09-Twelve Mile Limit (11 page)

“Now, what I’m worried about is, I might knock you over the railing. It’s sure as hell going to drop you. I don’t want to hurt you—it goes against all my training, my entire commitment to nonviolence—but if you don’t move your ass?” He shrugged. “You’ve forced me. I have no choice. And know what the funniest thing is, Professor? There isn’t a damn thing you can do to stop me.” He paused, giving it a few beats, as if speaking lines for the camera. Then: “Final warning. Get out of my way. Now.”

I heard Amelia and Claudia, their warning words melding together: “Ford, I don’t think he’s kidding. I’ve read about him. Me, too … he’s got all kinds of black belts, he really does … His hands, he had to, like, register them as weapons or something… . It’s no big deal, just let him go… . Doc!”

Camphill liked that. He puffed up a bit, his smile broader. “Do us all a favor, Professor. Listen to your little girlfriends. Move.”

Without looking at Amelia or Claudia, I said, “No, I don’t think so. That kick he just described? I’d kind of like to see if he can really do it.”

“Okay, friend, I warned you. Everyone here’s a witness.”

“I’ll testify on your behalf,” I said softly.

Then I watched Camphill take a half step back, knees bending, fists clenched low for balance, and I knew he was preparing to do a spinning back kick, my head as his target.

A few years back, I was having dinner at Mack’s bayside home, and he talked me into watching one of those pay-for-view extravaganzas. It was the “world championship” of something I think they called “Extreme Fighting,” as if there were any other kind, or maybe it was “No-Holds-Barred Fighting.” I didn’t pay enough attention to remember.

Mack was very excited about it because the “Professional Bracket” included six of the world’s most famous and feared martial arts experts from Asia, Europe, and Africa. Films and documentaries had been made about two of the masters; one of the experts supposedly had a cult following. There was also one heavyweight boxer who was ranked in the federation’s top five. The hype was massive, the purse hefty, and the ring an enclosed cage from which only the winner could exit.

The promoters made a very big mistake, however. They allowed four “amateurs” to buy their way into pairings against the number-one seeds.

Apparently, it was a feed-the-Christians-to-the-lions gambit in the minds of the producers—a way of feeding easy meat to the audience before the real fighting began.

One of the amateurs might have been another boxer, the other might have been a martial arts expert, I don’t know. Two, however, were mildly successful former collegiate wrestlers, one from the University of Wisconsin, I think, and the other from a little Pennsylvania school by the name of Slippery Rock.

In the first bout, Mack was shocked when the kid from Slippery Rock—he couldn’t have weighed more than 170, 180—had the famous Ninja on the mat, gasping for air, within less than a minute. The Ninja couldn’t breathe and tapped his lone free hand on the canvas in pain and for mercy.

The kid seemed a little surprised. He’d hardly broken a sweat.

Then the wrestler from Wisconsin—big guy, two hundred plus—had the heavyweight boxer down and unconscious before anyone had time to understand what had happened, and the boxer might have died if doctors hadn’t come charging into the caged ring.

Neither of the wrestlers used holds that were legal in amateur wrestling, but every experienced amateur wrestler soon learns all the illegal stuff, all the dangerous and dirty little tricks, and they know how to use them.

It went that way all night. One martial arts expert after another was quickly eliminated and unfailingly humiliated—a big letdown for the promoters, but no surprise to me. Out of all the so-called “fighting” disciplines, there are only two groups who actually fight. They fight it out, toe to toe and hand to hand, day after day after day. Those two groups are wrestlers and boxers. The other disciplines pose, they practice and play-act—which is why they are sufficiently naďve about actual combat to take themselves too seriously.

Boxers work hard, but no sport requires more discipline, courage, or mental toughness than amateur wrestling (and that’s why it’s a national tragedy that colleges are eliminating wrestling because of a misused but well-intended piece of legislation called Title IX). Only wrestlers and boxers actually fight for a living. The rest are interesting and often stylish pretenders.

Which is why I did not take Amelia’s advice, why I did not move aside.

When Camphill shifted his weight toward me, preparing to jump, spin, and kick, I reached across and grabbed his right wrist and bicep, moving with him. I pulled and ducked under his arm and leg, then came up behind him just as his feet returned to the deck.

