Shark River (29 page)

Always orderly by nature, I retaliated by following my own instincts toward sanity. I became fanatically neat, driven by insistence on accuracy and a lifestyle that sought precision. It was the only way of creating distance between myself and the unfortunate genetic connection to my late mother’s brother.

I was even less tolerant of his wild lies and self-serving schemes. They were crazed and so constant that I refused to acknowledge or play a role in any of them. Tucker claimed to have found the Fountain of Youth in his pasture, and sold bottled water to tourists until the state made him stop. He got it into his head that, while guiding Walt Disney on a tarpon-fishing trip, he’d given the famous Californian the idea for Disney World. He’d filed a claim for damages in an Orlando court and was laughed out of town. He tried to make it as a country music singer and failed. Because he’d run guns to Cuba prior to the revolution, he’d tried to get Fidel Castro to assign him a massive land grant in Pinar del Rio, but failed at that, too, and damn near ended up in prison on the Isle of Pines.

Tucker became the living symbol of all the things I did not want my life to be. He was random and maudlin, an obnoxious drunk with a terrible temper who could be on the verge of violence one moment, on the verge of tears in the next.

The only thing I liked about living with Tuck were visits from his old friend and partner Joseph Egret, an Everglades Indian of mild humor and gigantic stature. Why Joseph put up with Tuck and his constant racist badgering, I never understood. The two of them were dedicated to each other, which was the only valid endorsement my uncle ever received as far as I was concerned. I liked Joseph a lot, but he wasn’t around enough to make a difference, so I left.

As punishment, Tucker tried to leverage me with guilt whenever he could, and he called me Duke, a nickname he knew I hated but used anyway.

What good would it do to explain the whole sad relationship, though, to Ransom, who really was the man’s daughter?

 

 

The band was playing again.

I worked around in the lab until there was nothing left to do, locked the door behind me, went into my house, and switched off the turntable.

Through the screen window, I could see the lights of the marina casting saffron columns across black water. I could see the Japanese lanterns aboard
Tiger Lily,
lucent paper blooms of green, strawberry, and blue. Could hear Danny Morgan singing another Buffett song: “Cowboy in the Jungle.”

Appropriate.

It was a song that always conjured up images of a cowboy who’d spent a lot of his life in one kind of jungle or another—Tucker Gatrell.

I went to the table, picked up the envelope and opened it. Inside were two sheets of yellow legal paper covered with the man’s sloppy block hand.

I opened a beer, poured it over ice, then cleaned my glasses. Finally, I took a seat in the overstuffed chair by the reading lamp along the north wall, and I read:

I read one of the paragraphs several times before I folded the yellow paper and slid it back into the envelope. As I did, I noticed a smaller piece of paper inside that I’d overlooked. Took it out and saw that it was another handwritten note, but the handwriting was much different. It had the beautiful flowing loops and curvature that I associate with a people who learned to write before typewriters were common, a precise pencraft that is more like calligraphy. It was from Joseph Egret.

I read:

I stood when I’d finished Joseph’s letter. Took off my glasses and cleaned them, smiling. Frog-eaters—Joseph’s name for tourists and modern Floridans, white and black, because he knew them to eat the legs of Everglades frogs, something his people would not do.

I turned and went into the lab and filed the letter away before returning to my house and bolting the door behind me. I rummaged through the desk until I found the two silver keys on their ring, then got down on my hands and knees, pulled the fireproof lock chest from beneath my bed and opened it.

One key fits the door, the second key fits the lock on the drawer’s false bottom, which I also unlocked and removed, thus revealing neat stacks of folders and notebooks, five bogus passports, some clothing, and other detritus from a life I thought I had abandoned long ago.

For a moment I was taken aback when I realized that two very important manila envelopes were missing. Over the years, I’d grown used to seeing them each time I opened the little secret compartment. One was labeled OPERATION PHOENIX, the other with the words DIRECCION: BLANCA MANAGUA written on a label in red felt-tip pen.

I felt a mini-moment of panic because, in a very worst-case scenario, they are my only wedge against potential legal problems from which no statute of limitations would ever protect me.

Harrington had been right about that.

Then I remembered that the envelopes were presumably right where they were supposed to be: in the bank’s safety-deposit box where I’d stored them several months before.

My notebooks were still there, though, and I removed them carefully, pausing to linger over the names I’d written in precise block print on their covers, each notebook catalyzing visual memories, some good, many bad.

There were others.

All contained the carefully kept details of my most private life, much of that lifetime spent traveling alone through the Third World tropics, necessarily duplicitous years spent doing clandestine work as well as the work I still care passionately about: marine biology.

I set the notebooks aside and found what I’d unlocked the box to find.