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  Captiva

  ( Doc Ford - 4 )

  Randy Wayne White

  Featuring government agent turned marine biologist Doc Ford, White's wicked, suspenseful tales of Florida's west coast take social concerns, offbeat characters, crackling prose and a vivid sense of place, and toss them together to produce stories that snap like a whip. In Captiva, Doc Ford finds himself caught between warring bands, as Florida's sports fishermen and commercial fishermen battle over a net ban due to go into effect soon. With friends on both sides, Doc prefers to stay neutral, but when the war escalates to arson and murder in his own backyard, he has no choice but to become involved. With the help of his ex-hippie friend, Tomlinson, and an extraordinary island woman named Hannah, he sets out to calm the waters - only to find that they are much deeper than he ever could have imagined.

  From Publishers Weekly

  White, who has always had the talent, moves firmly into the major leagues with his latest Doc Ford story (after Sanibel Flats) and its lavish panorama of cross-cultural and environmental issues played out passionately in south Florida. The Florida Keys uneasily contain rich pleasure seekers and subsistence-level fisherman; someplace in the turbulent middle, Doc, a biologist, and his existentialist buddy Tomlinson hang out. As a ban on net fishing engenders increasing debate, a man is blown apart when an explosion demolishes a jetty. The sultry voodoo-practicing widow soon has Doc and Tomlinson hopelessly spellbound; her host of admirers includes others with drug and land-development interests. By this point, the sweep of White's prose and the earnest intensity he brings to the ecological debate will likely blind readers to a story line with holes large enough for marlin to swim through. Tomlinson is fascinated by the socioeconomics of a small, insular key with nothing but fishing to support it, while Doc is more intrigued by the herbs the widow places in the hot tea they sip prior to bouts of strenuous lovemaking. The conclusion embraces some sinister business with drug smuggling and a minor miracle of modern medicine. While it isn't quite clear how White gets to drug cartels from the charred remains of a lazy brain-fried doper who liked hitting attractive, oversexed women, the whole weird trip, fueled by the author's thoroughly convincing re-creation of his chosen and much-loved world, is a blast.

  CAPTIVA

  Also by Randy Wayne White

  THE DOC FORD TRILOGY

  Sanibel Flats

  The Heat Islands

  The Man Who Invented Florida

  NONFICTION

  Batfishing in the Rainforest

  The author would like to thank Karen Bell, Captain Kim Gerz, Dr. Roy Crabtree, and Lieutenant Gary Beeson for kindly sharing their time and knowledge. I would also like to thank the many Floridians on both sides of the net ban controversy who, out of concern for the fishery, generously provided information and opinions on this complex issue. Any factual errors or misrepresentations of fact are entirely the fault of the author. Finally, I would like to thank my friends Glenn Miller and Susan Beckman for dutifully reading the early drafts.

  For women who burn brightly and cast a powerful wake: Debra Jane, Mother Marie, Jayma Gillaspie, Sherry Lavender, Katy Hummel, Renee Wayne Golden, Rilla Kay White, Lorian Hemingway, Phyllis Wells, Gigi Cannella, Debbie Flynn, Jennifer Clements, Deb Votaw, Cheryl Moore, Gloria Osburn, Chris Allman, Jacquie Meister, Janet Henneberry, Sandra McNalley, the Wilson sisters—Georgia, Jewel, Delia Sue, JoAnn, Johnsie, and Judy—and for Kimberly Gerz, who left a comet's trail.

  Captivity is Consciousness— So's Liberty.

  —EMILY DICKINSON

  What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage. . . .

  —EZRA POUND

  Sanibel and Captiva Islands exist, but they are used fictitiously in this novel. The Smith sisters, Hannah and Sarah, are taken from Florida history and, the author hopes, have been accurately portrayed. Hannah Smith of Sulphur Wells, however, is a fictional character, although her hereditary characteristics—a hellish independence, among them—are not uncommon among women throughout the South. In all other respects, this book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  CAPTIVA

  Chapter 1

  The reason I was awake at four a.m. when the bomb that killed Jimmy Darroux exploded was that my friend Tomlinson and I were on the dock taking turns squinting through a telescope, inviting—or so said Tomlinson—"ocular confirmation" that telepathic messages he believed he had received were, indeed, being transmitted by space creatures.

