Twelve Mile Limit df-9

by Randy Wayne White

  Hassan Kazan seemed weasel-like, not evil, and surprisingly frail-though why I was surprised, I do not know. Only weak people take pleasure in imposing on the vulnerability of others and causing them pain.

  Out in the jungle, far enough from the camp so no one could hear, I slapped his face, hoping he would fight back. Instead, he began to cry and to chant a repetitive phrase-a prayer, perhaps-in a language I did not understand.

  But when I asked, “Why did you kill her?” and he replied, “Because she bit my hand. I had no choice!” the cold fury in me returned.

  I dropped both weapons, ducked under his arm, behind him, and locked my fingers beneath his jaw, tilting his head back, my right knee pinned against his spine. With teeth clenched, I said, “I have done this ten times, and each time I whispered something into their ear. I’ve never told another living soul what that was.”

  Kazan was crying again. “I’m sorry. Please. I don’t want you to do this. I truly am sorry. ”

  His words so surprised me that I heard myself reply, “ Yes. Very close. That’s almost exactly what I’ve told them. But not now. Not to you. This time, it would be a lie.”

  Then, with my hands still locked around his neck, I allowed my legs to collapse beneath me, my full body weight plummeting earthward, pulling Hassan Atwa Kazan down as if we’d both been dropped through the trapdoor of a gallows.

  Epilogue

  In what an editorial in the Sanibel Shopper’s Guide would call “a clear conspiracy between the makers of Guinness beer, whiskey, and other strong drink,” Florida’s state legislature showed uncommon foresight and backbone by postponing the implementation of the so-called “manatee protection laws.”

  They postponed them, at least, until lawyers of Save All Manatees filed briefs explaining why they had “(allegedly) intentionally perverted and misrepresented certain scientific data to advance their organization politically and economically to the detriment of the economic well-being, and maritime freedoms, of the citizens of Florida.”

  The fact that the legislature made its announcement on Thursday, March 16-the day before St. Patrick’s Day-catalyzed the tongue-in-cheek editorial in the Sanibel newspaper.

  The article went on to say, “Nowhere on the islands will this evil Celtic conspiracy be more self-evident than at our own Dinkin’s Bay Marina and Fishhouse. Tomorrow, the marina’s traditional Friday pig roast and cotillion-always popular-will reach gala proportions. The fishing guides, liveaboards, sad old hippies, and other misfits who have lived there, unproductively, for years will be celebrating the fact that the government will not be kicking them out of their slovenly, floating homes. Not yet, anyway.”

  The article even quoted Mack-and probably accurately. “According to Graeme MacKinley, the marina’s owner, the local package stores have hired extra personnel just to deliver the massive quantity of dyed draft beer and liquor he’s ordered. Hundreds of locals are expected to attend.

  “‘There’s only one thing that really scares me,’ MacKinley told this reporter. ‘We all know how marina people are when they get a few beers in them, and it’s dark on the docks, and they have to relieve themselves. I’m afraid we’re going to wake up Saturday and the whole damn Gulf of Mexico will be shamrock green.’”

  It was good news. Even to my face, it brought a small smile-and I had not smiled much since returning from Colombia. There were a couple of obvious reasons. For one thing, in the rain forest, I had seen myself in another incarnation, and my name was Curtis Tyner. As much as I’d fought the truth, I’d proven it true. As much as I hated the truth, I now had no choice but to acknowledge it. It was not an easy thing to live with, yet I would have to find a way to do exactly that for the rest of my life.

  Mostly, though, I missed my friend, Amelia Gardner. From her mother, I’d asked for and received several nice photographs of her. In my little house, I’d tacked the photos on the wall at eye level, so I could look into her eyes when I felt the need. It was the only way I knew to try to blot out the way her face looked the last time I saw her. I wanted to replace that sad, small image with the face of the person I knew and loved.

  Sometimes, it worked.

