Shark River df-8

by Randy Wayne White

  Why did she keep pushing? I said, “You’re exaggerating. And misinterpreting. You want me to tell you about horseshoe crabs or not? I know they look simple, maybe not that interesting, but they’re really one of the great survival stories on earth. The crabs you’re carrying in your bucket right now are identical to fossilized crabs dug out of the Alps. Two hundred million years old, that’s how long they’ve lived unchanged-essentially perfectly designed animals. You don’t find that interesting?”

  “It’s them Spanish men you’re scared of, isn’t it? Uh-huh, uh-huh, your eyes talkin’ to me now even though your mouth saying something else. What you call them… Colombians? The Colombians, they after you and you know it, but you ain’t saying nothing.”

  I told her, “I’m talking away, but you’re not listening. You asked me why we’re collecting crabs that can’t be eaten, which is what I was getting at if you’d just listen. The thing about a horseshoe crab, they have a small amount of blue-colored blood, which is important to pharmaceutical companies. Research facilities, too. Their blood clots at the slightest contact with endotoxins, which are toxic byproducts of some bacteria. Endotoximia is a lethal form of blood poisoning, so what we’re doing is important work.”

  “Blood poisoning, yeah, I know that a bad thing, but them Colombians, they something bad, too, which is what we should be discussin’. Why you don’t want me to help? Maybe I got some methods you don’t know nothin’ about.” She stepped to me and pulled the collar of my shirt open. “See here? Why you not wearing the gris-gris bag I give you? That good luck, man! Something else I can do for you, I can get some Goofer dust. Put a little on you, then pray over it every day for nine days. That and some blue stone mixed with amber and turpentine and salt to protect you from all harm. It very powerful. It what we call an Assault Obeah, a curse on your enemies.”

  I was shaking my head, amused by the irony. Me talking research and technology, Ransom replying with archaic superstition: an illustration of the diversity of two islands, an example of similar genetics from diverse cultures.

  She straightened my collar and leaned closer. “I tell you something true now, ’cause I can see you’re not a believer. That same Assault Obeah, I used it against Sinclair Benton. Nine days after my last prayer, that bad man was found dead in the same lake that kill my baby. I tol’ you about that evil place. We islanders saw vultures, knew Benton was missing and sent a couple tourists to check. There his big body was, face down, out there like he was tryin’ to find something.

  “Sinclair drown in Horse Eatin’ Hole, a man who couldn’t swim a stroke in his life and had no reason to be at a place nobody on Cat Island have the courage to go near except my sweet brave Tucker. That how strong that spell is.”

  I picked up my bucket and began to walk along the bar again. I was walking in ankle-deep water, at the demarcation of turtle grass and sand, and soon found a nice little pocket of sea anemones. It was in a slightly softer area where there were also dozens of nickel-sized siphon holes in the sand: a bed of angel-wing clams below.

  I touched my middle finger to one of the holes. I could feel the angel-wing’s siphon jetting water as the clam dug deeper, effecting escape.

  Ransom continued to follow. “What I don’t understand is, why you worried about them Colombians finding you way out here in the middle of the ocean? How they even know you’re out in your boat, man? It what tell me you’re very scared for a reason, ’cause you not the type to scare easy.”

  The Colombians could have known because that morning, on the phone, I’d given Lindsey a precise rundown of my schedule. Told her where I would be and when I would be there. Would do the same thing tomorrow morning and the next day and the next.

  It was something else I’d promised Hal Harrington.

  To Ransom, I said, “You’re imagining things, again.”

  That night, a little after midnight, Tomlinson came sneaking up the boardwalk to my house, exaggerating his careful steps in an attempt to be quiet, and thereby made even more noise than usual.

  I heard Ransom’s happy giggle, the muffled lyric of voices, my cousin probably pretending that he’d surprised her.

  There was not much chance of that, because I’d strung a hammock for her in the breezeway between the house and the lab. She’d told me she liked sleeping out there because she could look at the stars and hear the night sounds, plus the tin roof that connected the two little buildings kept the dew off her, so it was fine, just fine. Best place to sleep on Sanibel, she told me, and was probably right.

