Salt River Page 5

  He swung the computer around for me to see. It was video of beach carnage shot months ago during the worst of the algae bloom. A dead false killer whale lay amid piles of bloated fish. The YouTube caption urged viewers to donate to a local conservation group to “Fight Big Sugar” and pollution from Lake Okeechobee.

  “Sanibel hauled three hundred tons of dead fish off the beach,” I reminded Mack. “Water quality still isn’t great. And it’s not like it didn’t happen—you know how fast people forget.”

  The man’s face reddened. “Right, mate. But it’s not happening now, and this goddamn lie was posted today. That’s my point. Silly fools don’t realize that if businesses like mine go broke, who’s gonna fund them and their damn staff? They’re pissing on the bankbook in their own bloody nest.”

  On the laptop screen’s search window, I noticed an oddity. Mack had been researching gambling laws in New Zealand, as well as the culture of the indigenous people there—the Māori Tribe.

  “Are you thinking about selling out?” I asked.

  He seemed not to hear. “Cheeky do-gooder bastards,” he fumed. “We’ve never asked the media to lie—tourists aren’t stupid. Pull a trick like that, they’d never come back. Every business owner on the islands understands that. But why do these idiots beg for money by publishing this crap when the beaches are clean and the fishing’s good again?” He turned the computer his way and looked up. “Fishing is good again, isn’t it? Have you done a flyby lately?”

  “Can’t,” I said, “my plane’s down for repairs. But I’m taking my net boat out around sunset, and I’ll do a drag for forage fish.”

  Mack’s reaction asked Huh?

  “Forage fish—small stuff that bigger fish eat,” I said. “Menhaden, ballyhoo, pinfish, mullet. Without them, the whole fishing pyramid collapses. It’s a lot better than it was, I can tell you that much.”

  He seemed satisfied, then motioned with the cigar. “Got a minute? I want to show you something else. Between us, okay?”

  I followed him through the fish market outside, then into his private office. After a peek out the door, he locked it and took a seat at his desk. “What do you know about gaming casinos?”

  Casinos? Maybe he really was thinking about selling the marina. “They’re smoky,” I said. “And it’s gambling, not gaming. Using a sham name doesn’t make it less of a dirty business. You’re thinking about opening a casino? Mack, that’s just nuts.”

  “I thought you’d be more open-minded,” he replied patiently. “Doc”—he chewed at his cigar for a moment—“there’s a lot you don’t know about me. Well, let’s face it, everyone at this marina has their little secrets.”

  His smile suggested he knew things about me that were best not shared.

  I didn’t doubt it. And I knew a lot more about Mack than the man realized. He hadn’t made his money in the goldfields of Australia. He’d left Tasmania, where he was wanted for assault, racketeering, and running an illegal carnival show. Mack hadn’t migrated to Florida, he’d fled.

  “We’re all human,” I responded amiably.

  “You’re bloody right about that, mate,” he chuckled. “I’m going to tell you something that only two of my girlfriends know. Have a look at this.” He reached behind him and placed a carved wooden spear on the desk. The thing was beautiful. It was glossy amber with intricate designs etched into the knob and along the shaft. “This is considered to be a power totem in New Zealand,” he said, lowering his voice. “Handed down by kings.”

  I waited for him to nod permission before taking the spear into my hands. “From the Māori Tribe?”

  “My ancient ancestors,” Mack said.

  “Your what?”

  The man seemed to puff up, shoulders back, in his chair. “That’s right—I’m part indigenous Pacific Islander. You’re a scientist, maybe you can tell me. Does that mean, legally speaking, I might also be considered a Native American? I’m a legal citizen of this country, after all, and people did migrate here from the Pacific. There was a show about it on the Travel Channel.”

  I started to laugh. Couldn’t help myself. “Geezus, Mack, I get it now. A gambling casino like the Seminole and Miccosukee tribes run in the Glades. How long has it been since you got your DNA test back? A few days? I told you those damn things would be nothing but trouble.”

