“You want information about Trina?” he said, walking toward the chair.
“Of course,” I said, lying down on the thick carpet now, hands behind my head.
“She thought Fletch actually drowned her younger son,” he blurted out. “It’s why she gave the older boy up for adoption. Fletch is capable of extreme violence. He killed someone when he was young—about eighteen. But the county called it manslaughter. I don’t think she—I think she blamed herself for not being a good mom. But I don’t think she killed herself. I think she was shot.”
A bolt of shock went through me. How specific he was, yet what he didn’t know.
He stood up. “You have sunscreen?” he said, frowning. “You know how the sun gets in a boat on the water.” He walked to a kitchen drawer and rummaged around until he pulled out a drugstore brand sunscreen with 50 SPF. He brought it over. “Let’s go,” he said, putting out a hand to help me up.
“Let me take a stop in the ladies’ room, first, okay?” I said. He nodded and put the binoculars in the case. I dove into the bathroom. Maybe it wasn’t a date. He seemed tense and unfriendly. I pulled ChapStick from my shirt pocket and realized the letter Madonna had snagged from Tay’s pocket was still there. Some detective I was.
The letter said:
11/5
Dear Taylor,
I’d love to have you out to help me put in an herb garden! Thanks for the suggestion.
I can’t do it this week. You know how you think some people don’t understand your way of thinking that we have to preserve the natural world? How you don’t know what to do sometimes? I am going through that. And I have to do something about it this week!
How about next weekend? I’ll make your favorite, chili and carrot cake.
I have new camping gear for you, too.
Let me know Monday if you can garden next week!
Love,
Aunt Trina
My eyes welled. Tay hadn’t managed to see Trina that week, I thought, leaning back against the wall. I flushed the toilet to make Randy think I’d used it. I sniffled a little. Trina was dead the day after she wrote the missive. The day after Tay got and read the note. He was still basically a kid. Had she been pulling him into her problems?
And Tay. He’d walked around for weeks with this knowledge and had told no one. No wonder he had been behaving in an edgy way, pulling away, hanging out with kids who were trying to escape.
I burst out of the bathroom after I crammed the note into my pocket. I raced to the boat to release some energy, some paranoia about my son’s safety now, my own, Randy’s weirdness.
We stepped down into the inboard/outboard, and Randy and I wordlessly untied the ropes from starboard and shoved off. He cranked the motor, and the water gurgled and left bubbles behind us, and we were off. The boat slipped through the sparkling gray water. The sun was rising slow and orange as late butterflies. A cloudless sky. I swore boating felt like a bird must feel during an effortless flight, almost weightless, with a dash of the exhilarating danger thrown in.
We cruised down the peninsula to the tip. The sand beach sat brilliant, almost too much white. I’d forgotten about this beach. Randy shocked me by continuing back towards the swamps, the opposite direction from the Gulf. He pulled the throttle, and we sped across the dark water towards the side of the old Indian mound. I’d not seen the mound from water since Grandma and I canoed down there decades ago. She had told me she knew panthers still lived around here. Randy stopped the boat and turned off the motor. Waves lapped gently along the sides of the boat.
“This is a bizarre way to get to the out islands,” I kidded. “Do you see any unusual or dangerous animal life here?” I was thinking about the bears I’d heard from Matteo that lived around here.
Randy didn’t say anything. He pulled out his binoculars and peered towards the mound. “Want to see unusual animal life?” he said. “We have to climb the mound, but this is what I brought you out here to see.” We anchored and got our land legs, the waves bubbling around us, the waves hissing onshore. We climbed the steep mound full of shells and weeds and pottery shards until we reached a clearing, and then the top. We could see for what seemed like miles.
He handed me the binoculars and rolled up his sleeves and pointed as I looked through the binoculars. “See that tall palm? Look right past it and focus,” he said.
Far into the swamps I saw movement. Large movement. Like dinosaurs. No—trucks. Slowly I began to hear faint grinding. Trucks were pulling up earth, dripping organic muck, and putting it on the shore. The camo machinery Matteo had mentioned. A couple sat on the top of a truck, the man with his arm around the woman. I zoomed in with the binoculars. Mary and Fletch. Sitting, watching from the top of his truck.
