Shark River

by Randy Wayne White

  I was trying to hold her away. “Look, lady, I don’t know what you’re trying to do here...where you got the idea...but it’s absurd, just plain silly. Believe me, I am not your brother.”

  “’Course you are, only Daddy never tol’ you. Last month, the lawyer man, he sent me Daddy’s secret papers. Got them right here in my backpack, you want to see your name and picture for yourself. Big ol’ smiling picture of you and Daddy Gatrell. Know what else? He hid some money away for us. Now you and me, we going to go find that money and split it right down the middle.”

  “Daddy Gatrell? My name isn’t Gatrell. Gatrell, that was my mother’s maiden name—” I stopped as my brain made the slow translation. Then I said, “That pathetic old fool.”

  Tomlinson seemed very cheerful about it all. “Ransom is Tucker’s daughter. All you have to do is look at her eyes to believe it; the same sled-dog blue. You agree?”

  I didn’t want to look, but did and had no choice but to nod. They were just like Tuck’s, the same crazed color of blue. Unmistakable, once I thought about it.

  “So what happened is, about three weeks ago, Tucker’s lawyer sends her these papers Federal Express, including a letter from Tuck that claims you’re his son. Hilarious, huh? She’s already let me look through the package; some interesting things in that black bag of hers, Doc. That Tucker, he was a character, wasn’t he?”

  I put up a warning palm—whoa. It was too late at night and I was too tired to listen to it. Not then, hopefully not ever. I stood and stepped toward the door, meaning it was time for them to leave, I said, “Oh yeah, that old man was something.”

  My insane old uncle, the late Tucker Gatrell.

  The living room of my bungalow opened out onto a screened porch that sat above the ground on three-foot pilings, looking down across a little sand and mangrove beach to the bay.

  I was sitting on the porch alone, finally. I had walked Tomlinson and the woman partway to his cottage, just to make sure that she didn’t change her mind and come back.

  Told her I’d listen to the whole story, read all the papers she’d brought, but tomorrow.

  “I bet you’re surprised to find out you got a sister like me!”

  She kept saying that. She seemed very excited and wasn’t the least bit deflated by the several times I replied, “I’m not your brother. Trust me, I’m not your brother.”

  If she was, indeed, Tucker’s daughter, one thing that she had not inherited was his natural cynicism. I found her reaction touching but also frustrating. “But why would Daddy Gatrell lie to his own daughter? I saw the man seven, eight times in my life, and he loved me. That much I know. He not the kinda man to go tellin’ crazy lies.”

  I thought, If you only knew, but said nothing.

  I felt emotionally and physically drained, but too restless to sleep. So I opened a midnight beer to celebrate the sudden absence of people after spending the last many hours listening and talking.

  Not that I felt celebratory. What I’d suggested to Tomlinson was true. Participation in violence opens all the adrenal reserves and dumps in way too much adrenaline way too fast. Especially violence that seeks the lethal existential. Violence has always produced a grayness in me. It seems to extract light and validity from those things that provide the scaffolding for what I normally see as a useful, productive existence: the chemical/mathematical order of biology; interaction with friends and lovers; days of solitude and open water.

  Violence is a vital component in natural selection and the hierarchy of species, and I view it unemotionally in all conditions but my own, which is the human condition. Violence debases us. It sparks the dark arc that refutes all illusion. In the instant it occurs, humanity seems reduced to the most meaningless of fictions, nothing but a hopeful fantasy created by primates who aspire to elevate themselves.

  I don’t know why it affects me so, but it does.

  Perhaps it’s because inflicting injury on a person also inflicts an equal and opposite proof, the proof of one’s own mortality.

  As I moved from kitchen to porch, I kept reviewing the series of events over and over in my mind, wincing at my own stupidity, my own clumsiness, cringing at the whap of a bullet that passed much too close and at the sound of a man’s spine snapping.

  We are frail creatures, indeed. Contribute to the debility or death of another human and, if you have any conscience at all, you will find yourself standing on the lip of the abyss, peering downward, into your own black reflection.