  My friend, offended, took the spear from my hands. “That’s a shitty thing to say. I’ve always suspected I’m part Māori. In my heart.” He banged his chest with his fist. “Where it counts. It’s something a Caucasian wouldn’t understand. The DNA thing only confirms what I’ve always known—legally speaking.”

  “Take it easy,” I said. “What percentage Māori? Look in the mirror, it can’t be much.”

  Mack turned as if to spit into the trash can. “Whiskey is still whiskey no matter the proof. I thought you’d be better informed. There are studies that prove that Pacific Islanders share some of the same DNA as tribes in the Americas. Marion”—his tone becoming confidential—“this could be a bloody gold mine. I’ve done some checking. The New Zealand government doesn’t give our people a break when it comes to opening a casino. But in the U.S., a few of our native tribes are getting rich.”

  Our people, our tribes? It took some effort to compose myself.

  “What are we talking about, less than four percent Māori? I don’t know how it works, but Tomlinson might. We’ve got some Miccosukee friends who I can ask. The gambling business, though, you don’t really want any part of that.”

  “I’m two point five percent,” Mack conceded, and some of the air went out of him. “I know . . . it was just an idea. This red tide mess has really got me down. And so has battling to get permits to fix up cottages I own, not some bastard with a clipboard. Even the way they are, the rooms are nice enough we could open tomorrow if they’d let me change the sign and wire the place for internet. Maddening crap, and it never seems to end. Makes me want to pull up stakes and run sometimes. You ever feel like that?”

  No, not lately, but I played along. “Sure. Who doesn’t?”

  “Guess you’re right,” Mack mused. He eyed the wooden power totem, lofted it briefly like a spear. “Nice, huh? Since I was a kid, I’ve wanted one of these. We lived near a tribal area, North Auckland. They performed for the tourists. At night sometimes, particularly when there’s a storm, I can still hear their drums pounding in my ribs. Makes me want to strip down to my shorts and hunt by the light of the moon. I’ve always been that way—a Māori in my heart. A hunter. So how the hell did I end up a fat old man behind a cash register?”

  I waited while he drifted off for a few seconds, stroking the wooden totem.

  “Doc?”

  “Yeah, Mack.”

  “Between us, I bought this damn thing on eBay,” he said. Wincing, he placed the totem on the desk. “It’s kinda embarrassing, you know? But I trust you not to peach on me, mate. I’m gonna mount it over the counter. How do you think it’ll look?”

  “Like it was made for a Māori king,” I said, which was the truth.

  On my way out, he stopped me in the doorway. “I should’ve asked,” he said. “I haven’t seen Hannah around in a while. How’s she and your son doing?”

  It wasn’t common knowledge that the child was my son. It was Hannah’s preference—for now. I chose not to view his inquiry as a subtle reminder that entrusting a secret is a dual agreement.

  “I’ve got babysitting duty after I get off the net boat,” I told him. “I’ll say hello to them both for you.”

  FOUR

  Delia seemed at home on my creaky, flat-bottomed bay shrimper. It is 30 feet long, built of heavy cedar planking and brass screws, an old workhorse I’d bought in Chokoloskee years ago. With its twin booms and the nets raised, the vessel resembles a floating pterodactyl. It’s as solid as a slab of cement. And just about as nimble.

  “Cool boat—kin
da old-timey-looking,” the girl said despite the thumping diesel.

  Experience can be gauged by the little things. Delia didn’t step aboard without asking permission. She avoided the common rookie irritants such as trying to help when help wasn’t needed or suddenly standing up once we were under way.

  Another encouraging sign was that she was dressed for work, not a beach outing. But her khaki cargo shorts and maroon fishing shirt seemed to emphasize, not disguise, an ample sexual dimorphism that, under other circumstances, might have caused whiplash to a passing male.

  At first glance, Delia was a beautiful young woman with a healthy pelt and muscularity. But a drawn, serious expression dulled her face and begged for horn-rimmed glasses that she did not wear. It was her eyes, gray-blue, that suggested a life of responsibilities and constant worry.

