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  Sanibel Flats

  Randy Wayne White

  Its cool gulf breezes lured him from a life of danger. Its dark undercurrents threatened to destroy him.

  After ten years of living life on the edge, it was hard for Doc Ford to get that addiction to danger out of his system. But spending each day watching the sun melt into Dinkins Bay and the moon rise over the mangrove trees, cooking dinner for his beautiful neighbor, and dispensing advice to the locals over a cold beer lulled him into letting his guard down.

  Then Rafe Hollins appeared.

  How could he refuse his old friend's request-even if it would put him back on the firing line? Even if it would change forever the life he'd built here on Sanibel Island?

  Sanibel Flats

  Randy • Wayne • White

  ST. MARTIN S PRESS • NEW YORK

  For three friends: Dan Rogan, Lee Wayne, and Allan W. Eckert

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  The details of Pedro de Alvarado's conquest of the Maya are historically accurate, as are accounts of the modern-day butchery by Sendero Luminoso, the Shining Path. The Kache and Tlaxclen are fictional peoples and should not be confused with the Quiches and Tzutuhils of fact. In all other respects this novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The exception is Florida, which still exists.

  Whether or not we find what we are seeking Is idle, biologically speaking.

  —Edna St. Vincent Millay

  SANIBEL FLATS

  PROLOGUE

  CIUDAD DE MASAGUA, CENTRAL AMERICA

  JULY

  Ford crawled to the mouth of the tunnel that connected the convent to the park outside the Presidential Palace. It was after midnight and he was wearing no pants, but he'd had time to grab his shoes—Nike Air Soles—and now he put them on. Water dripped from the ceiling, down his nose, and the cramped walls scraped at his shoulders. The convent had been built in the late 1500s; the passageway in the 1600s, during the time of the Inquisition, when the nuns of Cloister La Conceptión sometimes broke their vows of solitude to save heretics condemned by the courts to die by fire.

  Heretics, Ford decided, were smaller in those days.

  A stone disc covered the entrance, and he pushed the stone away, looking through the bushes into the shadows of the park. Beyond the traffic of Avenida Las Americas, the windows of the Presidential Palace formed a citreous checkerboard above lighted statues and fountains. Police were everywhere, running down sidewalks, surrounding the convent. Many wore the white holster tassels of the elite guard. How in hell was he going to get past them?

  He lifted himself out of the hole, replaced the stone cover, and stepped out of the bushes to find an old man staring at him. The man was dressed in the traditional clothing of a Maya shiman, embroidered shirt and baggy, mauve-striped pants—not unusual for the Indios who came down from the mountains to trade, for they practiced their own religion. The man had lighted rows of candles in front of a large stone artifact. There was a censer in his hand made from a bean can, and from it came the incense smell of burning copal leaves. Frightened at seeing Ford crawl out of the ground, the old man jumped back, chanting in some guttural language, Tlaxclen Mayan, probably . . . pleading, judging from his vocal inflections, or asking some question. When Ford did not respond, the old man said in Spanish: "Can this be? You do not understand . . . you really do not understand the old tongue?" He looked bewildered and a little disappointed, too.

  The elite guard was moving in on the convent; Ford could see the silhouettes of policemen moving through the trees of the park. Standing naked, but speaking formally in Spanish, he said to the old man, "Señor, you have perhaps confused me with another. I am only an American, a turista. To prove it, allow me to buy your pants. As a souvenir."

  The old man was staring at the stone artifact, a gray Mayan stela, staring at the candles flickering in the late wind, not listening, saying "How can it be that Quetzalcoatl does not understand the language of his people? I have been kneeling here, praying that he would come to save us—instead, he wants to negotiate for my clothing. Do the gods never tire of their shitty tricks?" He turned to Ford, considering him intently now, adding "Perhaps I am wrong; perhaps you are not Quetzalcoatl. Yes, that is it! I can see that you have been cut ..."