  "It's loaded with them out there," he told me. "Sentient beings? For sure. Real living souls who generate very heavy vibes. They're aware a few of us earthlings are tuned in. Seriously; I shit you not. Couple of weeks ago, I just flashed on it. The whole scene. Trust me. They're definitely out there."

  I thought: So are you, Tomlinson. So are you.

  But I didn't swing out of bed on a cold January morning in the hope of contacting Tomlinson's deep-space kindred. He's a believer; I'm not. However, one of my journals promised there was an interesting planetary oddity to be seen in the pre-dawn sky. Venus was in apogee and, over the period of a few days, would seem to pass in front of Jupiter. I'm not an astronomer. It's a sometimes hobby. Over the years, I've acquired a working knowledge of the night sky because my poor sense of direction has gotten me lost often enough to know that stars are handy navigational aids—that, plus it makes me uneasy to see something over and over again that can't be identified. Which is why I've learned enough waypost constellations to keep me comfortable. So, as long as Tomlinson was badgering me to break out the telescope, I decided the best time to do it was when there was something interesting to see. Tomlinson could look all he wanted for signals from space. I'd look at Jupiter and Venus.

  I awoke a few minutes until three, just before my alarm clock clattered. First thing I did was look across the bay to make sure Tomlinson was awake. Lights were on aboard the thirty-five-foot Morgan sloop that is his home, the portholes creating lemon-pale conduits in the darkness. The guy was up, probably meditating, burning incense, drinking green tea, no telling what else. I lit the propane ship's stove, listening to Radio Habana on the portable shortwave—my thought patterns switching comfortably into Spanish—as I dressed in chino pants and a soft sailcloth shirt. When the coffee was ready, I poured a mug and took it outside. The sky was clear: glittering stars suspended from a purple macrodome. Checked the weather station on the outside wall and found the barometer steady, temperature 49 degrees—cold for the southwest coast of Florida, even in January. Got a bomber jacket from one of the storage lockers and checked my watch: 3:13 a.m.

  Later, I would relay some of those details to the police detective who investigated Jimmy Darroux's death.

  There is a weight to the early-morning hours; a palpable density that's a little like being underwater. You can feel the press of it on your shoulders, the pressure of it in your inner ear. The resonance of one's own heartbeat is the test of silence—a fragile, fragile sound. I went through the list of my morning chores: check the fish tank, clean the filters, check the complicated pulley system I use to moor my boats . . . confirm that some late-night visitor hadn't swiped an engine or the onboard electronics. Lately, a lot of that had been going on up and down the Florida coast. Everything was in order, but I moved more methodically than usual, slowed by the weight of the hour. Then poured another mug of coffee, hunkered down on the porch and listened to the night noises, waiting for Tomlinson.

  I live in a remodeled fish storage shack in Dinkin's Bay, Sanibel Island. The shack is built over the water on pilings, so I could hear the draw of tidal current, a mountain stream sound . . . the
knuckle pop of pistol shrimp . . . the bee-wah croak of catfish. The lower level of the house is dockage, the upper level is wooden platform. Two single-room cottages sit at the center of the platform, both under the same tin roof. One of the cottages is home, the other I've converted into a lab. The lab is necessary because I run a small company, Sanibel Biological Supply, selling marine specimens, alive or preserved, to schools and research firms around the country. It's a good place for a biologist to live and work, particularly when the biologist is a bachelor who likes living alone but who occasionally wants company. Dinkin's Bay Marina, located down the mangrove shore, provides that when I want it, just as the marina store provides staples such as chips and conch salad and cold beer in quart bottles.

  From across the bay, I heard the ratchet cough of an outboard too cold to start on the first pull. After a couple of more tries, I heard Tomlinson's muted voice: "Japanese scum!" Then the engine caught, and a few minutes later, he was tying his Zodiac up at my dock, saying: "Um-m-m, coffee. I smell coffee ... or yeah, maybe a beer would be good. Something light, a breakfast beer. Maybe loosen up the receptors, make it easier to communicate." He climbed barefooted up to the main platform, combing fingers through scraggly blond hair, tugging at his beard, intense, focused, ready to communicate with the universe. As always, he smelled of Patchouli, the old hippie perfume.