  I know enough about mental illness to have realized I wasn’t doing well, or behaving normally. All people have emotional boundaries, limits beyond which there is no return. I was on the very outer fringes of mine. I recognized in myself certain troubling symptoms of depression-a malady to which I’ve never been prone. So, early on upon my return, I paid a visit to Dr. Dieter Rasmussen aboard his forty-six-foot Grand Banks and asked of him a favor.

  In his heavy, German accent, he replied, “Yah! Of course, I will treat you. Doctor-patient confidentiality. I am a psychiatrist and a scientist. You haf my word!”

  I didn’t tell him everything, of course. But I did discuss my symptoms and my strange inability to cry.

  After seven visits, I found his diagnosis amusing but not surprising. “You, my friend, will never be an entirely happy man because you are a rational man. In you, and people like you, intellect and spirituality will always be in conflict. My advice as your physician? Find a new good woman and make love to her. Drink more, laugh more, show your friends that you care. Concentrate on some of the many good things that have been happening lately! Remember what I’ve learned in all my years of practice: Freudian psychiatry is absolute bullshit. We are chemical, genetic creatures, but we still have the option of choosing our own direction.”

  So, wanting badly to follow his advice, I made a choice. Some good things had happened, and I decided I would focus my attention on them.

  The return of a transformed Janet Mueller had had a healthy, happy impact on the whole marina family, as well as on more than a few individuals. The teenage boy she was in the process of adopting, Ron Collins, was among them. So, surprisingly, was my cousin, Ransom Gatrell. Ransom and Janet had both lost children in earlier years, and the two of them had become the closest of friends and confidants. Grace Walker-a truly gorgeous woman-had been included in their sisterly triad. In the three of them, I now saw a peace, and a sense of self-security, that I envied but that also pleased me greatly.

  It was more surprising that Jeth Nicholes had not benefited in a way that most of us at the marina had expected. Oh, he was happy to see that Janet was back home, healthy and alive, but a curious thing had happened in her absence. He and Janet’s sister, Claudia Kohlerberg, had fallen quickly, passionately, and devotedly in love. When he tried to tell Janet what had happened, he stuttered so badly that Claudia had had to interpret.

  Only Janet’s great gift for understanding, and her new strength, saved what could have become an ugly, community-damaging situation.

  She’d actually laughed as she told me, “Irony, Doc. Irony and love. Those are the only two things that separate us from the beasts.”

  Another good thing was Tomlinson-who was still Tomlinson, thank God. He continued to demonstrate his universal quirkiness, which is to say, he never followed the path that those of us who know him expect. The most recent example was that, while I was away, he hired an attorney, started a small corporation, and embraced-of all the strange disciplines available-the American free-enterprise system.

  He was fascinated by chili peppers and had grown them for years. First, in pots aboard the No Mas. Then whole lots of them on land he leased near Periwinkle Boulevard. A natural extension of that passion was bottling and selling his own hot sauce. He said he had his sights set on a small catalogue company: sarongs from Indonesia, hammocks from Panama, things like that.

  “The stuff I love,” he told me, “from the places I’ve been and still miss.”

  Tomlinson also continued to demonstrate his kindness and his loyalty to our strange friendship by his concern for my mental health, his careful inquiries, his thoughtful gestures.

  One night, sitting with a beer on my deck, looking out over the black rim of mangroves, he said, in reference to nothing that I’d mentioned (perhaps it was in reply to my long, moody si
lence): “Marion, the world would be a far worse place without you. Please don’t doubt that. Not nearly so generous, and a hell of a lot duller.”

  A few days later, we both chuckled over another of his thoughtful gestures. It was a copy of People magazine with a story and photos about a new feud between Gunnar Camphill and his pointed-faced former agent, Lester West-the guy I’d lobbed into the water. Camphill was suing West for spreading “slanderous lies” about the film star being bested in a fight by a hick fishing guide who resembled the star of Gilligan’s Island. In reply, West had provided the magazine with a photo showing Camphill with two black eyes and a bandage over his nose.

  “Two adolescents,” Tomlinson said. “Immature spirits always behave this way.”

