by Robert Lane
I calmly took off my clothes and laid a bed on the ground beside the bush and under the window. I recalled Frederick telling me that Elissa, the elderly neighbor, discovered the disrupted stones. She must be an early riser as the house behind us was dark.
“I don’t want to get too much sand on you,” I said.
Kathleen slipped everything off like it was never on and placed her arms back around me. “Oh yes,” she said, “I hope I’m brushing it out for days.”
I hovered my mouth over the corner of her lips, but did not kiss her. As she exhaled, I breathed in her very breath, her Eden, until my lungs were full and could take no more.
We made love slowly, as if we wanted to be found, to have someone know we were there and to enjoy our time before it, too, was decades gone and then centuries with only the anonymous giving a damn and looking back. Under the window of Dorothy Harrison’s bedroom, we enjoyed each other and ran with the stars, while from the park I would occasionally hear, but muted now, “Who-wow! Who-wow!”
CHAPTER 8
The dolphin surfaced four feet from my kayak, tossed me a smile, got a clear look at the naked sky, and then slipped under the surface and back into its world.
Nevis had joined me as soon as I cleared the dock. Morgan had named all the dolphins in our bay after Caribbean islands. Nevis had a slightly shorter nose than the others and her tail was more slender. From a distance, I got them confused, but Morgan could sit on the dock and identify them from a mile out. If he said Nevis was a she, then I was on board. Nevis was the benefactor of fish I caught off the end of my dock that were too small to keep. At first I would toss them to her, but after a while I knelt down and she took them from my hand.
We navigated our way around my island in thirty-two minutes. That was a full three minutes over my personal best, which I wasn’t too happy about. But my record time was set in the winter on a calm and cold morning; no way could I match that in the early summer months. The second trip was for leisure as the sun was well into its daily ascent and reflected its blindness off the still waters of the inner canals. It quickly pushed up the pre-dawn temperatures that had never dipped below muggy. Nevis ditched me after the first circumference. Can’t blame her.
I hoisted the fourteen-foot kayak over the concrete retaining wall and then pulled myself up. Kathleen and Morgan were on the back porch where she was having coffee and Morgan was sipping his customary morning half beer. Morgan had witnessed the hard stuff ruin too many lives and constructed his own method of dealing with the necessary demon that we all must confront. His morning taste, he claimed, kept him away from it until late in the afternoon.
I bent over and gave Kathleen a kiss on the forehead. “Your hair seems a little sandy.”
She smiled. Sort of like Nevis.
“How was the trip?” Morgan asked.
“I think Nevis winked at me.”
“She’s the most sociable.”
“How do you tell them apart?” Kathleen asked.
“How can you not? They are different from each other in so many ways. They just live on the other side of the wall, under the surface, not above,” Morgan said.
“But they need both sides,” I said.
“Yes. They do need both sides of the water,” he said.
I went to the kitchen and grabbed a mug—a silhouette of Mickey, Goofy, and Donald marching up a hill—filled it two-thirds with dark coffee and took a seat next to Kathleen. I was glad Morgan was there. He often showed up early, which got the day off to a good start. I wanted to tell her that last night under the hibiscus was for keeps, and without taking her eyes off Morgan, her hand found mine.
“How do you tell them apart?” she asked again.
Morgan said, “You start by identifying their roles. A calf will have an aunt, another female dolphin that will take care of it while its own mother searches for food. Nevis, I know, was an aunt for Dominica a few years ago when Dominica was raising Little Bart. After a while, you become familiar with their different sizes and proportions as well as habits. Little Bart, for example, will go airborne almost daily, coming out of the water to get a good look around.”
“Little Bart?” Kathleen asked.
“Porpoise proportions?” I chirped in. He ignored me and took Kathleen’s remark.
“I’ll point him out sometime. He’s one of the smallest males I’ve seen.”
“Do they really take care of each other like that?” she asked.
Morgan looked at her as if there was no greater topic. “Absolutely. They’re joyful creatures that enjoy each other’s company. I’ve seen them mourn a death, just sulk with no playful activities for days. That’s when I know that one’s been lost. They’re very emotional.”