  No, I wasn’t celebrating. But it was good to finally be alone. I took the Bud Light I’d opened, and poured it in a glass over ice with a wedge of lime. I had a book to read and a floor lamp for light. Had my portable shortwave radio at my side, dialed into Radio Quito, Voice of the Andes, on the 49 meters band, the English-speaking newsperson reading articulate government disinformation and sharing static with Papua New Guinea Radio and the BBC.

  Waldman was exactly right. It was time for me to start paying attention to the world outside. Time for me to poke my head up and take a look around. I’d become way too comfortable in the tiny, safer world of boat and fish and my lab back at Dinkin’s Bay Marina.

  The book I was reading was an instructional pamphlet. I’d just taken delivery of a new telescope, a really superb Celestron NexStar five-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain, and now I was tutoring myself on some of the finer points of operation. Program it with latitude and longitude, then point it at Polaris, and by punching in the proper code, the telescope would swing automatically to the Great Nebulae of Orion or show you the polar caps of Mars or locate any of 1,800 deep-space objects already programmed into the little handheld computer.

  Amazing.

  I sat there reading in the soft light as a sulfur moth fluttered around, casting a pterodactyl shadow on ceiling and screen. Moonlight and the smell of night-blooming jasmine filtered in on dense air, as if fanned by the moth’s wings.

  I had the little telescope on the table in front of me, following the instructions, experimenting with the computer and clock drive.

  I don’t consider myself an amateur astronomer. I’m not knowledgeable enough or active enough to be worthy of the title. I do, however, enjoy applying what little I know about the science. Spend an evening viewing objects in deep space, and your own small problems and tiny life are given healthy proportion. Plus, as Tomlinson is continually pointing out, there is an unmistakable if unprovable symmetry and repetition of design shared by the marine creatures that I collect and the visible structure of the universe.

  The rays of an anemone and the plasmaic traps of certain hydroids appear as micro mimics of starbursts and celestial protoplasm. In narrow passages between two islands, eddies created by a running tide swirl in patterns similar to nebulae and whirlpooling comets.

  It’s an interesting phenomenon, one I don’t pretend to understand. So I’ve always had telescopes, and recently decided to trade in my old and simple refractor for this high-tech replacement. The Celestron has the added advantage of being very light—about twenty pounds, plenty small enough and light enough to carry around on my boat or in my truck.

  I’d figured that Guava Key would be two lazy, uneventful weeks, with plenty of peace and quiet in which I could learn the scope’s entire system and do some stargazing.

  As Tomlinson says, “Want to give God a good laugh? Tell him your plans.”

  Even so, my previous days on the island had been sufficiently quiet, with good, dark nights and clear skies. I’d used the scope nearly every night, and was particularly pleased because a celestial oddity was occurring that week: The sun and six of the planets were lined up like cosmic billiard balls, an event that happens about every twenty years and unfailingly inspires an assortment of weirdos and prophets to predict global chaos and destruction.

  Like the stars, the Earth’s prophets don’t seem to change much over the years.

  So I was sitting, reading the manual, futzing with the little handheld computer. Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn were easy
enough to find on my own. But had the little scope been programmed to locate Mercury and Mars? I was following the guide through a slow step-by-step, looking from the page to the digitized screen . . . and that’s when I stiffened in my chair, listening. I heard a twig break, then a rustle of leaves as the silhouette of a person moved across the porch screen.

  I was so overly sensitized and paranoid from Waldman’s warnings about drug runners, terrorists, and revenge, that I was about to throw myself backward, out of the chair in an attempt to roll away from any potential line of fire, when I heard a woman’s voice call, “Doctor Ford? Is that you?”

  An unusually girlish voice; it sounded like a teenager who’d yelled herself slightly hoarse at some school function.

  I stood and opened the porch door to see Lindsey Harrington standing on the sidewalk in a white T-shirt that hung to mid-thigh, no shorts showing on tanned legs, blond hair fanned over her shoulders.