  “How long have you been sailing?” I asked over the machine-gun putter of the engine. It was an hour before sunset with thermal heads dissipating over the mainland. She stood to my right, her hand on a towing boom. We had exited Dinkin’s Bay, headed for an expanse of shallow sea grass off the Intracoastal, west of Marker 13A.

  “Since I was a kid, I’ve loved it,” Delia said. “The Catalina was my graduation present from the fam. I keep her stocked with clothes and personal stuff in case the wind’s right and I want to take off on a whim.”

  We talked about sailing for a while—her childhood in San Diego, then Tampa—but with the careful superficiality of strangers at a dinner party. When she got to the part about why she’d chosen Eckerd College in St. Pete, across the bridge from Tampa, she parted the curtain a bit.

  “Five years ago, my father was diagnosed with—well, he’s been sick off and on. So I wanted to stay close to home, plus Eckerd has one of the best teams in the Intercollegiate Sailing Association. Now I’ve got a decision to make. Should I stay in the area or . . .” She shrugged. “This whole month has been a blur. I have a phobia about hurting people’s feelings, you know? I still haven’t told them.”

  “Your parents, about Tomlinson?” I asked. “Well, they certainly knew you might find out the truth someday.”

  Her response was a classroom primer on fertility clinics. It included what I already knew about “confused insemination.”

  “As far as my mom and dad are concerned,” she continued, “I’m their daughter in every possible way. Period. A week ago, I chose a drop-dead date and promised myself I’d do it. Just march in, sit them down, and talk as adults. Instead, I got in my boat in a sort of panic. All this crazy stuff in my life has been building up. Waiting to hear about jobs, problems with this guy—a boyfriend, sort of—then this. I was twenty miles south, off Sarasota, before I finally admitted to myself that I was on my way to Sanibel. Like, you know, what dafug? I knew my birth father lived here. It’s in his publisher’s bio.”

  The girl sniffed, tugged at a strand of hair in a way that was spooky, then considered the bundle of braided shrimp net above her head.

  “How’s that for too much information?” she joked. “Nice of you, though, spending time with me, Dr. Ford. This should be interesting. At Eckerd, I helped with a project on sedimentary development—core digs, all along the coast. But never a fish survey. It might help me land one of the internships I applied for.”

  I was watching the depth finder. North of us, in the late sunlight, channel markers caught the sun, bright red and green reflectors. On the Intracoastal, a flats boat angled our way while a go-fast Scarab beelined toward the causeway. This reminded me to asked Mack about recent visitors on a Harley.

  “You can drop the doctor stuff. Call me Marion,” I said. “Or Doc. Wait until I get the nets out, then feel free.”

  “Free to what?”

  “Ask me anything you want about Tomlinson. It’ll be quieter out here. I agree with your reasons—in a clinical sort of way. We can talk in private.”

  “I don’t see what you mean about ‘clinical.’”

  I said, “You’re trying to understand who your birth father is. Emotion—well, in my opinion anyway—only confuses the issue. And I think you’re right. Sometimes the best way to assess a person’s character is by talking to their friends.”

  “Assess?” Delia was mildly offended. “You mean, like, judge him? No, I just explained that I have a phobia about hurting people. I don’t know why. Or, like you said, emotion just screws up our thinking. Anyway, this morning at breakfast, I wanted to open up to the guy but I couldn’t. I . . . I heard a rumor, Dr. Ford. If it’s true, he needs to be warned. Or at least a chance to explain.”

  I was confused. “If what’s true? Are you talking about Tomlinson?”

  The girl confirmed it, saying, “He seems like such a sweetie. How could he not be to write as beautifully as he does? But you have to admit, the dude comes off as a little bizarre. The way he is, almost childlike, it sort of scares me. And he dodged a lot of my questions. If he didn’t have something to hide, why wouldn’t he just open up and share?”

  I reduced speed and held up a finger, meaning Give me a second. At idle, I cranked the booms down. Tickle chains clanked, the winch creaked. Delia helped deploy the otter boards. Twin trawl nets sank to the bottom and blossomed into funnels. Our conversation was put on hold until the boat settled into a slow turn that, to jetliners above, would appear as a dusty furrow on a sunset sea of bronze.

