09-Twelve Mile Limit (10 page)

That stopped Jeth, changed his expression, an insult so obvious, and he moved a step closer to the man, Ransom backing slightly to his right as he said, “What dah-dah-did you just call me, mister?” angry and drunk enough to punch the guy right there, his stutter getting worse because he was furious.

Then Camphill—large boned, muscular, with blond hair, square chin, tough-guy eyes—stepped in. He stood and moved between Jeth and the bar and said, “Look, my friend, what we’d really like to avoid here is causing a scene. Doesn’t that make sense? So what I’m going to ask you to do right now is back off a few steps, give us our space. A little room for us all to breathe, huh? Then here’s what I suggest: I will apologize to your nice lady friend for misreading something she said. Entirely my fault. After that, you go back to your table like a good boy, and all of us, we go our separate ways and forget the whole thing.”

Jeth didn’t step back; he seemed frozen, his fists clenched, staring at the smaller man, hyperventilating, while pointed-face, the man with coarse black hair, sat there sipping his drink, eyes moving lazily around the room, smiling as if Jeth were invisible or too small to see—an insignificant problem, something for the hired help to deal with, nothing at all to worry about.

Camphill’s voice had an actor’s resonance, and he knew how to make a statement using his body, posing. He was playing a role now, and the role was that of the rational adult, the peacemaker—a person big enough to take all the blame, even though he didn’t deserve it—but his hand gestures, the way he held himself, his vocal intonations said: Don’t push it, make nice with me right now, or I’ll have to change character and do something I don’t want to do.

“Did you hear me, my friend? Back off just a little bit. You understand what I’m saying? We’re apologizing.” Camphill reached to touch Jeth’s chest—move away, please—but I got my hands on Jeth first, worried that minor physical contact might cause him to snap. I’ve known the man for years, and I’d never seen him so angry, so close to losing all control. I turned Jeth and moved between him and the bar, my back to Camphill and the others. “Jeth Jeth, listen to me. Let me handle this. Go back to the table, I’ll find out what happened.”

Behind me, I heard the man with coarse black hair say, “First Gilligan with an Afro Mary Ann, and now the Professor. Where the fuck’s Skipper and Ginger?”

Jeth was looking past me. “Hey … wait a minute, did that guy just call me Gilligan? You jerk, I don’t look anything like Gilligan!”

“Drop it, Jeth. Let it go.” I was herding him gently away from the bar. Behind me, I heard pointed-face say, “Watch out for that razor intellect of his, Gunnar. He’s a sharp one, very sharp.”

I turned and, over the noise of their laughter, said to Ransom, “What happened? Why’d the guy grab you?”

Camphill said, “I was chatting with the lady—”

Angry myself, and feeling the alcohol in me, I leaned and put my index finger within an inch of the actor’s nose. Held it there for a moment before I told him, “I’m talking to her. Not you.” Stared into his eyes.

It took all the noise out of the bar. I stood and listened to a shuffling of feet, heard someone cough. I expected Camphill to knock my hand away. Instead, he took a huge breath, making a show of controlling himself, letting everyone around know this wasn’t easy for him, still playing the peacekeeper’s role, as the man to his right—a slim blond tennis player type—said, “He doesn’t know who you are, Gunnar. Better drop it. We know in twenty, thirty seconds, you could put him in the hospital, kill him, whatever, but you’re the one with the career—not the Professor here.”

I lowered my hand slowly, looking at Ransom, who was already talking, her voice easy to hear because the bar had gone so very quiet. “The way it happen, my brother, this pretty gentleman, he start a conversation with me. Very nice at first, then he say he give me two, three hundred dollars, whatever I want, if I come to their hotel and make his friends feel very good tonight. Told me his two friends, they’d never had them a black girl. It so good he wanted them to know what it like.

“I told ’em he and his friends, all three of them, they probably used to trading blow jobs with each other. Or maybe little boys—” Several people at the bar laughed at that. “So why they want to bother a nice colored woman like me?” She was shaking her head, smiling, giving them a dose of her contempt before she added, “That’s when this pretty gentleman, he grab me.”

I turned once again to the actor, some inner awareness reminding me that I’d had too much to drink, that I needed to be careful, cognitive, keep things cool, so I said, “You’re right, mister. You need to apologize to her. Now. Then we go our separate ways.”