  I heard her say, “I hope I didn’t startle you.”

  I answered, “Not at all,” even though my heart was pounding.

  I stood in the doorway looking at her. It seemed like she’d just gotten out of bed. Her smile and her wry tone implied apology as she said, “First thing I wanted to do was thank you. But the two women from the Sheriff’s Department wouldn’t let me leave our cottage. So now they think I’m sound asleep in bed, which is the way I always worked it when I wanted to sneak out, back when I was living with my dad.” She used both hands to rope her hair back and stretched slightly. “Truth is, I can’t sleep at all after such a crazy day. Mind if I come in?”

  I pushed the door wider and said, “You want a beer?”

  6

  We sat, sipping our drinks, and took care of the uneasy formalities of strangers newly met. I listened to her thank me over and over again, and deflected her apologies for stopping by when it was so late.

  Then we both began to relax a little as our exchanges became more personal and personable, her recounting what had happened that afternoon, the way she felt when she first saw the men in ski masks, me not saying much. When I could, I asked questions. I was interested in who she was, why the kidnappers had targeted her.

  I sat and listened, then, as the diplomat’s daughter told me, “My father was in D.C. for, what? Like sixteen years and spent eight working in the basement of the White House, part of the staff, so I got to know three presidents pretty well. Two of the three, you couldn’t ask to meet nicer men. I mean, really cool guys. The kind you’d trust for a father or a grandfather. The third one, though, he was a pompous asshole.”

  “Your father worked for all of them?” I’d switched off the lamp and sat, alternately, looking at the water, then at her. Lindsey Harrington’s blond hair looked satin white in the peripheral light, her face, delicate, pale, very young. The moon, low on the horizon, created a corridor of color on the water, silver and brass.

  “No, just two of the three. He did, like, political analysis stuff, administrative stuff. I’ve never really been sure. The way he puts it is, picture the White House as a major corporation—which it is—so my dad would be like the equivalent of a department head in one of the smaller departments. He does it ’cause he loves it. It’s not because he needs the money, that’s for sure.”

  I watched the girl sipping at her beer, combing bangs back with nervous fingers while she told me about Hal Harrington. She explained that, back when her father was still in his late twenties, he’d gotten a job with one of the early computer companies as an unskilled laborer. He’d done the grunt work, unloading boxes, muling bundles of electrical conduit and parts. In his spare time, though, he’d studied the whole field, the way it was headed, liked what he saw and began to invest right there on the ground floor. Not only that, he invented what Lindsey described as a “little doohickey,” a plastic sleeve that was a docking device for computer chips.

  She told me, “Dad got the thing patented, and every computer company in the world uses it, so he was, like, a multimillionaire before he was twenty-five. Then, somehow, he got interested in politics, began to finance certain candidates, and ended up working in the basement of the White House for no salary. He moved me to D.C. with him. We had this really awesome suite at the Willard Hotel, and I attended this, like, really hotshit private school, Sidwell Friends, and hung out at 1600 Pennsylvania, when I could, which is how I got to be friends with all those presidents. Except for one of them, who was a creep, a genuine self-important dick, and his wife was even worse. This one time, we were in the state dining room, which is by the colored rooms, and my boyfriend—”

  I interrupted. “Colored rooms?”

  “Yeah, near the South Portico, the rooms are named after colors—Red, Green, Blue, Vermeil. It really is a cool place. Particularly if you are, like, totally into history, which my father is, so he made me study it, which could be a drag, but sometimes I actually enjoyed it. Anyway, we were at this boring-as-hell dinner, and my boyfriend went looking for the head. He opens a door by the colored rooms and catches the First Lady sneaking a cigarette. She, like, totally lost it, was screaming, swearing; almost had him arrested.

  “Her famous brat younger sister was right there; witnessed the whole thing. And her famous neurotic poodle. Spend any time at all around the White House, and the first thing you learn is don’t judge anyone by their politics. As my father likes to say, ‘D.C. is the only place in the world that has assholes on both sides of the crack.’ ”

  We were sitting at a white wicker table, drinks in hand, looking at a cusp of waning moon that was encircled by rainbow colors, the upper stratosphere showing ice crystals. She had her keys and cell phone before her on the glass top.