My hands on his shoulders, controlling his body, I said into his ear, “You missed,” as I reached around and pried his mouth open, avoiding his teeth by using only the middle fingers of my hands.

Then I hooked a finger into each corner of his lips, applying pressure, pulling his mouth wide, until he arched backward, and I heard him making a hoarse, gasping noise, shocked and in agony, his nails scratching at my wrists as I kneed him hard, twice, on the coccyx at the base of his spine, the very sensitive and easily bruised remnant of our primate tail.

The next morning, I knew, Camphill would have trouble walking. If he could walk, and it would probably be impossible for him to sit.

Had I wanted to rip his face from ear to ear, I could have done it easily. Drunk as I was, mad as I was, that wasn’t my intent. I was giving him a signal—letting him know that, if he continued, the consequences would be serious. There is nothing pretty, heroic, orderly, or theatrical about a real fight. It is brutal, messy, and damn dangerous.

Pointed-face and tennis player were screaming at me. It seemed as if I were in a vacuum, yet a few of their words and phrases pierced through: “Kill him, Gunnar … what are you waiting for! … My God, Gunnar, your face … there’s blood. You’re hurting Gunnar’s face!”

The harder Camphill tried to pry my fingers out of his mouth, the more pressure I exerted, so there was some blood, a slight ripping of tissue, but not much, and, finally, he stopped struggling.

Still speaking into his ear, I said, “I’m going to let you go. If you try to fight back again in any way, I’ll put you down on the deck. Then I’ll put you in the hospital. Count on it.”

I slid my fingers out of his mouth.

I thought he’d heed my warning. He didn’t.

As I released him, wiping my hands on my fishing shorts, he relaxed and shrugged—a decoy posture—then exploded, sidekicking me hard on the left shin, which hurt like hell, and tried to spin his right elbow back into my ribs. I managed to catch the main impact of the blow with my arm. Even so, it put a little wheezing sound into my breathing, caused me to double up momentarily. It also infuriated me.

When he came at me again, I locked my hands on his right wrist, got myself behind him once more, and, without giving him time to react, bear-hugged, lifted, and launched him up over my head, as I arched backward steering his body—a potentially deadly wrestling throw called a “suplay.”

Had I continued arching backward, I would have pile-driven the top of his skull into the floor. Instead, I did a fast quarter-turn so that only the side of his face slammed down onto the wood. Then I pinned him there, using my right elbow to burrow into his neck until I finally heard him wheeze, “Enough. No more!”

I stood and waited to make certain he wasn’t going to leap to his feet. Then I turned and limped toward the steps, hearing pointed-face say, “You’re going to let him do that to you, Gunnar? He got lucky, for Christ’s sake. Go get him!” as Amelia took my arm, helping me.

The sidekick had been nasty. I’d be feeling a burning sensation in my shin for a week, maybe longer.

I turned to her when she squeezed my arm and saw an intense, appraising expression on her face. A little bit of surprise in there, too, as she said in a low voice, “My God, you’re something. Professor—I figured, yeah, the perfect nickname ’til watching you just now. Like he was a sack of corn or something, that’s the way it looked when you threw him. Un-damn-believable.”

I used peripheral vision to make certain Camphill wasn’t rethinking his surrender. “He’s a sack of something,” I said. “You want to get another drink?”

And it still wasn’t over. We stopped at the Green Flash because it’s a good place, then walked along the narrow beach road to ’Tween Waters Inn, the Gulf off to our left, a vast lens of starlight and black water without horizon.

Everyplace we stopped, we collected people; old friends and fishing guides and islanders out for a Friday night, more than willing to help us honor Janet. On the islands even a bad reason is good enough for throwing a party, and this was a great reason. So by the time we got to the Crow’s Nest at’Tween Waters, there were more than twenty of us, and the place was already crowded.

One look told me why. The bar has an extended dining area that can be partitioned off from the elevated dining room. The partition was closed except for a door-sized space through which I could see tables of men and women wearing name tags. A sign on an easel read: “Save All Manatees.”

Welcome SAM members!

Damn.

I remembered Camphill saying he was the national spokesman, which meant that he was bound to show up sooner or later. In fact, they probably had him housed in one of the little cottages out back. I took Rhonda and JoAnn aside and told them, “I think we ought to collect our people and get out of here.”