  I was lying in bed reading The Windward Road, a classic by Archie Carr, the great Florida biologist, and listening to my shortwave, Radio Bogota. I had just heard a news reporter say in Spanish that Colombia’s military had suffered casualties in three days of heavy fighting against guerrillas. Fifty-four soldiers and police were dead, and a United States-built army helicopter had been downed by suspected rebel fire. Another seventeen were feared dead or taken prisoner by the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, FARC. According to the reporter, the rebels were reacting to a recent U.S. antidrug policy of interdiction by force. Some of the smaller producers were being put out of business.

  That made me think of Hal Harrington. It also brought back some memories of Colombia, a place I love.

  Colombia is one of the most beautiful little countries in the world and also one of the most tragic. When its economy flourished, then became dependent on the drug trade, the first casualty was Colombia’s own legal system and the respect its citizenry had for that system and their republic. It started with marijuana, then cocaine. Now Colombia is the second-largest producer of heroin in the world. The beautiful little country of rain forest and ancient stone cities just keeps getting dirtier and more ruthless as the drug whirlpool sweeps it around, dragging it deeper and deeper into the abyss.

  If Colombian drug merchants had come to care nothing for the lives of other Colombians, they would not hesitate to kill me. Ransom was exactly right: I was afraid. Afraid for good reason. Somewhere beyond the night and across the Caribbean, Amador Cordero, oldest son of Edgar Cordero, was hooked up to tubes and hoses, a paraplegic. I was the cause and his father would have his revenge.

  The only question now was when… and who would come looking for me?

  I heard Ransom laugh louder, then the slap of Tomlinson’s bare feet on wood. I saw his silhouette fill the doorway, told him to come in before he had a chance to knock, and there he was: Hair more matted than usual, eyes glassy, pupils fixed, completely naked. His lower body was caked in what looked to be gray mud, his torso painted red, his face streaked with tribal designs, black and yellow.

  I said, “You get kidnapped by Indians or just showing off your artistic side?”

  Behind him, wearing one of my T-shirts as a nightdress, Ransom made a clicking noise with her tongue and said, “He all man, that for sure. From the top to the bottom. Lordy! That something I no longer got a question about!”

  Tomlinson was staring at the wall beyond me, maybe looking out the window… no, just staring. He seemed to be in some kind of trance, and weaving, too. I realized he was very drunk or stoned. Probably both. I listened to him say, “I spent all night, all day, praying and meditating about what to do. I pounded up leaves and drank the sacred Black Drink, what the Indian shamans used to drink when they were on a vision quest. The Calusas I’m talking about, here on Sanibel. That’s why I’m here.”

  Still amused, an approving smile on her face, Ransom said, “You been smoking some herb, too, that what I smell. Smell very nice, too. That the bad thing about not having no pockets, you walking around naked like that. You got no place to carry a little present for your friends.”

  I crossed the room and found a towel. I wasn’t wearing the sling now. My arm was still bandaged but it felt a lot better, no longer so stiff, although the bruise had darkened, spread and turned a sickly shade of blue-green.

  Which was not much different than the shade of Tomlinson’s face right
now. The unpainted areas, anyway.

  I said to him, “I think you should sit down before you fall down. Maybe some food would help. There’s a piece of grouper in there from dinner.”

  He was shaking his head. “No, man. Not now. It came to me. In my vision. That I should come here and tell you how it was, what I did. Everything. We need to talk. I don’t know why I put it off for so long.”

  “You want to talk now? This instant?”

  “Damn right, amigo. I wait ’til I’m sober, I might lose my courage.”

  I tossed the towel to him. “Okay. I’ll listen. But do me a favor first.”

  Tomlinson said, “Nearly fifteen years ago, I was a member of a political activist group that was responsible for sending a bomb to a San Diego naval installation. It killed three people and injured another guy pretty bad. One of the people killed, he was a naval officer. I think he was a friend of yours. You didn’t know? I’ve always wondered if you knew or not.”

