Twelve Mile Limit df-9

by Randy Wayne White

  Yes, there would be photographs available, and Bernie could find them.

  We talked for another fifteen minutes. We traded old stories, spoke of old friends. I mentioned the Islamic terrorists, and he went on a ten-minute tirade. “They have asked for a dirty war, and we are giving it to them!” he said more than once.

  Yes, he was fixated on them, despised them.

  Bernie was wrong when he said I have no appreciation for the electronic niceties of this century. I much appreciate the fact that I now have access to instant communications worldwide with people about whom I care deeply. Pick up a telephone, punch a few buttons, and we have an immediate conduit to those individuals who have made a mark upon our lives. Much of technology is a response to the loneliness of the human condition. Drums and signal fires, cell phones and Internet cafes-methods change, but our wistfulness, our rebellion against isolation, does not.

  Finally, Bernie told me how well Eve’s son was doing. He was in high school now. Getting straight As and he’d almost aced his SATs on his first try. Sports, too. He was a superb point guard and played baseball as well. The proud uncle going on and on.

  As we chatted, me standing in the lab, watching the octopi with cat-gold eyes watching me from their lighted tanks, I had an idea. Missing stone crabs were not nearly so compelling as three missing people, but the oddity of it still troubled me.

  I said, “Hey Bernie, maybe you can give me some advice about another little problem I’m having. Someone or something is sneaking into my lab at night and stealing specimens. How hard would it be to rig a little night-vision camera in here and keep track of what happens when I’m away?”

  “So, finally you ask for a favor that I can help you with! What I’m going to do is loan you a little digitized video camera. The night-vision lens is already attached, so what you’re going to do is mount it on the wall, plug in the converter, and walk away. Simple as falling off a whatever it is people say. A barrel? There’s a timer you could probably figure out on your own after futzing with it two or three hours, so it’s better if I program it here. How’s it with you I set it to come on at midnight, off at six? With enough memory to film nine, maybe ten, nights before you got to go to the menu and delete.”

  “Perfect,” I said.

  “Not a problem, old friend. You will be getting something from me in the next few days.”

  I wasn’t certain if he meant the camera or satellite photographs.

  The next night, Sunday, a cool, clear Pearl Harbor anniversary eve, Tomlinson came puttering up in his little rubber dinghy. I could hear him swearing fraternally at the ancient Japanese kicker that missed, coughed, sputtered, and threatened to stall. He’d had the thing for years, refused to get rid of it because, he said, it dependably sapped all the aggression right out of him each and every time he used it.

  “The goddamn thing is an emotional laxative,” he explained. “A bad karma purge with a carburetor glitch that Jesus Christ himself plus the twelve disciples couldn’t solve if their holy asses depended on it. I still think it’s a bad diaphragm, by the way. Reminds me of my ex-wife, the ball-breaking dragon lady. Dealing with that rice-burning piece of crap is like meditation in reverse. It’s cheaper than therapy, plus I’m never in much of a hurry, so what do I care?”

  Now I felt the rubber boat bump my inside dock, then felt and heard the clomp-slap sound of Tomlinson’s bare feet as he swung up onto the deck. Heard the heavy rustling of paper bags, so I flipped on the outside flood, then held the door wide as he came in, arms filled with two bulging grocery sacks. I don’t have air conditioning-don’t like it, don’t need it. Just ceiling fans and lots of big windows with screens. Even so, Tomlinson came in pushing a pocket of mangrove-dense air, hotter than the air inside, and rich with sulfur, iodine, and the oil fragrance he always wore, patchouli. Something else, too: the sappy sweet odor of marijuana clinging to his baggy surfer shorts and tank top, plus a hint of a familiar woman’s perfume, Opium. Opium was my sister, Ransom’s, favorite perfume. Apparently, they were keeping company again. I fanned the air away as I pulled the door closed and hooked it tight.

  “Dinnertime, compadre. You eaten yet?”

