Baja Florida

by Bob Morris

  “Why’s that?”

  “His family. It was all screwed up. Mickey’s dad was long gone. His mom came and went. Mickey and his sisters lived with an aunt. Trailer park, down by Edgewater. They didn’t have much. Anything Mickey ever got, he got for himself.”

  “So your grandfather paid him to look after you?”

  “Yeah, only I didn’t figure that out until years later. It wasn’t like he was a babysitter. More like…”

  “A friend?”

  “A brother,” I said. “The big brother I never had.”

  “So he taught you how to surf?”

  “He taught me everything,” I said.

  Not to take anything away from my grandfather, who did his best to raise me after my folks were gone, but my life would surely have assumed a different trajectory had it not been for Mickey Ryser.

  By the time I met him, Mickey had already won the first of several Eastern Surfing Association championships. The classic Florida beach kid—long sun-bleached hair, seldom seen wearing much other than a pair of board shorts. In and out of trouble, but nothing all that bad. Cherry bombs in the grumpy neighbor’s mailbox. Driving a car without a permit. Stealing beer from the 7-Eleven on a dare from some older kids.

  Mickey Ryser was fearless, the coolest guy in Minorca Beach. And I wanted to be just like him.

  He taught me how to surf. He taught me how to throw a baseball. He taught me how to tackle with my shoulders instead of my arms. He also taught me a bunch of other things essential to a young man’s adolescent development—how to cuss, how to blow smoke rings, how to act around girls.

  Yes, Mickey Ryser was always there for me.

  Even in high school, when he had a car, along with social opportunities that were not enhanced by hanging out with a punk like me, he found the time. After graduating, he went to work at the local surf shop. He claimed he couldn’t afford college. But although he never said as much, I later came to understand that one reason he didn’t want to leave town was me. He wanted to make sure I was going to be alright.

  “So how did he make all his money?” Barbara asked.

  I pulled the bread out of the oven. It needed to rest a couple of minutes.

  “Let’s just say he parlayed an unexpected windfall to his advantage,” I said.

  I never heard the story straight from Mickey’s mouth, but substantial rumor had it that he’d gone surfing early one morning at Coronado Inlet and chanced upon a half-dozen bales of pot that had been tossed overboard by some luckless smuggler. Square grouper. The catch of the day along the Florida coast back then.

  Mickey wasn’t a doper, at least no more than anyone else in those days, but he wasn’t one to turn his back on opportunity either. He sold the pot, bought the surf shop. Then he just kept buying and buying. Mickey was smart about real estate. Smart about business, too.

  By the time I was playing ball at Florida, Mickey was flush enough to pony up the sizable donation it took to be a Bull Gator. Private parking privileges, seats on the fifty-yard line. He brought my grandfather to all the games.

  After I signed with the Dolphins, Mickey decided he might as well buy a place in Miami, too. He was into all sorts of things by then. Apartment buildings in Atlanta. A car dealership in Fort Myers. A horse farm south of Gainesville. Over the years we saw less and less of each other. Still, we were forever connected.

  “So tell me about the daughter,” Barbara said.

  “Her name’s Jen,” I said. “Mickey hasn’t seen her in a long time. Since she was a kid. More than twenty years ago.”

  We both looked at Shula. Still slurping from her sippy cup. Still adorable.

  “Can’t imagine,” Barbara said.

  “Me neither.”

  I put dinner on the table. Another masterful presentation from Chef Chasteen. Barbara was digging in before I sat down. An enthusiastic eater, Barbara. High on the list of the many things I loved about her.

  “Mickey’s first wife—her name was Molly—she won sole custody of Jen when the two of them split up. She didn’t make it easy for Mickey to see their daughter. She moved them around a lot, never told Mickey where they were.”

  “He didn’t have to pay child support?”

