Deep Water Blues

by Fred Waitzkin

  When Bobby decided Rasta should share the bar profits with Hannah, she felt humiliated and tried to talk him out of it. But Rasta only shrugged. Empty promises had become the language of this place.

  After two days of potluck dinners, fishermen stopped going to the mammoth outdoor bar. Bobby met the boats at the dock and invited them to the clubhouse for dinner. Bring your whole crew. Bobby’s rekindled joie de vivre spiced his culinary masterpieces. Most nights, there weren’t more than three or four guys sitting on Dennis’s costly benches looking at their feet.

  Bobby was winning. He stayed in the club a couple of hours after Hannah left, cleaning up, shaking hands, holding court about the future with a few night owls.

  When he arrived back at the house on the hill, it was usually past midnight and he piled into bed, inviting Marlin to join him and Hannah. She found him greatly distracted, couldn’t listen to a word she said. He was totally focused on the marina war.

  Bobby could sense Dennis. He knew the storm was coming, but from what direction? He’d survived many storms.

  ~

  There was the morning he told her Rasta was considering leaving the island, going back to Nassau to live in the big house with his family. Bobby insisted they didn’t need him anymore. She could run the bar. They’d be fine.

  Hannah was jolted. Anything but fine. Rasta gave color and depth to the lonely sand-swept place. How long could she remain on the island acting the role of Bobby’s virgin bride?

  Hannah needed to talk to Bobby, there were things he didn’t know about her, but he insisted he had to get down to the dock. He was trying to starve Dennis out. He laughed. “I’ll drive him away with food.”

  Bobby was loved by the fishermen who cruised 400 miles to troll the corner and dine at Sumner Point. He tried to explain this to her while he quickly got dressed. He pulled on his shorts, mentioned that Rasta had stolen from him when they were in Europe, pocketed the fuel money. “I have to let him go.”

  She put her hands to her ears, shook her head, No, no, no.

  “Got to go. We’ll talk later.”

  Hannah rushed out of the room wearing her red slip. She came back in a minute holding something in her hand. She was shaking like a leaf.

  “I was a child myself,” she managed. “I was crazy. I’m crazy now. Why does he have to go, Bobby? You love him.”

  Bobby tied his laces, looking past her. Who would pump the fuel?

  Don’t tell him now, Hannah. Later on. Some other day.

  Her face was twisted horribly. It was bursting out of her like the baby girl she was guarding so closely. Her one true thing.

  Hannah held the picture of a baby in her hand.

  But the boats were waiting to head offshore. Who would pump the fuel?

  “She was so perfect. She loved me. No one ever loved me like that tiny girl.”

  “What are you telling me? Why are you telling me this now?”

  “I was a baby myself. I didn’t know what to do with her.” Hannah’s chest was caved in with grief like an arthritic old woman.

  Bobby shivered at the sight. The boats were waiting at the fuel dock.

  Later that night, when he came home, she was sitting at the wooden table in her red slip from the morning, drinking wine. There were four small pictures of her baby daughter laid out in front of her. Bobby had had no idea his young wife had been a mother, had nursed a baby with her adolescent breasts. He couldn’t put his arms around this news. He couldn’t have been more surprised to learn she’d once been a terrorist. Bobby wasn’t sure if he was devastated by the news or offered a brand-new chance.

  Bobby coaxed her into the bedroom. He talked to her quietly about the marina. She shook her head, No. Not interested. He pulled off her slip, but she covered her breasts with her hands. Why, Hannah? Why? After a while, he made love to her, and her face gathered into such a deep sadness it seemed to embrace all of the tragedies on this island before and what was yet to come. Hannah cried while he held her, her sadness deepened further and was something he couldn’t touch with all of his charm and optimism. It was beyond him. That’s when he truly began to love her.

  Part VIII

  Two weeks later.

  Rasta decided not to take his things back to Nassau—he wanted to start fresh. The day before he left the island, he hitched his trailer onto his battered jeep without a reverse gear and pulled his prized possessions to the two-room shack in town Biggy shared with his mother and two of his sisters. He brought Biggy his three beat-up ATVs, his TV, and his surround sound. Biggy was dumbstruck. He’d never owned such treasures before.

