by Nevada Barr
On first arriving, struck by the beauty of the sky and sea, the fishes and the masonry, Anna couldn’t understand what stresses could possibly chase even a heartbroken man around the bend. Piloting the Reef Ranger into the harbor, the glow of her swimming with the fishes burned and blown away, she realized that after a mere couple weeks of isolation, wet heat and scouring winds, she was tempted to dream up companions of her own. She needed a sense of connection to something, somebody to keep her on an even keel.
She laughed. The sound whipped away on the liquid wind over the bow. Soon she was going to have to relinquish her self-image as a hermit. Paul—or perhaps just the passage of years—had socialized her to some extent. Molly would be pleased. Anna made a mental note to tell her sister when next she phoned. It could be a while. Not only was the fort’s only phone in much demand, but it also had a one-to-two-second delay, like a phone call from Mars, that made communication an exercise in frustration.
Red on right.
Anna slowed the Ranger to a sedate and wakeless speed as she entered the small jewel of a harbor on the east side of Garden Key. Eleven pleasure boats were anchored, two she recognized from the weekend before, Moonshadow and Key to My Heart, both expensive, both exquisitely kept. They were owned by two well-to-do couples out of Miami who seemed joined at the hip as their boats were joined at the gunwale, one rafting off the other. Anna waved as she passed.
At the end of the harbor away from the tourists, as if there were an invisible set of tracks running from Bush Key—Garden’s near neighbor—to the harbor mouth and they had been condemned to live on the wrong side of them, two commercial shrimpers cuddled up to one another.
Commercial fishing and, much to the shriek and lament of the locals, sport fishing was banned in the park, but right outside the boundaries was good shrimping. The boats stalked the perimeters, the honest—or the cautious—keeping outside the imaginary line established by NPS buoys. Perhaps a few sought to poach, but there were plenty of shrimp outside. Most came for the same reasons ships had been coming for two hundred years, the reason the fort had been built in the middle of the ocean: the natural safe zone of flat water the coral reefs provided.
Shrimp boats, their side nets looking like tattered wings falling from a complex skeleton of wood and metal, were a complication Anna’d not foreseen. They sailed from many ports, most in the south and southeast, following the shrimp: four weeks in Texas, then through the Gulf to the Keys. Some boats were family owned, most were not. All were manned and kept in a way unique to an idiosyncratic and inbred culture. Daniel called them “bikers of the sea.” Having spent an unspecified and largely undiscussed number of years in the land version of that violent fraternity before, as he put it, “breaking my back and seeing the light,” he would know.
The shrimpers were a scabrous lot, not just the boats, which reeked of dead fish, cigarette smoke and old grease—part cooking, part engine—but the sailors themselves. The family boats were crewed by men and women, three or four to a boat. The others were all male, but for the occasional unfortunate who, like a biker chick out of favor, was passed from boat to boat, usually fueled for her duties with drugs and alcohol.
Anna had yet to see a shrimper with all his or her teeth. The violence of the culture coupled with months at sea away from modern dentistry marked their faces. A lot of them went to sea to kick drugs and found more onboard. A startling percentage had felony records.
This borderline lifestyle would not have affected Anna had not a symbiotic relationship sprung up between them and the tourists and park employees at the fort. Fresh gulf shrimp were delicious. The shrimpers were glad to trade a few for the culinary delight of those in the park. The problem was that the currency was alcohol—mostly cheap beer, but enough whiskey to make things interesting. Drunk, the shrimpers lived up to Daniel’s name for them. They came ashore; they yelled, disrupted tours, urinated in public, knocked one another’s few remaining teeth out, beat their women and, occasionally knifed one another.
Her third day at Fort Jefferson Anna had been made painfully aware of a few administrational oddities of Dry Tortugas National Park: there was no place to hold prisoners and, though they were legally allowed to make arrests, it was highly discouraged by headquarters in Homestead. Two law-enforcement rangers keeping drunken violent shrimpers under guard in the open air for hours till the Coast Guard arrived wasn’t a great idea. Transporting them three hours one way to Key West and so leaving the park without law enforcement or EMTs for a day didn’t work either.
The best they could do was separate the combatants, bind the ugliest wounds and shoo the lot of them back onboard their boats.