  I looked at my watch. It was more than an hour past sunset, nearly 7 P.M. Through the west window, I could see a quarter moon, coral pink among December stars, drifting seaward. I’d checked the Farmer’s Almanac: Moonset was at 10:46 P.M. A good, black night for stargazing if I decided to break out the superb Celestron Nexstar 5-inch Schmidt-Casselgraine telescope that stood angled on its tripod by the north window, next to my reading chair and lamp. It is an amazing piece of optics. With its built-in computer and GPS, all you have to do is point the barrel of the scope north, punch in the approximate lat and long, and you can then select from a menu of many hundreds of celestial objects, stars, and planets. Choose any one of them, touch a button, and the telescope will automatically find it.

  I said to Tomlinson, “Amelia didn’t head back to St. Pete until after four, and I just finished working out. So the answer’s no, I haven’t eaten.”

  He was taking objects out of the sacks, bunches of fresh herbs-parsley, basil, cilantro-a handful of Persian limes. “Did you run? Or go to the school and swim laps? They’re keeping the pool open late, I hear.”

  “Both. Kind of. I went down by the old landing strip and ran a couple of miles along Algier’s Beach, then swam out to the jet-ski buoy and back.”

  “You’re shitting me. This time of year, man, the water’s getting cold. Has to be in the mid, maybe low seventies.”

  I said, “I don’t care. After the Gulf, the water in my cistern shower seems warm. I like it.” I looked at the counter as he unloaded his sacks on to it, noting that, along with food, they contained a pilot chart of the Gulf of Mexico, wirebound, plus a sheath of what looked to be printed material from the Internet. I picked up the pilot chart, then looked into Tomlinson’s deepset and sad blue eyes. “You called your buddies at Blue Water Charts in Lauderdale.”

  “Yep, Rick and Dorie. They knew just what I needed and FedExed it over.”

  “So explain. Are we making dinner or doing research?”

  “You got any fish? Maybe some shrimp, something like that? I’m going to make a Panamanian chimichurri sauce.”

  I loved Tomlinson’s chimichurri but could never seem to duplicate it exactly: diced bunches of parsley and cilantro, one clove of diced garlic, one small diced chili pepper, a pinch of kosher salt, a little drizzle of balsamic vinegar, the juice from half a fresh lime, plus a cup or more of olive oil. Sometimes he added tomatoes, sometimes he didn’t.

  I nodded. “Jeth dropped off a couple of nice kingfish steaks. He says the mackerel are running two-ten off the light-house in thirty-five feet of water.”

  Tomlinson was at the sink now, washing the greens, the veins in his biceps implying the tubular network linked beneath his skin, the complicated hydraulics of human physiology. We are delicate machines, indeed, fleshy pumps, electrodes, and cartilaginous wiring. He said, “In that case, we’re making dinner and doing research.”

  12

  Tomlinson and I discussed it, going back and forth until we agreed that there were only three possible explanations for why Janet and the other two weren’t found. One: The people aboard the planes, helicopters, and search vessels missed them. Two: Someone, something, or some incident had removed them from the surface of the water before or during the search. Three: They were never adrift to begin with.

  Sitting at the little teak table on the porch outside, an oil lamp burning between us for light, Tomlinson took a bite of his mackerel in chimichurri, and said, “Okay, but the working premise is that Amelia Gardner’s story is mostly true. We start with that, then presumably eliminate the other possibilities as we go along.”

  “Agreed,” I said.

  Tomlinson was getting into it, his brain firing, generating enthusiasm. We’d had the memorial service for Janet that afternoon at Jensen’s Marina. It was an emotional affair. Some cry
ing, some laughter, the ceremony-like all funeral ceremonies-underlining the fact that our lives are brief and that the impact an individual has on the life of another is never realized until the association has forever ended. Apparently, Tomlinson had converted his own sense of loss into a determination to salvage Janet’s reputation. It’d been a while since I’d seen him so focused and lucid. Now he said, “Our job is to compile all the data we can. Objectively, I’m saying. If we go into this as advocates, hermano, we forfeit our credibility. We’re both scientists. We both know that.”

  “Of course. I wouldn’t do it any other way.”