He thought about it, staring at me with his tough-guy eyes, nodding, creating drama because he knew how to do it, and then threw his head back and laughed. “Okay, Professor! I’ll blink first!” He stood, took Ransom’s hand, bowed at the waist, and kissed the back of her hand regally. “Lovely lady, I was wrong to say what I did. I hope you’ll accept my apology.”

Then he stood there as if maybe expecting to hear some polite applause, but there wasn’t any. Everyone around the crowded bar was staring at him, mostly locals, their expressions saying he was a jerk, maybe they were a little embarrassed for the famous man, too.

Which got to him. I could see it in his expression. So he had to get the last word, contrive a dominant gesture, so he leaned and put his index finger near my nose—payback time—and said loudly, “And you, my friend, you don’t know how very, very lucky you are that I’m in a good mood tonight.”

Looking into his eyes, I let the words hang there for a moment before I answered softly, “Just for the record—I am not your friend.” I waited for something to happen, and, when it didn’t, I shrugged and turned away.

I thought that was the end of it.

It wasn’t.

Because then Gunnar Camphill focused on Jeth’s T-shirt. It was a T-shirt that had quickly become popular with Florida’s sports fishermen. On the back is a silk-screened cartoon of a dead manatee lashed to a spit, roasting over a fire. Beneath the cartoon are the words: Any Questions?

The irony of the T-shirt—and the situation—is that Florida’s sports fishermen have, for years, been among the state’s most vocal and powerful environmental advocates. Now they were being labeled “antienvironmentalist” by groups pushing to get fishing boats off the water. The long and careful defense required to disprove broad, buckshot accusations, such as “racist” or “communist,” is incapacitating—exactly the reason such charges are so commonly made and why they are so effective.

Thus the popularity of this angry T-shirt.

“What the fuck is that?” said Camphill, pointing.

Jeth looked down, looked up, and said, “Yeah, what about it?”

Camphill made a blowing nose with his lips—was this guy really so stupid? “You’re kidding. You really don’t know why I’m here? SAM—the Save All Manatees group—flew me in for the conference on Captiva. They’ve got about a half million members, and I’m their national spokesman, which is why, Gilligan, you either need to strip that T-shirt off right now or get the hell out of this bar.”

If Matt, the owner, hadn’t intervened, it would have started right there. Jeth was ready to go at him, and as for myself, this guy, Camphill, his behavior really was noxious, and I was drunk enough to bypass the obvious, rational options—as most drunks will—and had decided to see just how far he was willing to push it. It’s a truism: Almost all bullying behavior is symptomatic of bedrock cowardice, and there was plenty of evidence now that Camphill was a bully.

But then Matt was there. After twenty-some years in the business, dealing with drunks and pissed-off tourists, he knew just how to handle the situation. First he went to work on Camphill with adulation—“You’re really the Gunnar Camphill? My God, I love the work you do”—as he positioned himself between Camphill and us. Then he fed him some man-to-man stuff, first giving us a meaningful look—Stay calm, he’s an asshole, but let me deal with it. “Don’t worry about Jeth. Our locals, they tend to be… different. Just goofing around—the manatee roast? It’s kind of a local joke. We’re all very pro-environment on the islands.” Matt was steering him away, toward the bar. Then he added a bribe, saying, “I just got in a half dozen jars of Russian Malossol caviar. Gray beluga. My own personal stock. Would you and your friends mind trying a couple of ounces, giving me your opinion?”

That quick, Matt had Camphill’s full attention. “Malossol? How did you know I’m a connoisseur of caviar?” Close enough to the bar now for his friends to hear, he added, “When I was studying aikido in Japan, I fell in love with the stuff. My master, Ueshiba Morihei, he got me hooked on the gray beluga. Had it shipped in once a week from Vladivostok, just across the Sea of Japan. Unpasteurized, the finest. There’s an art to serving it, of course.”

Truth is, Matt has an amazing memory for trivia. He probably saw the bit about the caviar in some magazine and filed it away.

Meanwhile, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Tomlinson stand up, use his fingers to comb his hair back. He gave Amelia a reassuring wink before he walked toward Matt. Tomlinson had been uncharacteristically silent during the confrontation, and now I watched him place his hand on Matt’s shoulder—this was a friendly intrusion—then stand there in his flower-print sarong and black Hawaiian shirt, smiling mildly. Looking at Camphill, he spoke briefly in what, after several slow seconds, I finally realized was fast Japanese. Friendly tone. Very animated. He might have been welcoming him or extending an apology.