The two shrimpers anchored in the harbor as Anna motored in were family owned. They’d never caused problems, and the lady on one of the boats had a terrific little dog she let Anna pet. Tonight should be quiet. Anna didn’t know if she was grateful or not. With only one other ranger—Bob Shaw—in house, neither ever truly had a day off but slept with a radio ready to serve as backup for the person on duty. Quiet promised uninterrupted sleep. Anna supposed that was a good thing. Still, she would have welcomed something to do.
As she backed the Reef Ranger neatly into the employee dock, Bob Shaw walked down the weathered planking. Opposite where Anna tied up, on the far side of the park pier with its public bathrooms and commercial loading area that the ferries from Key West used, the NPS supply boat, the Activa, was moored. Like Christmas every Tuesday, but better, the Activa arrived with supplies, groceries, mail and Cliff and Linda. Cliff was the captain, Linda the first mate. New blood was as exciting to the inhabitants of Fort Jefferson as fresh food. The crew of the Activa could be counted on to bring the latest news and gossip along with other treats and necessities.
“Teddy took your stuff up to your quarters for you and stuck the perishables in the refrigerator,” Bob said as Anna cut the engine. She tossed him the stern line and he tied it neatly to the cleat on the starboard side. Wind was more or less a constant on DRTO, and the NPS boats were tied to both sides of their slips to keep them from banging into the sides of the dock. Fenders could only do so much when the winds flirted with hurricane force.
“I’ll be sure and thank her. Is Teddy in the office?” Anna asked. Teddy, short for Theodora, was Bob’s wife.
“Till five, like always.” He stood stiffly to one side as Anna heaved towel, fins, snorkel and water bottle onto the dock.
Bob was a strange fit with the park. He’d been there for eleven years and clearly loved the place. He said, and Anna believed him, that he never wanted to work anywhere else and intended to serve out his remaining six years till retirement at the fort.
Anna suspected his desire to remain in this isolated post was due only partly to his love for the resource. A good chunk of it, she theorized, was because nowhere else could he live such a rich and rewarding fantasy life without coming head-to-head with the cynicism of his fellows.
Fortunately for her, Bob’s particular brand of psychosis made him a great ranger.
Swearing he was five-six, though Anna, at five-four, could look him in the eye in flat shoes, he seemed bent on being the poster boy for a benign version of the Napoleon complex. Now, as he readied to go on his evening rounds—showing the flag, boarding boats he deemed suspicious, handing out brochures to newcomers and checking the boundaries because they were there—he wore full gear: sidearm, baton, pepper spray, cuffs and a Kevlar bulletproof vest. If the man hadn’t been such a strong swimmer, Anna’s greatest worry would have been that he’d fall overboard and his defensive equipment would sink him like a stone. The only concession he made to the cloying heat was to wear shorts.
Though Anna would never have dreamed of telling him so, they tended to spoil the effect. Not only was he no taller than Anna, but he couldn’t have exceeded her one hundred twenty pounds by much either. Like a lot of men who take to the water, most of that was in his chest and shoulders. Chickens would have been insulted to hear his legs compared to the
irs.
“Anything up for tonight?” she asked as they made lines fast. Mostly she asked for the fun of hearing Bob’s answer. His fantasy, as luck would have it, was that he was the sole protector (she didn’t count for reasons of gender, and Lanny hadn’t counted for reasons Bob clearly had but was too honorable to speak of) of this jewel in the ocean. Like all other great and honorable lawmen of history, Bob was constantly in danger from the forces of evil. Each and every boat could be smuggling cocaine from Panama, heroin from the east, guns from pretty much anywhere. All shrimpers were ready, willing and able to knife him in the back.
Given that he apparently genuinely believed this despite eleven years in a sleepy port, Anna couldn’t but admire his stalwart courage in facing each day, never late, never shirking. Having been exposed to this criminal-under-every-bush, Marshal Dillon under siege mentality the day she arrived, Anna was pleasantly surprised the first time she’d patrolled with him. Part of honor and duty—and natural inclination probably, though his tough-guy image would never let him admit it even to himself—required he be gracious, polite and, when he thought no one was looking, overtly kind. Seeing that, Anna had been quite taken with the man and made it a point to resist the temptation to tease him about the boogeymen that lived under his boat. She didn’t even resent his sexism. Respect for a superior overrode it, and it wasn’t personal. There were no women patrolling the streets of Dodge City, flying fighters over Nazi Germany or walking shoulder-to-shoulder with Clint Eastwood through the saloon’s swinging doors.