  “Not that I don’t have my own biases. Some of the crap they’ve been saying about what happened out there? It was a drug deal gone bad. It was murder. It was some military snafu that the right-wingers are trying to cover up-that one, at least, I’m willing to consider. Like maybe the three drifters were out there and saw the military doing something top secret. Whatever happened, we need to collect all the data we can and just have faith that Amelia’s story is mostly true.”

  That word again: mostly. It surprised me. “Did I miss something? I didn’t find any holes in her story. Everything seemed consistent. An emotional event that was tough to talk about, but she seemed to do her best to lay it all out there. To be honest.”

  Tomlinson started to speak, hesitated, choosing his words carefully before he said, “It’s just a feeling I’ve got, man. You know me. I collect information on a whole different level. Let’s face it. I’m clairvoyant. Psychic, whatever small label you want to use. Clairvoyant, anyway, ’til it comes to love affairs, then I turn into a hundred percent numb-nuts fuck-up. But, if I’m not in love, I know things about people without them having to say a word. I just have a sense that Amelia didn’t tell us everything. Intuition. But it’s more than that.”

  “If you think she’s lying, you need to tell me. What’s she have to lie about?”

  He said, “I think it has something to do with the way she got separated from the others. Something she’s ashamed of. Not that she should be. Under those kind of circumstances, your boat sinks, you’re set adrift at night, no one has a right to question or criticize someone else’s behavior.”

  “But that’s exactly what you’re doing right now. Did you catch her in some kind of factual error in her story? Or are you just guessing?” I said.

  I felt relieved when he said, “Intuition, just like I said.”

  “Okay, your concern is noted. But let’s stick to the facts. You’re the one who brought up the importance of credibility.”

  “Just because it’s anecdotal doesn’t mean it’s not factual. There are all kinds of ways to collect data. When I was out there alone aboard the No Mas, three extra days searching, I dropped into a very deep meditative state. It was a heavy scene, man. I was right there with them the night the boat went down. Janet, Amelia, Michael, and Grace. I saw what happened. I saw what happened afterward. The whole dark vision. Like an electric current pouring into my brain. My own little movie running, close enough to them to see their faces, hear their voices.”

  I almost allowed him to lure me off the subject and back into our old debate on parapsychology, ghosts, the whole mystical question. I’d like to believe such things happen. Who wouldn’t? If certain people really can foresee the future or read the minds of others, it adds substantial weight to the proposition that there is symmetry and spiritual purpose to the human experience. I would like to believe that, but I don’t.

  I’ve heard Tomlinson’s so-called proofs often enough, but I have yet to see proof myself of mystical, extrasensory powers. Tomlinson has an eerie ability to read people and quickly perceive what few others can-that, I don’t argue. I suspect he does it by interpreting body language, voice intonations, who knows, though he’s very good at it. But could he really know what happened the night the Seminole Wind sank without being there? That I did not believe and would not accept.

  I took the pilot chart off the deck and folded it open beside my plate. “So if you perceived all that through meditation, tell me how it was. What happened to the three of them after they got split up from Amelia? Are they still alive?”

  Tomlinson smiled patiently and tugged his scraggly blond hair back with his left hand, letting the question hang there before he answered, “Marion, sarcasm is your least attractive quality. You resort to it so rarely, I sometimes forget.”

  I was cleaning my thick glasses, wanting to see and understand all the little symbols on the chart. I pulled the oil lamp closer as I said, “I’m sorry. So I withdraw the offensive tone, but the question’s the same. What do you think happened? Why didn’t we find them?”

  “What I think is, one of the reasons is right there in front of you. Actually the main reason. Look at the current arrows. It’s all right there on the chart.”

  Pilot charts are superb tools for the blue-water voyager or the gunk-holing cruiser. They give a lot more information than the much more commonly used U.S. government or NOAA nautical charts. Published by the Defense Mapping Agency, their aim is to help the mariner select the fastest and safest routing for any offshore passage at any time of the year. The charts provide information on weather conditions for very specific areas. They note prevailing winds and calms, average wave heights, typical barometric pressure, average currents, air and water temperatures, and recommended routes.