  Then Rasta drove the jeep and empty trailer to Rosie’s little farm, just north of the cemetery. He gave Rosie a hug and left her the jeep and trailer, which he knew would be useful hauling feed for the animals. Rosie drove him back to the marina and then waited to give Flo a lift home.

  That evening, Rasta and Biggy were sitting on the bench talking for the last time.

  “Listen here,” Rasta said to his friend, “I had little shares in this place, you know … but so did lots of folk.”

  Night was falling all over the marina, and Rasta could barely make out the rock cliff across the lagoon where he and Bobby were going to build their luxury hotel. He shook his head trying to make sense of the inexplicable.

  “Bobby let debts get him … Spendin money everywhere. Promisin this one, that one. He sellin part of the marina to different people, fifteen people. Promisin Dennis. Promisin, promisin, you know. Every time he can’t pay electric, he promise a part to somebody. And then he make a big promise. He sign a paper. What it matter? Only a paper. Bobby sign anything.”

  They sat quietly for minutes watching a few sharks cruise listlessly between the pilings. Rasta was leaving the next morning on a twenty-four-foot sailboat brought to the island three days earlier by two friends from Nassau. His friends were big men with dreads like him.

  “I put my friends in one of the empty cottages on the beach. Didn’t think why not—been no renters for months. But Bobby believe I bring fellas here to hurt him. Can you imagin?”

  “I tell em, ‘Bobby, you like my brotha. I’ll never do nuthin to hurt you. Never in my life. You a part of me. You teach me.’ But Bobby don’t lisin anymore. He gone to anotha place.”

  After a pause.

  “Bobby turn off all the lights in the house, lock hisself up.”

  Rasta pointed up the hill from the docks toward Bobby’s blackened house.

  “They hidin, I tell you.”

  “Cause of the dog?”

  “Marlin made him crazy.”

  “Can’t understan why Dennis do such a thing to Bobby dog.”

  “Listen here, Biggy. I was right there. Fellas got drunk and put Marlin on top of the new bar. Everyone laughin. And you know, Dennis don’t like a dog. He pick up a board and strike Marlin on the head. Marlin fall to the ground, jus whimperin. And Dennis, he pick up a heavy stone and smash him again in the head. Was a gruesome sight. He kick the dog, try to kill Marlin. Dennis gonna throw him off the dock, was when I come over . . . Marlin was Bobby best friend.”

  “No, you his best friend, Rasta. Built this place.”

  “Yeah, but um Marlin was Bobby best friend.”

  “Better than you?”

  “Oh yeah. I know the kind of love Bobby have for animals. You know, animals would never betray him. You understan what I sayin? In Bobby life, betrayal be always in the air. He always fightin it. Always makin it happen.”

  After another pause.

  “I carry Marlin up the hill to Bobby who start cryin. Bringing blankets and ice. Holdin Marlin in his arm. Both of them cryin. She love that dog too, tryin to understan things here in this place. Bobby carin for Marlin like mother of a dyin baby.”

  “I don’t see Bobby for days after that. Get to the point where I stop going down to th
e marina. I had my stuff down there. Bobby was rentin my vehicles, keeping the money for hisself. Mostly I stayin in my bed. I talk to my sister on the phone. She say, ‘Rasta, don’t stay in that room anymore. Go down there, tell Bobby how you feel.’ So I went down the marina. He was carvin outside the office under the almond tree. Tears of rage come into my eyes. I say to him, ‘Bobby, I don’t like how you treatin me like an outsider. You pushin me outta here. That what you want?’

  “While I talkin to him, Bobby has his shades on and he carving a skull, a beautiful skull. I could see tears coming down from under his shades and he say, ‘My best friend died last week. And my other friend went against me.’ ”

  ~

  Three days later.

  Hannah sat up in bed at the sound of one of the dogs retching. “Go back to sleep,” Bobby said without opening his eyes. It wasn’t unusual for one of their dogs to vomit on the worn rug. But she recognized Cisco’s whimpering and couldn’t sleep. After a while she got out of bed and went into the living room. The dogs were scattered here and there breathing deeply. Cisco smelled of vomit and shit. Hannah sat on the floor and he put his head into her hand, looked up at her gratefully.

