“I’m about to head back,” she told him. “You good?”
“Brilliant,” he said. “How’s the ice industry today?”
“Fair to middling. Roy’s crying about missing you.”
“Aw. Sweet.”
“You home?”
“Just out for a walk,” Johnny said. Sid snickered.
“Back in a bit,” Pauline said.
“Drive safe, kidda.”
“You should just tell her you’re drinking with sweaty old farts in a filthy dive at the beach,” Sid said after Johnny hung up. “Why hide it?”
“Is that what you tell your wife?” Johnny said.
“I tell her I’m going to play bocce. That’s the truth. And she tells me to take my balls and get the hell out. We have an understanding.”
Johnny looked at his watch. It was nearly five. Pauline would be met with the first swell of evening traffic and it would likely be six o’clock before she reached the house. He had a fifteen-minute walk ahead of him. Time for another beer? He couldn’t see why not. He raised a hand and motioned to Vic.
“So, how’s the ice business out there?” Sid said. “Making it?”
“So far,” Johnny said. “But we’re still waiting on the OSHA appeal to be scheduled.” He accepted his second beer from Vic and touched it to Sid’s paper cup of sangria. “Here’s hoping we stay alive, Sid. You, me, and the ice plant.”
“Salud,” Sid said. “And how’s Knowles treating you?” Knowles. The name was becoming quite the thorn in Johnny’s side. Knowles & Frusciante (“We’re on Your Side”) was one of the biggest law firms in Jacksonville, and the firm’s labor law specialists were supposed to be the superheroes who were going to pull Bold City Ice back from the precipice. “We feel your pain,” Knowles had told Johnny and Pauline solicitously in a boardroom at the top of the Riverplace Tower. “And we can help you.”
“Christ,” Johnny said. “Don’t get me started. Are lawyers always this pompous?”
“Of course we are. That’s what makes us so lovable. But are they making progress on the appeal?”
Johnny shrugged. “They sent in the big guns for two days back in the beginning. Knowles himself was at the factory for maybe an hour, tops. Now they say they’re in the ‘research’ phase. Which makes me laugh. I haven’t seen anything solid from them yet. It’s piss. We’re no better prepared to appeal the citations than we were before we started writing checks to Knowles. OSHA says negligent tank maintenance. Our boys were sloppy with the logs. How are we going to argue against this?”
Sid positioned his sangria cup in front of him and peered into it like he was reading tea leaves. After a moment, he shook his head and looked at Johnny. “It’s a tough nut, friend.”
“Sid,” Johnny said. “You used to deal with the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, right?”
“In city cases. Sure. All the time.”
“Answer me this: Why can’t we get more police presence in Little Silver? We’re beating our heads against the wall. We’ve got a house right across the street from the factory that I’d bet my bollocks is part of a drug operation, and the cops aren’t doing a thing about it. If there was a bust there, it could have a bearing on our OSHA appeal—I think the druggies tampered with the ammonia tank.”
“Oh, I know about that house,” Sid said.
“You do?”
“Big gray Victorian?”
“That’s the one.”
Sid nodded. “That’s Leonard’s house. You’ve seen him? Snaky-looking guy, rides a bike around?” Johnny had seen him, all right. He’d noticed him right away when he showed up in the neighborhood last spring. Always whistling. Looked weird around the eyes, something a little unbalanced there. There was a strung-out-looking blond woman living there with him for a while, and the way Leonard would shout at her—You heard what I said, you dumb bitch—would make your hair stand on end. Johnny was relieved when she beat a path. Even the shiftless bunch of old guys that hung out down the block, drinking and cupping hands around their fat-rolled joints all day, seemed to want little to do with Leonard. “That dude scary,” one of them, old Ford, had said to Johnny once. “That dude ain’t right.”
“Leonard’s well-known to JSO,” Sid was saying. “He’s dealing, all right.”
Johnny slapped the countertop. “Well, you see? What if he’s cooking meth in there? And what if he’s using our ammonia to do it? Sid, if we had evidence of meth-making, like a drug bust and a police report, I’d sure like to share it with OSHA.”