“But they are known to engage in infanticide,” I reminded him.
“On rare occasions. We have no idea why, assuming there even is a ‘why.’”
Morgan took another sip from his beer, placed it behind him, and said he’d catch us later. He had barely drunk the beer that was in the bottle’s neck. As he walked across my backyard, a pelican violently dove from forty feet into the water off the end of my dock. My overhead fan starting clicking with each revolution, and for some reason it reminded me of my crooked stool. What is it with the little things?
Kathleen’s hand still rested on mine.
I dropped her off at her house and a few hours later PC called.
“You hitting it today?” I asked without salutation when I saw who it was.
“We’re done.”
“Done?”
“You gotta stay with me here, Jake. We tackled it early, God’s work is important, man. Let’s meet. Boyd printed the pictures. You’ll like what we got.”
“Same place as yesterday?”
“See you in fifteen.”
Fifteen minutes later I walked into the Riptide Bar, an expansive beachside watering hole. The young ladies behind the bars wore bikinis and the beer was ice cold. A sign on the bar by the tip jar said, “For every dollar tip, a Justin Bieber fan dies.” PC and Boyd were sitting at a high wood table by the outside bar that had no walls. They wore T-shirts and shorts. Boyd had a cloth hat on, and the back of his T-shirt said “See other side.” PC’s shirt had a small covered wagon on it and said “I died of dysentery.” His sandals were on the ground under his stool.
“You boys spreading the good word looking like that?” I took the stool across from them. At the last second I placed my right hand on the back and made certain it wasn’t on a fault line.
“Check this out,” Boyd said and shoved his phone in my face. It was a self-portrait of the two of them, dressed in khaki pants and loose fitting long sleeve blue shirts. “This was us this morning and, man, did we rock. Did you know there are Jesus books, Jesus clothes, and Jesus music, and I mean some seriously good Jesus rock tunes. We’ve been totally in it, man. There’s a whole Jesus industry. He’s bigger than Elvis.”
“You guys are a little late to that party. You do know what Jesus and Elvis have in common?”
“Tell us,” PC said.
“Both their deaths were brilliant career moves.”
PC said, “I see that, man. I see that. What a powerful launching pad a death can be.”
A waitress with short brunette hair, two ounces of cloth on her body, and a silver ring in her belly button came by to see if I would like anything. I would like to polish her ring with my tongue, but I doubted that went with the spirit of her inquisition. I ordered an iced tea. PC and Boyd were halfway through their beers.
Boyd spoke. “Your house was to be the fifth we hit. Whole neighborhood is cul-de-sacs. We wanted to get into it, you know, like play acting, then we saw our friend Dan and—”
“That’s character acting, Boyd,” PC said, “and it’s culs-de-sac. Here’s what we got.” He pulled out a dozen pictures from an orange folder and placed them on the table. I started leafing through them and PC kept talking. “I went up by myself and rang the bell at the gate. Some guy’s vo
ice booms over the box asking what I wanted. I said—”
“What the hell is this?” I held up a picture of Boyd with a FTD hat and uniform standing inside a grand foyer. “How did you—?”
“Do you ever listen, man?” PC asked. “We ran into Dan the Man on house number two. He delivers flowers and asks about the Bibles, you know?”
“Dan the Man was freaked to see us pushing the good word,” Boyd said.
“Who is Dan the—”
“He’s a buddy of ours. We laid it out and changed plans,” Boyd said. “Made an old hawk decision.”
“Boyd, really, man. It’s ad hoc, Latin, dude.” PC leaned in across from me and drilled my eyes. “We connected, Jake, big time. The Man tells us he delivers flowers almost daily to the house, but today he’s got a dozen arrangements to drop off.”
“They’re having some big—” Boyd said.
