Ten Thousand Islands (6 page)

I told her, “He’s actually not as airheaded as he seems. Your friend will love him. Almost everyone does.”

“If you say it’s okay, Doc, I guess it must be.”

“Then you’d better call Della. Tell her she’s about to get company.”

I
spent the next three days working fourteen hours a day, trying to fill the order from Mote. I was up every morning before first light, cruising the beaches of Captiva Island and Cayo Costa, looking for spawning snook. They are a hardy species but delicate in their way. Most conventional nets will injure them, so I had to use a castnet. A castnet is a circular web of monofilament with lead weights seeded along the perimeter. It is ancient in its design and very effective. Three thousand years before Christ was born, men wading in water were throwing castnets at fish, and we still throw them pretty much the same way.

I’d had this net custom-made just for snook. It was huge: twenty-four feet in diameter. It was woven of much heavier, finer mesh than most nets. Because there was more mass and resistance, the net required twice the lead weight to make it sink fast enough. Throw a castnet properly and it will open like a parachute, trapping everything
beneath. Throw it improperly and it will spook every fish around. A standard bait net weighs maybe fifteen pounds. This monster weighed nearly thirty pounds dry, and so, good throw or bad, it was like tossing a small refrigerator. And I was making forty to fifty throws a day, without much success.

It’s tiring enough to spend all day in the heat of a September sun, poling a boat, stalking fish, anchoring and re-anchoring. Add this man-killer net to the equation and you are toying with debility.

So, at the end of each day, when the work was finished, I would limp up the steps to my little house, strip off my sodden, filthy shirt and shorts, and stand under the outdoor shower for half an hour, my muscles quivering, threatening to cramp. Then it was into fresh clothes, maybe some snapper or grouper on the grill if I could manage, or else hobble over to Timber’s Restaurant for dinner. After that, I would sit on the porch, my feet propped up on the railing, beer in hand, and wait for sunset, because it is inappropriate for a grown man to go to bed before it’s dark, and I do have some pride.

A couple of days after I watched
No Más
make the tricky jibes out the channel, bound for the Keys, JoAnn stopped by with a snack of sandwiches and one of those collapsible coolers filled with ice and bottles of beer.

It was a Sunday. Beyond the mangroves, the sunset horizon was a lemon sphere streaked with blue. On Sanibel’s beach side, the Gulf of Mexico absorbed light and deflected colors skyward.

She asked me, “Did you talk to Tomlinson last night?”

I was in a porch chair as usual. One more tough day behind me in which I’d managed to fall off the poling
platform and damn near drown with thirty-some pounds of net tied to my wrist. But I’d also added five good brood snook to my holding tank.

I sipped the bottle of beer she’d placed in my hand and said, “For the last three or four days, I haven’t answered the phone, returned messages, nothing. Haven’t checked my mail or paid bills. I’m on autopilot. So the answer is no.”

“He said he was going to try and call. Something else, he took the other stuff Dorothy found, all the remaining artifacts, put them in a box and mailed them to you. So the thieves wouldn’t know where to look. So now I understand why you haven’t gotten it yet.”

“Like what?”

“That Egyptian-looking cat I told you about? He mailed it insured, priority, plus some other things Della wanted to protect. Nothing really valuable, except for maybe the cat, but Della’s lost enough. You don’t mind, I’ll stop at the post office tomorrow and pick it up. I’ll get your mail while I’m at it, drop it all by tomorrow morning.”

“Does he want me to open the box?”

“You can ask him when he calls. But I wouldn’t mind seeing that cat again.”

“If I talk to him, I will. lust before I fall into bed, I unplug the phone. The idea of waking up to Tomlinson on a talking jag is not pleasant. I’ve been through that too many times.”

She pulled a chair close enough to the railing so that she could prop her feet up beside mine. I got a whiff of shampoo and subtle, indefinable female odors.

It was a calm evening. The saltwater lake that is Dinkin’s Bay spread away in shaded increments of brass
and pewter and pearl. Pelicans roosted heavily in nearby mangroves, while white ibis crossed the bay in gooselike formation.

The moon, one day past full, would soon balloon up over the bay.

