dog island

by Mike Stewart

  Joey grinned at us and said, “Did you two get the dishes cleaned up?”

  I said, “Yeah. Susan did.”

  He kept grinning. “Take the trash out to the alley?”

  I said, “Uh-huh.”

  “Mmmm. You find anything else interesting to do out there in the yard? Under the stars, moonlight bouncing off the flowers, soft spring breezes blowing through your hair…”

  Loutie said, “Shut up, Joey.”

  He was chuckling. “Yeah, I was gettin’ a little misty myself.

  And I gotta go anyway. It’s been four or five days without much sleep. I need to get home and hit the hay.”

  Everyone but Carli was tired, so Joey and I thanked Loutie for having us and wandered out into the night. As we walked between rows of purple flowers toward the street, I said, “You’re a real asshole. You know that?”

  Joey was still laughing to himself when he climbed into his Expedition and shut the door.

  chapter eleven

  Bright sunshine poured through French doors and tilted a warm rectangle of light across the white sheet where it covered my legs. I squinted at the alarm clock, rubbed my eyes like the fat kid in “The Little Rascals,” and squinted some more. It read 7:78. For the first time in months, I had slept for six straight hours, and I felt like kissing someone. Again.

  Since late fall, the red-dotted numbers over my bedside table had become more of a gauge than a reminder to get up and face the day. They were a gauge of how long I had dented sheets and tossed covers without sleeping. Then they were a gauge of how long I had slept before waking up more tired than when I went to bed. More than anything, they had become a gauge of how screwed up my life had become since my difficult—some might say criminal—younger brother caught a thirty-aught-six round in the neck one September night on the Alabama River. I had been too busy to deal with Hall’s bullshit when he was alive, which meant that—for the past six months—I’d been lying awake every night feeling like a jerk for failing to salvage a life that was ultimately unsalvageable.

  But something had happened now. And I guessed it had a lot to do with the widow Fitzsimmons and even more to do with some sort of absolution that my subconscious seemed to have tied to Susan’s playful intimacy. Whatever the reason, for the first time in six months, the sun was up on that bright Saturday morning before Tom McInnes was.

  I decided to lie there and think about making out under a magnolia tree and smile.

  Around nine, Kelly called to let me know her Coast Guard captain had phoned. She got a date out of it. I got bupkus. According to the boyfriend, all vessels leaving foreign ports must go through customs when arriving back in the United States. But, between ports, they can pretty much wander around the Gulf of Mexico—or anywhere else they want—without telling a soul. The young captain explained that a private yacht, for example, could have left Brazil, sailed along the Central American coast, and cut over to Apalachicola Bay without filing a report or leaving any record of its route. Also, that same yacht could pull into Tampa two days later and no one would ever know where it had been—only that it left Brazil and then entered the United States a certain number of days later.

  After saying goodbye to Kelly, I padded downstairs and scrambled three eggs, which tasted better than I remembered eggs tasting. Later, as I swirled orange juice in my mouth like wine, I punched in Joey’s number on the kitchen phone. We spoke briefly before I hung up and called Loutie’s. Carli answered. I said good morning, made polite conversation about Hitchcock and Grace Kelly, and asked for Susan.

  When Susan picked up, I said, “Good morning.”

  Susan, I thought, sounded pleased. She said, “Good morning to you. Is this call one of those Southern things that Midwestern girls like me don’t know about?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You know. Calling your conquest the next day to let her know you still respect her.”

  “Cute. Unfortunately, it wasn’t much of a conquest, which is not to say that I will not always think fondly of emptying the trash.” Susan laughed. I said, “The reason I called is that I’ve tried every way I can think of—short of going to Apalachicola and renting a boat—to find out who may be cruising from South America to Dog Island with merchandise and refugees on board. Monday morning, Kelly’s going to start checking customs in Panama City, Mobile, and Tampa to see if anything jumps out at her, but that’s really a hope-we-get-lucky tactic. I think I’m going to have to head down to the islands and ask a few questions and maybe rent a boat or a plane.”