“I’ll get to that,” PC said. “So I laid out our plan, Dan’s a little hesitant, but we go way back. I bailed his ass out in eighth grade when Fat Scully, the gym teacher, got in his face one too many times for not putting everything he had into push-ups. Dan was never no good at push-ups. Like, really, man, that’s education, doing push-ups? Scully called it ‘core training.’ Don’t get me started. Dan just flat out laid Fat Scully down.”
“Thing of fuckin’ beauty,” Boyd said and took a healthy swig of his beer. “Dan unloaded the largest roundhouse in the history of the great state of Florida.”
“You got that one right, Boyd. Anyways, Scully’s thinking of pressing charges, so I get Jessica, she was my girl—”
“Still is, man, she still is,” Boyd said, nodding his head. At this point I wondered if I was stuck in a tour of their formative years.
PC said, “Jessica tells Fat Scully that if he presses charges, she’ll have to tell the power that he felt her up. After that, Fat Scully didn’t say nothing to nobody.”
“He felt her up?” I asked.
“Really, Jake? If you can’t hit the pedal, get out of the lane,” PC said.
“Tell me what happened today, boys.” I took my elbows off the table and leaned back.
PC sat back and took a swig of beer and yelled over to Marlene, evidently the girl with the belly button ring, to bring two more. Boyd whacked a fly on the table and flicked it off.
“So Dan says OK, and we put his outfit on Boyd,” PC said.
“This was after we convinced him we weren’t really doing the Jesus thing,” Boyd added.
“He knows that, Boyd. He wants the skinny. Here we go—I, as bible man, ring the doorbell, they say beat it. Boyd arrives in the van, says he’s got flowers. Dan says they always just open the gate for him and let Dan bring them in the house. I tell them I haven’t seen my home in two years, preaching the word and all, and next thing you now, we’re in the foyer. I’d say Mediterranean with a nod toward Spanish influence and encompassing good use of red and yellow. A drop-dead gorgeous aluminum painting—they’re the latest, man. Also some beautiful antique seashell sconces. She asked about Dan, and we said he was sick. She was genuinely concerned. Sweetest person you’ll ever meet.”
“Big house,” Boyd said.
“And I took these pictures.”
“Who is she?” I asked.
“Sophia, man. It’s her house. You can tell,” PC said. “Told us to click away.”
“You didn’t happen to inquire about a letter while you were in there, did you?” I asked.
“Not picking up what you’re putting down,” PC said.
“Never mind.”
“I asked her why all the blossoms,” Boyd said. “They’re having a fund-raiser this Saturday night for Congressman Kittredge, whoever the hell he is. Fifty people at two grand a plate. Can’t even imagine that. Sophia said she’s serving Florida lobster, clams, and roast beef with odd juice.”
“Dude,” PC said, “it’s au jus. French. Meaning ‘with its own juice.’”
Something clicked in my head about PC, but it would have to wait.
“Give me a minute,” I said. I got up and walked toward the beach, cell phone in my hand, Laurel and Hardy at the table. I hit speed dial.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Travis,” Mary Evelyn said.
“Mary Evelyn, either you call me Jake or I’m never talking to you again. I’m serious this time. I’m at the top of the Skyway. Don’t make me jump. I’m begging you. My blood will be on your hands.”
“Now, Mr. Travis, we both know you’re bluffing.” She had a slight tease in her voice that was new to our relationship. Maybe she was loosening up. Maybe I’d been the stiff one.
I glanced out at the Gulf and saw a boat pulling a parasail.
My insides went radioactive.
When I drank at Fort Myers Beach for a year after leaving the army, a parasail harness snapped and two junior high school girls from Wisconsin hit the water from 220 feet. I had tumbled out of a CH-47 Chinook my share of times and knew that my terminal velocity, the maximum speed I would reach falling with a belly to earth pose, was 195 kilometers per hour, or 122 mile per hour. I figured the girls hit the concrete water at around seventy miles per hour.
The man with the light gray beard who pushed the ice cream cart with the white and yellow umbrella on top said he never saw it. He was serving cherry push-ups to two children with his back to the water when he heard screams from the beach. He was a large man and he said his body and cart blocked the small boy and girl from witnessing anything.
