Bone Deep

by Randy Wayne White

  Tomlinson had been snooping. Rude, but it was no big deal, so I straightened the papers, closed the folder, and went about my work.

  Last night, I had called an archaeologist friend and e-mailed photos of the jar fragment. She had tentatively IDed it as the rim from an olive vase, stem broken. Probably Spanish, possibly 1600s but maybe 1500s. She needed to consult Gainesville or Madrid. Thus the folder and my interest in Conquistadors who had not only explored Florida’s Gulf Coast but had ventured inland—perhaps as far as the pond on Mammoth Mines property.

  Tomlinson broke into my thoughts, asking, “Did you figure out which Spaniard belongs to that jar? I couldn’t help noticing your research.”

  “I couldn’t help noticing you left the damn folder wide open,” I replied. “Why don’t you take a guess? If it is Spanish, and if it dates back to the fifteen hundreds, someone hiked forty miles inland carrying an olive jar.”

  “I only skimmed through the data,” Tomlinson said, “but there are only four possibilities. I mean, only four Spanish captains are mentioned. Which, of course, totally ignores all the men and slaves who actually did the grunt work. Typical of the Anglo-centrist mind-set when it comes to writing history.”

  I told him, “No more smoking dope in here, okay?”

  He remained silent while I neatened the folder, primed the siphon, and resumed vacuuming.

  Some of what my pal had said was true. History contained only the names of four Spanish explorers who had ventured into inland Florida during the fifteen hundreds. None of those men had fared well. Only two had survived to tell the tale.

  I thought about it as I worked. Of those four, the most interesting—to me, anyway—wasn’t the famous Ponce de León or Hernando de Soto. It was a much lesser known Spaniard who, under the guise of exploration, had come to Florida on a personal mission. He came to search for his son and also some former crewmen, all of whom had disappeared in a shipwreck off the Florida coast.

  Pedro Menéndez was the explorer’s name.

  Because I have a son, Menéndez’s story was compelling. But there was another link that struck a nerve: Captain Menéndez had sailed to Florida carrying a letter of marque. The letter was a legal document that governments still have the power to issue—as I knew from experience. It granted Menéndez the right to “mete out judgment” to anyone he deemed a threat to his country or to his cause.

  Any and all threats to your country or your mission was a phrase more familiar to me.

  A letter of marque was a dangerous tool in the hands of an angry, driven man. Menéndez was both. As a young officer, had been tortured in a French prison, and he had described natives of the Bahamas as “the most wretched and godless savages on earth.”

  By the time Pedro Menéndez’s ship arrived in Sanibel waters, the loving father, the loyal naval officer, had become a stone-cold killer.

  The click and whirr of the printer interrupted my thoughts. When I looked, Tomlinson was using a magnifying glass to inspect a glossy of the saber cat skull. He went over it carefully before he spoke. “When you put your hands on this, what did you feel?”

  “The skull?” I said. “It felt like bone.”

  “Come on . . . You know what I’m asking.”

  I played along. “Take your pick: I felt a charge of primal energy. Or voices of the first aliens who seeded Mother Earth with life. Bone,” I repeated, “that’s what it felt like. Heavier than expected because bone mineralizes over time. It’s what makes fossils. Water seeps into organic tissue. Minerals crystalize within the cells and the cells harden to create a sort of stone duplicate. I looked it up.”

  When Tomlinson pressed about what I had felt when touching the skull, I shifted the siphon saddle, changed buckets, and carried several gallons of detritus outside, where I dumped it over the rail. Over the Gulf, fresh nimbus towers had gathered in a rumbling green mass.

  Leland Albright returned my call as I was coming through the door. He sounded tired or slightly drunk. Possibly both, since it was after seven, cocktail hour, on this Wednesday evening, but no hint he was upset by today’s ugly scene at the pool. He asked about water samples I’d taken from Mammoth Ridge. I told him I needed more extensive samples from differing depths. He accepted that, asking, “Can we meet tomorrow?”

  I was diving with Mick’s clients in the afternoon, and Leland was busy anyway. We settled on later—six-thirty at the Albright ranch.

  “I’ll bring my sampling kit,” I told him.