  Now there was this additional good thing: The government was not going to close our marina after all. As a biologist, my immediate concern, though, was that this mandated review of “fradulent” manatee data was, itself, based on greed, not science. There are now, without fail, parties on both sides of environmental issues who seldom hesitate to pervert science to advance their own cause, increase their own power.

  But then I was much reassured when I read the name of the scientist whose work was most often cited: Frieda Matthews, one of Florida’s best biologists and field researchers.

  So maybe we’d get to keep our home after all.

  Mack was right. That was a pretty good reason to celebrate.

  Which is why, on this late Friday afternoon, St. Patrick’s Day, I returned from the marina after spending a couple of very rugged hours helping Mack and Felix, Jeth and the other guides lug kegs of beer and platters of food and set up tables, decorations, a limbo pit, and a PA system for the bands-getting ready for the all-night party to come.

  I was sweaty, dirty, and more than ready for a hot shower and my first cold beer of the day-which is why, as I hurried down my wobbly boardwalk, I was so pleased to see the girl standing on the upper porch of my house, frosted mug in hand, smiling.

  She was another of the new and unexpected good things that had happened recently, and who had helped bring the occasional little smile to my face.

  I listened to her call out to me, “So is this the way civilized people are expected to behave? Drink waiting. House cleaned. All your files, nice and neat. Anything else I can do for you, sir?”

  I took the beer from her, nodding while wagging my finger, “You are learning, young lady. That is why you’re here-to learn. Don’t forget it.”

  She followed me through the door, telling me about her day, all that she had done, all that she had accomplished. The paper she’d written, the math problems she’d solved. Proud of herself, and with good reason.

  In the lab, she said, “Oh yeah, and when I was dusting, this thing fell off the wall. Like it was already broke, just hanging there. What is it, like a security camera? I didn’t know what to do with it.”

  As I sat at the stainless-steel dissecting table, she placed in front of me the little digital camera that Bernie Yeager had sent. I’d forgotten all about the damn thing. During my many weeks in Colombia, all of my stone crabs and calico crabs had died, and all of my octopi had disappeared. Right along with most of my fish and two of my biggest sharks.

  I was too busy trying to restock to mess with a camera, which was why I hadn’t thought to check the memory stick. But now I did. I opened the little viewing screen, pushed the on button, and then touched rewind.

  As the little machine whirred, I heard the girl say from the breezeway, “A package arrived for you today. The box was torn a little, so I could see inside. It’s some kind of small glass case, with like a little blackball inside.”

  I looked up from the camera, peering over my glasses. Trying very hard to keep my tone breezy, disinterested, I said, “Oh? Probably some kind of specimen. You better let me open that one.” I wondered if it might be from Tyner. Had he somehow gotten my address?

  I listened to her reply, “Okay, okay, I was just telling you, that’s all. Oh, and I took your advice. I called the school counselor and told her I definitely planned to apply to college. Trouble is, I’m so far behind it’s going to be tough for me to catch up. It’s a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. So… well, I’ll see how it goes.”

  Speaking slightly louder because she was outside, I said, “Just because it’s difficult doesn’t mean you can’t do it. If it’s harder than you thought, then work harder than you’ve been working. It’s that simple.”

  “Oh sure, for someone like you. Maybe I just wasn’t raised that way.”

  I didn’t care for her tone of voice. I stood, walked out the screen door, then into my little house where Shanay Money, dressed in baggy shorts and T-shirt, was busy cleaning my kitchen.

  She glanced up broom in hand, when I entered, and I said to her, “Look, young lady, when you called me bawling, the night they hauled your father off to jail, you told me that you felt like you were trapped in your father’s life. Trapped by that kind of society. That you wanted out. Okay, so I agreed. We’ve got a deal. You’re out. You have our full support, Ransom’s and mine.”

  Shanay said, “I know, I know. That sister of yours, man, she’s so great.”

  “Yeah, and she thinks you’re a great roommate, enjoys having you around. You don’t have a mother? Ransom might make a pretty fair replacement. But there are a couple of things neither one of us is going to tolerate. Among them is you speaking badly of yourself. You have a fine intellect, every gift it takes to succeed. I’m not going to let you quit something before you’ve tried. So stop whining, stop looking for ways to fail. I won’t allow it. Any questions, Shanay?”

