Shark River

by Randy Wayne White

  Something else you don’t seem to know is that Tucker Gatrell is like Ransom. He has a heart that is strong and good. He may be a drunken liar and half crazy but he is a decent man, plus my partner, and always will be. I hope you will honor his wishes, Marion. He’s always felt real bad about how things turned out.

  Sincerely, Your Friend

  Joseph Egret

  I stood when I’d finished Joseph’s letter. Took off my glasses and cleaned them, smiling. Frog-eaters—Joseph’s name for tourists and modern Floridans, white and black, because he knew them to eat the legs of Everglades frogs, something his people would not do.

  I turned and went into the lab and filed the letter away before returning to my house and bolting the door behind me. I rummaged through the desk until I found the two silver keys on their ring, then got down on my hands and knees, pulled the fireproof lock chest from beneath my bed and opened it.

  One key fits the door, the second key fits the lock on the drawer’s false bottom, which I also unlocked and removed, thus revealing neat stacks of folders and notebooks, five bogus passports, some clothing, and other detritus from a life I thought I had abandoned long ago.

  For a moment I was taken aback when I realized that two very important manila envelopes were missing. Over the years, I’d grown used to seeing them each time I opened the little secret compartment. One was labeled OPERATION PHOENIX, the other with the words DIRECCION: BLANCA MANAGUA written on a label in red felt-tip pen.

  I felt a mini-moment of panic because, in a very worst-case scenario, they are my only wedge against potential legal problems from which no statute of limitations would ever protect me.

  Harrington had been right about that.

  Then I remembered that the envelopes were presumably right where they were supposed to be: in the bank’s safety-deposit box where I’d stored them several months before.

  My notebooks were still there, though, and I removed them carefully, pausing to linger over the names I’d written in precise block print on their covers, each notebook catalyzing visual memories, some good, many bad.

  Coast of Bengal

  Borneo/Sandakan

  Nicaragua/Politics/Baseball

  Havana I

  Havana II

  Ox-eyed Tarpon/South China Sea

  Masagua’s Ridley Turtles and the Magnetic

  Mountain

  Singapore to Kota Baharu (with 3rd Gurkhas)

  The Hannah Smith Story

  There were others.

  All contained the carefully kept details of my most private life, much of that lifetime spent traveling alone through the Third World tropics, necessarily duplicitous years spent doing clandestine work as well as the work I still care passionately about: marine biology.

  I set the notebooks aside and found what I’d unlocked the box to find.

  I squatted there staring, for a time, at the nine-millimeter Sig Sauer P226 semiautomatic handgun that lay, in its shoulder holster, atop a black Navy watch sweater that I had not worn in a long time. I removed the Sig Sauer from the holster, feeling the weight of it. Popped the clip, flipped the slide lock and removed the barrel. The weapon had an industrial, black finish . . . the spring and metalwork, though, had gathered a couple of small spots of corrosion.

  Why did I find the marring of this old weapon so distressing?

  I took a can of WD-40 from the cupboard beneath the sink and polished until the rust was gone. Then I disassembled the entire weapon and cleaned every element to a mirror finish before I took up the clip again and layered in ten silver-jacketed nine-millimeter hollow-points, the slug of each round copper-bright and symmetrical. Each cartridge singular . . . dense.

  I lifted up the sweater and found the brown case made of cowhide leather. Unsnapped it to see a six-inch custom-built sound arrestor resting on its own cradle so perfectly that it gave the impression of a surgical instrument.

  I screwed the silencer onto the barrel of the Sig, aware of its frictionless threads and flawless pitch. Swung the weapon in a fast arc, the balance of it no longer as comfortable and familiar as it had once been. Recalled the amplified blowgun noise it made when fired.

  Nothing comforting about that memory, either.

  I stood and placed the weapon under my mattress. Hung the sweater in the closet. Then neatened everything and locked the door behind me before returning to the marina.

  It was getting late, but the party was still spinning along. I noted that Tomlinson’s sailboat, No Más, was under way, the little engine he seldom used straining to push the boat’s mass toward the deepwater opening of Dinkin’s Bay. I pictured him out there at the wheel, a Verner twin on each side, and wished him a silent good luck.

  I had another beer. Mingled around listening to Ransom on steel drums, still playing with the band.

  When she was done, I told her I’d go with her to find her inheritance. That I would help her if I could. First, though, I needed a couple of days to finish up some work. And that we couldn’t travel together. It was too dangerous.

  She kept asking why.

  I didn’t tell her why.

  16

  I spent the weekend dragging nets, wading the flats, collecting specimens, then working in the lab. The biology professors at Grinnell and Waldron College would have been heartened. Maybe even proud. The thing is, I never receive an order without feeling an obligation to provide what I can as fast as I am able. It creates a specific, physical connection between my small lab and the wider world. For reasons I don’t pretend to understand, that connection is important to me. The image of starfish and sea anemones taken from the Sanibel littoral sitting in heated classrooms, snow and cornstubble through the windows outside, is oddly satisfying.