  Instead of answering, I said, “A political activist group that sent a bomb? That seems like a pretty mild way to describe cold-blooded killers.”

  “Well, revolutionaries then. Or anarchists. That’s more like it. This was back when I was a teaching undergraduate in Boston. What we really were-there were thirteen of us who were super-active; the core group of true believers, I’m talking about. Power to the people. Up the establishment. Death to the pigs. That’s where our heads were at, but we were so young, man. So fucking young! Really, what most of us were was just a bunch of dilettantes who thought violence was like what we saw on television. Good guys and bad guys, cowboys and Indians. Like that.”

  I said, “A lot of people wouldn’t have the courage to admit that.”

  Tomlinson said, “It’s the truth, man. The truth. Back then it seemed like we were doing the right thing, trying to crash the establishment so we could start all over and make things better. You’ve got to know yourself, some things going on during that time period really sucked. Until I saw the film footage of the people we’d killed. That’s when it got real, man. Way too real. I’ve never been the same person since.”

  I was sitting on the bed. Tomlinson was in the reading chair by the north window. Instead of wrapping himself in the towel, he’d borrowed a pair of khaki shorts. They were baggy. He had his forehead braced in both palms, looking at the floor as he spoke, not looking at me. The floor lamp above him made his hair seem a brighter blond, the shadow of his goatee darker, the tribal paint on his face surreal.

  Through the window behind him and to his right, I could see black water and a fringe of stars. Out on Periwinkle, the island’s main strip, bars such as ’Tween Waters and Sanibel Grill and at Casa Ybel were probably still going strong, but this side of the bay was given over to darkness and silence.

  I’d asked Ransom to leave. She was outside somewhere. Maybe eavesdropping, maybe not.

  It didn’t matter.

  I sat there and listened, saying nothing, as Tomlinson told me how it was. The rallies, the demonstrations, the late-night talks about civil disobedience and insurrection, discussions of violence becoming gradually more and more acceptable and extreme as the subject of violence became commonplace. Their words making it seem doable and real, the fantasy of their small unit making bloodless war, accomplishing good, changing the world. The women members into it, a communal feeling, sex and drugs and revolution. Like it could really happen and they, the elite, had a responsibility to make it happen.

  Conditioning is one of the least appreciated dynamics of human behavior. Take a group, any group, and condition them to a philosophy or pattern of conduct one tiny deviant step at a time and, within a few years or less, you can convince them that such atrocities as mass suicide or marching one’s own neighbors into ovens are both perfectly reasonable acts.

  Tomlinson’s group had found a book called The Anarchist Cookbook. It gave detailed directions on how to make bombs and detonators. They’d already rented a little farm. They began to experiment.

  Amazing. The ingredients were easy to find, the bombs easily built. They actually worked.

  Boom!

  For the novice, activating a weapon gives the illusion of power. They all felt that power and liked it.

  The bombs they built became more and more sophisticated. Finally, one night, one of them said it was time to become part of the revolution, which was like a dare, and no one said no, and so they rigged a contact detonator to a six-volt battery, packaged it, and sent it to the Naval Special Warfare base on Coronado Island off San Diego.

  It was in early winter when Coronado’s jacarandas are in bloom; whole streets lined with lavender trees from the country club clear to the Hotel Del.

  Tomlinson told me, “About a week later, the FBI came calling. Interviewed us all. I don’t know why they didn’t make any arrests. I thought sure we were all going down. Nothing ever came of it, though. The other members, they were like, ‘Hey, man, the pigs just aren’t smart enough to catch us.’ I didn’t send the bomb, help make it, nothing. But I didn’t stand up and tell them not to make that bomb, either. So there was blood on my hands. Blood on my hands just as sure as if I’d killed those three men all by myself. After that, the next year or two, I don’t remember much. The guilt, man, seeing those smoking corpses on TV. I went insane. No other way to put it. My father finally had me institutionalized. Just to keep me safe.”

