Black Tide

 

BLACK TIDE

 

 

by

Del Stone Jr

 

First published in England in 2007 by

Telos Publishing Ltd

17 Pendre Avenue, Prestatyn, Denbighshire, LL19 9SH, UK

www.telos.co.uk

 

Digital Edition converted and distributed in 2011 by

Andrews UK Limited

www.andrewsuk.com

 

Telos Publishing Ltd values feedback. Please e-mail us with any comments you may have about this book to: [email protected]

 

Black Tide
© 2007 Del Stone Jr

Cover artwork by Gwyn Jeffers

 

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

 

I do not know where to begin this story.

I strike a match.

I know where it will end.

 

 

It begins with sunrise, I guess, on the first day. It was hot, and I didn't want to be here, and I didn't like Scotty, and that made everything wrong. The sun was only a distant blister of half-baked light swelling above the eastern horizon, melting the water into the sky so that our boat appeared to be nudging slowly forward into a vast and overwhelming heat, like an oven, or a furnace. Only a little closer was a thin line of sand pines, black against the torrid light, that reared above the narrow spine of dunes that made up Okaloosa Island.

Behind me was cool darkness. And giggles. When I heard the sound, my heart sank a little. I could feel it shrivelling and dying. Giggles.

‘Not much of an island, is she?' the boatman said. His voice barely rose above the gurgling mutter of the Evinrude. He was a shape hunched over the wheel, his head bobbing in the gloom. But he handled the boat competently. The still waters of Santa Rosa Sound seemed to barely touch the Boston Whaler's fibreglass skin.

It's the heat
, I remember thinking. I wanted to take off my shirt. The sun wasn't up and already I was sweating. The conspiracy of temperature, humidity and perspiration had transformed my clothes – a cotton T-shirt and a pair of ridiculous clown shorts of a type that all the kids were wearing – into clinging, claustrophobic torture devices that rubbed my arms and increasingly ample stomach and the backs of my knees in all the wrong ways.

But you can't take off your shirt
, I reminded myself dejectedly, and it was true. There had been too many busy days when I'd skipped the gym or traded jogging for an extra hour's sleep or lied to my workout group about not being able to escape the office, and many, many nights of beer-soaked conversation with grad students and faculty cocktail parties and occasional forays into seminar hospitality suites. When once I had been trim and lean and narrow-waisted, now my stomach hung over the waistband of these ridiculous shorts in jiggling folds, and my chest had begun to sag embarrassingly – somebody once jokingly suggested I look into wearing a sports bra.

How could I have let this happen? I glanced back at Heather, who was perched on a bench in front of the boatman. As I stared she became more than a shape in the dark, but I didn't need to see her to know every detail of her appearance. I seemed to carry a permanent image in my brain. She was thin but not sinewy, like a long-jumper. More elegantly shapely – a gymnast without the muscle mass. Her hair was straight and blonde, framing angular cheekbones, a tiny bud of a nose, and dusty blue eyes that begged you to adore them. And she was bright somehow, as if she radiated energy. In all she possessed an intangible allure that defied ‘pretty', or ‘beautiful' or ‘sexy'. It was a natural quality of attraction, a gift that deserved respect. Scotty had his arms draped over her thin, blonde shoulders, and he wasn't even looking at her. But Heather's eyes flicked to mine for a moment, and a subtle shift in her expression seemed to acknowledge that yes, she could hear my thoughts, even the ones I wasn't articulating. Which is why she'd brought Scotty along. I hastily turned away.

‘A good hurricane would put her under 15 feet of Gulf of Mexico,' the boatman declared. For the life of me I couldn't remember his name. I think it was DeVries. He was under contract to the University of Florida to provide water transportation services for visiting researchers. I'd gotten his name from the provost's secretary, who had told me he was a reliable fellow, though I had my doubts. But DeVries, if that was his name, had shown up at the God-awful hour I'd asked and indeed, was driving us to the island.

I studied the fuzzy line of tree-ridged dunes. ‘No, Doc, you're looking at the wrong island,' DeVries chuckled. He pointed at the trees. ‘That's Okaloosa Island. It's a barrier island – million-dollar an acre Gulf-front, except what the US Air Force owns. Stretches all the way from Destin to Pensacola, a good 50 miles.' He gargled and spat over the side, into the turgid water. ‘
Your
island is over here, to the right.' He nodded into the azalea-coloured haze.