  I didn’t risk adding And my dive gear.

  TWENTY-TWO

  That night, an oceanic storm anchored itself over Sanibel and knocked out the power, which gave the psycho gangbanger time and privacy while he cut the chain at the marina gate and snuck onto the property.

  The man had no idea how lucky—or unlucky—he was. At Dinkin’s Bay, Fridays and Sundays are party nights, but Wednesdays also are an excuse for a midweek gathering. The schedule doesn’t vary much. Chinese lanterns and music come on at first dark, and the socializing doesn’t stop until the last beer is gone.

  If not for the storm, the biker—Quark, according to Mick—might have been cajoled into joining the party . . . or he would have gotten bored waiting for drunks to leave and probably ridden his Harley home.

  But there was a storm. One of those Gulf Stream flotillas that seek the heat of land for renewal. I felt the first rumbling at dusk and switched on the VHF radio to hear warnings to any boater foolish enough to venture offshore.

  There would be no Wednesday-night party on this evening. That was fine with me.

  I have a monkish streak. I like the solitude of heavy rain and wind, and wasn’t in a party mood. Hannah, I suspected, had a date—with an attorney from a neighboring county, not the Brazilian. And I was tired of people in general.

  So, great. Bring on the lightning and rain. Flood and pestilence, too, for all I cared. I had work to do in my lab. At first, I didn’t even allow myself a beer but then weakened and poured a Bud over ice and carried it to the computer.

  As a peace offering to my son, I wrote a long e-mail, and included photos of the mastodon tusk. I caught up on some other correspondence, including a note to my former lover, Dewey Nye, the ex–tennis pro turned golf pro.

  Even added, “Give Walda my best,” as a goodwill gesture to Dewey’s man-phobic girlfriend, the Romanian ball-breaker.

  By nine, I was multitasking. Between bouts at the computer, I had two lab projects going. I was using Tomlinson’s favorite rum beakers to decapsulate brine shrimp cysts. Because my aquarium animals need to eat, it is a common chore: separate brine shrimp naupili from shells, then refrigerate. Not a complicated process, but it required attention.

  I was also fine-tuning a terrarium that replicated a mangrove shoreline. Trying to anyway. Tulane University wanted twenty dozen fiddler crabs, and the order had to be filled incrementally over the next three months. That meant I’d have to warehouse specimens.

  Fiddler crabs are colony animals. They dig burrows along the shore, depositing the fill as little balls outside their holes. When the tide rises, the crabs vanish into their burrows and use the balls as plugs. When the tide recedes, the males shove the plug away, then extend one oversize claw and begin to wave for female attention. Hundreds of males at the same time, all swaying in a unity that resembles the string section of a symphony. Fiddler crabs are either very easy to catch or they are damn-near impossible to catch. Thus the terrarium.

  Perhaps because I was worried about my son, I soon returned to my research on Pedro Menéndez. The expedition to find his son, Juan, had not gone smoothly. The search had spanned three years and had transformed the loving father into a tyrant and a methodical killer.

  On Florida’s Atlantic Coast, Menéndez had executed more than three hundred people, mostly French colonists, before sailing around Key West into the Gulf of Mexico—payback for his stint in a French prison.


  In a letter to the Spanish king, Menéndez described his preferred technique for dispatching justice: “I had their hands tied behind them and had them stabbed to death . . . To punish them in this manner [was] serving God, our Lord, and Your Majesty.”

  As a trademark touch, Menéndez had many of the corpses strung from trees with signs around their necks as a warning to anyone who wasn’t Catholic.

  Pedro Menéndez was on a mission. He wanted his son Juan safely home and God help anyone who got in his way. The letters of marque he carried justified his methods even as his methods degenerated into cold-blooded slaughter.

  Finally, on Florida’s Gulf Coast, the desperate father struck what he believed to be his son’s trail. Somewhere near Sanibel, he made contact with the indigenous people. They were the same people who had built pyramids of shell on Cayo Pelado and Captiva and on many other islands along the coast. In his journal, Menéndez referred to the reigning warrior chieftain as “Carlos” to honor the king of Spain. The people, he named the “Calus.”