“So it’s true,” I said. No response. “How long has this—” I waved my arm around the swampy area with all the activity back upriver.
“The relationship or the machines?” he said. I let him tell me as he stood, thumbs on his hips. “Years. Let’s say decades. How long have the machines been out there making a big mess? Couple of months, I’d say.”
“What are they doing?” I said.
“I’m not sure. I got a file on the purchasers of the property—a group called ECOL. I’ve been suspicious of this group for a while. They keep it way below the radar, know what I mean?”
“But aren’t they digging awfully close to Magnolia Gardens?” I said.
“Let’s get down and head back to the boat,” Randy said, helping me down the steep mound. “There was nothing in any media about the purchase. Laura can’t seem to pull anything from them. She does have an appointment to see the power plant. Mac, Fletch, Bob Sturkey from the power plant, the widow Fielding are all on the paperwork. I can’t find the file, though. I was sure I put it in the hybrid,” he said.
“Oh, it’ll probably turn up,” I said, feeling queasy. We were back on flat land and sloshed into the salty, chilly Gulf and back into the boat.
“Just not sure what they’re up to, but I know it’s no good,” he said, mysteriously. Then he changed his whole demeanor, smiling, reaching for his ice chest.
“I made you some special sandwiches,” he said. “Grouper. I caught it myself, out too deep yesterday with this little boat. Figured I’d better go out before the fish had either eaten up the oil or were eaten up with oil. Well worth it.” He pulled out sandwiches and a jug of water.
We sat and ate quietly. I tried not to think about lying on his chest, or what his whole body would feel like flat next to mine.
“Delicious,” I said. “Thanks. Okay, you still haven’t exactly told me anything I didn’t know. I mean, I’d heard about this—both things. Seeing it is revolting, but . . .”
“What did you want to know?” He offered me half an orange, which I didn’t take.
“Okay, what’s ECOL about, exactly?” I said.
“Not sure,” he said. “I think it has to do with this new development. This is a totally underground activity. They don’t have permits to do this digging.”
“What a surprise that is!” I said with sarcasm. “Where’d you get information about ECOL?”
“Trina gave me a file.” He went on. “She was going to have me look into what they were doing. The machinery was rented from the military base, shipped in by water from an ex-military guy in the Panhandle. On paper, it looks like . . .” he shrugged, “it looks like they’re legit, you know, just buying property and renting machinery to use at the power plant. They bring the machinery on a barge from the power plant, and unload up here where no one can see what’s going on. It’s been constant, though. They’re working fast and furious, sunup to sundown.”
“Okay, is Mary a part of ECOL?” I asked. “Mac and Fletch, I know, because of the real estate factor. But who else, I don’t know. Sturkey has invested with them before. You know old Fielding was a crook. And how does this—what would Fletch and Mary be doing out here? Do you think they—do you think Trina knew and protested? And one of
them . . .”
He eyed me knowingly. Then shrugged. “You’d be amazed what people will do,” he said, starting up the boat to head back. “Safety or health or murder issues are not a problem for these people. Or it’s a total disconnect. I honestly can’t say what makes them behave the way they do. Greed. The unforgivable sin,” he said grimly. Boy, was he ever raised Baptist.
BY THE TIME we returned the boat to the dock at Randy’s house, the sun was at its apex and though windy, the day had warmed. I was dreaming of having a dark hot chocolate, or even a tea, but Randy offered neither. We sank into the quiet carpet of his living room floor, perpendicular to each other. It was good to be out of the wind, the sun, the cold, and the salt spray. We both relaxed for a few minutes in the quiet.
“Can I get something warm to drink?” I finally asked. His eyes had a faraway, almost absent look.
“One more thing. Got something else to show you,” he said, rolling to his side. He patted his pocket for his car keys. Then he stood, focused on the sliding glass doors.