  “I don’t know all the details, but Molly had plenty of money of her own—her family was well off, owned timberland and pulp mills—and apparently she was fed up, wanted a clean break, nothing more to do with him. Can’t say that I really blamed her.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Mickey was a wild man back then. He had more money than he knew what to do with and he was barely thirty. He had no business getting married, no business having kids. We all have times in our lives when we wish we could claim do-overs. That’s one of his.”

  “Still, Zack, there are ways, legal ways, for a father to occasionally visit his children. If he really wants to. I mean, how could he go that long without seeing his daughter? It’s unthinkable.”

  “You’re absolutely right. I know Mickey regrets the way he’s handled things. Especially now.”

  “This Jen, she’s his only child?”

  “As far as I know.”

  “So she stands to inherit something when he dies?”

  “Mickey and I didn’t talk about that. But Mickey being Mickey, yes, I’m certain he plans to take care of her.”

  “What about the mother?”

  “Molly died six months ago. Car accident. Mickey heard about it and that’s when he found Jen and reached out to her.”

  “Did she reach back?”

  “The two of them have been talking, yes.”

  “Does she know he’s dying?”

  “Can’t tell you that. All I know is that the last time Mickey heard from her—about a month ago—she said she was planning to visit him and would be there within a couple of weeks. She had been living in Charleston, going to college, and had just bought a sailboat. She and some friends planned to head south, do some island-hopping, their big post-graduation adventure before finding jobs and making their ways in the real world.”

  “Putting off the inevitable.”

  “Which, ultimately and in the very broadest sense, is the lifework of us all.”

  “Whoa,” Barbara said. “You getting philosophical on me, Chasteen?”

  “Fatherhood has brought out the profundity in me.”

  We worked on our food. It was easy work. I thought about another beer. I thought maybe I’d forgo the beer in favor of an after-dinner rum. Another example of me, the deep thinker.

  “Here’s what I don’t get,” Barbara said. “Why would he ask you to track down his daughter? I mean, there are people who do that sort of thing for a living. Professionals.”

  “I told him that. He did everything he could to find her. But he didn’t really have a lot to go on. The only phone number he had for her was a landline and it has been disconnected. Didn’t know the names of Jen’s friends, the ones who were going with her. Didn’t even know the name of her boat or where she was keeping it in Charleston. He tried to go through Bahamian authorities, just to see if she had passed through customs and immigration. Got nowhere on that front. Just before he went into the hospital, he hired a private detective in Miami. Sent him a ten-thousand-dollar retainer. Hasn’t heard a word since.”

  “And time is running out for him.”

  “Yeah, I’m afraid it is.”

  “So, Chasteen to the rescue.”

  “Appears that way.”

  “You find the girl, get the yacht, and grant Mickey Ryser his dying wish.”

  “Simple as that,” I said.

  She came out of it in stages. Sleeping, waking. Sleeping, waking. Not certain where one ended and the other began.

  Her mouth was dry, crusty around the corners of her lips. Like when she was sixteen and had knee surgery after her cleats caught on the lacrosse field. Torn ACL. The anesthesiologist stuck a needle in her arm and told her to count backward from hundred. She’d made it to ninety-four.

  A
nd when she’d woken up it was like this. Woozy, nothing making sense. She half expected to see her mother standing at her bedside. She had always been there for her. Always.

  She strained to see. Everything was black.

  She tried to put thoughts together, hold on to something.

  She hurt all over. Especially along the top of her back, the left side, by the shoulder blade. She remembered: A storm. Running to the foredeck, falling. And blood. Lots of blood.

  And who was it? Will. Yes, Will. Dr. Will. Helping her down below, cleaning the wound, making her drink Absolut straight from the bottle as he stitched her up. And Pete, always the joker, saying, “Just like the cowboys would have done it. Here, pardner, take a belt of cranberry vodka.”

  But that had been on the crossing, not long after they left Charleston. And other days had followed that.

  And what? Then what?

  The last thing she recalled: On the boat. Night. All of them sitting in the cockpit, having a good time. And then…and then things fell apart.

