I chuckled, amused and penitent, dropped my garbage in the can, and told her that’s exactly what I’d do if it made her happy. I walked around by the shallow water docks past the rental canoes to tell Tomlinson that I’d be right back.
The little crowd that had been watching him play tag with the dog had scattered. He stood there alone by the big sea grape outside the Red Pelican. He had his hands on his hips, sweating, breathing heavily. He motioned with his head when he saw me approach and said, “Look at that evil little son-of-a-bitch. And I used to sneak him Milk-Bones every time I had the chance.”
I followed his gaze to see the old golden retriever standing at the edge of the parking lot, staring back at us. The dog’s tail was curved at attention, head held high. “I don’t get it,” I said. “What’s the problem. Why in the world are you mad at Mark’s dog?”
“Because of them, that’s why,” he said, and jerked his thumb toward the Verner twins. They were now standing on the stern of Das Stasi, giggling at something Dieter Rasmussen had apparently said.
“Huh? I’m not following. Are you stoned?”
“No! That’s another thing. There’s so much on the line tonight, I didn’t smoke at all and only had seven, maybe eight beers. I can’t even feel it, man. Then that bastard comes along and spoils the entire gig.”
Meaning the dog again.
Tomlinson faced me, his expression pained and said in a frantic whisper, “The fucking dog ate my Viagra, man! I took it out to show Mack what the pill looked like and dropped it. Before it even hit the ground, Shadow gobbled the damn thing down like the Milk-Bone piggie he is. Wouldn’t give it back, either. So now I’m cold sober, plus I’ve got the Verner twins to deal with. How’s that for a living hell on earth?”
15
I walked back to my stilthouse, picked up the envelope that was addressed DUKE FORD, SANIBEL, then tossed it back onto the desk and tried to ignore it. I neatened the kitchen even though it didn’t need neatening, then fiddled with my record player, searching through albums for something to play. Finally selected an old favorite, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and put it on, volume low. Listened to it while I avoided the envelope, marveling at my own immaturity. How could Tucker Gatrell, a man who’d been dead for nearly two years and whom I’d hardly really known, still continue to have a negative influence on my life?
I truly didn’t like Tuck. That, at least, I could admit to myself.
As of a few years ago, I could also finally admit the real reason why.
It had to do with my parents.
My long-dead parents.
I’m not an emotional person. I have very little patience with sappy sentimentality or maudlin displays.
Still, there’s bound to be some emotional attachment between child and parents-which is probably why I still resented what had happened many years before, and the role Tucker had played.
When I was eleven, both of my parents were killed in a boat explosion. They’d set out on a trip through the Ten Thousand Islands south of Naples in Tuck’s homemade, cypress cabin cruiser. It took me more than a year to jigsaw pieces of that boat together and do what professional investigators had failed to do: explain why the boat had exploded.
There were accelerant pour patterns on what remained of the inner hull of the boat-arson wasn’t a consideration, so there’d been a gas leak. Flames will spread fastest across the underside of boat decking or a bulkhead overhang, so the flooring adjacent to a flammable wall is the most likely point of origin.
On the cruiser, the fire’s point of origin was just beneath and above the gas engine’s starter motor. The starter motor was mounted low, under the big block’s cooling jackets, only a few inches from the bilge pump.
Thus I isolated the fuel that had created the explosion and the source of combustion. But what had caused the gas leak? That took longer to figure out.
Tucker had always considered himself a brilliant inventor. He’d applied for and received a number of worthless patents. By going through his papers, I discovered that one of his “inventions” was a butterfly shutoff valve for fuel lines on inboard boats. The valve was made of PVC plastic and joined together by common plumber’s glue.
Petroleum products-such as gasoline-neutralize plumber’s glue, so his choice of sealant was not just idiotic, it was lethal. The glue had melted. The valve had leaked fuel into the bilge. A spark from the engine’s starter motor had ignited the explosion.
Tucker never accepted nor admitted responsibility, though late in his life he did offer me a vague apology.
That’s not the only reason I never got along with my uncle.
Tuck was more than a decade older than my late mother. He looked seventy when I was fifteen. By the time I was thirty, he still looked seventy and he still wore skinny-legged Levi’s and pearl-buttoned shirts. He wore gunslinger clothes because he owned a mud and mangrove ranch in a backwater called Mango, a little tiny fishing village south of Marco Island where he kept a big Appaloosa horse and a few cows.
The last of the Florida cowboys, or “cowhunters” as they were known-that’s what he fancied himself. Newspaper people loved the guy because he was always good for a colorful quote, and more than one writer said Tuck resembled an older Robert Mitchum, but that had more to do with his attitude than his looks. He had the Jack Daniel’s swagger, the polar-blue eyes, the shoulders and scrawny hips, and lots of stories.
The trouble with Tuck was, there was no way to tell which of his stories were true, and which weren’t. Many of those stories were based on the fact that he’d spent a lot of years supplementing his income as a fishing and hunting guide. He’d started in his early teens and, with his natural gift for people and his knowledge of the back country, he actually did become one of the most famous guides in Florida. Tuck claimed to have fished such luminaries as Thomas Edison, who had a winter home in nearby Fort Myers; Colonel Charles Lindbergh; Harry Truman; Walt Disney; Clark Gable; Dwight D. Eisenhower; Dick Pope, who was one of Florida’s first promoters; Ted Williams; Mickey Mantle; and John F. Kennedy. Not only claimed to have fished them but to have been their friends-close friends with a few of them, which led to other outrageous assertions.
Tuck loved nothing better than to sit on his porch at sunset, chew tobacco, tell stories, and get drunk. I know because, as an orphan, the court had assigned me to live with him. I did, too, for a couple of years, which was all I could tolerate before I moved out, still in my teens, and lived alone until I graduated from high school.
Something else I disliked about Tucker was that he was prone to sloppy behavior and indifferent to shabby living conditions. His house was always a filthy massing of clothes, spittoons, garbage, and dirty dishes. Once, when Tucker’s old horse, Roscoe, cribbed himself into colic, Tuck moved the animal inside during three days of rain, stepping over islands of horse manure as if they were nothing more than soiled socks or someone’s old shoes.
Always orderly by nature, I retaliated by following my own instincts toward sanity. I became fanatically neat, driven by insistence on accuracy and a lifestyle that sought precision. It was the only way of creating distance between myself and the unfortunate genetic connection to my late mother’s brother.
I was even less tolerant of his wild lies and self-serving schemes. They were crazed and so constant that I refused to acknowledge or play a role in any of them. Tucker claimed to have found the Fountain of Youth in his pasture, and sold bottled water to tourists until the state made him stop. He got it into his head that, while guiding Walt Disney on a tarpon-fishing trip, he’d given the famous Californian the idea for Disney World. He’d filed a claim for damages in an Orlando court and was laughed out of town. He tried to make it as a country music singer and failed. Because he’d run guns to Cuba prior to the revolution, he’d tried to get Fidel Castro to assign him a massive land grant in Pinar del Rio, but failed at that, too, and damn near ended up in prison on the Isle of Pines.