  I opened the ice chest, aware but unconcerned about the fast, blue-hulled flats boat that would soon pass nearby. “Water, beer, or Diet Coke?” I asked.

  Delia, backdropped by the sun, got up and selected a bottle of Corona. She hefted it as if toasting me, her host, but was visibly uneasy. “Okay,” she said after a long drink. “Here’s the thing about Tommy—that’s what he wants me to call him, Tommy—I don’t know if I can handle that. Anyhoo . . . this morning, I asked him if he had any past, uhh, like health issues. As the child of a third-party donor, we have the right to know, don’t you think?”

  “Of course,” I said. “Medical history on the paternal side has to be a concern for anyone in your position.”

  “And there are hundreds of thousands of us,” Delia agreed. I realized she was referring to the number of children fathered by sperm donors as she took another drink and waited for the alcohol to move through her. “There’s lying by commission and then there’s lying by omission. That’s what I was taught. Anyway, I might have had the balls to warn him if Tomlinson hadn’t pissed me off by evading that one simple question.”

  I said, “Warn him about what? As far as I know, the guy’s healthy as a buffalo.”

  “You sure?”

  “Well, I’m not his physician. About his health . . . What’s the rumor you heard?”

  “Not a rumor.” The girl stepped closer to study my reaction. “It’s something we found out—Tomlinson spent six months in a California psych ward. Electric shock therapy, probably drugs, too, around the same time he was donating his . . . selling his sperm to the fertility clinic. One of us—I don’t know the name yet—got his medical records somehow. You’re his closest friend, but you didn’t know?”

  I bought some time by looking from the go-fast Scarab to the blue flats boat angling our way. “I’m aware he went through some tough times when he was younger. A lot people do. Did he deny it?”

  “I didn’t ask specifically, just if he’d ever had to see a shrink. He gave me some dumb line about learning from his mistakes. That was a bullshit answer. Marion . . . Doc . . . this is important to me—to all seven of us—and however many others that man has fathered. There are five types of mental illness that can be traced to the same inherited genetic variations. But . . . why the hell am I telling you?”

  “I’m interested,” I said. “Keep going.”

  “Then I will. There are at least five mental disorders that include depression, bipolar disorder. My god”—she was getting angry—“schizophrenia, for Christ sakes. You don’t thin
k I’ve doubted my own mental health since I got the DNA thing back? My whole life, I’ve had to fight a sort of . . . not depression, exactly. More of a shitty sort of cloud that scares me sometimes. And what about my children?”

  The girl had a right to be angry. When I told her, “Fair enough. I promise that Tomlinson will talk to you, and he’ll tell the truth,” she put a fist to her lips, hesitated, then gave me a quick, impulsive hug.

  “Thanks . . . even if you’re wrong,” she said. “This isn’t easy . . . And there’s something else, something I didn’t tell him but need to. That rumor I mentioned?”

  A week ago, she explained, the seven half siblings had received an email from an attorney asking them to join in a class action suit against the fertility clinic. Named in the suit was a long list of Mensal Cryonics donors, among them, Sighurdhr M. Tomlinson. The rumor was, she said, the lawsuit was real but they hadn’t confirmed the authenticity.

  “A lawsuit demanding what?” I asked.

  “Money, probably,” Delia replied. “Is there any other kind? One of the bio sibs, my half brother—he’s the minister of a small church in North Carolina—he suggested we vote on what to do in case the suit isn’t bogus. So far, the vote is four against joining the suit until we have a chance to get to know him, you know, our birth father. The other two sibs, I think one’s too embarrassed to get involved. And the other, a guy I think from his chat posts, he already sounds a little nuts. Psychotic, even. Understand now why I panicked and came here?”

  “Psychotic, as in dangerous?” I asked.

  The girl shrugged the question away until I pressed her for an answer.

  “I don’t know. Psychotic, as in crazy, I guess. These long, rambling posts about us being spied on, wiretaps. That we’re being set up by some evil government agency. According to him, donor siblings around the country are starting to unite, they’re so pissed off at the system.”