Catching Genius

by Kristy Kiernan

  She sighed. “We’ll see.”

  “Well, I’m going, with or without you,” I said.

  And when Tate showed up the next morning, a morning bright with sun and no rain clouds in sight, she stayed in bed while we set off for Little Dune Island. We bounced along in his pickup truck with the windows down and a big cooler and fishing rods jostling in the bed behind us.

  Once at the end of the road, Tate carefully bumped the truck off the edge and onto sandy soil, following a path so narrow that branches dragged against the sides and over the roof. He finally stopped when the greenery closed in, turning the sort-of-a-road into barely-a-footpath, and he held the fishing rods in one hand while we carried the cooler between us. I had two bags slung over my other shoulder, but we managed to get through the scrub without dropping anything. We pushed through some cabbage palms and then we were at the cut, the very end of Big Dune Island. We dropped our loads on the beach, and I sat on the cooler to catch my breath.

  It was just after sunrise, but the day was heating up already. It had the same feel as those long-ago summers, as though the day might never end. I heard Tate rustling in the brush behind me and turned to see him sliding a canoe out along the sand. The nose of another, smaller canoe poked out beside it. I helped him drag the canoe to the water’s edge.

  “Steer or paddle?” Tate asked.

  “Steer,” I said.

  He pulled off his shoes and threw them into the canoe, then walked out in the water, pulling the canoe behind him until just the back edge remained on the sand. He climbed in the back and moved to the front while I steadied it, and then I pushed it forward, climbing in the rear at the last minute. We hauled ourselves forward and were soon off the sandy bottom, floating easily toward Little Dune.

  The little intricacies of steering the canoe came back effortlessly for me, and Tate paddled us across the calm water at a good clip. In less than ten minutes we were on the shore of Little Dune. The island was just waking up; birds were calling through the trees, making a racket I hadn’t heard for years.

  We unloaded onto the beach and Tate pulled the canoe up to the scrub line. I sat on the cooler again and surveyed the island and the Gulf from this new, wilder vantage point, pleased to have the day stretching ahead of us.

  Estella was probably right to stay home that morning. She was only good for the beach in short spurts, and going to Little Dune was an all-day affair. She’d have been miserable by noon. I rose and stretched while Tate inspected the fishing rods, and then I opened the cooler to see what he’d brought, plunging my hand deep into the ice to find the hidden treats. Soda, water, a beer apiece, turkey sandwiches, a container of grapes and strawberries, and two frozen chocolate bars. My stomach rumbled, and I quickly closed the cooler.

  “You want to fish or check out the lighthouse first?” Tate asked.

  “Lighthouse,” I answered immediately. Tate carefully stored the prepared rods in the canoe, and I helped him stash the cooler under a cabbage palm before we set off down the beach. Tate pointed out birds as they flew overhead and quizzed me on calls. I was rusty, but the names eventually came back to me with a little prodding. We were laughing over the sandpipers scurrying before us when Tate put his arm up in front of my chest, stopping me in my tracks.

  “Look,” he said, pointing to the sand in front of us. Long slashes in the sand, alternating on each side of a shallow furrow, marked the tracks of a sea turtle. He grinned at me and we followed them, keeping carefully to the side, until he pointed out the nest. He pulled a small notebook from his pocket and, looking around for landmarks, drew a little map.

  “I’ll come back later and put some wire down,” he said.

  “Should you notify somebody?” I asked. He shrugged and started to brush the turtle tracks away, camouflaging the nesting site, and I knelt beside him and helped.

  “People call me about the nests now,” he said. “On Big Dune I report them. They come put little signs in front of them, put tape around some poles. But it just makes people more curious. Nobody comes over here anymore, and if they do, they’re usually here because they respect the area. I hide the nests as best I can, put chicken wire over them to keep the raccoons and hogs away, and hope for the best. I’ve only lost a few over the years here on Little Dune, but they’ve lost a lot more on the big island. So I’m going to just keep it up until someone catches me.”

  “What would they do?”

  “I’m not sure. I don’t worry much about it.”