  Menéndez’s big break came when he discovered that the chieftain’s slaves included a Spaniard who had been shipwrecked seventeen years earlier. The Spaniard’s name was Hernando Fontaneda. Fontaneda became the explorer’s eager guide and interpreter, and later, in his own journal, would claim to have saved Menéndez’s life at least twice.

  To win Carlos, the warrior chieftain’s, cooperation, Menéndez married Carlos’s sister—but fell from grace when he ordered Carlos’s brother beheaded. Menéndez and his men escaped and continued searching, often inland, on foot or by following rivers.

  Relentless. The word fit a man and a story that, unlike tales of pirate treasure, were as real as the jar I had found and that was soaking in a nearby tank. Occasionally, as I read, I looked at the thing: a shard of gray clay, its rim black on the outside, buckskin orange within.

  Pedro Menéndez might have poured wine from the jar after hiking through forty miles of Florida jungle—or used it to sluice blood off his hands.

  I could relate.

  • • •

  THE DOG GRUNTED FOR HIS DOORMAN, so I took a break. Rain had slowed to a rumbling downpour. Umbrellas have yet to dent marina culture. Easier to changes clothes later . . . or wear no clothes at all. Standing at the railing, I whizzed off the dock. A motorcycle headlight skimmed the top of the mangroves, which should have set off alarm bells but didn’t.

  It was only nine-thirty. Why would a brain-damaged biker risk invading our little marina when residents were still awake?

  Brain-damaged was the key anomaly, yet I ignored the possibility.

  Instead of investigating, I used a towel, changed shirts, and checked messages. There were two from Mick the tour guide. He was becoming my dutiful pawn. Before I would allow him to dive the pond, I required information; the name of the unknown artifact collector was at the top of my list. There were a couple of other things he was working on, too.

  No messages from Hannah, though. Better to stay busy than to ruminate over where she was, or who she was with, so I went back to the lab and did a few more rounds with the computer.

  Researching Pedro Menéndez dovetailed with rivers and hydrological changes in Florida. Hydrology dovetailed with phosphate mining.

  I followed that track for a while. Depending on the publication, the phosphate industry is either flooding Florida’s estuaries with killer nutrients or bleeding our aquifers dry. Studies done by major mining companies, however, presented data that, while occasionally similar, offered far rosier conclusions.

  One thing the studies all agreed on had become a familiar refrain: The industry had to move south toward the Peace River or die. Phosphate, like oil, is a finite resource.

  Who to believe? Not since Darwin’s time have field scientists been so threatened (and influenced) by the powers of righteousness—groups righteously devoted to their environmental convictions on one side, companies blindly devoted to profit on the other. Both were a coveted source of research funding.

  Charles Darwin had courage enough to challenge Genesis, but how would he have fared against politics, peer pressure, and almighty funding dollars?

  Working alone beneath a tin roof during a storm is a pleasant thing. My only interruption was the dog. Every ten minutes or so, he wanted in or he demanded to go out. The dog can bang the screen door open, if needed, but he preferred that I inspect his gifts from the sea: a bucket, a chunk of wood, a mullet, a crab buoy, the rope from a crab buoy, then an entire crab trap, which he tried to pull through the door, and that’s when I put a stop to it.

  I banished the retriever to the breezeway and returned to work . . . until a sizzling blast of lightning killed the power. I said, “Damn it,” but was actually delighted. Losing the Internet was like being rescued from a ketamine drip. I had been returned by force into the realities of a summer night in Florida.

  Beneath the floor, the little Honda generator kicked on; aerators in a dozen tanks continued their ozone burble. I ignored the emergency options and chose oil lamps over electric or a Coleman. Delicious is a word too feminine for what I felt, but pretty damn close. I found the newest issue of Coral, a superb magazine for marine aquarists, and carried it, plus an oil lamp, to my reading chair and plopped down.

  In the subtropics, rain mimics the rhythm of oceanic waves. Lulls are troughs that escalate in volume. As waves peaked, a waterfall hammered my tin roof. During each lull, Cuban tree frogs competed with native frogs in a chorus of burps and trills that argued supremacy.

  Fifteen minutes into “Nematocysts—Nature’s Arrows,” my cell rang.