“Oh, my god, do we have to go?” I whined. “Okay, but—” I stood heavily, following his lead.
“I’ll get you some hot chocolate at the Minit Mart. You cold?” he said, putting both his hands on my arms from behind, rubbing me warm.
About twenty minutes later, we arrived at the Magnolia Springs entrance with a stone and wooden toll booth. We paid the $4 entry fee and drove slowly into another world, one full of ancient cypress trees, red, orange, and brown now in the winter, with long strands of Spanish moss hanging from the limbs. In some ways, it felt like Middle Earth. The land lay below the road, and I’d sometimes seen it flood.
“This spring pumps out as much as one-fifty to six hundred thousand gallons of water per minute,” Randy said as we parked and walked to the spring head. Only one lone couple was swimming. A small cluster of people waited for the boat ride we would take. It had been a few years since I’d visited the spring, and the familiar kabloosh of the one swimmer off the diving board returned me to childhood memories. Dad had brought carloads of us kids in the summer. School end-of-year picnics happened here. Great white egrets sat in the cypress across from us, and some moorhens screamed like monkeys from the near side of the river.
We walked onto the boat, and Randy intentionally sat us in the front. Far from the back-of-the-boat guide who gave talks as he steered over the river. “A few years ago, Trina and I were here with the Friends of the Magnolia, pulling hydrilla,” he said as the boat took off and the motor drowned his voice from tourists’ ears farther back. I knew hydrilla was a plant that signaled excess nitrates or pollution in a water body. Laura had covered the threatened status of the limpkin population in Florida. Their primary food source, apple snails, had vanished because of the hydrilla problem.
“You know, Magnolia Springs and its septic problems, I assume,” Randy went on, paying the guide for our tickets.
“Well, sort of,” I nodded. I pulled my jacket tight. Bright green eelgrass under the spring-fed river swayed as if in slow motion. A few bream swam past. Above water, the orange-leafed cypress trees made islands in the middle of the river. The Spanish moss draping them looked like ladies’ stockings drying languid in the sun.
Randy turned to me, urgency in his eyes. “There were thirty-five thousand septic tanks pouring leakage into the watershed back then, including Magnolia Springs and up Leon County way. Because the underground lime rock passageways in north and north central Florida are so interconnected, the dirty water—all water—seeps through the surface and enters the system. Once it flows down here, the pressure is high. So the pressure from the water pushes that dirty water back up into the spring, right?” he said as the boat backed out of its parking spot and turned to head south down the river.
He continued, pointing to the water. “Hydrilla is like an uncontrollable monster. You couldn’t stop it when the Friends were trying to get rid of it. The stuff grows an inch a day, the water was that dirty with nitrates. And it was as if the water was fertilized, there were so many nitrates.”
I nodded. He pointed across the river, no longer looking at me. He was staring at the other side of the river from the boat. I felt like a kid he was teaching at.
“We eventually had to start mowing the spring.”
“Mowing the spring?”
“We mowed the spring,” he repeated. “It was that bad. The hydrilla had taken over and the boats couldn’t even get through.”
“To add to that, there’s a black bacteria growing on the back side of the spring now,” Randy said, pointing towards the side of the river where the new secret neighborhoods would be located. Even as we floated down the river, the swamplands were being dug, platted, and dug deeper for septic tanks.
I said nothing. I had no idea what all that meant.
“People get sick from it,” he said. He nearly spit it out the way I heard his father could spit out a sermon. For a minute, I was repulsed by his anger, but he meant well. He seemed to carry the weight of the Gulf and the rivers on his shoulders.
I wanted to put a name to it to have it make sense. “What’s the name of this bacteria?”
“Lyngbya majuscule, a cyanobacterium. Seems to be increasing in frequency in blooms across the planet these days. It seems to attack humans with acute skin lesions and respiratory and eye problems. Toxic. It affects the ecological health of marine reptiles, too.” He sounded like a robot science teacher from the future.
“So.” I didn’t know what to ask next. “So who let that happen?” I asked. “It doesn’t appear out of nowhere.”