  He stood and surveyed our work, used his foot to shuffle another spot. Then, seemingly satisfied, he turned toward me. “Not going to turn me in, are you?” he asked lightly.

  I laughed. “Of course not.” We headed toward the lighthouse again, keeping our eyes open for more tracks.

  “You never know,” he said. “There’s not a lot of gray area for most folks these days. I miss your dad for that. He really knew how to look between both sides to see what was important.”

  I snorted, thinking of how easily he’d polarized our house. “Well, maybe when it came to the islands,” I said. “Not so much with the rest of the world.”

  Tate stopped walking. “You keep making comments like that, but your dad was a great man, Connie.”

  “My dad was a great man for everyone except his family,” I said, my face heating up. Tate shook his head.

  “What are you talking about? You and Estella seem to have turned out just fine. Do you have any idea how much he did for this place?”

  “Estella and I turned out fine despite him, Tate. And from what I remember, your father was the one who knew what to do with the islands. My father just saw something he could stamp his precious Sykes name on.”

  “Jesus, Connie, listen to yourself,” Tate said. “Since when do you hate your father?”

  “I don’t hate him,” I corrected him. “I just see him more clearly now. He’s no legend, no mythical figure. He was a man who didn’t do much with his life. He got interested in one thing and did it halfway, or screwed it up and moved on to something else.”

  “Bullshit, Connie. Like what?” Tate asked. He squared his shoulders at me and leaned forward. I imagined the intimidation worked on plenty of people, but I’d never been afraid of Tate. He’d hit a nerve and I wasn’t willing to back down now.

  “Like all his collections, all the auctions he went and bought crap at because educating himself about what was really valuable took too much time. The violins he bought and would never get restored. Moth-eaten rugs simply for their names.” My voice steadily rose, making the birds flap away from us. “What about me? As soon as he found out about Estella, he dropped me like a bad habit. He—”

  “So this is all about you,” Tate interrupted, raising his voice to match mine and jabbing his index finger at me.

  “Okay, how’s this? He cheated on Mother. No matter how much he loved her, he still fucked somebody else!” I yelled at him. “That’s not about me, now, is it?”

  “Oh, Connie,” Tate said quietly, his shoulders slumping. “Yeah, I think it is.”

  No birds called, no waves swished, the beach was silent for a long moment.

  “Fuck you, Tate,” I said as evenly as I could, stalking back the way we’d come. I was leaving; he could swim back. He caught up to me and grabbed my arm, but I shook it off and kept going. He grabbed for me again, and I whirled on him. “Leave me alone!”

  “No. Talk to me, Connie.”

  “We’re not best friends anymore, Tate. I’m not fifteen.”

  “Well, yeah, I mean, the gray hair makes that obvious.”

  I started walking again, and again he caught up to me and reached for my elbow.

  “Hey, come on, I’m sorry. I was trying to make you laugh. You’re gorgeous, you’re fabulous. You look fifteen.”

  I slowed down, feeling ridiculous trying to march through the shifting sand. “I certainly don’t look fifteen,” I finally said.

  “I’m sorry, Connie,” Tate said, serious this time. “Your h
usband is an idiot. And I didn’t know Sebastian cheated on your mother. He seemed to adore her. He was an idiot too. For that, anyway.”

  I sighed and ran my hands through my hair, raking my nails against my scalp. “I’m tired of everyone thinking how wonderful Daddy was. I know he did good things. Maybe he was trying to make up for what he’d done to us. I don’t know.”

  “Hey, my father wasn’t always the man in the stories either. He could be mean when he was drunk. You know why I joined the Marines?”

  “So you could go to college?”

  “I joined to punish him.”

  I gaped at him. “For what, Tate?”

  “For raising me on this island, for not keeping my mother from dying, for being the man in the stories. He was a lot to live up to.”

  “Tate, I had no idea. I thought you loved growing up on the island.”