I stared hard but couldn't see it. I heard Heather whisper, ‘Uh, yeah,' and then her voice trailed into a disappointed ‘Ugh.' I still couldn't see it, but I could feel Heather's pitying gaze on my back.

‘You call that an island?' Scotty smirked. ‘What's its name? Gilligan?' He looked like Johnny Depp I decided, not realising I'd been working that problem in the first place. Johnny Depp, or at the risk of dating myself, one of the younger Flavour of the Month heartthrobs, or the endless parade of bachelors you see on televised reality shows. The pouting lips. The greasy black hair. The hint of stubble on his starved cheeks. The smirky insolence in his dull eyes.

I gazed frantically into the murk, feeling dumber by the minute, and wished I'd chosen the bifocals like the optometrist had advised. ‘You're at that age where your eyes are transitioning,' he'd told me, and I'd wondered,
Dear God, I'm only 42 and I need bifocals? What will 50 bring? Diapers?

‘It's a spoil island,' DeVries explained. ‘It was dredged by the Army Corps of Engineers back in the '50s when they cut the channel down Santa Rosa Sound between Choctawhatchee Bay in Fort Walton Beach, which is just east of here, and Escambia Bay in Pensacola about 45 miles to the west. There's not enough water movement through the sound to erode the island, especially after the grass took root and tied down the sand. So it's been here ever since.'

Finally I saw it, barely rising above the water, a dark hump like the crusted back of a whale. A few scraggly clumps of Uniola paniculata, ‘sea oats' as the locals called them, grew at the island's interior, which rose only a little higher than the surrounding beach. The fringes were bearded with saltmeadow cordgrass.

‘She ain't much of an island, and I guess after today she won't be anything at all,' DeVries went on. ‘They open that new pass and the water will fairly rip through here.'

Yes. The new pass. One of the reasons we were here.

A group of businessmen in a town called Navarre, about halfway between Fort Walton Beach and Pensacola, wanted to dig a channel across Okaloosa Island to the Gulf. They claimed such a channel would create a ‘flushing action' in the sound, which had become badly polluted over the years with runoff and sewage spills. The real reason, of course, was that a channel would allow Navarre to develop a deepwater sport fishing industry, thereby bolstering the economy of that tiny Gulf-side town. Nobody in the Department of Environmental Protection would sign off on the project, but the governor's office had intervened, prompting rumours of payoffs and favours owed. Whatever the reason, today was the day when barges tied up next to the pass would remove the last of the retaining rocks and allow unrestricted water flow through the channel. Once the flow was stabilised, boat traffic would be allowed to use the opening.

From the edge of my vision I saw Heather and Scotty exchange smug looks. He patted her on the shoulder, and I felt myself hurting suddenly – how utterly casual the gesture had been, a simple pat on the shoulder, and how desperately jealous I felt that Scotty was granted that kind of access when to my mind such an act deserved the status of … I couldn't say. It was something I would lie in bed mornings during the muzzy period between sleep and consciousness and picture myself doing, and I'd feel a wash of contentedness slip over me. It was the stuff of dreams, if such a thing existed.

‘You think you could speed up, Skipper?' Scotty hailed back over his shoulder. ‘This ain't no three-hour cruise.'

DeVries, who seemed impervious to Scotty's sarcasm, gave a healthy laugh. ‘Guess I could, but why stir up all that crap in the water?'

Crap in the water. The other reason we were here.

I asked him, ‘Is it bad?' and he darkened and suddenly became serious. ‘“Bad” doesn't begin to tell the story,' he said. ‘You get the crap in your eyes or down your throat and you'll be smarting the rest of the day. It's worse than tear gas – not that I've been tear gassed. But it's bad. I've lived here since 1964 and I've never seen anything like it – dead dolphins, dead birds, dead fish – hell, even the channel catfish are dying … and you'd need a hydrogen bomb to wipe out channel cats.' He paused a moment, maybe for dramatic effect, or maybe to wonder if he should say anything at all. But finally he added, ‘I hear there's something worse moving out of the bay.'

I asked him what he meant.