  “Yes. Last night, you said you might do something like that. Do you want to stay at my house while you’re down there? It’s a little shot up at the moment, but I’ve already had the real estate company—you know, the people who handle renting out the place when I’m not there—I’ve already had them clean up the mess and nail plywood over broken windows and that kind of thing. So, if you’re interested, you’re welcome to it.”

  I said, “I think I’d rather stay someplace where the Bodines haven’t already tried to kill us.”

  “Good point.”

  “I think I’ll try to rent something on one of the islands. Probably on St. George, since Joey already has Dog Island covered. He’s going to keep watching Haycock and let me know when he goes out to meet another boat. That way, I can check around with some of the local fishermen or maybe rent a boat the next morning. If I can get out there before our smugglers weigh anchor, I should be able to get a name or a registration number off the boat.”

  Susan was laughing again. “Weigh anchor, huh?” I didn’t answer. She gave me the name of her agent so I’d have someone to help me find a rental, and asked, “Are you going to come by before you leave?”

  “No. I hadn’t planned to. Do you think I should see Carli and explain what I’m doing?”

  There was a brief silence. “No. No, that’s okay. I think she’s fine.”

  Now there was a short silence on my end as my sad little brain kicked in. “I slept like a baby last night.”

  She said, “Okay,” but what she meant was, Why are you telling me this?

  “Since my brother died last fall, I haven’t been able to sleep a whole lot. Hell, I see the sunrise so much I’ve gotten tired of looking at it.” I said, “I just wanted you to know that last night, for the first time in months, I slept through the night and didn’t wake up until after seven.”

  “If you’re this happy about sleeping in till seven on Saturday morning, you must have been having problems. So, I’m glad. Whatever the reason.” She hesitated and said, “For whatever it’s worth, last night had the opposite effect on me. I tossed and turned for an hour before finally drifting off.”

  I thought of how I had pulled her against me in the moonlight, and I recalled the emotion in her eyes. I decided I had gone too far. She obviously missed her husband and wasn’t ready for another relationship.

  “I’m sorry, Susan. I know it must be hard.”

  She giggled, which was something I had never heard her do. I had heard her laugh, chuckle, and even guffaw on one occasion, but I had never heard Susan Fitzsimmons giggle. She said, “Tom? You really don’t get it, do you? For me, the only hard thing about kissing you was stopping. And, oh yeah, then trying to go to sleep in what I can only politely describe as a thoroughly unsatisfied condition.”

  “Oh.”

  Susan repeated back, “Oh.”

  I promised to call from the beach and to come by the minute I got back in town. I put the receiver in its cradle and found myself sitting at the breakfast table, smiling idiotically at an empty glass of orange juice.

  The house Susan’s agent found for me was not in The Plantation. Based on past experience, I decided that the fat guy at the gate was not an insurmountable obstacle to people who wanted to kill me. And there was always the consideration that Susan was footing the bill. Unless I stayed in Susan’s house, which seemed like a monumentally bad idea, I would be looking at a
couple-thousand-plus a week for a rental house inside that gated community. But just a few hundred yards away, on the low-rent side of The Plantation’s guarded gate, I found a beachfront Jim Walter home on hurricane stilts for a mere eight hundred.

  Inside the little house, pastel upholstery, pastel curtains and blinds, and pastel prints filled the house with faded ocean motifs. There was a “master bedroom,” which meant, if you were careful, you could actually walk around the bed without bumping into the wall or the dresser, and there was a “guest bedroom,” which meant, in there, you couldn’t. The kitchen occupied a back corner of the living room, which boasted two double sliding glass doors that provided the requisite Gulf view and led out onto a weathered deck.

  I threw my canvas duffle on the guest bed and rummaged around until I came up with running shorts and shoes and a Grand Hotel T-shirt with a faded nautilus shell on the front. After stuffing my new house key and two fifty-dollar bills into the inside pocket of my shorts, I left through the roadside door, circled back under the house, and walked out onto the beach.

  Small whitecaps lapped the sand ten feet below a wavering line of gray and white shells that marked high tide. A hundred yards offshore, a striped-sail catamaran skidded across blue-green swells. Seagulls hovered over my head like graceful beggars, and, as far as I could see in each direction, no more than a dozen bodies interrupted the soft flow of sandy beach.