She watched the ibis for a moment before she said, “I figured there was a reason he couldn’t get you. Last night, he kept me on the phone for more than an hour. And it’s not easy to call him because he and Della are either at the bar where she works or he’s aboard his boat. There’s a lot of stuff he wants to tell you about the gold medallion that Dorothy found. The wooden paddle thing, too. What he calls the totem. The medallion and the totem, that’s all he talked about. He says it’s related. The break-ins, Dorothy’s death, everything. There’s some books he wants you to find and read.”

“I barely have time to eat. If I don’t get those snook to Mote by Saturday, they may not renew my contract. Getting permits from the state was a nightmare.”

“Then I’ll go to the library for you, maybe tell you about it. The history stuff, I think it’s interesting.”

I nodded, staring at JoAnn’s profile. It’s surprising, but if we interact with a person day after day in a benign setting, we cease to see them as a specific, physical being. Their physical characteristics are blurred by familiarity.

Now, for the first time, it seemed, I noticed that JoAnn had an elegant nose and chin. In the sunset light, her eyes were iridescent jade and she had good, clear skin beneath the smile lines and wrinkles of thirty-some years in the Florida sun.

I believe that sexual awareness is chemically induced and the dialogue necessary to catalyze that reaction takes place on many levels. Through eye contact or body positioning,
an interrogative exchange takes place:
Are you? Would you? May I?

But first, the synapses must open the door to whatever chemical it is that keys sexual interest.

I sat there staring at her, then she was staring at me, her eyes making cursory contact, then deeper contact. We sat there in a momentary trance, the two of us, before we realized what was happening. Still looking at me, JoAnn touched her fingers to my wrist. “Doc? I think I probably shouldn’t stop here for a while.”

I smiled; leaned to kiss her, then paused, undecided. Then I kissed her on the forehead and stood quickly. “I’ll make it easy on both of us. I’m taking my boat up to Mote tomorrow. It’ll give us both a break.”

The next morning, a Monday, I packed my skiff with castnet, ice, food, water and beer, plus a tent with sand fly netting, just in case, and set off on what might be a two-or three-day expedition.

To paraphrase an old-time Key West writer and fisherman, Florida’s hurricane months, June through November, have the finest kind of weather when there’s not a blow. The weather during this particular autumn was fine, indeed. So why not vanish for a little while? Furthermore, to quote Tomlinson, I needed to get some boat beneath my feet.

Just after first light, I idled into the marina docks and kibitzed with the skiff guides as I topped off the oil reservoir and fuel tank.

Captain Felix called over that he’d found some small chunk of wreckage about seven miles off the lighthouse. “Maybe some old World War Two plane, one of the trainers they used to fly out of Buckingham,” he said. “We’ll have to dive it when the water clears.”

Dieter Rasmussen, a retired Munich psychopharmacologist, was up early as usual. He and his gorgeous Grand Banks trawler,
Das Stasi
, were a recent addition to A Dock. He’s a big guy with a shaved head, good-looking—judging from the reaction of local women—brilliant, rich, and he apparently loves the kicked-back, happy life of Dinkin’s Bay. He called out a greeting. I nodded in reply.

Then Jeth stopped to talk. Recently turned thirty, he’s a big, good-looking guy with straight black hair, all shoulders and narrow hips. He’d just taken delivery of a 20-foot Shoalwater with a console tower that was light years nicer than anything he’d ever run before.

I complimented him, adding, “From the tower, I bet it’s a lot easier for you to spot fish.”

“Man-oh-man, that’s the truth! Dave Godfrey, up to Captiva, he told me this boat would increase my fish production thirty percent and I bet he’s right!”

Early morning at a fishing marina has a fresh, anything-can-happen mood that is cheerful and frantic and full of expectation. The guides hosed their skiffs after catching bait, then loaded on drinks and ice for their anglers, while coffee in big Styrofoam cups steamed within their hands.

One by one, they waved at me as I idled toward the channel.

I should have felt better than I did, but I was still fretting about how close I’d come to kissing JoAnn. That was a line not to be crossed, and we both knew it. I told myself that the uneasiness between us was temporary, but I knew that it was a lie and that it would be awhile before JoAnn and I would feel comfortable together. There is no such thing as casual sex. It can elevate one’s sense of self-worth
or diminish it proportionally. It always, always changes a relationship, sometimes for better, often for worse. Each and every new partner extracts some thing from us; a little piece of something that is innermost and private. Sadly, it is one of the most common ways of ending a friendship.

