“’Course you didn’t. But that don’t make no never mind to me. I lie for you today, I lie for you tomorrow. That’s what family people do for each other.”
I said, “Huh?”
She was looking at Tomlinson now, the two of them smiling, sharing some inside joke. Apparently, she’d already told him something she hadn’t confided in me. I listened to her say, “It take me two weeks to track you down, Mister Doctor Marion Ford. Flew over on Air Bahamas, Nassau to Lauderdale, then took a big Greyhound bus across the Everglades to Sanibel. But you not there either, so I had to ask around, ask around. Everybody on that island, man, they all know you and like you. They tell me, ‘Oh yeah, that Doc Ford, he a good man.’ Man, that make me feel good and proud to come all this way just to surprise you. Wanted to see how your face looked when I telled you the news.”
Was the conversation making me dizzy, or was I still feeling the effects of blood loss? None of what she said made sense. I said, “What news? What the hell are you talking about?”
Her smile broadened as she stood and leaned, taking me in her arms even though I tried to pull away. I felt her skin against my face, as I heard her say, “The news is, I’m the sister you never know’d you had, man! My big ol’ handsome white-skinned fella!” She stepped back, holding me at a distance, beaming, while I sat there feeling mild shock. “Hello, my brother!”
I was trying to hold her away. “Look, lady, I don’t know what you’re trying to do here…where you got the idea…but it’s absurd, just plain silly. Believe me, I am not your brother.”
“’Course you are, only Daddy never tol’ you. Last month, the lawyer man, he sent me Daddy’s secret papers. Got them right here in my backpack, you want to see your name and picture for yourself. Big ol’ smiling picture of you and Daddy Gatrell. Know what else? He hid some money away for us. Now you and me, we going to go find that money and split it right down the middle.”
“Daddy Gatrell? My name isn’t Gatrell. Gatrell, that was my mother’s maiden name-” I stopped as my brain made the slow translation. Then I said, “That pathetic old fool.”
Tomlinson seemed very cheerful about it all. “Ransom is Tucker’s daughter. All you have to do is look at her eyes to believe it; the same sled-dog blue. You agree?”
I didn’t want to look, but did and had no choice but to nod. They were just like Tuck’s, the same crazed color of blue. Unmistakable, once I thought about it.
“So what happened is, about three weeks ago, Tucker’s lawyer sends her these papers Federal Express, including a letter from Tuck that claims you’re his son. Hilarious, huh? She’s already let me look through the package; some interesting things in that black bag of hers, Doc. That Tucker, he was a character, wasn’t he?”
I put up a warning palm-whoa. It was too late at night and I was too tired to listen to it. Not then, hopefully not ever. I stood and stepped toward the door, meaning it was time for them to leave, I said, “Oh yeah, that old man was something.”
My insane old uncle, the late Tucker Gatrell.
The living room of my bungalow opened out onto a screened porch that sat above the ground on three-foot pilings, looking down across a little sand and mangrove beach to the bay.
I was sitting on the porch alone, finally. I had walked Tomlinson and the woman partway to his cottage, just to make sure that she didn’t change her mind and come back.
Told her I’d listen to the whole story, read all the papers she’d brought, but tomorrow.
“I bet you’re surprised to find out you got a sister like me!”
She kept saying that. She seemed very excited and wasn’t the least bit deflated by the several times I replied, “I’m not your brother. Trust me, I’m not your brother.”
If she was, indeed, Tucker’s daughter, one thing that she had not inherited was his natural cynicism. I found her reaction touching but also frustrating. “But why would Daddy Gatrell lie to his own daughter? I saw the man seven, eight times in my life, and he loved me. That much I know. He not the kinda man to go tellin’ crazy lies.”
I thought, If you only knew, but said nothing.
I felt emotionally and physically drained, but too restless to sleep. So I opened a midnight beer to celebrate the sudden absence of people after spending the last many hours listening and talking.
Not that I felt celebratory. What I’d suggested to Tomlinson was true. Participation in violence opens all the adrenal reserves and dumps in way too much adrenaline way too fast. Especially violence that seeks the lethal existential. Violence has always produced a grayness in me. It seems to extract light and validity from those things that provide the scaffolding for what I normally see as a useful, productive existence: the chemical/mathematical order of biology; interaction with friends and lovers; days of solitude and open water.
Violence is a vital component in natural selection and the hierarchy of species, and I view it unemotionally in all conditions but my own, which is the human condition. Violence debases us. It sparks the dark arc that refutes all illusion. In the instant it occurs, humanity seems reduced to the most meaningless of fictions, nothing but a hopeful fantasy created by primates who aspire to elevate themselves.
I don’t know why it affects me so, but it does.
Perhaps it’s because inflicting injury on a person also inflicts an equal and opposite proof, the proof of one’s own mortality.
As I moved from kitchen to porch, I kept reviewing the series of events over and over in my mind, wincing at my own stupidity, my own clumsiness, cringing at the whap of a bullet that passed much too close and at the sound of a man’s spine snapping.
We are frail creatures, indeed. Contribute to the debility or death of another human and, if you have any conscience at all, you will find yourself standing on the lip of the abyss, peering downward, into your own black reflection.
No, I wasn’t celebrating. But it was good to finally be alone. I took the Bud Light I’d opened, and poured it in a glass over ice with a wedge of lime. I had a book to read and a floor lamp for light. Had my portable shortwave radio at my side, dialed into Radio Quito, Voice of the Andes, on the 49 meters band, the English-speaking newsperson reading articulate government disinformation and sharing static with Papua New Guinea Radio and the BBC.
Waldman was exactly right. It was time for me to start paying attention to the world outside. Time for me to poke my head up and take a look around. I’d become way too comfortable in the tiny, safer world of boat and fish and my lab back at Dinkin’s Bay Marina.
The book I was reading was an instructional pamphlet. I’d just taken delivery of a new telescope, a really superb Celestron NexStar five-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain, and now I was tutoring myself on some of the finer points of operation. Program it with latitude and longitude, then point it at Polaris, and by punching in the proper code, the telescope would swing automatically to the Great Nebulae of Orion or show you the polar caps of Mars or locate any of 1,800 deep-space objects already programmed into the little handheld computer.
Amazing.
I sat there reading in the soft light as a sulfur moth fluttered around, casting a pterodactyl shadow on ceiling and screen. Moonlight and the smell of night-blooming jasmine filtered in on dense air, as if fanned by the moth’s wings.
I had the little telescope on the table in front of me, following the instructions, experimenting with the computer and clock drive.
I don’t consider myself an amateur astronomer. I’m not knowledgeable enough or active enough to be worthy of the title. I do, however, enjoy applying what little I know about the science. Spend an evening viewing objects in deep space, and your own small problems and tiny life are given healthy proportion. Plus, as Tomlinson is continually pointing out, there is an unmistakable if unprovable symmetry and repetition of design shared by the marine creatures that I collect and the visible structure of the universe.