days after I watched No Mas make the tricky jibes out the channel, bound for the Keys, JoAnn stopped by with a snack of sandwiches and one of those collapsible coolers filled with ice and bottles of beer.

It was a Sunday. Beyond the mangroves, the sunset horizon was a lemon sphere streaked with blue. On Sanibel's beach side, the Gulf of Mexico absorbed light and deflected colors skyward.

She asked me, "Did you talk to Tomlinson last night?"

I was in a porch chair as usual. One more tough day behind me in which I'd managed to fall off the poling platform and damn near drown with thirty-some pounds of net tied to my wrist. But I'd also added five good brood snook to my holding tank.

I sipped the bottle of beer she'd placed in my hand and said, "For the last three or four days, I haven't answered the phone, returned messages, nothing. Haven't checked my mail or paid bills. I'm on autopilot. So the answer is no."

"He said he was going to try and call. Something else, he took the other stuff Dorothy found, all the remaining artifacts, put them in a box and mailed them to you. So the thieves wouldn't know where to look. So now I understand why you haven't gotten it yet."

"Like what?"

"That Egyptian-looking cat I told you about? He mailed it insured, priority, plus some other things Delia wanted to protect. Nothing really valuable, except for maybe the cat, but Delia's lost enough. You don't mind, I'll stop at the post office tomorrow and pick it up. I'll get your mail while I'm at it, drop it all by tomorrow morning."

"Does he want me to open the box?"

"You can ask him when he calls. But I wouldn't mind seeing that cat again."

"If I talk to him, I will. Just before I fall into bed, I unplug the phone. The idea of waking up to Tomlinson on a talking jag is not pleasant. I've been through that too many times."

She pulled a chair close enough to the railing so that she could prop her feet up beside mine. I got a whiff of shampoo and subtle, indefinable female odors.

It was a calm evening. The saltwater lake that is Dinkin's Bay spread away in shaded increments of brass and pewter and pearl. Pelicans roosted heavily in nearby mangroves, while white ibis crossed the bay in gooselike formation.

The moon, one day past full, would soon balloon up over the bay.

She watched the ibis for a moment before she said, "I figured there was a reason he couldn't get you. Last night, he kept me on the phone for more than an hour. And it's not easy to call him because he and Delia are either at the bar-where she works or he's aboard his boat. There's a lot of stuff he wants to tell you about the gold medallion that Dorothy found. The wooden paddle thing, too. What he calls the totem. The medallion and the totem, that's all he talked about. He says it's related. The break-ins, Dorothy's death, everything. There's some books he wants you to find and read."

"I barely have time to eat. If I don't get those snook to Mote by Saturday, they may not renew my contract. Getting permits from the state was a nightmare."

"Then I'll go to the library for you, maybe tell you about it. The history stuff, I think it's interesting."

I nodded, staring at JoAnn's profile. It's surprising, but if we interact with a person day after day in a benign setting, we cease to see them as a specific, physical being. Their physical characteristics are blurred by familiarity.

Now, for the first time, it seemed, I noticed that JoAnn had an elegant nose and chin. In the sunset light, her eyes were iridescent jade and she had good, clear skin beneath the smile lines and wrinkles of thirty-some years in the Florida sun.

I believe that sexual awareness is chemically induced and the dialogue necessary to catalyze that reaction takes place on many levels. Through eye contact or body positioning, an interrogative exchange takes place: Are you? Would you? May I?

But first, the synapses must open the door to whatever chemical it is that keys sexual interest.

I sat there staring at her, then she was staring at me, her eyes making cursory contact, then deepe" contact. We sat there in a momentary trance, the two of us, before we realized what was happening. Still looking at me, JoAnn touched her fingers to my wrist. "Doc? I think I probably shouldn't stop here for a while."

I smiled; leaned to kiss her, then paused, undecided. Then I kissed her on the forehead and stood quickly. "I'll make it easy on both of us. I'm taking my boat up to Mote tomorrow. It'll give us both a break."

The next morning, a Monday, I packed my skiff with castnet, ice, food, water and beer, plus a tent with sand fly netting, just in case, and set off on what might be a two- or three-day expedition.

To paraphrase an old-time Key West writer and fisherman, Florida's hurricane months, June through November, have the finest kind of weather when there's not a blow. The weather during this particular autumn was fine, indeed. So why not vanish for a little while? Furthermore, to quote Tomlinson, I needed to get some boat beneath my feet.

Just after first light, I idled into the marina docks and kibitzed with the skiff guides as I topped off the oil reservoir and fuel tank.

Captain Felix called over that he'd found some small chunk of wreckage about seven miles off the lighthouse. "Maybe some old World War Two plane, one of the trainers they used to fly out of Buckingham," he said. "We'll have to dive it when the water clears."

Dieter Rasmussen, a retired Munich psychopharmacolo-gist, was up early as usual. He and his gorgeous Grand Banks trawler, Das Stasi, were a recent addition to A Dock. He's a big guy with a shaved head, good-looking-judging from the reaction of local women-brilliant, rich, and he apparendy loves the kicked-back, happy life of Dinkin's Bay. He called out a greeting. I nodded in reply.

Then Jeth stopped to talk. Recently turned thirty, he's a big, good-looking guy with straight black hair, all shoulders and narrow hips. He'd just taken delivery of a 20-foot Shoal-water with a console tower that was light years nicer than anything he'd ever run before.

I complimented him, adding, "From the tower, I bet it's a lot easier for you to spot fish."

"Man-oh-man, that's the truth! Dave Godfrey, up to Cap-tiva, he told me this boat would increase my fish production thirty percent and I bet he's right!"

Early morning at a fishing marina has a fresh, anything-can-happen mood that is cheerful and frantic and full of expectation. The guides hosed their skiffs after catching bait, then loaded on drinks and ice for their anglers, while coffee in big Styrofoam cups steamed within their hands.

One by one, they waved at me as I idled toward the channel.

I should have felt better than I did, but I was still fretting about how close I'd come to kissing JoAnn. That was a line not to be crossed, and we both knew it. I told myself that the uneasiness between us was temporary, but I knew that it was a lie and that it would be awhile before JoAnn and I would feel comfortable together. There is no such thing as casual sex. It can elevate one's sense of self-worth or diminish it proportionally. It always, always changes a relationship, sometimes for better, often for worse. Each and every new partner extracts some thing from us; a little piece of something that is innermost and private. Sadly, it is one of the most common ways of ending a friendship.