W
ater is a dependable antidote for nearly anything that is troubling, including regret, so I did not stay upset at myself for long.

I flew my little skiff out the channel from Dinkin’s Bay, past Woodring Point, then banked northwest into Pine Island Sound, running a golden rind of sandbar that was the demarcation of mangrove and turtle grass.

It was a powder-blue morning, summer-slick but with a September horizon. The meld of sea and sky created a translucent sphere into which I seemed to be traveling at speed; a liquid void on which floated dark islands that were as solitary as I.

Before me, black diving birds flushed to desperate flight while, behind, an arrowing wake expanded in slow proportion to the velocity of my fast boat. I stood at the wheel, feeling the wind, feeling the water beneath me.

Water is a mirror until you learn to use it as a lens. Through Polarized sunglasses, the sea bottom was iridescent.
Beneath and beyond me were green fields of turtle grass that were vein-worked by riverine trenches of deeper water and craters of sand. On a low tide, I could use those submerged creeks and rivers to cross the flat as if traveling a mountain road.

There were valleys and hills and ridges below me, too, where lives were being lived. Tunicates and sea hydroids and sponges flew past in a blur. I spooked a school of red-fish that angled away as a herd, pushing an acre of waking water. A stingray flapped off in an explosion so abrupt that I could feel the shock wave through the fiberglass skin of my skiff.

I stood for a while, then I sat behind the wheel in the heat and light, comfortable and alone, on the move.

Jeth was not the only one at the marina who’d recently taken delivery on a new boat. I am not a gadget person. No one has ever accused me of being faddish, nor am I normally attracted to gaudy, big-horsepower machinery. My old Chevy pickup truck has a tough time making it up steep hills and it may be one of the last vehicles in Florida that doesn’t have air conditioning. I am, however, very picky about boats. So when it came time to get rid of my old skiff, I researched my options as carefully as I would have researched fine optics before buying a microscope.

There is no such thing as a perfect boat, so selection is a process of reasonable compromise. There were my own quirks to consider. The number of cars in Florida has nearly doubled in the last ten years, and many of those vehicles, it seems, end up touring Sanibel and Captiva. Traffic is terrible and I hate to drive.

As a result, I use my boat the way most people use their car. Nearly all of my shopping is done through the mail or a couple of blocks from the marina at Bailey’s
General Store. Otherwise, if I can’t get there by water, I usually don’t go.

So I needed a skiff that could take a sea. It had to be comfortable, dry and fast. Because of my work, it also had to be capable of running in very shallow water.

I spoke to a bunch of fishermen, I test-drove dozens of hulls. I ended up buying one of the great little boats in the world, an 18-foot Maverick, which is built over on the east coast, Fort Pierce. For power, I added an equally classic engine, a 200-horsepower Yamaha V-Max. To avoid attention from the Marine Patrol, I’d opted for a cowling that read:
150
. Why advertise?

The stunning and sometimes scary result of this volatile combination was an engine that was ghostly quiet on a boat that steered like a BMW. If the crunch was ever really on and I needed to get someplace in a hurry, I could run seventy miles an hour in a foot of water. Which I sincerely hope never happens. At fifty, my eyes begin to water; at sixty, the world begins to flutter like film from a bad projector. But seventy-plus was there if I had to outrun a storm or if there was an emergency.

On this calm Monday morning, though, I ran north at a comfortable forty miles per hour, enjoying myself, taking in the scenery. I stopped and took a quick swim at Useppa Island. Stopped in at the Temptation Restaurant on Boca Grande for lunch; sat at the bar and talked with Tina while Annie the fortuneteller read my Tarot cards.

“Says here, you’re due to have some women problems,” Annie told me.

I replied, “Really? Gee, that’s uncanny. Those cards say anything about me getting another beer?”

The weather held, so I cut through into the Gulf at Gasparilla Pass and ran the outside beaches along Don
Pedro Island. Just south of Englewood, off Stump Pass, I got very lucky and spotted two large balls of spawning snook working their way up the beach.