  No Más was back at its familiar anchorage, out in the bay, a short boat ride to the marina or to my docks.

  No sign of life aboard, though. On Saturday, I tried to hail Tomlinson via VHF radio. No reply. I stopped by in my skiff and banged on the sailboat’s hull. No answer.

  Strange, because his little dinghy was tied off the stern, which meant that he was aboard. I could smell the cloying odor of incense and marijuana. I could hear the stereo playing the monotone Latin chants he always listens to when in a certain mood. Live at the same little marina with a person, and over the months and years you will come to know his quirks and react accordingly. Tomlinson wanted to be left alone—which suggested his voyage with the Verner twins had not gone well.

  A couple of times that day, Ransom made vague references to Tomlinson and his whereabouts, before she finally said, “I like that Mr. Thomas, but he kind of a strange old hippie, ain’t he? He just go off and disappear, never say a word to me about where he gonna be.”

  “You think he’s acting strange now?” I said to her. “Stick around.”

  I listened to her tell me what I already knew—tomorrow the two of them were driving to the little bayside village of Mango, because, according to Tucker, he’d left something there for her to find.

  If I knew Tuck—and I did—he’d try to bounce us all over Florida just for fun, which is why I wasn’t going to join the hunt until my work in the lab was done.

  I listened to her say, “I look into that Mr. Thomas’s face and it like looking into the face of someone who were maybe an owl in a different life. Or one of them saints in an old painting like you see in church. He act so young, but his eyes, man, they old, real old, and filled with sadness. What the problem with that crazy boy, Mr. Thomas?”

  Her tone suggested personal interest and warm concern. Maybe romantic interest. She was asking me for specific information in a sly way with her innocent, general questions.

  After the third or fourth inquiry, I told her, “He’s got a lot on his mind. Tomlinson, he’s a very emotional guy with a strong sense of right and wrong. It could be . . . well, I think he feels a lot of guilt about something . . . maybe something that happened in the past. It’s finally caught up with him for some reason.” I told her I didn’t know why.
She’d have to ask him about it, not me.

  I didn’t like the niggling little surge of conscience my disclaimer produced.

  I realized I not only didn’t like disappointing Ransom, I wasn’t comfortable lying to her, either.

  Ransom said, “Man you can’t eat ’em. Why would anyone want to pay good money for something so ugly?”

  She meant the five-gallon bucket of horseshoe crabs she’d collected. A horseshoe crab looks like a plastic, caramel-colored helmet with a spiked tail. The hairy legs beneath contribute a spidery effect.

  It was still Saturday, the 10th day of February, the day of the new moon according to my almanac calendar. No matter what time of year, summer, winter, or fall, tides on the new and low moon are called “spring tides” worldwide. Because the moon is in direct alignment with the sun, the combined gravitational influence of those two bodies has a substantially greater effect on water mass.

  Not that tides are always dependable or predictable in the Gulf of Mexico. Ask any boater. They are not. Sanibel, Captiva, and adjacent islands generally have semidiurnal tides, which means two equally high and low tides per day. Because the moon rises fifty-eight minutes later each evening, those tides usually peak nearly an hour later every twenty-four hours.

  Usually.

  Because the Gulf is not much more than a gigantic saltwater lake joined to a larger ocean, there is a kind of slopping-bowl effect. It’s easily illustrated. Put water in a bowl, then tilt the bowl slowly and rhythmically, one side up, one side down.

  Tilt the bowl to the right and water rushes away: low tide on the left edge. Tilt the bowl to the left, and water rushes back the other way: high tide on the left edge. But soon, very soon, the wave thus created will separate into two opposing waves. When those two waves collide, water in the bowl does not fluctuate much at all. Which is why, about once a month, tides around the islands do not seem to change.

  One-tide days, we call them.

  Weather over the Atlantic and Caribbean can also often override the lunar pull. Distant winds can push water into the big bowl or winds can slow the water from leaving the big bowl—“wind-forcing,” in scientific terms.

  Random—that’s the way tides seem, at times. What is not random, though, is that on each and every spring tide, full moon or new, the bays and shallow water flats around Sanibel become livelier, more interesting places.

  Which is why I almost always go out collecting on those days—lots of interesting stuff to see and find. The strong gravitational influence keys very predictable animal behavior, too. A good example is the horseshoe crab. Every Florida spring, on the highest tides of the month, female horseshoe crabs plow their way to shore and lay their eggs above the tide line, out of reach of lesser tides. In the same way, every Florida spring, on the full and new moon high tide, the eggs of those same animals hatch (often in concert with a storm, for reasons unknown to me) and the miniature animals plow their way back toward deeper water again.

