Standing at the wheel, peering beyond the feeble glow of my own running lights, I pictured Hannah. Felt an electric rush of longing in abdomen and thighs, and winced, as if in pain. Tried to will the image away . . . but the picture wouldn't disappear. Could still see her standing in the disc of yellow light, taunting me . . . enjoying it.
The problem was, I was jealous. That's what it came down to. Before I could even admit it to myself, I was well past the shoals off Patricio Island, almost to Cabbage Key. I didn't want to be alone, at night, on my boat. I wanted to be in Gumbo Limbo, alone, with her, in that creaky little tin-roof house. Wanted to sit there feeling her eyes burrowing into mine, giving me her total attention. Wanted to hear more about her outlaw behavior. Wanted to pull her face to mine, then peel her out of those tight jeans. . .
But she had chosen Tomlinson. She preferred him over me—that was pretty obvious. Skinny, frazzled Tomlinson, with his Jesus eyes and Joe Cocker face. Over me.
Why? Well. . . that was pretty obvious too: he could help her with the book she wanted to write; help her find a publisher. That was his power. Pure opportunism on her part.
Which is what I told myself. . . then wondered if it was true.
I was thinking irrationally, and knew it. The realization was so strong that I throttled the boat back to idle, then switched off the engine. Drifted along in the darkness, the silent flare-burst of channel-marker lights flashing all around.
Nothing I had felt in the last several hours meshed with my own image of self. It was a red flag. When your emotions or your behavior are contrary to your own self-image, it's time to stand back and reassess. Yes, I had met two, maybe three women in my life for whom I had felt an instant, marrow-deep sexual attraction so strong that it had almost knocked the wind out of me.
Hannah undoubtedly could now be counted among them.
But I had never reacted so emotionally before. Yeah, I had been irritated at Tomlinson all day—the man wore at the nerves. But to be jealous? And obsessive? It wasn't me; it was nothing at all like the man I perceived myself to be. Realizing it seemed to help.
I started the boat and got under way again.
It is impossible to force a topic of thought from your own head. But it is possible to substitute one topic of thought for another. So what I did was spend the next few miles making a cold unemotional assessment of Hannah Smith.
It produced a less attractive picture. By her own admission, she was greedy. She was also self-obsessed. "I do what I damn well please!" How many times had she said that? She used people, she bullied people. The hangdog deference of Arlis Futch—a powerful man himself—was proof. Perhaps most troubling, though, was that Hannah was capable of extreme behavior, the extreme gesture. I believed every detail of her story about taking Jimmy Darroux into Boca Grande Pass. Not that I blamed her. The term "spousal abuse" is much too meek to represent the kind of humiliation and fear that those two words actually define. Any man who hits a woman is mentally unstable and should be forced to get help. Immediately. Just as any man who rapes a woman should be treated as if he has forfeited all considerations of help.
But this is the modern world. People don't take the law into their own hands. The fable of justice has become just one more Walter Mitty dream. Oh, they like to talk about revenge. They like to watch movies about it. But to actually do it ... to actually cross the border into the netherland, to actually make the extreme gesture, is far too frightening for most.
Not for Hannah Smith. She didn't hesitate. Knew just exactly what she was going to do and how to do it—she'd told me that herself in her rowdy, piney woods voice. I admired her for it. Also, she scared me a little because of it.
For a while, I felt better. Reason and logic were familiar territory. They were the tools out of which I have created my own refuge. Emotion, any emotion, was a symptom of perceived reality, not reality itself. Become the slave of it, and you paid a heavy price: wives, lovers, divorces, children, mortgages, corporate infighting, charge cards, early retirement, two cars in the driveway and a dog in the garage.
I preferred my solitary island world. A house and lab under one roof. My boats, my specimens. The clarity of a microscope, the precision of a trip-balance scale. Just me, living my work, doing what I wanted to do.
Which is when, for no good reason, Tomlinson's words tumbled me back into the cycle of obsession: You are both extreme people.
A thought that was all the more unsettling because it had the ring of truth.
It was nearly eleven p.m. when I approached the channel markers off Cabbage Key. Cabbage Key is a hundred-and-some-acre island, mostly mangrove, but with enough Indian shell mounds to keep its dozen or so houses high and dry. There are no bridges or landing strips. Boat access only. The biggest house on the highest mound is a sprawling one-story: white board-and-batten with green shutters; a long open porch that, this time of year, was buttoned tight with canvas, the only way to keep out the chill. The house was built in 1938—which made it ancient by the standards of transitory Florida. In the fifties, it was converted into a public inn. A bar was built in what was once the library, and a restaurant was added. Over the years, Florida changed; the old house on the hill did not.
I considered running right on past. If I pushed it, I could make Dinkin's Bay in a little less than half an hour. But I was feeling restless. Dissatisfied with myself, and oddly dissatisfied with other things—what, I didn't know. Still felt as irritable as some moonstruck adolescent. So what could it hurt to pull in for a beer?
I tied up near the boathouse. There were a couple of mansion-sized yachts moored in the deep-water slippage. One looked like a Hatteras, the other a beautiful old Trumpy. On the Trumpy, people were milling around above deck, drinks in hand. A couple of corporate types in blazers along with what looked to be a cluster of sorority-age girls. The music being piped out of the main salon was vintage World War II, Glenn Miller. The gal from Kalamazoo had just become the girl who was drinking rum and Coca-a-a-a-Cola, as I trudged up the path to the inn. I wondered if the corporate types really believed the antique music would put their MTV generation guests in the mood.
Rob, the owner, wasn't around, but Captain Doug and a couple of other guys I knew were at the bar. I had a Heineken, then another. The guys had heard about the explosion; wanted me to give them all the details. We kept buying rounds and Bob, the bartender, kept serving them. Pretty soon, the party from the Trumpy came spilling in. I found out that the men in the blazers were, indeed, corporate types, but they were neither ego-brittle nor stuffy—the good ones seldom are. Also, the women, though attractive and pert enough, were neither sorority-age nor were they college girls.
"What we do is market cellular phones," one of them told me—a chunky little blonde with pale, Germanic eyes. "This is sort of like a convention, only it's really not, 'cause we had to market more units than anybody else to win this trip. Our regions, I'm talking about. All seven of us, we were picked the top marketers. All women!"
It took me a moment to translate: "marketers" meant "sales staff." Like "educator" and "refuse attendant," it was another one of those inane euphemisms that, instead of clarifying, only murk their own definitions.
She said, "So we won two days at Orlando, then three days at this place on Captiva Island. I just loved Epcot, but Captiva . . . well, that's been sort of boring. It's so . . . quiet. But then we met Charlie, and his corporation leases this great big boat, complete with captain, two weeks every year. You see it down there? Huge. And Charlie, he's such a nice man, Charlie said, what the hell, he'd take us on an overnight cruise so we could see the islands. But no strings attached. He made that real clear." She poked my arm with an index finger to emphasize the importance of that. Said, "What we found out is, Charlie's corporation does a lot of business with the group that owns us, so we're like business associates. Just down here networking, doing our jobs!" She giggled and beamed at me.