Sans petticoat and fan, Anna simply didn’t fit into Bob’s worldview.
“Did you see the boats on the south side, anchored out a ways, not in the harbor?” Bob asked. He smoothed his sandy-red and handsome mustache with one hand and pointed with the other.
Vaguely Anna remembered passing them, but had paid them little mind.
“I saw them.”
“They’ve been here two and a half days. Never come into the harbor. Never visit the fort. Something’s up with them.”
Anna’d not noticed those things. And they were pertinent. Most folks, if they bothered to come to Garden Key, made use of the harbor and at least paid a curiosity visit to the fort.
“Good eye,” Anna said and meant it. “I’ll keep close to the radio.”
Bob jumped lightly into the second of DRTO’s five patrol boats. Only four were working. The fifth was beached behind the dock up on blocks. Bob took the Bay Ranger, a twenty-foot aluminum-hulled Sylvan. He seemed to prefer it to the sturdier Boston Whalers. Maybe because it was quieter, had a lower profile. All the better for sneaking up on evildoers.
Anna shouldered the net bag she used to carry her dive things.
“Oh,” Bob said as she turned to go. “You got a big box from New York waiting for you. Teddy said if there’s bagels in it, she’ll trade you some of her homemade key lime pie for some.”
Anna waved Bob off, then stood a moment, habit demanding she do a visual check of an area after an absence of hours. The campground, with space for only a handful of tents and, other than flush toilets on the public dock, no amenities, was quiet. Because there was so little dirt to be had on Garden Key, ovemighters were by reservation only. Picnickers sat at tables nursing beers and sunburns, talking among themselves, families for the most part with lots of little kids scratching at mosquito bites, Kool-Aid smiles adding to the clownish colors of beach towels and bathing suits. Even Bob would have a hard time imagining an evil nemesis in the bunch.
Savoring the fact that she wasn’t in a hurry, that, once again, her work for the National Park Service allowed her to rest her eyes and mind on a wonder most people would never take the time to see, she turned her attention to the fort.
Bob’s motor’s drone a pleasant burr in her ears, as comforting as the hum of bees in summer blooms, she looked across the moat at Fort Jefferson. More than the skyscrapers of Manhattan, the Golden Gate Bridge or all of Bill Gates’s cyber magic, it impressed her with man’s determination to fight the world to a standstill and then reform it in his own design.
Seventy miles out in the sea, on the unprepossessing Bush Key, the magnitude of the effort awed her. Fort Jefferson stood three stories high and was topped with earthworks and ammunition bunkers. A coal-black tower, built as a lighthouse but demoted to a harbor light when the taller lighthouse on Loggerhead Key was finished, thrust above the battlements. The black metal of its skin gave it an unearned sinister aspect. A wide moat, meeting the fortress walls on one side and contained by brick and mortar on the other, ran around the two bastions fronting the structure. Beyond was nothing but the Atlantic. At first the moat had amused Anna. Only in the front and along the eastern wall was it bordered by land. On the two other sides its outer wall separated it only from the sea.
When she’d first seen it, it had struck her as a conceit, the architect slavishly following the classic castle moat theme though this fort was set in a natural saltwater moat thousands of miles on one side and seventy on the other. Duncan, the island’s historian and chief interpreter, had disabused her of that notion. Moats were not merely to keep land troops at bay but ships with malicious intent at their distance.
Trailing a young couple so in love they didn’t notice it was too hot to be hanging all over each other, Anna crossed the bridge. As she stepped into the imagined cool and welcome dark of the entryway she heard the shivery sound of children giggling and saw a small head vanish into a stone slot. Anna laughed because heat and boredom had yet to diminish the childlike glee the fort engendered in her: “secret” rooms where ammunition had once been stored, dark and twisted caves where arches met and clashed and crossed at the bastions, designed by an architect who must have foreseen the genius of Escher. The formidable structure was now dissolving back into the sea with infinite slowness. Lime dripped out of solution as rain worked its way through ancient mortar. Stalactites formed, growing like teeth in the long, long passages through the casemates. Standing at a comer and looking down arch after arch after arch, perspective skewed. It was easy to feel as if one were falling through time itself.