  What she thought was: Something happened, something bad, and now I’m at the hospital.

  Only…

  She couldn’t see. Something was wrapped around her eyes.

  A bandanna? What? Duct tape…

  Must pull it off.

  But she couldn’t. Her hands, tied behind her. Her feet, they were tied, too.

  That’s when she screamed.

  4

  The deal that Barbara and I have going is that I do the grocery shopping and the cooking, and she does the cleaning up afterward. Which can be considerable. My mise en place is better described as me really messing up the place.

  So when we were done with dinner, I got out of the way and headed down to the boat house with Shula. She was strapped in a baby sling, a papoose-style contraption that let her ride on my chest so she could face out and see everything I saw.

  Time was when I would spot a father hauling his child around in a baby sling and think: No way on God’s good earth will you ever catch me wearing one of those things.

  Then Shula came along. And I got soft in the head.

  My office, such as it was, occupied the first floor of the boat house. I stepped inside, flipped on the light, looked around: Sofa, desk, refrigerator, rods and reels, cast nets, tackle boxes, outboard motor propellers, gas cans, motor oil, nautical charts, a couple of crab traps, scuba tanks, assorted flotsam and jetsam that I couldn’t remember exactly how it got there or what I needed it for.

  There wasn’t any work that really needed doing in my office, but it gave me a sense of accomplishment to visit it occasionally, put in an appearance, let it know who was the boss.

  Before long, I’d have company on the two floors above me. I wasn’t sure exactly how many people would be making the move to the new Orb Communications headquarters. As many as twenty perhaps. Editors, an art director, and a couple of designers. Some accounting people, the circulation director, and an IT guy. Barbara ran a pretty bare-bones operation. The ad reps were scattered all over the place and telecom-muted mostly. Barbara farmed out the HR work.

  Compared to the rest of the magazine business, which was in a fiery tailspin, Barbara’s publications were holding their own. The flagship, Tropics, was a few pages thinner than in previous years, but circulation was steady and a loyal core of advertisers remained on board. Barbara had steered the company more in the direction of custom publishing for niche audiences. Quarterly in-room magazines for boutique hotel chains. Slick biannual publications for some high-end resorts and a couple of cruise lines. A few months before Shula’s birth, she had made a trip back to London, met with some old college friends now in high places, and landed lucrative contracts for publishing the annual reports of several international corporations. She called it bottom-feeding, but it bulked up the cash flow. And there was enough hope in the future to constitute a capital investment in a new office atop the boat house.

  Not all the staff was happy about leaving Winter Park. For those who’d be moving to Minorca Beach, Barbara was helping absorb the relocation costs. And for those who would be making the haul back and forth, she was leasing a couple of vehicles for carpooling and giving plenty of flex time. She was good to her people.

  I was good to my people, too. I told him he had put in a long, hard day and it was time to knock off for the night.

  “Thanks, boss,” I said.

  Then I flipped off the office light, locked the door.

  I walked Shula and me out on the dock and sat us down at the end, feet dangling over the water.

  Shula cooed and made her little-girl, gurgly sounds. What ever she was saying, it was brilliant.

  I cooed back and made gurgly sounds of my own. Yeah, totally soft in the head.

  I sipped from the glass of rum I’d brought from the house. Flor de Caña. From Nicaragua. The twelve-year-old old stuff. My go-to brand of late. I sampled some more.

  Drinking while daddying. Call the authorities.

  The big lights that hung out over the end of the dock illuminated the water and I could spot shrimp after shrimp working their way in the falling tide. My Oak Hill Sock was close at hand. It’s a tight-mesh dip net on a twelve-foot aluminum pole. The net funnels at the end and hangs down like a long tube sock. The shrimp stay put in there so you don’t have to empty the net every time you catch one.

  It was a pretty good run, a regular freeway full of shrimp, free for the plucking. There was lots of activity on the boats in the channel. But tonight I figured I’d let the shrimp live. Plenty of fun just to sit there and watch them.