  Soon after dawn Bobby was up and dressed, heading for the marina. He wasn’t concerned about Cisco. His dogs were voracious eaters. “Get him a bucket of water. So he can flush it through. Probably ate some old bait on the dock.”

  Bobby was now running the whole operation himself. He was hustling from the fuel dock to the office, catching dock lines when the boats came in after fishing, running back to the kitchen. He needed Flo to make salad and keep the kitchen straight, but she was always anxious to get home to her little girl. Flo was in another world. Bobby needed to find someone to replace her, but there wasn’t time to look.

  Cisco was wobbly all day and by the time Bobby came back after dinner he couldn’t stand up. The other three dogs were walking around as if they were drunk and there was bloody diarrhea all over the floor. Mixed into the mess were chewed-up plastic bags. Hannah was moving from one dog to the next, petting, hugging. They were all so sick. Hannah had pots of water set out around the room but none of the dogs were drinking.

  One of the homes on the beach was owned by a vet who was off the island. Bobby tried to reach him in Fort Lauderdale, but there was no answer.

  He drove his jeep to the tiny island clinic. The block building was dark and locked up. A nurse visited Rum Cay one weekend a month, but a note on the door said she wasn’t returning to the island for another three weeks.

  Bobby was trying to hold it together. He’d lost Marlin, and now Marlin’s babies were all sick, mortally sick. They were his family. Plastic bags. Why plastic bags?

  Bobby broke a window at the clinic, looked around inside with his Maglite. He found a cardboard box filled with saline bags and IV hook-ups. He grabbed the stuff and drove back to his house.

  All four Labs were lying on the ground, panting and feverish. Blood was coming from their asses and black tar was vomiting from their mouths. The place was rank with mortal disease. Bobby quickly fashioned IV hook-ups from broomsticks and scrap lumber. He’d jury-rigged IV drips before when there was an accident or illness and no doctor or nurse on the island. He knew that each of the saline bags would last about eight hours.

  “Bobby, I took rotten vegetables out of the refrigerator. Maybe I left them on the counter.”

  He shook his head dismissively, began operating like a machine. He was like this whenever an accident occurred in the marina and he needed to stitch up an arm or a belly, or he had to make preparations for a category four hurricane closing on the island. At such times he shifted into another gear and did the work, grim though it might be. He directed his wife to comfort their dogs, coax them to sip water.

  He fell into bed a few hours before dawn. Bobby had a marina filled with boats and guests. He needed to push the dogs from his mind, smile, and remain optimistic around his customers.

  For the next two days, the dogs held their own. Cisco even started walking again and the others were sipping a little water. Hannah cared for them almost without taking a break. Bobby worked the marina, promising the world while he served them dessert.

  When Bobby woke the morning of the fourth day, Hannah was holding Cisco in her arms, crying, and rocking mournfully. The big Lab was dead.

  “I left their food outside in bowls rotting in the sun.” She spit out the words like poison.

  “I killed them, Bobby.”

  Hannah’s despair spilled all over and had no quarter. She was trapped in a loop—the spoiled vegetables on the counter, the dog food rotting in the sun.

  “You didn’t kill anything. Stop it.”

  Hannah couldn’t stop. She’d poisoned her dogs. Gave away her baby daughter.

  “You didn’t do this. Stop writing your fucking book.”

  Bobby’s own grief was now sheared by rage. He knew, or thought he knew.

  Still, he tried to restrain himself. His marina was crowded with boats. The dreams of his father, from the day he’d discovered this place, had become Bobby’s dreams.

  By the middle of the afternoon, two of the other Labs were dead and the fourth was just barely alive. Bobby was on the phone with the vet from Fort Lauderdale. He carefully explained what needed to be done.

  “Yeah, I can do it,” he said.

  Bobby carried Cisco to Rasta’s house across the yard. He turned on the naked overhead bulb and then dragged inside a worktable from outside that he occasionally used for sculpting coral. He placed Cisco on the table, spread his legs and cut him down the middle. Evening mosquitoes quickly settled all over Bobby’s arms and face while Bobby did the careful work. He cut away Cisco’s liver, then his kidneys, his heart, and his stomach. Bobby placed each of the organs, in a separate plastic bag, brushed aside flies and mosquitoes before sealing the bag. The vet explained that none of these body parts could be frozen or it would make the lab work more difficult and maybe even impossible. Bobby put the plastic bags in their refrigerator. The following morning, they were flown off the island.

