Hunter's Moon Read online

  When we’d traded seats, Wilson finally revealed our destination. We were bound for the southern point of Cayo Costa, an isolated barrier island three miles southwest of Ligarto. There was a settlement of shacks and beach houses on the point that were only occasionally inhabited by the eclectic mix of beach bums, hermit entrepreneurs, and hippie dropouts who owned them. There were no roads on the island, no landing strips.

  When I asked why he wanted to go to Cayo Costa, the former president told me I’d find out when we got there. It was the answer I expected.

  Cayo Costa was now an undulant darkness less than a mile away, ridged like a sea serpent floating on the Gulf’s rim. The moon was over the island, its reflection linked to our canoe like a tractor beam, drawing us away from mainland Florida, leaving sleeping tourist resorts and city lights behind.

  Wilson noticed.

  “The way the moon hits the water . . . it’s like a passageway. Almost like the deck of an aircraft carrier opening up.” After a pause, he asked, “Do you believe in omens?”

  “Umm . . . no.”

  “Would you admit it if you did?”

  I smiled. “Probably not.”

  “Me, neither. Which makes us both a couple of superstitious liars. There was a moon like this the first time I landed on the Kennedy. It turned out to be good luck, so I take this as a good omen. Did you ever make a night landing on a carrier, Ford?”

  “No. Well . . . in a helicopter once. But not what you’re talking about.”

  I expected him to add something, tell me how terrifying it was. He was a Naval pilot. He’d experienced it. But all he did was nod. It was another of his techniques: Say little, imply much. You had to listen or you might miss something.

  I continued paddling as Wilson opened his backpack. His back was to me, a precise silhouette in the liquid light. I watched him roll his sleeve and wipe his shoulder. Disinfectant. The Angel Tracker had been just under the skin, he told me. Easy for Vue to make a tiny incision and remove it.

  Wilson patted a fresh bandage in place, buttoned his sleeve, then swallowed a couple of pills. For the first time, I noticed that his profile lacked a familiar contour. His stylish hair had been buzz-cut.

  I assumed he’d figured out some kind of disguise. Was that it?

  “I’ve got all my medicines, vitamins, and things in here.” He was talking about the backpack. “I can’t lose this. Or get it soaked. I hate taking pills, but they buy me time.”

  Lightning flickered on the horizon, revealing distant cumulous towers. I waited through a minute of silence before saying, “That storm’s ten, twenty miles out to sea. You’re okay. But if we travel by canoe tomorrow, you’ll need a waterproof bag, plus flotation.” I paddled a couple of strokes before adding, “Are we going by canoe?”

  He rolled down his sleeve and closed the backpack. “When it’s time for you to know, I’ll tell you.”

  As expected.

  Useppa Island and Cabbage Key were behind us. Windows of sleeping households twinkled through trees, and Cabbage Key’s water tower was a solitary star above mangroves, bright as a religious icon. To the south, lights of Captiva Island and Sanibel were a melded blue aura; Cape Coral was an asphalt fluorescence to the east.

  Separating us from Cayo Costa was the Intracoastal Waterway where navigational markers blinked in four-second bursts: white . . . red . . . green. The Intracoastal is a federally maintained sea highway that runs from Texas to New Jersey. Big boats depend on it. I avoid it. The water would be rougher there because its deep channel accelerated an outgoing tide like a faucet.

  I told Wilson, “You can stop paddling. We’ll let the tide do the work. Get some rest—but secure your life jacket first.” I explained why.

  “I wondered why you were bearing north. You being such an expert paddler, there had to be a reason.”

  The man didn’t miss anything

  I said, “The channel’s going to be running fast, like a river. If we get swept too far south, we’ll have to wait for the tide to change, then work our way back.”

  “We can’t wait,” he said. “I don’t have time. So stay as far north as you need to be.”

  I nearly responded, “Aye, aye, sir.”

  For the last half an hour, I’d been watching a light on Cayo Costa. A yellow light that brightened, then dimmed—a fire, I realized, on the island’s point. There was pink sand there, where the water of Captiva Pass swept past, fast and deep, into open sea.