“It kind of does, because it’s underground. You know we’re linked by sinkholes, right?” I thought of the many places where I’d swung from ropes into the deep sinkholes that filled with the underground aquifer water east, west, every which way in the county.
“Yeah, okay, the big system below the surface, water running towards the Gulf.”
“Everything gets in it if the ground doesn’t perk it,” he said. I wished he’d face me. His legs were still so hot, his shoulders broad, his face square and tan.
“So in the best of situations, the water, even say dirty water, gets filtered by the earth. Then the water you get when it hits aquifer is clear, clean. But when you only have a foot of soil before you hit the aquifer, the water doesn’t clean up. It doesn’t have enough earth to filter it well.”
“Okay,” I said, shifting in my seat. A couple of moorhens screamed their monkey scream, which echoed through the waterway. An alligator slid off a log to the water so that only its eyes floated on the surface. The tourists ran to the side of the boat and started oh’ing and ah’ing. “So, like Magnolia Gardens, right? How does that fit the septic problem?”
“Old septic tanks leak. Those folks don’t have money to repair them. And so where do you think that nitrous-filled crap goes? One to three feet below? The aquifer.”
“Ew, shit,” I said.
“Exactly,” he nodded. “Nothing wrong with it in nature, but in such concentrations, it’s poisonous. Add to that the street waste—gas, oil, city soot that all washes off the roads and into water, holding ponds, what have you, and gets into the aquifer. Worldwide, this toxic combo is being linked to cancer.”
“Yuk,” I said, depressed, looking at the ancient cypress trees with Spanish moss, the great blue heron lifting off and flying to a higher branch, the female anhinga with her black and silver wings, her fluff of a brown neck like a stole this time of year.
“So why are they allowed to keep creating these places, people like ECOL?” I said.
“You know the county. They’ve been passing money hand to hand under the table for as long as the county has existed.”
“Starting with the senator,” I said. We all knew Fielding had planned the first set of condos on the Island against all kinds of protest, from crabbers to shop owners. But Mac came in from out of town and quickly got permitted and contracted and the first high rise on the island popped up.
&n
bsp; And the problem was everywhere and involved all of us, I thought. Sure, it was big business, it was the county commission, the state legislature. Fresh water bodies all over Florida. But it was as simple and unsexy as poop and pee, too. Ours. All of ours. In our waters now.
“Men should all pee outside,” I said suddenly. I sounded like Madonna, I knew, but it was true. In rural settings, where’s the harm in that?
Randy laughed despite himself. “How about I pee over the side of the boat right now?” He leaned as if to do just that, saw my shocked expression and sat down, shaking his head and laughing still.
The wind was picking up across the river, making ripples on the water and pushing the boat back down the river towards the Gulf as the tour guide talked about Tarzan, and how the movies were sometimes filmed on this river.
I imagined how much warmer Randy’s house would be. I conjured up the idea of hot chocolate with marshmallows on top as I pulled my jacket tighter. I thought of those graves of people who’d died of different kinds of cancer.
“It Never Rains in Southern California” went through my head. Randy and I had listened to that as teenagers. A soppy sentimental song. We’d driven around the graveyard drunk, singing at the top of our lungs. Then we’d made out on the old Mr. Field’s grave until we’d heard an oyster boat across the bay and realized it was just before dawn and the fishermen were out. We’d stayed up all night, drinking, singing, and getting hot and bothered.
Now, the tour guide cranked the boat up. We headed back up to the springhead as the sun was setting, red and fiery and glorious as our young relationship had been. As we reached the car, we said nothing much, but held hands briefly, walking to the car in the chilly air.
RANDY ZIPPED UP HIS JACKET as we headed for his sliding glass door. We hadn’t spoken since the pee conversation and his countenance was back to sobriety.
A few crazy mullet were jumping in the Gulf beyond Randy’s deck. People were as mysterious as the fish that flew into the air for no apparent reason. What did we humans know about the animal world? We hadn’t even learned where to pee and poop safely.
Cutting Loose in Paradise Page 25