“Sherriff thinks he’s doing more than cooking meth,” Sid said. “Trust me, Johnny: They’re paying attention to that house. They think Leonard’s connected to a pretty big operation. Heroin, guns, all of it. I’d steer clear.”
Johnny shook his head in frustration. “Why don’t they bust it, for God’s sake?”
Sid raised one eyebrow. “Because they’re being strategic. You know how these things go. They gotta get it right. Probable cause. They can’t get a warrant without the right evidence. Plus, they want to catch them in the act so they get the whole caboodle, not just some dime-bag transaction.”
“I want that house busted. I want to have evidence of a nearby meth lab entered into my OSHA appeal.”
“You think it will help?”
“It can’t hurt. It’s across the street, for God’s sake. I wouldn’t be surprised to find a Bold City Ice hand truck over there. Probably half our missing bleeder valves sitting on Leonard’s kitchen counter. He’s helping himself. I can feel it. He’s getting in.”
“Let me guess. You talked to the lawyers about this idea?”
“Pauline and I both did.”
“And let me guess. They’re not interested?”
“Right.”
“That’s because they’re lawyers, Johnny! Take it from me—they want a paper trail, not a half-assed theory.”
“A bust at Leonard’s house. A meth lab bust would produce a paper trail.”
“Probable cause, Johnny. Repeat after me: JSO needs probable cause. And they’re willing to wait for it. You can bring your theory to the OSHA hearing. But my guess is it’s not going to get you where you want. Evidence, John. Evidence.” Sid climbed down off his stool. “I better get back to my posse over there,” he said, nodding toward the Bocce Quartet.
“How do you stay so informed, Sid?” Johnny asked.
“Johnny, I’m a pushy old man with not enough to do. City of Jax is my beat. They see me coming, they start talking, hoping it will make me leave faster. Ha!” He clapped Johnny on the shoulder affectionately. “Hang tight, Johnny. Let your pompous lawyers do their jobs. Maybe it will all work out,” Sid said. “You never know.” He didn’t sound very convincing.
Johnny texted Pauline and Roy an abbreviated version of Sid’s report on Leonard and the Little Silver drug scene. Doesn’t really help us, Roy replied immediately. Unless/until they bust him. Johnny waited, but Pauline didn’t reply. He pictured her—hunched over the steering wheel, locked in traffic on the Acosta Bridge; she’d surely have glanced at her phone and seen his message, but she wouldn’t text back until she pulled the Prius into the garage on Watchers Island, knowing full well that by then Johnny would be in the kitchen waiting for her. Don’t text and drive, she told him all the time, earnest and righteous. Ah, Pauline. So sweetly prim. So moral. She really would have made a good mother.
Johnny paid his bill. He exited the crab shack and felt the heat wrap around him like a wet towel. He made his way to the waterline and headed toward home, carrying his shoes and sloshing through the surf while a shrimper moved north along the horizon, bound for Mayport. The beer was buzzing pleasantly in his chest and the water on his calves was soothing, familiar. He stopped and looked east, where four thousand miles away, the great crashing waves of the Atlantic were calming in the coves of the Caledonian firths, lapping at the pebbled shores, then fingering up into green machair, just beyond.
Having grown up on one side of the North Atlantic and having m
ade his life on the other, Johnny felt an affinity to the coastline so strong he sometimes wondered if it betrayed a latent phobia of landlock. Back in Glasgow, he could ride his bicycle three miles to the south and put his hands into the cold current of the tiny North Calder Water river. There he could set a leaf afloat and know that it would progress down into the River Clyde and out through the firths, past the tip of Ireland and into the great wide sea. Here in Florida, he could pitch a buffed green piece of sea glass out toward the breakers and imagine it tumbling deeper, deeper, into the tidal tumult for days and then weeks and then months, scuttling along the seafloor until it washed up again, smoother now, lighter, on the bright cold beach at Iona.
When Corran was little, Johnny told him he’d pitch a stone every day, and that if Corran could get over to the sea, maybe he’d find one of the very same stones that Johnny had once fingered in America, on tiny Watchers Island. Johnny hadn’t thought of that in a long time. He bent now and ran his fingers through a trough of shells until he found a piece of glass. He stood, grunted, and threw.