  “Damn,” I said again, and meant it this time.

  It was Jeth, who lives in an apartment over the marina office. He asked, “Do you know who belongs to that motorcycle blocking the gate? The headlight’s off, but it’s still there. If you have company, maybe ask them to move it when the rain stops, okay?”

  Trying to sound patient, not irritable, I said, “If the headlight’s off, how do you know the motorcycle’s blocking the gate?”

  “Because of the lightning. I happened to be taking a leak when they pulled up, I can see it from the bathroom. That was fifteen or twenty minutes ago, but the bike’s still there.”

  “Congratulations on the longest piss in history,” I said. “You saw two riders? You said they.”

  Jeth stutters when he’s annoyed. “You don’t need to be a sa-sa-smart aleck, Doc. I thought you’d want to know. I’d go check, but Janet’s at her mother’s, so I’m taking care of Javier alone.”

  Javier, age two, was named after a close friend of the marina, Javier Castillo, a good man who had escaped Cuba by crossing the Florida Straits on a raft made of inner tubes.

  Feeling like the ass I sometimes am, I apologized. Jeth was doing me a favor. The gate is next to the path that leads to my house. It was odd for someone to sit there in the rain on a . . . motorcycle?

  Finally, it hit me. I put the magazine aside and got to my feet, saying, “You didn’t answer. Is there one person or two?”

  Jeth replied, “It’s too far to see, but”—a strobe of lightning interrupted him—“Yep, the bike’s still there. Hard to tell because of the trees, but maybe two people under a poncho.”

  “Under one poncho?”

  Jeth said, “It’s not even ten o’clock. If they wanted out of the rain, why not pull into the 7-Eleven? That’s why I figured you have company, so—” In the background I heard a clattering noise, then Jeth reprimanding his son. Talking fast, he said to me, “Javier just threw his spoon at the weather girl, now he’s chewing the remote. Call me, okay?”

  • • •

  I WENT TO THE DOOR AND SWITCHED ON DOCK LIGHTS. Rain angled across the walkway, wood gleaming beneath lamplight that ended where mangroves began, shadows churning.

  No visitors . . . unless the biker was somewhere on the lower deck, where the ta
ctical Brunswick and my old net boat are moored. The toolshed was there, too, where boxes of relics—minus the priceless mastodon tusk—were hidden in plain sight, if someone bothered to look.

  The Honda generator can carry a sizable load, so I flicked on more lights beneath the house and waited. No telltale thump of a man’s feet, but waves banging at the pilings might have covered that.

  I stepped into the breezeway and looked out to check on Tomlinson’s boat. No Más, at anchor, was pointed into the rain, a gray husk. One frail porthole light suggested my pal was aboard, but he wasn’t aboard. No dingy tethered astern. So . . . after Tomlinson had left the lab, he’d probably gone to the Rum Bar with one of his lady friends, or with Duncan, or both.

  But maybe not. Maybe the crazy biker had intercepted him and was now preparing rags soaked with gas.

  Moving faster, I went inside, found a flashlight, and removed the MUM-14 monocular from its case. Sanibel Island is not the sort of place one packs a gun to confront strangers, so I stuck a wooden fish billy in the back of my pants.

  When I opened the door, the dog came in, dripping water on the floor. I had yet to hear him bark a warning, and his retrieving skills weren’t required, so I told him, “House,” meaning I didn’t want him to follow. He carried a nondescript object in his mouth and collapsed near the Franklin stove that, instead of providing heat, whistled with a Gulf Stream wind.

  I killed the outside lights, then went down the steps and checked under the house. Boxes that had contained megalodon teeth, fossils, Clovis points, and the little box of doubloons were where I’d left them. My boats appeared intact.

  False alarm so far. Then, as I was scanning the mangrove fringe, I heard a motorcycle start. Reassuring. The crazy biker wouldn’t leave without attempting to search my house. Unless . . . unless he had found Tomlinson and had decided to use him as bait.

  Jogging, I adjusted the night vision over my eye and pulled the club from my belt. Ran harder when I got to the path, but the motorcycle was accelerating away, lights out, as I exited the mangroves.