Everglades (8 page)

“Yeah, well, I don’t much care about what some dead Indian predicted two hundred years ago.” Izzy held both palms out, getting peeved. “You don’t need to know all the details, Jerry. I don’t
want
you to know the details. I have people in the right places. The whole thing’s set. So just take my word for it.”

Raising his voice, Shiva said, “
I
make the decisions in this organization—”

“Not when it comes to covering my ass, you don’t. You want some stooge, find yourself another guy.”

Izzy fumed for a moment before he added, “Maybe it
is
time for me to quit. Maybe write that book I always wanted to do. Call it
Behind the Curtain with Bhagwan Shiva.
Start off with the gag where you made the one-armed girl whole again. How many people converted that night? Couple thousand? I wonder how they’d feel if they found out the truth—your one-armed miracle girl got paid a bundle . . . and so did her twin.”

In barely a whisper, Shiva said, “Don’t threaten me. I won’t tolerate it. Other men have threatened me, other organizations, and you know what happened to them.”

Izzy allowed himself to smile. “Who you think you’re talking to—
Jerry?
I’m the one who
makes
it happen. Which is why you’d better be telling the truth about the money.”

“You’re worried? It’s already been deposited into a numbered account. The trustee I’ve appointed—”

Izzy interrupted, “I’ve talked to him.”

He had, too. The man’s name was Carter—a banking tycoon before he’d joined the Church of Ashram and was soon elevated to Shiva’s inner circle: the Circle of Twenty-eight.

To Carter, Izzy had said, “If you don’t answer your cell phone the instant I call, if the account numbers aren’t kosher, guess who I’m gonna come looking for first? Don’t even try to hide.”

Shiva referred to the money as a “bonus” not a payoff.

Izzy made a good salary working for the church. He’d invested in stocks and property. He’d done okay.

A few years back, he’d done what he’d always dreamed of: bought his own island. Made a sizable down payment, anyway. The island was in Lake Nicaragua, just a mile off the coast from Granada, a fun little town. His island was a hundred acres of palms, waterfalls, a beach so white that it hurt his eyes.

The bonus was big enough that he could pay off the island and build the house he wanted: native stone, tile roof, ceiling fans. Big enough that he could quit, hire servants, enjoy the local women, do anything he desired for a long, long time. Which meant no more hanging out at Palm Beach’s Chesterfield Hotel. No more dancing at the Leopard Lounge, seducing aging socialites. No more crossing the bridge into West Palm, searching for hookers.

Which is why Izzy patiently listened to Shiva say, “All I’m telling you is, if it works, we both benefit,” before he replied, “The question now is, when do you want the second blast?”

Izzy got up off the couch, adding, “You gave me some dates, if you can stop being pissed-off long enough to listen.”

He pulled a spiral notebook from his inside jacket pocket, and began to read, “May second is the last day of Ridvan—that’s three weeks from now, a Friday.”

He looked up. “What the hell’s Ridvan?”

Mulling it over, Shiva said, “A prophet, Baha, found enlightenment near Baghdad in the Garden of Ridvan. That’s where God spoke about another messenger. A prophet who would usher in an era of peace for all mankind.”

Izzy said, “Meaning you, of course.”

Shiva wasn’t listening. “May second . . . yes, that could work. It’s not a well-known holiday, though. And there’s a pretty long gap between it and Palm Sunday. What’s the next date I gave you?”

Izzy looked at the notebook. “The eighteenth’s Good Friday. A week from now. Sunday’s Easter, then Shavuot—that’s Jewish. Or we could wait for the Green Corn Dance in late May. You want to impress the Indians, that’s the time to do it.”

“We can’t afford to wait.”

Izzy said, “Okay. For the second blast, let’s say next week, Easter Sunday, in the afternoon. Which’ll give me time to make a quick flyover, make sure there’re no people in the area. We’ll have to postpone if there are, so maybe the Green Corn Dance can be a backup. In the area where you’re building the casinos, you sometimes get airboaters, people canoeing.”

Shiva was shaking his head, “No. No postponements.”

Izzy had been expecting this. He said slowly, “So you want me to detonate . . . no matter
what.
”

Shiva nodded emphatically:
Yes
—no more discussion.

