Ten Thousand Islands (3 page)

The best option was to swim along the shoreline, then come up behind them.
Surprise, surprise! Guess who!

Some part of me was glad that it was my only choice. I like black water. I like swimming at night where creatures of purer instinct cruise. There must be a compelling reason to swim, though, or else it is cheapened. It becomes a puerile device, like bungee-jumping or the craps tables at Vegas.

People naturally think that Sanibel runs north and south, like most barrier islands on Florida’s Gulf coast. It doesn’t. It curves from east to northwest. The north windows of my house look over the bay, and that is where I
went. Putting one hand on the deck, the other on a floor-beam beneath the house, I lowered myself into the water. The water was warmer than the air; a mixture of salt and fresh.

I released air until my feet touched bottom a few feet below, leveled off, and used the pilings to pull myself along. I did everything by feel, seeing only the bioluminescent streaks of fish as they spooked away; hearing the crackle of their fast-twitch muscle fiber as they exploded to speed.

Unexpectedly, my face pressed into thick netting. It took me a moment to realize that it was the deep-water pen where I keep big fish. Already, my navigation was off.

I used the netting to pull myself along. Took my time, moving slowly to conserve oxygen. I’d been down for less than a minute. I wanted to surface far from the house.

The darkness of the innermost core of the brain would be a similar darkness. It was a darkness given occasional dimension by sparkling green light: bioluminescent plankton.

How many times had I used that darkness to travel unseen? The unexpected is defined by the fears of our enemies. Always choose the unexpected route.

THUNK

I nearly panicked when I felt a creature of great mass punch me in the side. I floundered momentarily for control, then it hit me again,
thunk
. Not hard, but in a measuring, experimental way.

It took a moment for my brain to compute what had happened.

On the other side of the thick mesh I kept two big bull sharks. There was a torpedo-sized female over two hundred pounds, plus a male close to a hundred. I do ongoing
research on these unpredictable animals; animals that can be found three hundred miles up a freshwater river, or a mile below in the purest blue sea.

Now they were doing their own investigation. I could picture them circling inside the mesh, pectoral fins drooping into attack position as they touched deticles to flesh. It was an ancient interrogative: Was the thing alive? Was the thing edible?

True predators prefer darkness.

I pushed away from the netting, toward shore.

I was no different …

When I surfaced, someone was whistling …

It wasn’t a normal, cheery kind of whistle. It was a thin, absent-minded sound, made through clenched teeth, no louder than a series of harsh breaths.

We all do it. A tune gets into our brain. We don’t know it’s there. During moments of deepest concentration, it slips out, a subliminal backdrop to the work at hand.

This man must have been a romantic. It was one of those old country-western torch tunes. I could hear little bits and snatches of it, as I drifted toward him through the fog. Couldn’t identify it. Kept listening.

He was standing on the bank, near the steps of the boardwalk. He was a black, vertical shape in the drifting plateaus of mist. I knew he was trying to decipher the obvious: Was the house occupied? Would someone awaken if he crept out, cut the lines to one of my boats and paddled it away?

Was he wearing something over his face?

The cloud parted momentarily. Yes. A tall man. Perhaps wide. A ball cap backwards on his head, a dark scarf tied over his nose.

The curtain closed and he vanished.

But I could still hear his absent-minded whistling …

The reason we remember song lyrics more easily than poetry is that music is stored in the cleaner, mathematical side of our brains. Poetry is shoveled into the cluttered, creative side.

Some of the lyrics came to me as he whistled:
In the dah-dah glow I see her, dah-dah cryin’ in the rain
….

It took me a moment.
Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain
. That was the song. Willie Nelson sang it; maybe a woman country singer, too.

My hands were on the bottom now, pulling me along toward my visitor. Fingers touched muck and broad-bladed turtle grass. Only my back and the top of my head were on the surface of the water. I knew the silence of a saltwater croc; knew expectations no croc would ever comprehend.

Love is like a dyin’ ember, only dah-dah remains
….

Now I was nearly under the base of the boardwalk. Only a couple meters from the man. Staring up at him in darkness, he was still a charcoal shape. I floated there, belly touching the warm bottom, the toes of my shoes dug into the mud for quick traction.