  I liked the look that came into her face. It was a combination of gratitude, astonishment, and humor. “Damn it, Doc, when you’re right, you’re right. I was whining. Exactly what I was doing. You know what’s weird? Kind of secretly, I wanted you to tell me just exactly what you did. That I was looking for excuses to quit.”

  Pleased, I said, “There you go. You are your own best barometer. Not me. Not anyone else. So when you talked to the counselor, did he happen to ask what you’re interested in majoring in?”

  She said, “He did, matter of fact. I told him pre-law. I’ve always found it kind’a interesting. Plus all the experience I’ve had with cops coming to the house, I figure I already know more than most.”

  I smiled, hardly trusting myself to speak. After a long pause, I said, “This state can always use another good lady attorney.”

  “That’s what I figure,” she said. “Plus they do some good. Help people. Like you did for my old Davey dog. I’d like that.”

  Janet’s line came to mind, though I did not speak it: Irony and love are the only things that separate us from the beasts.

  I’m glad I didn’t. The irony I then witnessed would have made a mockery of her, of me-of everything, perhaps. Or maybe it was simply a confirmation of something that only Tomlinson would understand.

  I returned to the lab, picked up the camera, pressed play, and a bright, digitized video began to run, everything colored as if shot through a green lens. For a while, there was nothing. Then the show began. I watched the little screen amused, then amazed, and then in a sort of chilling wonderment, as the largest of my Atlantic octopi used its tentacles to pry back the lid of its own tank.

  Then, as if purposefully trying to be quiet, the octopus crawled slowly across the lab floor, moving like a Slinky, toward the tank in which I’d kept my stone crabs and calico crabs.

  I whispered, “You brilliant little sneak!” as, still methodically, the animal climbed up the leg of the table, to the top of the crab tank. There it carefully and expertly augered the little vise open.

  The audio was good. The metal vise clattered when it hit the floor.

  Then the octopus pushed back the lid of the crab tank and slid inside to feed.

  But that was not the most astonishing shot. The last few seconds of the video consisted of a sudden, unexpected close-up of suction cups
, very powerful suction cups, clamping on to the lens of the camera.

  They were from the tentacles of a second octopus.

  The tentacles flexed, suction cups flattening themselves over the glass of the lens-huge, throbbing a furious red-and then the body of the animal slid over the camera, and suddenly I was staring into one bright, yellow eye. The eye had a black, vertical pupil set like stone into lucent gold. The eye telescoped toward me, then away, focusing, goat-like, staring into the lens as if studying the construction of the camera-or as if studying me.

  Then the lens shattered.

  I sat back, holding the camera away from me, as the screen slowly faded into darkness.

  Author’s Postscript

  M uch of what you’ve just read is not fiction, it is fact. This novel is based on an actual event as well as political realities that exist in North and South America. To the best of my ability, that event and those complicated political circumstances are described here accurately.

  The event: On Friday, November 1994, at approximately 7 P.M., four Canadian SCUBA divers were set adrift off Marco Island, Florida, when their swamped boat sank to the bottom. They were fifty-two nautical miles offshore, anchored over the wreck of the Baja California.

  On Sunday morning, thirty-eight hours later, a Coast Guard helicopter spotted one of the missing divers standing naked on a light tower, waving his wet suit to get their attention. The search for the remaining three-all of whom were wearing inflated buoyancy compensator devices (BCDs) and wet suits-resumed. For six days, the search continued. In the body of this novel, the results of that search are portrayed accurately in every small detail. The Coast Guard combed more than 23,000 square miles of water on a carefully coordinated grid search, using the latest high-tech radar and heat-sensitive vector systems, but found nothing. No trace of the remaining three divers was ever found. They vanished as if they’d been drawn into a vortex, then swept over the edge of the earth. David Madott, Omar Shearer, and Kent Munro, all twenty-five years of age, and each a resident of Mississauga, a suburb of Toronto, left behind family and friends who still grieve for them.