“Ohhhh-kay . . . . which leaves one more little decision—and I mentioned this six months ago. I’ve read enough geology to know that an underground blast in the ’Glades—a big one—might crack the limestone plate. Limestone’s delicate stuff. It could screw up some of the water system between Miami and Naples. That could bring the Feds running.”

Shiva was focused on his computer, indifferent,
no big deal.
He replied, “What happens to a bunch of swamp water is the least of our worries.”

Then he sealed the subject, saying, “When I go to our Sawgrass Ashram, I want the new girl with me, the blonde. Her name’s Kirsten something, from Lauderdale.”

Izzy began to grin—the guy was shameless. “That’s going to piss off your old sweetie. What’d Mary donate, a couple hundred acres of hubby’s Colorado ranch land? That’s the way you want to do business?”

More controlled and formal now: “I keep telling you: I don’t run a business. This is a
religion.
”

Izzy had heard him say that before. Lots of times.

At the door, remembering one last thing, he stopped and said, “That subject we discussed earlier. The woman who went to Sanibel. What if she and her friends start getting too close?”

Shiva said, “Oh yeah, her friend the old hippy bomber.” Giving it a double meaning.

“Umm-huh, the eco-freak who’s screwed with us before. I’m already thinking of that angle. If the guy starts sticking his nose where it doesn’t belong, what we
could
do is get the two of you together. Find a way to piss him off, get him to threaten you personally. Establish a
motive,
is what I’m saying—an eco-terrorist bomber to throw to the cops just in case things go wrong.”

Very calmly, in the deeper voice he used when giving sermons or making prophecy, Shiva said, “The souls of many are worth the lives of a few. Just make it happen, Izzy.”

Izzy had heard him say that before, too.

chapter seven

I
finished my drink, then ushered Sally inside the house, where I built another tall one. I told her to make herself at home while I got cleaned up. Then I stepped outside, and walked toward the darker, rear section of deck. A single cloud, no bigger than a house, cloaked the moon for a moment, then floated overhead. It was holding water, and it began to rain again, fat, heavy drops. My own little dark cloud hanging over just me.

It didn’t affect the party going on across the water. I could hear music; and see Chinese lanterns, red, yellow and green reflecting off the bay. It was 8:20 P.M. Still early for a Friday night at Dinkin’s Bay.

My shower is outdoors, a big, brass water bucket of a spray head beneath a wooden cistern, sun-heated through coiled black pipe, gravity creating sufficient pressure.

I walked through the rain, stripping my clothes off as I went, and threw them in a heap onto the deck below—I’d bag them and toss them into the marina’s Dumpster later. Then I stood beneath the shower, rain slopping down from snow-peak height, warm water and cold mixing.

Tomlinson had left bottles of counterculture soap, the health-food-store variety—Dr. Bronner’s Hemp & Peppermint Castile. I used it to suds away the stink and grime of what had been a weird, but occasionally interesting, four days in the Everglades.

Much to my surprise, I realized that thinking about the trip brought a little smile to my face.

Surprise because, in the last year or so, I hadn’t been doing much smiling. Too many bad dreams, too many bad and haunting memories. Too many good people lost.

I am objective enough, scientist enough, to have recognized in myself an uncharacteristic slide toward clinical depression. I kept fighting it, kept thinking that, one day, the feelings of guilt and dread would dissipate.

It didn’t happen.

Something else I also recognized: My increasing dependence on alcohol was symptomatic.

On this night, though, I felt better. From any objective aspect, I had reason to smile, and those reasons seemed to be accumulating.

For one thing, anyone who lives on the mangrove coast of Florida, USA, is automatically one of the luckiest souls on earth. Except for going to the ’Glades, I hadn’t had to do any traveling for months, and the simple orderliness of a daily routine, awaking each morning on the bay, and doing my work, was helping me to heal.

Professionally, I was doing okay. My monograph entitled
Adaptive Behavior and Problem-Solving Aptitude of the Atlantic Octopus (Octopus vulgaris) as Compared to Selected Primates
had received national attention and was causing interesting debate.