I waited. I waited.

On the banks of billabongs in Australia’s Northern Territory, I’d watched massive crocs wait for feral water buffalo to take just one step closer. Move too soon, the quarry runs free.

I’d learned from the best.

The whistling stopped. I watched the man take a step toward me; saw him turn slowly, slowly to check his backside. Watched him stumble slightly, disoriented by the fog, perhaps.

At that instant, I lunged from the water in one smooth
motion, grabbed him chest high and held him, consciously fighting the urge to slam him to the ground. He made a screaming, gurgling sound; a cry of pure terror. Screamed loud enough to awaken people at the marina a hundred yards away. It was such a frenzied, feminine sound that it froze even me momentarily.

I released him; pushed him away. “Take it easy, fella.” I squinted at him through the mist with my poor eyesight. The screaming stopped, punctuated by a series of rapid, suctioning breaths. He began to back away from me.

I dismissed the old, old voice in my head which told me to immediately take physical control, to force him into some kind of painful come-along hold, bury his face in the mud and lock his arm up behind his shoulder blade until the bone grated. Instead, I took a long, slow breath and said, “A little early to be playing Halloween, isn’t it?” Meaning the scarf over his face.

No reaction.

“Okay … let’s make it real simple. You picked the wrong place to rob. But we talk it over, I get the right answers, maybe I won’t even call the police.”

Kathleen Rhodes would have been surprised and pleased by that.

The dark shape continued to back away slowly. I kept pace with him for a few moments, but then I stopped. “Hey—listen to what I’m saying. If you run, I’ll catch you. So what you’re going to do right now is follow my orders. You’re going to throw your wallet on the ground; put your hands behind your head and drop to your knees.” I gave it a few seconds. “
Do it!
”

Nothing. Which is how I knew he was going to make a break.

He backed away two more steps, then crouched
slightly. It was like a telegraph signal. I was already moving when he pivoted. I jumped onto the boardwalk to cut off his angle of escape … and saw him stumble when he realized that he couldn’t get past me. I stood there looking down at him, and heard a falsetto whine of frustration, a precursor to his shriek.

People on the verge of panic are more apt to react to words spoken softly. Nearly whispering, I said, “If you scream again, I’ll shut off your air.”

The whine became a sob, nothing more.

I stepped down and reached for the scarf that covered his face, then grabbed him roughly by the shirt when he stepped away … which is when I sensed a tremendous rush of wind from behind me that culminated in a withering impact. The force of it drove me away from the boardwalk into the water.

I rolled groggily, feeling starbursts in my head, expecting to be stomped at any second. I was down. I was hurt. They’d certainly come after me.

I pulled myself toward deeper water. For me, there is always safety in deep water. I lunged and dolphined until I was underwater, swimming hard. Then I surfaced.

He was gone. They were gone….

Sculling on the surface near my shark pen, I heard an automobile engine start and tires spinning in the loose shell.

I pulled myself up onto the dock, found my glasses and took a towel from the stack near the outdoor shower, then I went into the lab and switched on a light. I thought about calling the Sanibel police, then decided against it. No laws had been broken; I hadn’t given the intruders time even to get to my boat, which had certainly been their intent. I couldn’t blame them. I’ve got a great boat.

Or was there another possibility?

I stood there for a moment, letting my mind clear. I took my glasses off and cleaned them. Along the west wall of my lab, there is a stainless steel dissecting table. Scattered on the table were the contents of a box recently delivered by a friend. There was a package of blue glass beads, dozens of arrowheads and a stunning impressionistic wooden carving of a cat; an Everglades panther, perhaps. The cat was upright in a kneeling position, its front legs pressed into its lap. The legs were suggestive of human arms. The carving was surprisingly heavy and there were still traces of paint to be seen if you used my good magnifying glass.

Only traces of paint because the thing was ancient, made by an American Indian artist many centuries ago, then found in a recent decade by a gifted child.

The child was the daughter of a friend of a friend who was now in trouble.

Okay, so what if the guys I’d surprised hadn’t come to steal outboard motors? Was it just possible they knew the artifacts had been mailed to me, and they’d come to take them?