  He took a long drink of water and handed me the bottle. I drank, the cool water slipping down my throat and soothing the harshness of shouting and sand. He shrugged. “I did, I just didn’t know it. I hated shrimping. He wanted me to take it over. And he’d hated the military. So I did what I thought would piss him off the most.”

  “Did you hate it too?” I asked. Tate had rarely talked about his time in the Marines, and never about his time in Kuwait.

  “Oddly enough, no, I didn’t, not at first. I loved it. It was the first time any of my knowledge was actually appreciated. Hell, it was the first time I even knew I was knowledgeable about anything. We were in deserts all the time. Sand I knew—or, I knew it better than grunts from Minnesota did, anyway. It was different there. Here you can dive in the Gulf if sand gets anywhere you don’t want it to.”

  “Please, don’t elaborate,” I said with a laugh.

  “Whatever you’re imagining, make it worse. Heat I knew. But it was different there too. Better in some ways. And I’d always been good with my hands. Stuff like that is sort of taken for granted here. All the men are tough, they can all fix engines, they can all fish, and drink, and shoot. They were all legends here, you know?”

  I did. There was something about the South, especially the islands before the conveniences of man made them livable, that made men of a certain age and a certain temperament into hard gods, into Heming- ways and Sykeses. And of course my father had been trying to live up to his forefathers, just as Tate had.

  “So why did you come back?” I asked.

  “It’s who I am,” he said simply. “I don’t have to beat my father anymore. This is where I belong.”

  “How come you’ve never married, Tate?” I asked. “How come you don’t have any kids?”

  “I’m not fit to be a husband, Connie. And I’m certainly not fit to be a father. It’s good that I know that.”

  “How can you say that?” I asked, dismayed. “Think of all the things you could pass on—”

  “Hell, Connie, I don’t even sleep in my house half the time. I live outside. I’d rather fish than make money. That’s no example, and God knows no woman would put up with it. And I don’t want to change. I have a girl I see on the mainland once in a while, sometimes a tourist over here catches my eye and I get to flirt for a few weeks. It’s plenty.”

  “Really?” I couldn’t imagine it, but his face gave nothing away, just like the island men who went before him. “I guess I’m happy for you, then.”

  He grinned. “Don’t do that,” he said.

  “What?”

  He started to laugh. “That well, you just don’t know what’s good for you but I’ll eventually convince you otherwise thing. I’ve been worked on by the best, Connie. I’m good. It took me a long time to get that way, but I really am. I wish you were too.”

  “There’s plenty that’s good in my life,” I said. “I just have to cut the other stuff out.”

  “So, are you really going to leave him?”

  I considered. “I think my friends in Verona, except Alexander, would suggest counseling,” I said slowly. “They’d say I owe that to my kids.”

  “What do you say?”

  “This lawyer friend of Mother’s, Bob, he’s gathered all kinds of information about Luke. I have a bad feeling it’s going to get worse. I think I’ve been waiting for Luke to make a decision so I won’t have to.”

  “No decision is still a decision.”

  “Yeah, thanks, Dr. Tate, you’re a tremendous help.”

  He smiled at me. “I might not be husband material, but I’m still a damn good friend. Let me know what I can do when you’re ready.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “So, are you going to take me to the lighthouse, or what?”

  We trekked the rest of the way in silence. I was lost in thoughts of Luke and our children, and of my father, and I think Tate was just so used to being alone that he didn’t need conversation anymore.

  We reached the lighthouse and stood beneath the sloping canvas awning that had been bolted to the building and drank our water. A small fire pit, lined with stones, bore the blackened remains of a recent fire, and a small pile of kindling was stacked against the lighthouse. A green anole poked his head out from under a piece of charred wood and stared at us, ready to skitter away should we prove dangerous, and the scrub around us rustled and snapped with the sounds of unseen animals.

  The lighthouse was well locked, but Tate had the keys to every dead bolt and padlock. We toured it as though we’d never been there before. The coquina tabby inside had been painted often, and I could see several different colors where it had flaked away in the humidity and heat. Tate led me up the crumbling steps to stand in the open arc of the window and gaze out at the water.