  Ford looked where the old man was looking, hoping he wouldn't see blood.

  ". . . cut in the way of the Hebrews. And you are wearing glasses. And you did not come from the sky as the sun god surely would. No, you cannot be Quetzalcoatl. But your hair is blond and you came at the moment of my prayer. And on this night, near the end of the Calendar Round and the beginning of the Year of Seven Moons—"

  Ford interrupted. "I really do like those pants. They would make a very fine present. A nice souvenir. I will give you twenty—no, thirty. Thirty quetzals for your pants!"

  The old man stood, wobbling, troubled. He was very drunk, Ford realized. "You came from the earth—" He looked at the bushes in sudden realization. "No . . . that is the place of the old tunnel; the tunnel that connects the palace to the convent and the convent to the park. My people still speak of it, though the knowledge has been lost to others. You did not come from the earth, you came from the convent. Yes, I understand this thing now. A naked man in the convent! A bad omen!"

  The police were beginning to search the outside fringe of the park, the beams of their flashlights probing among the trees. Ford ducked as a funnel of light swept past him. "Señor, I will give you fifty quetzals for your pants. Have I mentioned that I am in a hurry?"

  Fifty quetzals were worth about thirty-five dollars, and, though it caught the old man's attention, he was skeptical. "And where do you carry this great fortune? Behind your ears?"

  Ford's hands went involuntarily to where his pockets should have been. "I can come back tonight and bring you the money." The old man still looked skeptical.

  "Or meet you in the morning. That would be better. Mercado Central, at the place where the women weave the mats and sack coffee beans. Fifty-five quetzals, I swear on my honor. " "I should take the word of a man who defiles nuns?" The man was already taking off his pants, resigned.

  "I was not with a nun. What do you take me for?"

  "Oh, do not tell me; do not lie. I am an old man who knows the way of people. I myself once lay with a missionary woman, an evangelica. Such a strange woman, but very lively in bed. Her eyelashes, she kept in a box on the table, and she made odd noises in her passion. This woman told me I had been born a second time, yet that year a certain insect came and ate my corn. Yes, most of the problems in my life have been caused by this creature which lives between my legs, so you need not lie to one such as me."

  Ford accepted the pants, saying "Now your knife. I must use your knife. Hurry, please."

  The old man handed over his bone-handled knife, but reluctantly. "Do not misunderstand. I wish to keep this creature. We have had many adventures and he refuses to grow old. Where is there a man who secretly does not covet such problems?"

  "You take me for a murderer, too?"

  "You do not have the look, it is true. You have the strange face of one who can be trusted, which makes me all the more suspicious. Who can tell in such a year!"

  As Ford cut the legs off the pants, the old man rambled on, explaining, saying this was the end of the Calendar Round, the fifty-two-year cycle, a time of great change in the Mayan calendar. It would bring many omens, many changes—some tragic, perhaps. Long ago in such a year, on a single night, the old man said, madness swept through Guatemala and Masagua. People ran into the streets screaming without reason; old women died
of fright. Men bashed their heads against walls, and thousands of people had gone insane at exactly the same time but in different parts of the land. On the very next day, earthquakes destroyed the cities.

  "It is because we have lost the old ceremony," the man said. "I was praying to the blond one, Quetzalcoatl, to return and show us the way. But on the summer solstice, for that is the proper time. " He took up a liter bottle of aguardiente, drank, drank again, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. "Is it possible that I am imagining this? Perhaps this is such a night; perhaps I have gone insane."

  The pants were now shorts. Ford put them on and began to run in place, trying to get a sweat going in the cool mountain night. "You have just sold your pantalones for a price twenty times what they are worth. You are not the crazy one."