  I said, "Interesting choice of clothing, Tomlinson."

  "Got to look sharp—that's what I always say. Look sharp, feel sharp."

  "The serape makes sense. Nice Clint Eastwood touch. But a sarong? Isn't it a little cold to be wearing a sarong?" With his long bony legs showing, the man resembled a stork.

  "Sah-rong" he said, correcting my pronunciation. "Night like this, my body wants to breathe. Teach Mr. Happy the world's not always a warm and cheery place. Living in Florida has spoiled the both of us."

  "Ah."

  "Self-deprivation is a forgotten path to spiritual awakening. The Buddha didn't live naked in the desert just for laughs."

  "Nothing funny about that," I said.

  "Pain purifies."

  "Yeah, well. . ."

  He was trying to hold down his billowing skirt. "Shit! That wind comes blowing right up the prune whistle, huh?"

  "If you're cold, I've got some sweatpants you can wear."

  "Goddamn right I'm cold. Take a whiz, I'd have to goose myself and grab Mr. Happy when he jumped out." He was pulling open the screen door, headed into the house. "You want a beer too?"

  "I'll stick with coffee."

  "Just in case, I'll bring a couple." Meaning he would drink them both.

  As I told the detective (his name was Jackson), we heard a boat enter the bay sometime between three-thirty and quarter to four. There was no moon, just a haze of stars, but I could tell it was a commercial netter's boat by the sound. Net boats are usually open boats, twenty to twenty-four feet long, and their engines are mounted near the bow through a forward well. Because of the well, a net boat can run forty miles an hour in nine inches of water and turn as if on a spindle, but the prop augers a lot of air. The cavitation noise is distinctive.

  Tomlinson and I noticed it at the same time, a bumblebee whine at the mouth of the bay two miles away. "This time of year," Tomlinson said, "those people don't sleep at all. The netters." He had his eye pressed to the telescope, looking and talking at the same time. "They got what? Five months left? Six?"

  "The net ban goes into effect in July. After that, they're out of business."

  "Yeah," he said. "Permanently. People wonder why they're desperate? Fish all day, all night, trying to bale all the mullet they can before the clock runs out. Babies to feed, mortgage payments to make. Shit. Out there alone in a boat, all that on their shoulders."

  I said, "You voted for the net ban. The guilt starting to get to you?"

  He looked up from the telescope as if mildly surprised. "I did? Jesus, I guess I did. Oh man. . . . That's exactly why I hate politics. Always having to make decisions. But they were wiping out all the fish, and fish can't vote. You're the one told me that."

  It was true, but had I told him that? I couldn't remember—although lately, it seemed, I'd been saying and doing more small dumb things than usual. "What I meant was, it's the migrant netters who come down and strip the place bare. The ones from North Florida, Georgia, Texas; all over. They come down for December and January, take the fish, dump their garbage, and leave."

  "The mullet roe season," he said. "That's right, I remember now. They sell the fish eggs to the . . . Taiwanese."

  "Taiwanese. Filipinos. The Japanese. They dry it, consider it a delicacy. Or can the milt."

  "Take the seed stock and the fish can't reproduce. Exactly."

  Which was also true. But he was missing the point—rare for Tomlinson because the man has a first-rate intellect. Granted, he's eccentric, often bizarre. As a late-sixties drug prophet, his mind sometimes takes odd and quirky turns, though it's impossible to say whether it's through enlightenment, as he claims, or because he has done serious chemical damage to the neural pathways and delicate synapse junctions of his brain. Tomlinson's genius is nonlinear, empathic, able to make intuitive leaps from illogical cause to logical effect. There are times that 1 don't take Tomlinson too seriously, but neither do I discount anything he says. That's not true of the general cast of New Age mystics, crystal worshipers, alien advocates, astrology goofs, macrobiotic back-to-the-earthers, and their politically correct brethren. If one of them told me they had been communicating with extraterrestrials, I would nod, smile pleasantly, then angle for the door. But when Tomlinson says it, you think: Well . . . probably not, but . . . maybe. He possesses a kind of stray dog purity that is without ego or malice. I have never met anyone anywhere who didn't like and trust Tomlinson.