  “Are we meeting someone?”

  He realized I was talking about the fire. “Yes. A friend.”

  I knew better than to ask who.

  “Did you tell him to do that?”

  “No. I’ve been wondering about the fire myself. It’s the last thing I’d want.”

  “Maybe he has camp pitched and breakfast cooking. That would be okay. We both need sleep and I didn’t pack a tent.”

  “Don’t worry about details. But there wasn’t supposed to be a fire.” His puzzled inflection read Why draw attention?

  “It’s not a private island. Maybe he has company.”

  The former president replied, “That would not be surprising.”

  The way he said it, it sounded like his friend might be an interesting character. I wondered if it was Vue. Vue could’ve hopped a boat and beat us to the island by an hour. But why?

  I could feel the running tide beneath us now, the canoe beginning to hobbyhorse among black waves. I adjusted our course, got my paddle rhythm set, before I said, “Give me twenty, twenty-five minutes and we’ll find out.”

  8

  I concentrated on paddling while Wilson sat with his forehead in his hands, resting I hoped. He had such a powerful personality it was easy to forget he was sick.

  Leukemia contributed to the illusion. I’d lost a friend to the disease recently so I had a layman’s knowledge. It’s a progressive cancer in which the abnormal production of white blood cells destroys red blood cells. In the final stages, a person can appear healthy even while a microscopic war is being waged within. Anemia and bruising are the first symptoms. Death can be the next.

  Even the word carries a chill. Like many cancers, leukemia seems inexplicably random and is therefore more frightening. Without clear cause and effect, the disease hints that life itself is random and without design. My friend Roberta Petish had a bright spirit, a huge heart, and she lived big up until a few days before her internal war was lost. I understood Wilson better because of her.

  I liked the man’s aggressiveness. Instead of lying back waiting for death, he was determined to race the bastard to the finish line. I was glad to be with him. For now . . .

  Paddling rough water kept my hands busy and allowed my mind to drift. Wilson’s silhouette at rest was an amorphous gray. He sat as silently as the battle raging inside his circulatory system. The man had survived his share of battles and prevailed in many. The research I’d done reminded me that my traveling partner was an unusual example of the species, sapiens.

  Kal Wilson was a man of contradictions and one of those rare people who was stronger for them. His legal name, Kal, was actually an acronym comprised of his first name and two middle names. He’d been born and spent the early part of his life in the village of Hamlet, North Carolina, but his family had moved to Janesville, Minnesota, when he was an adolescent. Having roots in the Deep South and Bedrock North was an unusual political asset.

  Wilson was a decorated combat pilot who, as a midwestern congressman, became known as his party’s steadiest antiwar voice. He was a conservative on some issues, liberal on others, but refused to be typecast as either.

  Criticized by his party for refusing to join the rank and file, he ran as an Independent and won three more terms in the House and then a seat in the U.S. Senate. Wilson switched parties yet again when he ran for the presidency. Even his campaign platform bucked Democratic and Republican stereotypes with unorthodox positions on gun control, abortion, the death penalty, and drugs.

  Wedge issues t
hat defined lesser politicians set Wilson apart as a freethinking maverick. He was passionate about stem cell research but pushed hard for returning the Pledge of Allegiance and prayer to public schools. He was an environmental hawk who railed against the hypocrisy of not relying on our own oil preserves. He was an antiwar dove, although he warned of a “global fascist awakening.”

  Voters have an affection for maverick outsiders that’s almost as strong as the contempt felt for mavericks by Washington insiders. Things did not go smoothly for Kal Wilson when he and his renegade administration arrived inside the Beltway.

  By the fourth year of his term, the man’s star was flickering. “Unorthodox” had been redefined as “inept.” His administration had brokered a cease-fire in the Middle East but been blamed for Central America’s instability, particularly the countries bordering the Panama Canal.

  Wilson’s main adversary had been Juan Rivera, a man I came to know well during my years in the region. Rivera was a Fidel Castro-style revolutionary who publicly, and repeatedly, outmaneuvered the American president, contributing to the perception that Wilson was weak.