  He left the old man sitting in baggy underwear among the candles and ran out of the park at an easy pace. When the police noticed him, he gave a bland wave and peered at his watch: a runner intent on his training. At every intersection, he checked his watch. He ran right past the Presidential Palace and the elite guard, confirming that, even in Central America, joggers had joined beggars and stray dogs as innocuous creatures of the streets. From a balcony on the third floor of the palace, a woman with waist-length black hair watched him, but turned away when Ford caught her eye. He kept running and did not look back; jogged straight to the American Embassy. Everything he owned was there, in crates, ready to be shipped to the United States. That would be his home, now that he had resigned.

  The next morning, Ford paid the old man at Mercado Central, then returned to the embassy to find a box delivered by courier. The box contained twenty thick blocks of U.S. $100 bills and the pants he had left in the palace the night before. There was also a short note. He was not surprised to find the pants; the money and the note were unexpected. The note was signed P.B. for Pilar Santana Fuentes Balserio, the young wife of Don Jorge Balserio, and it said that she would not be joining him, as planned.

  Ford rode in the cargo hold of a DC-3 to Miami that afternoon, sitting on the deck, his back braced against crates that held his books and specimens and microscopes; the things he still cared about. By morning he would be in Virgina for a week of debriefing. After that his life as a bureaucrat was done. He could forget about Masagua and try to forget about Pilar. He'd get a place on the water and do the work he'd always wanted to do. A simple life, that's what he wanted. Just a place to do his work and no more women. Not for a while. Not after the president's wife . . .

  He brought a Chevrolet pickup truck in D.C.; an old one with a pear-shaped cab, short bed, and new blue-black paint. He left with $1,500 cash in his money belt, receipts for three large separate bank deposits, and everything else he owned in back of the pickup beneath a tarp. He headed for the coast, then drove south, eating when he wanted and stopping at tide pools and estuaries to collect marine specimens. He slept outside when the weather was good; he ran each morning at sunrise. On the Outer Banks of North Carolina and in south Georgia, he found places that would be good to live, but he kept on going, crossing to the Florida Panhandle, stopping at several small towns to inquire about real estate, but ending up in Southwest Florida, as he somehow had known he would. He had grown up on this coast, yet there was no nostalgia involved in his decision—or so he told himself—for he was no less alone upon his return than he was when he had left eighteen years earlier. He wanted to buy a place, but learned of a house built on pilings right in the water— an old fish house inherited by some federal bureaucracy—that might be available on long-term lease to a marine biologist with the proper credentials or the right connections. The fish house was joined to Sanibel Island by a tide-bleached boardwalk, and there was a marina next door that sold fuel, block ice, and beer in quart bottles.

  It was not a difficult decision to make.

  He took possession of the stilt house in late August, sleeping on the floor while he concentrated on building the lab and office he wanted, stopping only to cook over the propane stove or talk with the marina s fishing guides or to go out collecting. Sometimes, late at night, or out on his new flats boat alone, he would think of Pilar . . . the memory electrodes keyed by an unexpected sound or fragrance, and into his mind would come gauzy images, as if etched by acid: the clean lines of her legs and hips . . . the way her head tilted in thought . . . the way she softened when surprised by his arrival, as if her aloofness was a guard to all but him. These stray remembrances were not unpleasant but he didn't allow them to linger, for they were meaningless now and uninvited. This, Ford realized finally, was the way it must feel to have once been in love.

  All marinas are more than a sum total of docks and property, bait wells, ships' stores, and receipts. They are communities; ephemeral colonies with personalities as varied as the individuals who form them. Gradually Ford was accepted into the marina community—Dinkin's Bay Marina, it was called—and, as months passed, he became more than just a member of that small society, he became one of its pillars. If a fisherman had a question about species identification, Ford and his library were available. If a guide had to limp back in after dark with an empty fish box and a broken water pump, there was beer and consoling conversation to be had at Ford's stilt house. In a relatively short time, Ford became the trusted dispenser of first aid, wisdom, reluctant medical diagnoses, and unwilling advice on everything from love to law to broken timing chains—all by saying little but listening much. His rapid climb to position in the community surprised no one more than Ford. He had always been a private person, a man who attracted people and valued his friends yet went his own way. But just as the marina s society had adjusted to him, Ford adjusted to his new role, his new life, doing his work each day and sometimes far into the night, accepting callers with the offer of cold beer and letting down his guard, slowly, slowly, for it was not easy after ten years of being necessarily suspicious and living a life of professional deceit.