  The island was between seasons. The end of spring break had emptied the beaches of young, nubile bodies; winter had fled New England and the Midwest, pulling hoards of not-so-young and not-so-nubile snowbirds back to their native climes; and the summer vacation trade had not yet begun to flood the beaches with sun-blistered families. I turned toward the center of the island, in the direction of a cluster of buildings that serves as the island’s downtown, and began walking. With every step, pockets of powdery sand squeaked like baby seals beneath my feet. I could feel the muscles in my thighs and calves and a thousand tiny fibers in my ankles and knees stretch and work and warm. I started to run.

  Twenty minutes and a little more than two miles later, the mustard walls of the island’s only motel jogged by on my left. I slowed to a walk and turned toward the restaurant-slash-bar just east of the motel. A wooden walkway stretched over grassy dunes and connected to an outside dining area furnished with plastic tables and chairs and a freestanding bar roofed with palm fronds and surrounded by four huge Tiki masks. I tried to imagine why Hawaiian kitsch had been used to decorate a bar in North Florida. If nothing else, the Seminoles should complain.

  I ordered iced tea and fried crab claws and struck up a conversation with my blonde, nut-brown waitress. Summer sun had bleached her as white and burned her as brown as a person can bleach and burn in the tropical sun. A yellow metal button on her left breast told me her name was Lauren. In fifteen years, when Lauren turned forty, she would look fifty. But, for now, she looked pretty damn good.

  It was midafternoon, and the restaurant was as deserted as the beach. Lauren took my order, and we talked. After she put a basket of steaming crab claws on the table, I asked her to sit.

  Lauren told me about life on the island and about the fishermen and about the pleasure boats that anchored and dropped speedboats full of yachtsmen who dined and drank and tipped like nobody’s business. And, most interesting of all, she told me about an old fishmonger—a local legend named Peety Boy who had known everything and everyone on the island since the dawn of time.

  Lauren went back to work, and I trotted over the walkway and down the beach to the waterline, where I pulled off my shoes and shirt and dropped them in the sand. Cold surf swirled over my toes and ankles and then my legs. A deep breath, and I dove into a wave. I didn’t wait thirty minutes after eating, but then I didn’t plan on deep-water swimming. I just needed cold water on my face. I needed to think.

  A few laps back and forth parallel with the shoreline, and I staggered out covered in chill bumps. I donned shirt and shoes and walked back up along the wooden walkway and past the restaurant. As I passed, Lauren waved and flashed a friendly smile.

  It was time to find Peety Boy. According to my new friend Lauren, every day of the week the old man parked his wagon next to the public basketball court near the center of the island. She said I couldn’t miss it, particularly since Peety Boy’s rolling store bore the logical name of “Peety Boy’s Seafood.” I was assured that word on the island was: If Peety Boy didn’t know about it, it didn’t happen.

  I hung a right on Gorrie Drive, the main road along the Gulf side of the island. The public beaches’ parking lot where Carli had parked with her date that fateful night came up on the right. Across the road, a basketball hoop protruded at a downward angle from a dejected backboard. The goalpost sprouted from a slab of sand-powdered pavement that sat in the middle of a small grassy field. On the far back corner of the grass sat Peety Boy’s Seafood. The boxy trailer looked homemade but well built. It was the size of one of those pop-up things that retired people haul from state to state, but this one was square and white, with a long service window cut into the side. Painted plywood hung down by chains to form a counter that, come nightfall, would swing back into place and close the window. Above the opening, Peety Boy had stretched a striped awning. Above the awning, he had painted the name of his business.

  As I approached, an elderly man with thick white hair, sun-wrinkled skin, and a paucity of teeth, said, “Good day to be alive!”

  I said, “Yep. This is a beautiful place.”

  Peety Boy turned to toss a couple of fresh fillets in the icebox and stepped back up to the window. The store sat on truck tires, so he looked down at me. “Most beautiful place on God’s earth. Been here my whole life. Never moved an inch, ‘cept for World War II. Helped whip the Germans in France. Then came on home and thanked God for gettin’ back and bein’ back.”