  These days, it’s impossible for me to look at a frail moon without feeling wistful and a little lonely. It reminds me of a long-gone friend.

  It was nearly 1:00 A.M. I’d been listening to her talk for an hour, but was relaxed and enjoying it. She was one of the troubled ones, a person driven by family demons, but still cognitive and aware, and she had a self-deprecating sense of humor that I liked. Remembering that Tomlinson had mentioned she’d had a substance abuse problem, I’d amended my offer of a beer, saying maybe she’d prefer water or a Coke? But no, beer was just what she needed, she said, and with a rueful laugh added, “I’m a crack addict, not an alcoholic.”

  I said, “There’s a difference?”

  “Oh yeah. No one’s ever tried to steal a vase out of the West Wing to trade for beer.”

  I couldn’t get used to her voice. She looked twenty-two, twenty-three—I really can’t tell ages anymore—but she sounded sixteen or younger. It didn’t mesh with consistent patterns of articulate thought and her world-weariness. She had a way of sighing, of looking off into space, that suggested emotional scarring and a loss of resolve or of confidence that originated in the marrow.

  What surprised me most about Lindsey Harrington, though, was this: I liked her. Liked her despite her age and mall-girl vocabulary.

  Initially, she’d hoisted a couple of red flags by saying, “I noticed you the day you got here, the first day you showed up on the island. You and that sweet old hippie with the really kind eyes. But you’re the one who really caught my attention. It’s not just that you’re so big. Kind of wide and rangy and bearlike. It was, like, I don’t know, something about your face and those wire glasses. Like if I was going to choose an ideal professor? You’d be the model. Real bookish and safe, but with enough testosterone flowing through that body to make it interesting.”

  Transparently ingratiating, I thought at first. Not just in speech, but in body language. Sitting there in the weak light, braless in her thin T-shirt, breasts swinging and showing cleavage when she leaned toward me to laugh or lift her glass, nothing else on but running shorts, looking into my eyes with her sad, rich-girl face, not caring what I saw.

  When strangers who happen to be female are so obviously demonstrative, I’m quick to retreat.

  But, no, that’s the way the girl was, apparen
tly. She spoke spontaneously, no editing whatsoever. Had nothing to hide, so nothing to fear. Same with her appearance. The rainforest humidity had made her hair wild as a lion’s, ribbed and curled, but she’d done nothing to try and contain it.

  At one point, she said, “At the White House, some of the staff would go fucking nuts when I refused to wear makeup or a bra, any of that crap. Lipstick’s the only thing I like because it comes in flavors. To this day, you mention my name to the basement drones and they’ll roll their eyes. It got so I felt like I wasn’t welcome anymore, so I stopped going. Then my dad got assigned to foreign service, and that’s the last time we lived together. That was six years ago, so I was . . .” She had to think about it. “Sixteen or seventeen.”

  I asked, “Are you still close?”

  She chuckled, toying with the cell phone. “We were never close. My father’s one of the world’s greatest men, but the only time he ever shows, like, real emotion or, you know, like, concern, it’s when I do something that he thinks is outrageous. The men I choose to sleep with, some of the causes I support, it drives him crazy. Know why I think it is, Doc?”

  I said to her, “The reason you choose to do outrageous things? As of now, I’ve got a pretty good guess, but you tell me.”

  “What I think it is? It’s, like, I’ve spent so much of my life having to associate with fucking fakes and political con artists that I’ve become, like, militantly natural. I want to live in a mountain cabin and grow my own tomatoes and curl up with my dogs by the fire. I want to walk around naked and take showers in the rain. If I never see another man wearing hair spray and a vote-for-me smile, it’ll be just fine with me.” She looked at me through the light for a moment before she added, “Know what my new motto is? Give me a man who prefers blow jobs to blow dryers. Catchy, huh?”