  When Wilson changed the phrase “global fascist awakening” to “global fascist fundamentalism,” it was perceived as a ploy to boost his approval rating. When he stopped referring to terrorists as “Muslim extremists,” insisting that “Islamicist killers” was more accurate, he drew fire from both parties in our politically correct Congress.

  It got worse when a reporter from Al Jazeera television asked him to explain the difference between “Islamicist killers” and “Zionist killers”—an impossible question because of the way it was couched—but Wilson answered, anyway.

  Zionists, he said, believe a Jewish state should exist in the world. Islamicists, he continued, believe that the world should exist as an Islamic state.

  “Are they both killers?” the reporter pressed.

  Wilson bulled ahead. “An interesting distinction. Killing women and children at a bus stop or in a Nazi concentration camp—or at the federal building in Oklahoma City, for that matter—should be referred to as ‘murder.’ They aren’t acts of war. They’re acts of cowardice.

  “So ‘fascist fundamentalism’ would be a more accurate term when used generally. ‘Islamicists’ would be the specific that describes murderers who use religion as a shield.”

  Kal Wilson, the “freethinking dove,” was vilified as a bigot and a warmonger, and he effectively alienated fundamentalists of all faiths.

  It had something to do with a bounty being offered for his head.

  THE SILHOUETTE DOZING IN THE FRONT OF THE CANOE was the president of the United States . . .

  As my mind lingered on the complex personality that was Kal Wilson, I sometimes paused to remind myself what the man had achieved, trying to counterbalance his unpresidential snoring.

  Why wouldn’t he snore? He was human . . . one of six billion members of our species who, at that very instant, were inhaling or exhaling, making respiratory noises, as the earth orbited through the silent universe that blazed above our canoe.

  He was flesh and finite; an ordinary man. As a man, though, he had lived an extraordinary life.

  Wilson was among the youngest men ever elected to the presidency. He’d upset an incumbent, served one turbulent term, then shocked the country by not running for a second.

  “Our reasons,” he said, “are personal”—the plural “our” referring to his wife, who, he often said, was the smarter half of their two-person presidency.

  At a news conference, a famous anchorman referenced Wilson’s fifty-seven percent approval rating, before pressing, “Is it because you and the First Lady fear that you’ve polarized the American people?”

  Wilson’s reply was measured and presidential—he never lost his poise in public.

  Offstage, though, an unseen microphone caught what he whispered to his wife: “What I fear is polarizing the American press by smacking one of those pompous assholes in the face. Most of them are spoiled brats born with silver spoons up their asses. That’s why feeding people a line of crap comes so natural.”

  Like most presidents, Wilson had run-ins with the media. But his “spoiled brat” line so endeared him to the public that the media retaliated by attacking as a pack. “Personal reasons” wasn’t explanation enough for not running, so the press speculated. Theories made headlines based on shock value, not fact, and they ranged from the offensive to the grotesque.

  Wilson never fired back, though. A distant descendant of Woodrow Wilson, he’d become an expert on the office long before he held it, and he was fond of stiff-arming reporters by quoting his predecessors instead of allowing his own words to be twisted. He remained in the background, refusing comment on world affairs, and taking pains not to second-guess the current administration.

  An example: Wilson, a track star and boxer at the Naval Academy, made headlines by winning his over-fifty age group in a Chicago triathlon, but then quit the sport. Characteristically, he offered no explanation, but friends said it was because he felt it wasn’t in the nation’s best interest to divert the spotlight from a sitting president.

  Even out of office, Kal Wilson remained presidential. He stayed cool—cold, some said. The exception was when he denounced the media for not running the Danish editorial cartoons that sparked riots.

  Tomlinson was wrong when he told me the incident was after Wray Wilson’s plane had crashed but right about the former president becoming more outspoken in the weeks after her death.

  Wilson began using the term “Islamicists” and “Nazis” as synonyms.