  I said, “They trained around here somewhere for D-Day, didn’t they?”

  Peety Boy looked pleased but, probably because of his missing teeth, smiled more with his eyes than his lips. “Not many folks know that nowadays. Yessir. Down close to Carrabelle, at Lanark Village, six divisions, ‘bout forty thousand troops, got what they called amphibious trainin’. A couple dozen drowned tryin’ to learn it. Walter Winchell, he called Carrabelle ‘Hell by the Sea.’ But it ain’t. Everywhere is hell when you’re trainin’ to fight a war.” Peety Boy wiped fish blood on his white apron, and changed to a businesslike tone. “So. What can I do for you today? Got some beautiful jumbo shrimp. Got the prettiest oysters you ever saw. Come right out of Apalachicola Bay. Just got ‘em in this mornin’.”

  “I’m trying to get some information.”

  Some of the openness faded, and Peety Boy looked doubtful. He said, “Well, I guess that’s all right.”

  “I’m trying to locate someone who would know whether the boat of a friend of mine has been around here recently. I don’t think my friend came ashore. But I’m pretty sure he laid up off Dog Island for a few days last week.”

  Peety Boy put his hands on the counter and leaned forward. Fish blood stained his thick nails and work-scarred fingers, and, as he put weight on his hands, hard cords of muscle jumped and strained beneath thin parched skin on his forearms. He said, “You say this is a friend of yours?”

  Peety Boy’s watery black eyes drilled through my face and into my thoughts. Country isn’t stupid. Uneducated isn’t stupid. Peety Boy had my number. I said, “No. It’s just easier to say a friend than to tell everything I know to everyone I ask. I’m looking for a large boat, probably a yacht, that was in the area last week. It’s for a real friend. A young girl who’s in trouble.”

  The old man’s face relaxed. He straightened up and reached over to pull a wooden stool up to the counter. He perched his thin rump on the stool, poked a Camel non-filter between a pair of dry chapped lips, and lit the end with a Zippo. Through a cloud of gray smoke, he said, “That’s fine. How long you been lookin’?”

  “A few days. But
this is my first day here on the island.”

  He chuckled, but there wasn’t much pleasure in it. “You go around askin’ questions like that ‘un, and it’ll probably be your last day here too.” He paused and looked out across the basketball court and the parking lot at the Gulf of Mexico. “Tell you what. I’m gonna fill you in, and I’m mostly doin’ it ‘cause you’re gonna get messed up if I don’t. And, the way I see it, if you’re lookin’ after a friend, that’s the right way to go. So listen up. Don’t ask nobody else about this stuff, and don’t tell nobody you talked to me. If you promise that, I’ll tell you who I think can help you out.”

  “I can do that. I’m not looking for trouble.”

  Peety Boy looked out at the water some more, then he said, “Get in your car and drive over to Eastpoint. You just go back across the causeway and take the first right. There’s a line of little seafood houses over there. Places where they buy the catch off the boats and sell it to tourists. Same thing I do, only they ain’t as particular about how old some of it is. You go to a place called Teeter’s and ask to talk to Billy Teeter. Tell him I sent you. Don’t tell nobody else. Just tell Billy. If he ain’t there, you ask when he’ll be back. You got that?” I told him I had it and thanked him. He said, “Well, that’s all right.”

  I pushed two fingers inside my waistband and fished out a wet fifty from the inside pocket. As I looked up, I noticed a bumper sticker over Peety Boy’s cutting board for the first time. It read, God is love. I said, “Can I pay you? Believe me, it’s worth it to me.”

  He looked down at my wet money and said, “No, sir.”

  I thought for a few seconds and said, “Can I buy fifty dollars’ worth of shrimp from you?”

  Peety Boy looked doubtful. “Yessir. You can do that. How you gonna get it home?”

  “I’ll come back for it.” He didn’t look like he believed me. I said, “I’m going to be on the island for a few days. If there’s any way possible, I’ll stop on the way home and pick up the shrimp. If I ran into trouble or I have to return home in a hurry, then next weekend I want you to give fifty dollars’ worth of seafood to the next young couple who comes by. Is that a deal?”