After a while he started walking again. He could see the top of his house, the old lighthouse cupola, from the beach. He headed up the dune.
Johnny was still standing at the back door, beating the sand from the bottoms of his shoes, when the home phone rang. He jogged to the kitchen, expecting Roy or Pauline. It was Dr. Tosh.
“Good afternoon,” Tosh said. “Still with us?”
“Yes, sorry to say,” Johnny said.
Tosh chuckled. “Johnny,” he said. “You are a pisser. When all this surgery business is over you and I should go play golf.”
“You play golf?”
“Sure!”
“In a wheelchair?”
“You’d be surprised, friend,” Tosh said. “All right, now listen. Johnny. I need to talk to you about the repeat MRI. The second one, that you had done yesterday.”
“Yes?”
“Well, the contrast brought some new details out. When Vogel and I looked at it together, we saw some concerns.”
“What do you mean, concerns?”
“In the tumor,” Tosh said.
“The cyst?” Johnny said.
“Yes,” Tosh said. “We’re seeing some fingerlike extensions, something we don’t usually see with benign meningiomas. And it’s a bit larger than the first MRI revealed.”
“What does this mean?”
“It means I’m really glad we have you scheduled for surgery,” Tosh said. “But I’m afraid it also means the surgery is going to be more complex than we had anticipated. And we can’t be as confident about the outcome.”
“Are you saying I have cancer?”
“Well, no.”
“Then what do I have?”
“You have the potential to have cancer.”
“Don’t we all have that?”
“Yes,” Tosh said. “You just have more of it, friend.”
Johnny looked out the kitchen window, where a half-dead frog was clinging to the screen. “Brilliant,” he said.
“Now listen. Talk to your wife, let her know about this, okay?” Tosh said. “We’re still going ahead as planned. I want to keep you on the prednisone to get the swelling down before we let Vogel in there. Surgeons, you know,” he said. “They’re a little high-maintenance. They like to have everything just so.”
“I think that’s probably a good thing,” Johnny said.
“Keep up your steroids. Take it easy. Don’t panic,” Tosh said. “You’ll be on the other side of this in no time. It will be fine. You just have to trust us. Okay?”
Trust him? Why should he trust Tosh? Why should he trust anyone?
“Hey, Doc,” Johnny said. “What happened to you?”
“What?”
“Your legs,” Johnny said. “Why are you in that wheelchair?”
“Fell off a stage,” Tosh said. “I used to perform musical theater off Broadway.”
“You did?”
“Yep. We were doing The Pajama Game,” Tosh said. “And I took a header off stage left. You didn’t see that coming, did you?”
“Must have been rough.”
“Oh, yeah. One minute you’re a dancer—a goddamned tap dancer, okay?—and the next minute you’re waking up in a hospital and they’re telling you you’ll never walk again? Bam!” Tosh chuckled. “I gotta tell you. I thought about killing myself. Glad I never got around to it. Turns out you can get all the way through medical school sitting on your ass. Johnny—listen to me. It may not be cancer. And if it is? You can fight it.”
Johnny didn’t answer right away. Through the phone, he could hear the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” playing in the background.
“All right?” Tosh said. “Tell me you’re all right, Johnny.”
“I forgot something,” Johnny said. “I did see the Stones in Edinburgh. It was a long time ago. I think I was pretty drunk at the time. But they were incredible.”
“Well, then!” Tosh seemed to think this settled it. “We all keep going, Johnny. We just keep going until we can’t.”
After Johnny hung up, he stared at the phone. An electric current erupted in his stomach and surged outward, toward the tips of his fingers. Something was changing.
That night, when Pauline came home from the factory, the rains returned. Johnny fried some tilapia with onions and made a salad. He said nothing to Pauline about Tosh’s phone call. Because what good would that have done? Why should they both be worried sick? It wouldn’t change anything. He was having the surgery in two weeks, fingerlike extensions or no fingerlike extensions. Give her this, he thought. You can’t give her everything, but you can give her this. If he was going to metastasize, he’d do so alone.