Pointed-face grinned toward Tomlinson, saying, “Ginger! Finally, here she is. I knew Ginger would make an appearance!” For the first time, Camphill seemed momentarily at a loss. But he recovered quickly, also looking at Tomlinson. He placed his palms together and gave a slight oriental bow, saying, “My friend, I think it’s very rude to converse in a language that others in the room don’t understand. We’ll chat in Japanese another time,” then turned away from Tomlinson, using Matt to emphasize the new focus of his attention.

End of conversation.

Back at our table, Tomlinson took a heavy swallow of his drink, then another before he nodded at me, and said softly, “The actor, he has a very young spirit. Very young and immature—the number of incarnations he’s made into this world I’m talking about. In his mind, no one on earth actually exists but him. Every other sentient being is simply a bit of fleshy furniture or decoration. That’s the way they are during that stage.”

Tomlinson then added, “Plus, he’s a liar. He never studied with Ueshiba Morihei. My friend, the great master, Ueshiba, doesn’t speak English, and the actor doesn’t understand a word of Japanese. Even his gassho, the way he placed his palms together, was a poor imitation.”

A little too loud, Jeth said, “The guy’s an egotistical pahpa-prick.”

Amelia added, “Little boy in a man’s body. I see them all the time in court.”

Camphill and his two friends, pointed-face and tennis player, all raised their heads a little, hearing their words, feeling them, then all emphasized the depth of their reactions by trying hard not to react. Matt had effectively insulated them with a forced truce, but it wouldn’t last beyond the last glass of vodka.

There was little doubt in my mind, then, that Camphill would have to do something to save face, to reinforce his big-screen persona. His friends were going to take this story back to Hollywood, and he couldn’t allow that.

We should have left then.

Half an hour later, when we did walk out the door, we were all a little drunker.

Over there drinking vodka shooters and eating caviar, so were Camphill and his pals.

Timber’s Restaurant and Sanibel Grill are built high on wooden stilts over a parking area that opens onto Tarpon Bay Road, near a sanctuary of lakes and trees, not far from the beach, and only a quarter-mile or so from my house and lab, which is on the bay side of the island.

I was the last of our group to leave. I stepped out onto the wooden deck and had only taken three or four steps when I felt the double doors behind me burst open. I glanced over my shoulder, and there was Gunnar Camphill in his khakis and black Polo shirt, biceps showing, walking fast, his two shorter friends following along behind like ducklets.

Camphill’s friends’ faces were flushed and mottled, a mixture of excitement and expectation. There was going to be a show, a little slice of real-life adventure theater, and they were the great star’s sidekicks, their man the good-guy hero who won every fight.

Camphill was calling as he walked, “Gilligan? Oh … Gilligan-n-n-n-n,” giving it a loud, humorous read.

JoAnn, Rhonda, and Claudia were already in the parking lot. Jeth and Tomlinson were halfway down the steps, and Amelia was just a few paces ahead of me. I turned when I saw Camphill, then moved sideways to intercept him when he tried to brush past me.

I said, “Hold it … hey! You’re not going anywhere.” I had my hands up, palms up—stop right there—and was backing away just a little to demonstrate that I didn’t want to initiate contact.

Behind Camphill, pointed-face, his voice strangely husky, said, “Kick his ass, Gunnar. The Professor with his thick glasses made you look like a fool in there in front of all his redneck friends.”

Camphill stopped and leaned, his face a few inches from my nose, and I could smell the alcohol on his breath as he said, “Your little friend needs to take off that T-shirt and throw it away. It’s offensive to me and anyone else who gives a damn about this earth and the creatures who live here. So he takes it off right now, tosses it in that Dumpster, and he walks away, no problem.”

Behind me, I heard Jeth yell, “You want to threaten me, mah-ma-mister? Then come down here and do it to my face!”

Camphill called back, “That’s what I’m trying to do, Gilligan. So tell your bookish friend here to move his ass, get out of the way, so we can discuss this man-to-Gilligan.” The humorous inflection again, telling his friends to enjoy it—it wasn’t going to last long.

He’d been looking over my shoulder. Now he looked into my face as he added, “Okay, Professor. This is your final warning. Get out of my way. Or … or here, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do.” He thought for a moment, making a show of the process, smiling because he had so many options. He glanced back at his friends as if in some wordless conferral, before he said, “Okay, what I’m going to do is, I’m going to put the heel of my right foot dead square on the right side of your temple. No … your jaw; I’ll go easy on you. Kick you on the temple, I could kill you. It’s going to happen so fast, you may hear it coming, but you won’t see it.