  "He must have struck fish," I said. The sound of the boat had traced the western bank of Dinkin's Bay . . . kicked up mud at the shallow Auger Hole entrance—I could hear it—and grown louder as it neared the marina, then stopped abruptly. The mullet fisherman had dumped his net, probably, and was now hauling it in.

  "Yeah," Tomlinson said. "Or maybe she did. I see women working right along, out there no matter what the weather. White rubber boots and plastic rain jackets, picking fish all by themselves. Couple of 'em." Tomlinson had begun to tinker with the telescope again, scanning through the viewfinder. We'd already taken a good long look at Venus. It appeared as a tiny moon in crescent phase, gold-tinged by the reflected light of its own yellow clouds. Jupiter was an ice-bright globe, its four visible moons suspended around it. I was satisfied. Felt it was worth getting up at three A.M. because looking through a telescope creates, in time, a pleasant converse perspective. You naturally imagine what it is like to be seen from space: a milk-blue planet, the peninsula of Florida dangling into the sea, the Gulf Coast, a sleeping island, the clustered lights of Sanibel and Captiva, clustered stars and infinity beyond.

  I stood shifting from one leg to the other, trying to stay warm now that Tomlinson was free-ranging the Celestron. To the west, the marina was still. Occasionally, a refrigerator generator would kick in or the sump of a bilge pump. I could hear the desert-wind baritone of surf on the Gulf side. The only other noises were the squawk of night herons and, once, the cat scream of raccoons. In another couple of hours, the fishing guides would be stirring, getting their skiffs ready for work. But now the docks were deserted. In the harbor's deep-water slippage, the trawlers and cruisers and doughty houseboats were as dark and motionless as a charcoal sketch. People aboard were buttoned in tight against the January cold. At the shore docks, near the gas pumps and bait tanks, smaller boats—the Makos, Aquasports, Hydrasports, Lake & Bays, Boston Whalers, and Mavericks— were tied incrementally and in a line, like horses.

  My eyes swept past . . . stopped . . . and swept back again. I had seen something on the docks. What. . . ? For an instant, just an instant, an image lingered—the suggestion of a human figure hunched down, moving past the bait tanks.

 
; "Far . . . out," whispered Tomlinson. "Hey—I think I've got it!" He was folded over the telescope, holding his hair back in a ponytail. "Yes ... a signal of some sort . . . definitely a signal. Flashing light . . . getting . . . getting . . . brighter." He stood, motioning with his bony hands. "Take a look, Doc. I think my space buddies are sending us their regards."

  I looked once more at the docks . . . saw nothing.

  "They're waiting."

  I removed my glasses, stepped to the telescope, and leaned to see a pulsing dot move across the optic disc and gradually disappear. I adjusted the focus, disengaged the clock drive, moved the scope's tube on its axis, and found the dot again. As I followed the light, I listened to Tomlinson's running commentary. One night, in the cockpit of his boat, he had been in deep meditation, just him and the stars. A meteorite—a comet, he called it—had swept down out of the sky and the shock of its appearance, its brilliance, had vaulted him through into another dimension of awareness.

  "An awakening is often catalyzed by a shock or a surprise," he explained. "In the fifth century, a simple monk gained enlightenment and became Buddha after he stepped on the tail of a very vicious dog."

  The comet, Tomlinson said, had drawn his consciousness outward, beyond the confines of earth. All that night he sat in meditation, allowing his brain waves to probe the stars. It was cold out there, he said. He sensed the infinite chill of nothingness, the black abyss of space.

  "It was a serious downer, man; a very heavy mojo. I mean, scary. That emptiness, it was like pulling me apart, molecule by molecule. Diluting me. You know how the beam of a flashlight diffuses over distance? Like that. But I kept going, fighting the panic."