  It was three days before the vet called back to say there were traces of chopped meat in Cisco’s stomach along with a cocktail of difethialone and zinc phosphide—enough poison to kill twenty dogs.

  Bobby was out the door before Hannah could make sense of it.

  No more reflecting or nudging. Bobby went to the back of his house and climbed onto his old excavator, snapped on the powerful headlights. He began steaming down the hill from his property and then headed north on the beach road. If he happened to see Dennis out walking, he’d run him down, then run back and forth across his fat belly. He was thinking this, hoping for the chance while he barreled the big screaming machine several miles toward the north end of the beach. Bobby was going to end it. He wasn’t sure how yet. Tonight. He wasn’t thinking about tomorrow or the guests at the marina or fueling the fishing boats. Just to kill that fat piece of shit and end it.

  ~

  Dennis owned a palace on the beach, ten thousand square feet of nouveau riche grandeur lit up with banks of floodlights like a small stadium. When Bobby pulled into the driveway, he was center stage. Dennis’s Land Rover wasn’t in the driveway but beside the front door, and framed on both sides by ornate marble pillars, was a shiny red all-terrain Honda. Bobby lowered the bucket of the excavator and piled into the vehicle and then he flipped it over and smacked into it a couple of more times with the teeth of the bucket. Then he aimed his bucket at Dennis’s front door and busted it open, and then he knocked over one of the pillars. It felt like punching Dennis in the gut. No one came out of the house. But several of Dennis’s workers who lived in quarters behind the guesthouse came out to investigate. They watched a lunatic at work and knew not to try to stop him.

  Bobby looked around, frustrated. He wanted to kill Dennis with his hands. Most likely Dennis was at the marina on his b
oat or sitting at his bar with a few cronies. Bobby again lowered the bucket of the excavator and began digging a crosshatch of trenches into Dennis’s driveway. When he’d made it impassable, he drove off into the night.

  ~

  Soon as Dennis got a phone call at the marina about Bobby’s mayhem, he broke into a wide smile—that’s what his men recalled, because Dennis rarely smiled, fully smiled. It must have felt as though he had walked through a gate to the promised country. For a long while he’d been sleepwalking, stumbling ahead, but no more. Bobby had been winning the slow game. Bobby had given Dennis the gift he’d been waiting for.

  “Bobby’s gone crazy,” Dennis said to a small crowd gathered around the stern of his boat. “He’s a menace to this island. We have to get Bobby. Get him tonight. Before he does something else.”

  Within fifteen minutes the police sergeant, the only cop on the island, was standing behind Dennis’s boat, along with a posse of four men from town. “Bobby’s lost his mind,” Dennis said to them. “Tried to kill my workers with a backhoe. Now we have to catch him or do whatever’s necessary.”

  The police sergeant was wearing a bulletproof vest and carrying a rifle. Four other men were holding baseball bats.

  There were crews and owners from other boats standing around, feeling the peril of the night. Rumors were spreading through the marina. Bobby had gone mad. The police sergeant got on the VHF radio and stuttered the words, “Bobby Little wanted dead or alive.”

  Even Mike came out of his decaying sailboat to listen and watch. There had never been such a scene like this on the dock—a hunting party for Bobby Little, who was the creator and benevolent if flawed king of the land. It was the first time Mike had been seen on the dock in months. He was pale and gaunt from no sun and living on rice and little else. He was taking in the moment, perhaps taking notes for his novel. Maybe he’d intuited this story line, or already written a version but from knowing him a little I suspect the pace of the story had become unattractive to Mike. There was way too much plot coming at him, plot snuffing out all gradation and reflection. Mike was an author who lingered on the changing nuance of a smile. I suspect the vulgarity of the night, the baseball bats, the crowing of Dennis, was terribly unsettling. After five or ten minutes, Mike nodded at no one in particular and ducked back below.