  He referred to the Islamic cleric who offered a bounty for his head as a “failed paperhanger” who didn’t have the courage to look an enemy in the eye—an obvious comparison to Adolf Hitler.

  In an interview with BBC television, Wilson warned that the United Kingdom, Holland, France, and Germany, through their policies of appeasement, were “providing the knife and whetstone” that Islamicists would use to cut Europe’s throat.

  He said, through the “dangerous charade” called “political correctness,” the United States was doing the same.

  Both political parties began a subtle process of distancing themselves from Wilson. Newspaper editorials hinted that his thinking had become “unsound” as a way of explaining why they now refused to quote the man.

  “Even former presidents sometimes need editing,” an editorial suggested.

  “Censorship through intimidation,” Wilson responded, “is the first objective of tyranny. Once accomplished, the truth is easily perverted to serve the tyrant’s goals.”

  For the first time in his career, Kal Wilson was criticized for behavior that was unpresidential.

  DID WILSON BELIEVE THERE WAS A LINK BETWEEN THE million-dollar bounty and the former First Lady’s death? In the next few days, I would find out.

  That was one reason I’d felt disappointed when I thought the trip was canceled. Another was that it was my chance to find out how Wilson was different. It interested me as a biologist and as a man. Extreme environments catalyze extreme adaptive mechanisms. By virtue of having inhabited the White House, Wilson was unlike other men.

  But how?

  I thought about it as I banged the canoe through the Intracoastal’s rough water into the slick, moon blue shallows. It was a question made more interesting because the man was a few feet away, motionless but no longer snoring.

  Had the office elevated him? Or only isolated him?

  Both, I guessed.

  All U.S. presidents are awarded a place in history, but the spatial corridor is limited—eight years or less. What happened before is historical context. What happens afterward is postscript. A president’s life is defined by the office, then cast in bronze, often long before the man’s death. Typically, the life of a former president consists of a long, polite silence that ends with a bugler’s farewell.

  Did ex-presidents chafe at inactivity? At the perception they are the walking dead?

&
nbsp; Maybe that’s why Wilson was determined to spend his final days as a free man. He was a cool one, sometimes cold. But history’s bronze statue still had a beating heart, a warrior’s soul. A river flowed beneath the ice.

  I liked that.

  But he wasn’t an easy man to get along with, as I was learning.

  “You could’ve cut off five, maybe ten minutes if you’d pointed us a few more degrees south. Get sloppy like that in an F-14, you could end up in Austin instead of Boston—if the pencil pushers hadn’t retired that beautiful machine.”

  Wilson hadn’t spoken for half an hour. I thought he was still asleep.

  I continued paddling, the island now so close I could smell the salt pan musk of cactus and sea oats. “I played it safe. We’re only a couple hundred yards north of where you told me to land.”

  “A quarter mile, is more like it. But that’s okay. That must be the cabin—do you see it?” As he stretched, he used his paddle to point at a shadowed geometric set back from the water. Its tin roof was ivory, the windows glazed. “We can lay in close to shore and no one will see us take our gear inside.”

  He was concerned for a reason. A few hundred yards down the beach, the bonfire was encircled by a cluster of men and women, their shadows huge. Some were dancing; others sat shoulder to shoulder, their faces golden masks.

  I said, “Are you sure you want to risk landing where there’re so many people?”

  “I told you before, I don’t think the public’ll recognize me. And if they do? Well . . . it’s better I find out now.” He tilted his head for a moment. “Why the hell are they doing that, you think? Banging away at this hour?”

  The beach people were pounding drums . . . tin cans . . . plastic buckets, too, judging from the noise. They maintained a steady, low-resonance rhythm that, for a while, I’d mistaken for the rumble of ocean waves. It was 5:45 a.m. Sunrise was in an hour.

  I said, “It’s called a ‘drum circle.’ A fad. People who normally wouldn’t give each other the time of day meet to play drums, usually on a beach around sunset. But this time of morning? It’s weird.” I paused, surprised by a sudden word association. Tomlinson’s face had jumped into my mind. “This friend of yours,” I said slowly, “how long have you known him?”