  The other members of the group didn’t fare as well. Within two years after the bombing, six of the thirteen members had either been killed in freak accidents or badly injured. Two others simply vanished.

  “I was with one of them when it happened,” Tomlinson told me. “I’d just been released. I wasn’t ready, was still woozy from the shock therapy and all the drugs, but I guess they figured it was time. So I hooked up with this old pal of mine in Aspen, a guy named Jeff. He also happened to be one of the original members of our group. The group that sent the bomb. We were in this bar called The Slope, and I went to take a whiz. Came back, and Jeff was gone. His car keys were still on the table, had a full beer and his cigarette was burning in the ashtray.

  “His folks spent a fortune trying to find him, but he was gone, man. Vanished. It was like there was some dark thing out there stalking us. Hunting us down. Taking revenge on us, one by one by one.”

  I was holding a can of Diet Coke. As I listened to him, the can began to slowly dent, then collapse in my hand. I told myself to sit back, relax, maintain an expression of indifference.

  He sighed, paused, chewed at his hair for a moment, then went to the little fridge, opened the door and knelt to see in. As he did, he said, “That was the end for me. I couldn’t take any more. I borrowed money from my old man and bought a sailboat. Headed out to sea. Offshore, a hundred miles or more out, was the first time in years I’d felt any sense of peace. Or safety, after what we did. It was a kind of spiritual rebirth, man. And a release, too. It’s like I always say: I love being offshore because no one can hear you scream.”

  He stood, holding a fresh beer. He told me that after months of cruising, he began to recover. Began to study Buddhism, doing sitting meditation twice a day every day. He also began to research the families of the three murdered sailors, wanting to make restitution, and finally found a way. He pretended to be the administrator of a private organization that provided scholarship money to the children of servicemen killed in action. Every extra cent he made, he funneled into that fund.

  “I interviewed all three widows by phone. I got to know them. Nice ladies, but only one of them had children, Cheryl Garvin. I talked to her several times. That’s where I first heard your name, long before we ever met. A guy named Marion Ford, but everyone called him Doc. You were tight with her late husband, Johnny, and already sending her money to help out.”

  I sat listening, trying not to react, as he added, “When you showed up on Sanibel, I put the two together right away. I figured you’d come to kill me. I expected that all along. By then, a couple more of us had ei
ther died in an accident or disappeared. And look who’s talking-me, the guy who always says there’s no such thing as coincidence. You with your spooky background. Tell me the truth, Doc. If you’d been sent to kill me, I’d be dead, right?”

  I nodded as if I had no idea what he was talking about, and, before I could think about it, heard myself say, “If I had that kind of background, yeah. Unless they failed to assign some kind of time frame. An oversight that left it entirely up to me when to do it.”

  He smiled for the first time. “I get it, one of your jokes. Like you still might have to pull the trigger. Uh-huh. But no, my point is, for us to end up friends is very powerful karma, man. It told me I was back on the right path. Maybe even forgiven. Two months ago, though. .. early December, it was the anniversary of the bombing, and it all came back for some reason. The guilt. The horror. You know why I pushed so hard for you to go to my retreat on Guava Key? Because I’d already arranged for Cheryl to be there, Johnny Garvin’s widow, and I was going to tell you both the truth. Finally get it off my chest. But she had to cancel at the last minute.”

  I nodded and stood, feeling some of the old anger return, fighting it, then compartmentalizing it. I am very, very good at compartmentalizing emotion. I waited until I was under control before I said, “I’m glad she didn’t come. It was a long time ago and why put her through it again? Just to make yourself feel better?”

  I watched the words hit him and saw them hurt. I took no pleasure in that. It was true. It had all happened a long, long time ago, and several years back I had made a personal decision to leave it all where it belonged-in the past.

  Once a decision has been made, emotion-any emotion-is wasted energy and a poor use of time.

  As I opened the door, showing him out, I added, “One thing you maybe overlooked. From what I just heard, anyway.”

  “What’s that, man?”

  “It was a violent time. There were a lot of subversive groups around. Not just yours.”