But Rhonda was already locked in animated conversation with Wally, the chef, and Janice behind the bar, so, as she hurried back to them, she said, “Doc, you worry too much. You think Mr. Hollywood is going mess with you again after you put him in orbit? I don’t think so.”

That wasn’t what I was worried about. I didn’t think there was much of a chance that Camphill would give me another try, but the dining room was filled with SAM people, and there was Jeth in his barbecue-a-manatee T-shirt, plus most of the Dinkin’s Bay family.

Something I saw underlined just how irrational and mean the issue had become. The Crow’s Nest is built around a hardwood bar in the shape of a broken L. At three corners of the bar are hand-carved manatees—a classy, ornate touch in a classy sportsman’s bar. Really beautiful pieces of work. On the belly of one of the manatees, though, someone had recently used a black marker to draw a bull’s eye, complete with an arrow. Above the arrow were the words, “Save a Fishing Guide, Kill a Sea Cow.”

A disturbing bit of graffiti.

I worked my way through the crowd and finally found Tomlinson holding court next to the fireplace beneath a mounted tarpon. When I tried to talk to him, though, he was slurring his words so badly that I gave up.

I decided that, if there was going to be trouble, there was nothing I could do to stop it.

Turned out I was right.

Frieda Matthews, one of Florida’s best biologists and field researchers, motioned toward the lighted building and told me, “I’m supposed to be in there speaking tonight, but they fired me.”

I said, “You’re kidding.”

She smiled. “Nope. But I still get paid. In our line of work, that’s what counts, right?”

Feeling claustrophobic among all those people, I’d stepped outside and spotted Matthews leaning against a palm tree, sipping a fresh beer. I’d met her years ago at a symposium near her office in Tallahassee and had come to respect her work—particularly her articulate field-research papers. She’s a fine observer and has a gift for precise, lucid, declarative sentences. Unlike an unfortunate and growing number in our field, Matthews is an advocate of science, not a scientist who advocates a particular point of view. She is generally regarded as a leading expert on Florida’s sea mammals. Thus the manatee connection.

I asked, “They canceled your talk? Why?”

She was still smiling, a healthy-looking woman with a good jaw and short hair wearing a dark business suit with a pale blouse. “Why do biologists and expert witnesses usually get fired? Because their employers doesn’t want to hear what they have to say. The thing that really irks me is, their so-called experts in there obviously haven’t read my recent papers. If they had, they could have fired me by telephone, and I could’ve saved myself a trip. We’re swamped in Tallahassee, plus I had to leave my husband alone with our four-year-old.”

The implications of her sudden dismissal were interesting. Suddenly, I wished I’d brought a notebook.

“Let me get this straight,” I said. “The SAM people paid you to come here, but now they don’t want you to speak? I don’t get it.”

So the lady explained it to me. I stood there fascinated, listening, as Frieda listed the accumulated data as she knew it. She spoke softly, but as articulately as any of her fine papers.

She and her staff had spent the last five years collecting manatee data, she said, performing necropsies, doing manatee counts by plane and helicopter on both the Gulf and Atlantic coasts of Florida, yet it was only in the last three months that her team felt they had sufficient information to publish their partial conclusions.

“All valid biological data,” she told me, “indicate that the population of our West Indian manatee is increasing, not decreasing. Not only that, the population has been increasing for the last twenty-five years. The manatee should be taken off the endangered species list. It doesn’t belong there, and our research proves it. Florida has plenty of environmental problems, and that’s where the money should be spent. But the manatee people don’t want to hear that.”

I listened to her explain that the minimum manatee count has increased at a rate of 6 to 7 percent per year but that it was really probably closer to 10. “You know me, Doc. I always use the most conservative figures possible. I take my work damn seriously. I’m not going to manipulate or exaggerate the figures for anyone. At the cost of what? My professional reputation? No way.”

She went on to explain the data in detail, and the bottom line was that the sea cows were back and doing well. I didn’t say what I was thinking, though: I’d recently read a report issued by one of the federal agencies that said exactly the opposite. Boat-related manatee deaths had risen from 25 percent ten years ago to 33 percent now, and the increased death rate far outstripped the slow-growing manatee population. Furthermore, in that same ten-year period, Florida had registered more than a hundred thousand new boats—bad news for anything in the water that was big and slow moving. But here was Dr. Frieda Matthews telling me about her own work, her own observations. It was not the time to debate.