Pauline had brought wine gums. Bless her. They settled on the couch and watched an episode of Top Gear—the one where the boys tour around Vietnam and visit the fishing villages of Ha Long Bay off the east coast. Johnny had read about the place. The villages are made up of floating houses. They are painted bright blues and greens and they are lashed together, tucked against storms into limestone coves. There are hundreds of people in these villages, and there are some who live their entire lives on the bay, buoyant, never walking on dry land. Birth to death, rising and falling with the tides, praying for soft winds.
Oh, Pauline. This was the way of things. Johnny thought of his workers, shivering in a man-made wind, turning water into ice and breathing air so cold it burns. He thought of his son, alone on a highland hillside with a baby daughter Johnny had never seen. He thought of Pauline, running from something that he hoped was not him. He thought of gray fingers reaching into his brain.
When the show was over, Pauline went upstairs and Johnny went to the file cabinet in the study. He found his passport and checked the expiration date—still good. If he wanted to go see Corran, he could fly to Scotland and be back within a couple of days—well in advance of his surgery. Not that he did want to go see Corran. But just in case he wanted to go see Corran. He tucked the passport under the blotter on the desk. He’d look at it again in the morning, when he was thinking more clearly.
They went to bed. Late in the night, the General was terrified when a thunderstorm blew through with the last of the rains. He couldn’t settle down. He paced circles across the top of the quilt, dug his way underneath, dug himself back out. Johnny was awake anyway, and he could feel the dog’s legs quaking through the duvet. He sat up; the whites of the General’s eyes shone like ivory in the dim light. Pauline was fast asleep.
“It’s all right, wee matey,” Johnny said to the General. He put his hand out and covered the dachshund’s trembling little head with it. “It’s just fear, that’s all. You’ll get through it.” He pulled the dog up onto his chest, and together they watched the lighting shatter the darkness, heard the thunder crash.
We are the houses of Ha Long Bay, Johnny thought. We cling together, we try to survive. If we are very careful and very lucky, we float.
Six
Paulin
e had learned a few things about Sam Tulley, the young research attorney from Knowles & Frusciante who seemed to be taking up residence at the Bold City Ice Plant. More than just a few things. God, what a talker. Sam Tulley had been picking the place apart backward and forward, going over every square inch of the factory and poring through every file in the admin wing, and he’d chattered glibly the whole way, even while making self-important marks in his notebook and snapping photos of the compressors, the water purification system, the nurse tanks.
He talked to Roy about an iPhone app that would warm your hands when they got too cold. (“Hell on the battery, though,” he said.) He talked to Claire about a new restaurant in San Marco that sold nothing but ice pops. Yes, ice pops. He talked to Ed from Sales about the new iPad (“Not enough storage!”) and to a googly-eyed Rosa about something called the “flame of thrones.” (Or was it the “game of drones”? Who knew?)
But mostly, he talked to Pauline. He told her that his father was a podiatrist, that his mother was born in Venezuela, and that his whole family was bilingual. That he was new to Jacksonville. That he wasn’t married, not that she’d asked, of course. He told her he was training for the Gate River Run, which got her attention, and when she asked him how it was going he told her he trained on the Hart Bridge in the early mornings. That she should do it sometime. Then he told her he was from Ann Arbor but had gone to law school at New York University in Manhattan. As an undergraduate he majored in industrial psychology. He told her that was not as abstruse as it sounded. She said she didn’t think it sounded abstruse. She thought it sounded pretentious, but she didn’t tell him that. Did he think she wouldn’t understand what industrial psychology was? Did he think she wouldn’t understand what “abstruse” meant?
At first, she was brusque. It was still annoying the bejesus out of her that this overpriced law firm had sent the low man on the totem pole over to the factory to work on Bold City’s appeal. What happened to Knowles? What happened to Frusciante, that seasoned, power-suited woman they’d met on the first day they contacted the firm, the lady who’d grasped Pauline’s hand firmly, looked her in the eye, and said confidently, “We’ll beat this, Mrs. MacKinnon. We’re on your side.” Where was she? Instead the firm had sent over Sam Tulley, an overgrown man-child who brought little packets of Cheetos in his bagged lunches and fidgeted like a fourth-grader anytime he was seated more than a half hour.
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