  This pilot chart was for the Gulf of Mexico, Campeche, Mexico to Cuba to New Orleans and Florida, the entire, massive basin dotted with symbols and navigational data. The chart consisted of twelve pages, one for each month of the year, and I had it open to the month of November. I found Marco Island, found the little crosshatched egg-shaped icon at 25 degrees 21 minutes 60 seconds north latitude and 82 degrees 31.97 minutes west longitude: the wreck of the Baja California.

  As I studied the chart, noting the feathered arrows that marked prevailing winds and the serpentine arrows that indicated ocean currents and tidal currents, Tomlinson said, “When the Seminole Wind sank, all the detritus drifted southwest. The life jackets, the empty tanks, everything we found. So it’s very natural to assume that three swimmers wearing inflated vests would also drift southwest.”

  I was nodding, enjoying the food, enjoying the concise data on the chart, the way they accurately distilled the wild ocean into an orderly and predictable rendering of numbers, graphs, directional arrows. I said, “It’s more than an assumption. All of the data-marking buoys the Coast Guard dropped-what? There were half a dozen or so of them? DMBs-they all drifted southwest. Covered five or six miles every twenty-four hours, which…” I paused. “Now that I think about it, and this is the first time I’ve checked a pilot chart, that doesn’t seem right. It says here the prevailing ocean current runs at about two knots. Anything floating, adrift, should have covered at least thirty, maybe forty, miles in twenty-four hours.”

  “Exactly. I was struck by that, too. The figures don’t seem to work out. I spent the afternoon holed-up in Mack’s office doing research on the computer, calling sailor buddies of mine, a couple of shrimp-boat captains who do a lot of dragging in that area. You ever seen a data-marking buoy?”

  I had, but I let Tomlinson talk.

  “They’re sealed canisters, about three feet long, flat on both ends, painted bright orange, and heavier on the bottom to make them float upright. There’s a GPS antenna on top. Self-locating data-marking buoys, that’s the official name. They send a signal directly to a satellite that tracks their movement. So it’s got to be accurate.”

  I said, “Very accurate. Which is why I hadn’t stopped to question the math before. So why did the buoys drift so slowly?”

  He stood, came around behind me, looking over my shoulder at the chart. Tomlinson has huge, bony hands with nails bitten down to the quick. Now he touched an index finger to the icon that represented the Baja California. “Okay, this is where they dropped the DMBs, right on the wreck site. All along this line. According to the chart, the prevailing winds are out of the nort
heast-and they were that night, blowing fifteen to twenty. Prevailing current moves east-southeast at about two knots. The wind was blowing slightly against the current, and that would have reduced the speed of drift. The DMBs covered only about six miles a day. So far, it’s just like the Coast Guard and all the rest of us figured.”

  I said, “Three people wearing vests would have blown southwest with the wind, but slowed quite a bit by a current trying to push them to the east. Then that explains it. They would have traveled the same direction and at a similar speed as the buoys.”

  Tomlinson said, “Not necessarily. Last night, I took this chart with me when I crawled into my bunk. Kept looking at it and looking at it. You know how when you look directly at a star too long, it disappears? I did that with the area around the Baja California. I just let it blur until it vanished, and that’s when the whole current system came into focus. I’m talking about for the entire Gulf of Mexico. Try it. Let your eyes go wide, imagine the current arrows are in red. Let them stand out and see what happens. The big picture is what you need to see.”

  I looked at the chart momentarily, tried to let my eyes blur, but then shook my head. “My imagination isn’t that good. Save us both some time and just tell me what it is I’m supposed to see.”

  “Okay, first thing you see is a big saltwater lake, more than a thousand miles wide between Florida and Mexico. The Gulf of Mexico.” He moved his finger down to Cuba. “The saltwater lake has only two openings. There’s a 20-mile-wide opening here between the Florida Keys and Cuba. There’s a 125-mile opening here between Cuba and the Yucatan Peninsula. Those are damn small openings for ocean currents to squeeze through. Take a garden hose, squeeze the end with your thumb, and the water speeds up. Like a jet.”