  Shrimp don’t exactly swim. It’s more like they do abdominal crunches in the water. They draw their tails toward their heads and then snap straight and it propels them along.

  Which, thanks to the way shrimp are built, means they move through life ass-backward, never knowing exactly where they’re going or what they might be getting themselves into.

  Not that the metaphor for my life was identical to that of a lowly crustacean’s, but there you have it.

  I leaned over and nuzzled Shula. Gave her lots of kisses, rubbed my nose along the back of her neck. There’s no smell quite like baby smell. Maybe it’s the innocence seeping out.

  Shula crooked her head and looked up at me. In her growing inventory of expressions, she was giving me a new one. It was a look that said: Something’s going on, I know it. What’s bugging you anyway?

  Women. You can’t hide anything from them.

  I held Shula close and we sat like that until she dozed off and I heard footsteps on the dock and Barbara sat down beside us. She put a hand on my knee and leaned against me, her head on my shoulder.

  A mullet leaped and belly-flopped back into the water. Country music played from one of the boats in the channel. Barbara pointed at something in the night sky.

  “Look,” she said. “A falling star.”

  “Lightning bug.”

  “Mmmm, you’re right.”

  “Don’t sound so disappointed. Better to see lightning bugs these days than falling stars.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah. Lightning bugs are becoming extinct. Their numbers are down something like forty percent over the last decade. I read it somewhere.”

  “Hmmm,” Barbara said.

  “Urban sprawl. Fewer and fewer places where it gets truly dark anymore. Makes it tough for male lightning bugs to find female lightning bugs. Bottom line: No lightning bug babies.”

  “I’m intimately familiar with how that works,” Barbara said.

  “Meanwhile, there are more and more falling stars. Only most of them aren’t really falling stars but what astronomers call orbital debris—space junk and chunks of dead planets. World’s going to hell, the universe is crumbling around us.”

  Barbara looked at me.

  “In a bit of a funk, are we?”

  I shrugged.

  “It’s not like you, Zack.”

  I shrugged again.

  Barbara sat up with a st
art, pointed overhead.

  “Look, there goes another one,” she said. “Maybe that’s the male lightning bug about to find his honey.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  She snuggled beside me, tickled my ribs.

  “You think when lightning bugs do it they shoot off sparks?”

  I laughed.

  “Hope so,” I said.

  “You leave tomorrow?”

  I nodded.

  “Boggy going with you?”

  I nodded again.

  “Well, that makes me feel a little better.”

  “Just a little?”

  “A lot actually. Nothing the two of you can’t handle.”

  “Figure we’ll head down to Miami first, have a few words with this detective who’s giving Mickey the runaround. Any luck, he’ll have some kind of a lead on where we might find Jen Ryser.”

  “How old is she? Twenty-two, twenty-three?”

  “Something like that,” I said.

  “You know how it is when you’re that age, Zack. Out spreading your wings, having a good time, oblivious to the rest of the world. You’ll find her and be back home before we even knew you were gone.”

  “Doesn’t make leaving any easier,” I said.

  She looked at me.

  “And since when did you become Mr. Homebody? You haven’t been anywhere in nearly six months, since Shula was born. Not like you to stay put for that long.”

  “Guess I’m becoming domesticated.”

  “You say it as if it were an infectious disease.”

  “No, it’s not like that at all. But…”

  “But, but, but…” She shook her head. “Darling, you are a wonderful husband and an absolutely perfect and doting father, but you will never be wholly domesticated. It is not in your nature. So don’t be frightened that it might be happening to you. It’s a biological impossibility. And I love you ever the more for it.”

  I started to say something, but she put up a hand to silence me.

  “Please, I know that the gentleman in you feels it necessary to protest, feels it necessary to make me think that you are perfectly content to sit on your porch and oversee the construction and keep an eye on your business and…”