He told me he didn’t believe in God, but thanked him every day for sending those kids at that time to buy cherry push-ups and for making him so damn fat that they couldn’t see around him. Said if he died now, he’d go with the peace of knowing that he’d served his purpose.
I did the imprecise math and derived, for that year, the parasail industry was akin to a dozen Boeing 737 domestic flights crashing every week. No one walks away.
I looked down and away at the sand. A dissipating current shuddered my body.
“Jake?” It was Mary Evelyn’s voice.
“Yes.”
“I thought I’d lost you. Hold on, he’s finishing a call.”
I blew out my breath and wondered what the hell had gotten into me—was still in me. I see parasails nearly every day. But sometimes, without warning, everything I am bursts unexpectedly and violently into one direction. The army shrink they sent me to told me I was a man of “extreme passion.” Highly unusual for a numbers man, he said while appraising me like a frog in formaldehyde. I asked him if passions could be anything but. He said I needed to develop coping mechanisms. He was still talking when I heard the door shut behind me. I turned my back to the Gulf.
“Talk to me,” Garrett said.
“Escobar’s holding a fund-raiser for Congressman Michael Kittredge.”
“Who the hell is he?”
“My elected representative.”
“How did you find out?”
“I’m an informed citizen.”
“No, the fund-raiser.”
“Thoroughly unconventional means, I can assure you.”
“When.”
“Tonight. Score me an invitation. I’ll take Kathleen.”
“How many people?”
“We think about fifty.”
“Did he call?”
“We connected a little over an hour ago.”
“And?”
“It seems personal this time. I’m not sure he knows that much himself.”
“What do you smell?”
Garrett said, “He confirmed the heat’s from the State Department. ’Sixty-one. We’re coming off Korea and at the edge of Vietnam.”
“Not as fun as the edge of seventeen.”
“Nothing is.”
“Seems more Bay of Pigs time to me. Little early to be worried about ’Nam. But it might not have anything to do with either. Maybe JFK blows altar boys. Listen,” I said, “I’m not sure how far I want to go into this with blinders on. The old church used to be inhabited by a lady
named Dorothy Harrison.”
“I read the dossier.”
“Her husband was an early spook. See what we can find on him, his associates. And cleared or not, I open the letter when I get it.”
We disconnected, and as I returned to the table I remembered what I had been contemplating before I walked away. Before I suppressed the urge to commandeer a Jet Ski and overtake the parasail boat like a horseman chasing down a runaway stagecoach. Au jus, ad hoc. Mediterranean with a nod toward Spanish. Discreetly taking pictures in a strange house. PC, 140 pounds of bones and attitude. And something else.
“PC,” I said as I mounted my stool, “how much formal education do you have?”
“Formal education? Really?” PC spit out. “You mean how many push-ups could I do? Fat Scully, man, telling us to do push-ups. When did a push-up ever do anybody any good? Un-fuckin’-believable.” He leaned in toward me. “Listen, Jakester, I got two things out of school. Mrs. Van Vaulkenberg scrawled ‘Life is not fair’ on the blackboard the first day of freshman year and never erased it. You complain? She’d point to the sign. And Littlefield—”
“Oh yeah—I remember this,” Boyd chimed in.
“—he had over a dozen ‘Do Not Chew Gum’ signs plastered on the walls of his geography room. One mammoth gum sign was plastered over a map of China like he was trying to suffocate the little red ants. Life’s not fair and don’t chew gum. Welcome to free formal education.”
“You have a bad habit of changing topics when you’re uncomfortable,” I threw back at him. I was ticked about his observation that I hesitated when I lied. I’d have to work on that.
He eyed me for a moment while Boyd stared at him. “I got kicked out after a prank during my junior year. Didn’t matter to me. Milton, the physics teacher, couldn’t explain the mathematical relation between the three magnetic fields that surround the moon—and Fat Scully gave me a C in gym. I was out of there.”
“You had a physics teacher named Milton?” I asked.
“Really, man. You’re too much.”