  “You know that old story about pirates is true,” Tate said.

  “The loot hidden on the island and all?” I asked, smiling. We’d all tried to scare each other with stories of Captain Taylor Packard, said to have had a short but profitable career as a pirate. Legend had it that Captain Packard deposited all his wealth on the interior of Big Dune, but near the tip, so now the fortune was supposed to be on Little Dune. Nothing had ever been found to support the claim—not a doubloon, or emerald, or pirate skull—but the legend persisted. Captain Packard’s crew, supposedly murdered on his orders, was said to haunt the scrub of Little Dune, and Captain Packard had himself died an equally gruesome death from syphilis in France before he could claim his treasure.

  “I’ve done some research,” Tate said.

  “Wow,” I said, needling him, “research, huh? Will you share the treasure with me so I can buy a vacation house up here?”

  He shook his head. “Nope, if I find the treasure, I’ll buy everyone out, collapse the bridge, and tear down all the houses. Except mine maybe.”

  “Thanks a lot,” I said, swatting him on the shoulder.

  “All right, and yours.”

  Our futures settled, we locked the lighthouse back up. Tate gathered wood to add to the pile for his next camping trip.

  “How often do you come over here?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Once or twice a week. Depends on how much work I’ve got on Big Dune. If it rains hard enough I sleep in the lighthouse,” he said as we hiked past the tender dwelling. “I tried sleeping in the house, but the floor is rotted almost all the way through. Found that out the hard way. There’s not enough money in the budget to repair it, so I’ve been trying to buy supplies a little at a time and fix things myself.”

  “But why bother if nobody’s allowed to live there?”

  He sighed. “I don’t know, Connie. It’s just important to me.”

  I felt chastised somehow, and we hiked back to the beach in silence. I was ravenous when we finally got back to the cooler, and I ate most of my share, washing it all down with the ice-cold beer. The afternoon was passing us by quickly, and I lazily casted in the surf while Tate fished with more serious intent. By four I was ready for a nap, and I spread my towel out on the sand, tilted my hat over my eyes, and fell asleep to the waves and the birds.

  Tate woke me just after five
and handed me a bottle of water and my chocolate bar while he packed the cooler with the fish he’d caught. We sat on the beach watching the tide go out and then finally shoved the canoe back in the water and returned to Big Dune.

  The current was strong as we paddled across, requiring more effort from me than a simple turn of the blade. The trip over had taken about ten minutes; the trip back took almost forty, but the effort felt good on my shoulders, though I knew they’d be sore tomorrow.

  Tate slid the canoe into the scrub next to the smaller one, and we loaded the truck, bone weary and happy. The weather had stayed clear, and I couldn’t wait to take a shower and watch the sunset from our roof for the first time.

  “We opened the widow’s walk,” I told Tate proudly as we jounced back along the path toward the road. “Want to stay and watch the sunset?”

  “Sure,” he said. “If I can use your shower, I’ll even make y’all dinner. I caught plenty today.”

  “It’s a deal,” I said.

  I knew something was wrong as soon as we turned into the driveway. Estella was standing on the stairs, holding the phone in her hand, and when she saw the pickup she rushed down, meeting me as I was swinging the door open before the truck had come to a stop.

  “What is it?” I cried. “Is it Carson?”

  She shook her head and handed me the phone. “I don’t know. Everyone’s been calling,” she said. “Luke called twice, he wouldn’t tell me why, and then Gib—”

  “Gib called here?” I interrupted, already dialing home. Gib wouldn’t willingly talk to me unless something was drastically wrong.

  “No, wait,” Estella said, grabbing the phone from me. “Mom called, she said to call her first. Gib is over there. And someone named Alexander called too.”

  “What? What’s going on?” I took the phone back and dialed my mother’s number as I raced up the stairs for my keys, ready to dive in the car and tear home.

  Mother snatched the phone up on the first ring. “Connie?”

  “What’s happening, Mother?” I said as I hit the second flight.

  “Everyone is fine, Connie. Calm down, nobody is hurt, nobody is dead.”