No, not likely. The artifacts were valuable, but not
that
valuable. To try something so risky for so little return wasn’t rational. Even thieves tend to behave rationally.

Right?

Right
.

T
he lady came asking for help on one of the most glorious autumn Fridays in the history of Sanibel Island. I was hunkered down, working in the engine well of my 24-foot trawl boat, up to my elbows in gas and oil and goo, when the familiar vibration of piney wood told me that someone was clomping along the dock, approaching my little house and lab.

It was just past noon. The September sun was bright overhead. I squinted upward to see chunky legs metronoming from within khaki safari shorts and the shampoo bounce of copper hair. Then a familiar silhouette was standing above me, hands on hips, boat shoe atappin’. So say hello to JoAnn Smallwood, part owner of the old Chris Craft cruiser,
Tiger Lily
, one of Dinkin’s Bay Marina’s gaudier floating homes. JoAnn is a heavy-hipped, busty lady with the sort of wide, handsome face that I associate with wheat fields or Wisconsin steetlights.
She was already talking before she reached the mooring dock.

“I’ve got a problem, Doc. Can you spare me a minute or two?”

JoAnn’s voice modulates an alto clarity. Women who are successful in business, trusted in politics, or who are very, very good teachers, speak with similar definition. But there was lots of anxiety in there, too. She was upset. No doubt about that.

I had a ratchet in my hand, and I was cleaning the ratchet head with a towel. As I fitted a spark plug into the rubber gasket, I said, “Mind if I finish this first?”

“Take your time.” She looked toward the house. “Is Tomlinson inside?”

“Yeah. He’s going through his record collection. He stores it here because he says his boat’s too damp.”

“Good. I’d like him to listen, too. He’s weird, but he’s smart.”

“Right on both counts.”

“No kidding. Did I tell you this? Rhonda and I cruised by his boat the other night and he had candles sticking out of each ear. Lighted candles. He was sitting naked on the bow, flames shooting up, his legs crossed. Inner ear purification, he told us. They were special hollow candles. The heat melts the earwax, or maybe it’s the smoke that purifies the inside of his brain. Who knows?”

I said, “You just explained his sudden interest in listening to old records.”

My net boat has an old standard six-cylinder engine. The name brand is “Pleasure Craft,” but it is actually made by Ford. Plugs and points, and no computer gizmos of any kind. The engine had developed a nasty little miss
and the habit of stalling when I attempted to dock. Boats that stall around the dock cause irritation and embarrassment, particularly flat-bottomed boats with wheelhouses and nets that act like sails in a wind.

This one was built of heavy cedar planking and brass screws; an old workhorse that I’d bought in Chokoloskee a couple of years ago and chugged up the inland waterway and used to dredge specimens for my business. She is solid as a slab of concrete and just about as nimble.

Thus the ratchet and a box of brand-new spark plugs.

I threaded the plug carefully, gave it just a tad of torque, swore softly when I clunked my head on the starter motor, then found the towel and began to wipe my hands.

“You’re bleeding.”

I looked at the rag. “Um-huh. Blood and oil. Mexicans say it’s good luck. The blood, I mean—if you scrape your knuckles or something when you’re working on an engine. So I’m lucky.”

“And I called Tomlinson the weird one.” The woman had a nice smile. “You two guys, you’re really characters. You hold this whole crazy marina together.”

I swung out of the boat and headed up the steps. “So come tell a couple of characters your problem.”

Dinkin’s Bay Marina does, indeed, attract its share of characters. Most of them arrive by boat, turning south off the Intracoastal at Marker 5 just west of the Sanibel Causeway and past the power lines. By car, they follow Sanibel’s Tarpon Bay Road into the mangroves, through the gate to the bay.

Beyond the gate, in the shell parking lot, there’s a community of wooden buildings that extends out onto the water via a latticework of wobbly docks. It is an unexpected
anachronism on an island known for designer homes and elegant restaurants. There are plank tables for cleaning fish, a bait tank, and benches beneath a tin roof, so visitors have a place to sit while they eat the marina’s sandwiches and chowder.