  I’d described that cycle to Ransom over coffee that morning, and she’d insisted on coming along. She told me, “Man, I grow’d up on the ocean, but it like my eyes wasn’t workin’ too good ’til I met you, my brother. I go with you and learn some more about what I should already know. Besides, Mr. Thomas, he don’t answer when I try to call him on the radio.”

  Her mind on Tomlinson again.

  I’d steered us out the mouth of Dinkin’s Bay, then northwest on Pine Island Sound. I ran a mile or so to the back side of Sanibel Bayou, which is part of Ding Darling Sanctuary, a national preserve. On the bay side, there is a long sandbar that traces the mangrove fringe from Dinkin’s Bay clear to Wulfert Channel, a sand bridge interrupted only by narrow creek entrances such as MacIntyre Creek, the Umbrella Pool, and Hardworking Bayou.

  It was 11:30 A.M., low tide. Pine Island Sound more closely resembled a flooded golf course than a saltwater estuary. The bar was exposed, dry and firm, a temporary peninsula ten meters wide and several miles long. On the Sanibel side, separated by a fringe of muck, were red mangroves elevated above the water on monkey-bar roots. On the bay side were hundreds of acres of turtle grass as green as spring wheat, that plateau of green pocked with sea pools and guttered by creeks.

  Idling toward the bar, I could smell the salt and sulfur and iodine mix that is the smell of low tide, the odor of life and rot and the spermious musk of reproduction.

  I anchored my boat in two feet of water and we waded in, both of us wearing white rubber boots and carrying five-gallon buckets. I had that order from Waldron College for horseshoe crabs, plus I needed sea anemones.

  We had no trouble finding both. It was as if someone had pulled a plug, exposing a sea bottom alive with hundreds of species of wiggling, crawling, squirting, drifting plants and invertebrates. As we slogged along, I answered Ransom’s questions if she asked about something; occasionally I would point out an animal I found unusual or interesting. She was quick and perceptive, but her interest in science seemed uneven, and her attention was prone to wander.

  Mostly, we worked.

  At the edge of the bar were hundreds of female horseshoe crabs. Some were nearly buried in mud, actively laying eggs. Others were in transit, drawing a half-dozen or more smaller males along behind, all of the males primed to deposit their white milt when the female was ready.

  At one point, Ransom said, “You keep talking about their eggs like there’s something to see. Back on Cat Island, we go out and collect turtle eggs sometimes. The green turtle and the hawksbill, they the best, but we sometimes eat them big ol’ leatherback turtle eggs, too. Scramble them up with grunts and grits. Or maybe a nice piece’a pork if you can find it. Them turtle eggs, they something good, man. But I never seen no crab eggs.”

  We’d been collecting only male horseshoe crabs, but now I stooped and leveraged a female out of the muck and put her aside. Then I used my fingers to dig down a few inches through the sand until I felt the familiar globular mass. Waited until the water had seeped away, then pointed at the clumps of greenish-gray eggs. I told her, “Each female lays thousands of eggs. Maybe tens of thousands, I’m not sure. See how she buried herself down in the mud? At least six inches, maybe even a foot. That’s so the eggs won’t get washed away before they hatch. It takes about six weeks from the time a male fertilizes them until the eggs are mature enough to—” I stopped talking, looking toward the Intracoastal Waterway, which was just a mile or so away. Something had caught my attention. I could see two yellow Mercury test boats speeding southward, outward-bound from the test center, traveling fast.

  Were the boats slowing now?

  I stood watching them, aware of how unlikely it would be for those same test boats to be targeted again as escape vehicles, yet automatically calculating how long it would take for me to get back to my skiff, where I had the Sig Sauer hidden away in the little bag I used to keep towels and my handheld VHF radio.

  “What’s wrong with you, man? You look like you just see’d a ghost. Or maybe somebody walked over your grave. Or my grave.”

  I didn’t respond. I watched until I was certain the boats weren’t slowing. Watched them continue down the channel—normal routing, normal driver behavior.

  “You gone deaf, my brother? You hear what I ask?”

  I turned slightly toward her as I said, “Huh? Sorry. I lost the thread. What was I talking about?”

  Ransom had her hands on hips, staring at me. “Crabs. You was telling me about their eggs and stuff, but I don’t care nothing ’bout that no more. What I’m seeing right now, my brother, is you scared of something. Real scared.”

  I bent, returned the female crab to her nest. Said, “Crabs . . . right, I was telling you about crabs. What most people don’t realize about horseshoe crabs is they’re more closely related to spiders and scorpions than to true crabs. They have no antenna, no elaborate or oversize mandibles. The spiked tail? It looks like a weapon, but it’s actually a leveraging device. They use it to right themselves if they get flipped over.”
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br />   She was still looking into my face. “There’s something you not telling me, man. Izzy and Clare, yeah, they two scary Rastamen, but it more than that. A man like you, them two not amount to much worry, so it somethin’ else. Somethin’ serious. What I see in your face just now, it scare me, too. It bad, man, it very bad. What going on in that heart of yours, my brother?”

  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.”