Also, I’d been contracted by Mote Laboratory to help with the organization’s massive five-year study of Charlotte Harbor—an ambitious project designed to investigate, then quantitate, the condition of an entire littoral. From sea grasses, to water quality, to fishes, dolphins and manatee, the objective was to assess the ecological health of a complex biota.

I’d been working with them on assessing the ecological role of sharks. Over many miles of sea bottom, we’d anchored forty acoustic hydrophones. They ranged from Sanibel’s Tarpon Bay to well north of Boca Grande Pass. Then we’d caught a total of sixty-six sharks and fitted them with internal or external acoustic transmitters. Nineteen of the fish were bull sharks—a specialty of mine. The results were spectacular. We could now precisely follow their movements. Valuable data was piling up.

True, I’d fallen off my normally rigorous exercise routine. I no longer ran daily, swam offshore daily, nor did I lift weights two or three times a week as I have done most of my life. I’d gained some weight and I was nowhere close to the level of aerobic fitness that I’m used to.

However, I
had
found a new recreational passion: windsurfing—a sport charming for its intimate relationship with wind and water, yet one that also consistently kicked my aerobic butt.

There were other good things. My cousin, Ransom Gatrell, had been dating a sane and stable bank president, Marvin Metheny, so there seemed hope the woman was going to abandon her wild ways and give monogamy a real try. Her (and my) quasi-adopted daughter/sibling, Shanay Money, had passed her high-school equivalency test, enrolled in a local junior college and appeared to be well on her way to a productive future.

Sometimes, her old Labrador retriever, Davy Dog, would spend a night or two with me. Crunch & Des endured him, which is to say the cat ignored him, occasionally staring at him as if he were made of inexpensive glass. Nothing more.

My personal life was going okay, too. I was enjoying a relaxed, sometimes intimate relationship with Grace Walker, a Sarasota realtor friend who made no demands beyond honesty. The chemistry wasn’t great, but it was comfortable.

Also, my old pal Dewey Nye had moved back into her house on Captiva. She is still one of my favorite people in the world—despite the fact that she’d been pressing me constantly to get back in shape and become her workout partner once again.

Finally, Dinkin’s Bay Marina was now enjoying a new source of quirky, human theater that small, good marinas tend to generate or attract. It was, not surprisingly, thanks to Tomlinson.

Mack, the marina’s owner, was the first to notice: Strangers were showing up at the front desk, with no interest in renting a boat or a canoe, hiring a guide, purchasing fresh fish or a fried conch sandwich from the seafood market. But they were very interested in
anything
Mack or anyone else around the marina could tell them about the storklike man with the hippie hair who lived aboard
No Mas,
the sailboat anchored a hundred yards beyond the docks.

“Tomlinson types,” Mack told us. Meaning oddballs. “The New Age, touchy-feely kind. Strangest thing is, most of them are from Europe, Asia—faraway places. When they ask about Tomlinson, it’s like they’re in awe or something. Like he’s a rock’n’roll star, and they’ve come all this way just to get a look at him.”

It was an accurate description of an ever-growing number of marina visitors.

At first, the attention surprised Tomlinson. He handled it with humor, and a kind of childlike grace that is at the core of what makes Tomlinson Tomlinson. But, soon, the escalating number of visitors began to upset him. Then, I think, they began to frighten him—perhaps because of the devotion they exhibited. Or simply his dwindling privacy.

He never offered to explain why strangers were now seeking him out. I asked twice, and twice I received cryptic answers.

Once, he said, “Start reading at Matthew seven:fifteen, and keep going until you get to the part about corrupted fruit.”

I answered, “The Bible? I’d have to borrow yours.”

His second reply made even less sense. “I’m aware that the universe is filled with weird, wonderful things patiently waiting to be understood. But the whole scene, man, the way the energy’s growing around me. It’s like some karmic snowball getting bigger and bigger—”

He held his palms up:
confusion; worry.
“—I refuse to encourage it. Or even to participate.”

 

 

So I did the research on my own. It only took a night’s work on the computer for me to discover the surprising explanation. It had to do with an essay he’d written while an undergraduate at Harvard. It was formally entitled, “Universal Truths Connecting Religions and Earthbound Events.”