  And just when it seemed he had finally adapted, Rafe Hollins called.

  ONE

  SANIBEL ISLAND, FLORIDA

  MAY

  Ford saw the vultures from a half mile off; noticed them wheeling over the island like leaves in a summer thermal, dozens of black shapes spiraling, and he thought, What in the hell has Rafe gotten himself into?

  He stood at the wheel of his skiff, traveling toward an island he hadn't tried to find since high school to meet a friend he'd seen only twice in the last eighteen years. He tapped the throttle and the skiff seemed to gather buoyancy as it gained speed, rising slightly as the bottom came up, a blur of sea grass and bronze sand at forty miles an hour. Ford leaned with the wheel and the skiff banked. There was the tidal rift—a green ribbon of water that crossed the shallows—and he dropped the skiff in, following the deeper water as if on a mountain road. After a quarter mile the rift thinned into a delta of old propeller scars. He touched the power trim and the outboard lifted with the whine of landing gear as he heeled the skiff, running for a time on its starboard chine. Ahead, fish and small stingrays panicked as if trapped beneath a slick of raw Plexiglas. Behind, nubs of turtle grass boiled in a marl cloud.

  Then the shoal: a sandbank that encircled the island like an atoll. Ford held tight as the skiff jumped the bank then settled itself on the other side. He looked immediately for the opening in the trees, found it, and turned hard into the shadows of the island, backing quickly on the throttle as the bottom fell away in shafts of amber light and mangrove trees interlocked to form a cavern over the tidal creek that was hardly wider than the eighteen-foot Permit flats skiff that now rolled on its own wake beneath him.

  Ford nudged the nose of the skiff onto a shell beach and killed the engine, then sat for a moment listening to the wash of waves, pleased that he had remembered the tricky cuts even though he hadn't made the run for all those years, thinking Maybe the intimacies of water and women are the only two things a man never really forgets. . . .

  He thought of Pilar momentarily, but then the vultures brought
his attention vectoring. He watched them circle overhead.

  The surge of pleasure faded.

  Where was Rafe?

  Rafe Hollins had called the previous morning; called three times before he finally caught Ford at the marina. Out of all the gin joints in all the world, Hollins had said, trying too hard to keep his tone loose and easy, saying he'd been fine, staying busy, and how'd Ford like living on Sanibel Island again, the old stomping grounds, huh? Boy, they'd had some times, and, yeah, the reason Ford hadn't been able to get in touch was he'd been out of the country and the telephone company disconnected his phone cause he moved around so much since the divorce there just wasn't any reason to pay the bill. "I was living on Sandy Key, but now I'm mostly out of town," Hollins had said. "Traveling's the only kind of life insurance I got, Doc. When I'm travelin', there's no chance of me killing my ex-wife and spending the rest of my life in Raiford. The kind of policy State Farm doesn't offer."

  The years had turned Hollins's voice gravelly, muted the Florida piney-woods twang, added something else Ford didn't recognize at first, an edge of desperation. In high school, they had been best friends: Rafe a left-handed passer and pitcher who threw bullets; Ford a mediocre linebacker and better catcher, the two of them cruising buddies. He had seen Hollins only twice after graduation: once while still in graduate school (he'd returned to Florida for a marine science workshop), then again three years ago in Central America, a coincidental meeting in San Jose, Costa Rica, that had shocked them both and should have turned into an all-night beer and talk session, but didn't. Hollins had been oddly distant, in a hurry, had to catch a plane. He never said why; Ford was in no position to ask. Hollins said he was looking for work outside the country. Ford gave him a few names, and that was that.