He leaned over and I could barely hear his voice over the motor's throb and the water gurgling against the hull. ‘Some of the old fish heads up in Val-p and Niceville, along the northern edge of the bay. Shrimpers. Mullet fishermen. Oyster catchers. They say it's out in the bay,' he nearly whispered. ‘Some kind of crap in the water, like this red tide stuff,' and he jerked his head at the sound. ‘But it's worse. It kills everything –
in
the water, and
above
.' He stared at me fiercely, his face hard. ‘
Ev-ree-thing
,' he reiterated, emphasising each syllable. ‘I hope you folks know what you're doing.'

I glanced at the vinyl bags of our gear lying in the bottom of the boat – tents, food and water, and all the equipment we'd need to assay the unprecedented bloom of the red tide organism that had occurred in these waters over the summer. I didn't buy his story about a new, killer organism. Some of the fishermen were rustics who concocted tall tales. But it could be that an intensely concentrated bloom had taken place in the bay. The red tide dinoflagellate produces a brevetoxin that becomes an aerosol under certain conditions and is transported by the wind. It causes massive irritation to the eyes and respiratory passages. But in lethal quantities? Maybe to something that was allergic to the toxin. But typically only marine creatures were lethally affected.

‘We've got masks,' I said to no one in particular. ‘And filters.' And then I did a rotten thing, an act for which I still feel a small degree of shame. I turned back to Scotty and I said very clearly, ‘I just hope we brought enough filters. We would have had plenty for two –'

‘Don't worry about me, Professor,' Scotty mocked, his narrow Flavour of the Month eyes watching me without blinking. They glittered with an unidentifiable malevolence. ‘I'll borrow one of Heather's swimsuit tops and strap it over my mouth. You wouldn't mind –' and he turned solicitously to Heather, who looked down at the bottom of the boat and muttered, ‘You're such a nut,' and struggled to keep her expression neutral.

I turned away. I could feel my face burning, which was impossible because the blood had long ago drained to some hidden reservoir in my body where it weighed me down, pinning me to the lacquered bench there in the bow. I could not move, but my mind was frenziedly active. I saw myself stepping over the bench that separated me from the two of them and planting an unsteady Wet Shoe squarely in Scotty's Abercrombie & Fitch chest and shoving him ass over tea kettle into the foul water of Santa Rosa Sound. Let him see how well he breathed with a sinus cavity full of
Karenia breve
.

But I merely shook my head and sighed wearily. This jealousy was pointless. And that's exactly what it was. Jealousy. Without a word having been spoken I'd been exposed as a foolish old man, and as a result I was angry, and jealous, and hot. How ridiculous had it been to arrange a weekend alone with a graduate assistant – if such a thing as a romantic liaison were even possible. The university observed a strict prohibition of such relationships at the cost of tenure, and future employment, and reputation – all commodities I'd invested a lifetime trying to acquire. Besides, I don't know that I was even in love with Heather. She interested me, yes. I found her attractive, and witty, and interesting in some indefinable way. But maybe it was something else. Maybe I just wanted
her
to be attracted to
me
. Maybe as I scrutinised the mirror and saw lines beginning to reach out from the crooks of my eyes and gnarly grey hair spreading beyond ‘distinguished' into ‘old' I'd begun to worry that such a beautiful and intelligent young woman – or any woman for that matter – would ever find me attractive. Particularly after my ex, whom I called Psycho Cecelia, had departed my life so unceremoniously. Whatever the reason, I now recognised that I'd been foolish and hopeful, like dozens of men my age,
old men
in our youth-oriented culture. By the same mechanism that had enlarged me earlier during my Scotty scenario I was now reduced, a small old man in their eyes, defeated and defeatable and worse, carrying the sullen face of a loser: Heather had brought her boyfriend on an assay of a red tide outbreak with her phytoplankton pathology instructor and now the old man was sulking. I didn't like the sound of that. For a moment I hated myself, just as they must have hated what they thought I was.

It would be a long weekend.

 

The boat was gone. We were alone.

It was hotter now. The sun was high, just past zenith, and it cooked everything into a sluggish, gasping stupor. Even the air didn't move. It held an odd stink, too, a cocktail of vapours baking off the mud flats, and bug repellent, and toxin breathing faintly from the still waters of the sound.