Settled in the kayak at last, he paddles slowly from the beach to the island, his frizz of white hair blowing around his mostly bald skull. A few turkey buzzards wheel overhead, making their ugly conversation. Once he was the son of the richest man on the Florida Gulf coast, then he was a lawyer, then he was a judge on the Pinellas County Circuit, then he was appointed to the State Supreme Court. There was talk, during the Reagan years, of a nomination to the United States Supreme Court, but that never happened, and a week after the idiot Clinton became president, Judge Harvey Beecher – just the Judge to his many acquaintances (he has no real friends) in Sarasota, Osprey, Nokomis, and Venice – retired. Hell, he never liked Tallahassee, anyway. It’s cold up there.
Also, it’s too far from the island, and its peculiar dune. On these early-morning kayak trips, paddling the short distance on smooth water, he’s willing to admit that he’s addicted to it. But who wouldn’t be addicted to a thing like this?
On the rocky east side, a gnarled bush juts from the split in a guano-splattered rock. This is where he ties up, and he’s always careful to tie well. It wouldn’t do to be stranded out here; his father’s estate (that’s how he still thinks of it, although the elder Beecher has been gone for forty years now) covers almost two miles of prime Gulf-front property, the main house is far inland, on the Sarasota Bay side, and there would be no one to hear him yelling. Tommy Curtis, the caretaker, might notice him gone and come looking; more likely, he would just assume the Judge was locked up in his study, where he often spends whole days, supposedly working on his memoirs.
Once upon a time Mrs Riley might have gotten nervous when he didn’t come out of the study for lunch, but now he hardly ever eats at noon (she calls him ‘nothing but a stuffed string,’ although not to his face). There’s no other staff, and both Curtis and Mrs Riley know he can be cross when he’s interrupted. Not that there’s really much to interrupt; he hasn’t added so much as a line to the memoirs in two years, and in his heart he knows they will never be finished. The unfinished recollections of a Florida judge? No tragedy there. The one story he could write is the one he never will.
He’s even slower getting out of the kayak than he was getting in, and turns turtle once, wetting his shirt and pants in the little waves that run up the gravelly shingle. Beecher is not discommoded. It isn’t the first time he’s fallen, and there’s no one to see him. He supposes he’s mad to continue these trips at his age, even though the island is so close to the mainland, but stopping them isn’t an option. An addict is an addict is an addict.
Beecher struggles to his feet and clutches his belly until the last of the pain subsides. He brushes sand and small shells from his pants, double-checks his mooring rope, then spots one of the turkey buzzards perched on the island’s largest rock, peering down at him.
‘Yi!’ he shouts in the voice he now hates – cracked and wavering, the voice of an old shrew in a black dress. ‘Yi-yi, you bugger! Get on about your business!’
After giving a brief rustle of its raggedy wings, the turkey buzzard sits right where it is. Its beady eyes seem to say, But Judge – today you’re my business.
Beecher stoops, picks up a larger shell, and shies it at the bird. This time it does fly away, the sound of its wings like rippling cloth. It soars across the short stretch of water and lands on his dock. Still, the Judge thinks, a bad omen. He remembers Jimmy Caslow of the Florida State Patrol telling him once that turkey buzzards didn’t just know where carrion was, but where carrion would be.
‘I can’t tell you,’ Caslow said, ‘how many times I’ve seen those ugly bastards circling a spot on the Tamiami where there’s a fatal wreck a day or two later. Sounds crazy, I know, but just about any Florida road cop will tell you the same.’
There are almost always turkey buzzards out here on the little no-name island. Judge Beecher supposes it smells like death to them, and why not?
He sets off on the little path he has beaten over the years. He will check the dune on the other side, where the sand is beach-fine instead of stony and shelly, and then he will return to the kayak and drink his little jug of cold tea. He may doze awhile in the morning sun (he dozes often these days, supposes most nonagenarians do), and when he wakes (if he wakes), he’ll make the return trip. He tells himself that the dune will be just a smooth blank upslope of sand, as it is most days, but he knows better.
Goddam buzzard knew better, too.
He spends a long time on the sandy side, with his age-warped fingers clasped in a knot behind him. His back aches, his shoulders ache, his hips ache, his knees ache; most of all, his gut aches. But he pays these things no mind. Perhaps later, but not now.
He looks at the dune, and at what is written there.
Anthony Wayland arrives at Beecher’s Pelican Point estate bang on seven o’clock p.m., just as promised. One thing the Judge has always appreciated – both in the courtroom and out of it – is punctuality, and the boy is punctual. Judge Beecher reminds himself never to call Wayland boy to his face (although, this being the South, son is okay). Wayland wouldn’t understand that, when you’re ninety, any fellow under the age of sixty looks like a boy.
‘Thanks for coming,’ the Judge says, ushering Wayland into his study. It’s just the two of them; Curtis and Mrs Riley have long since gone to their homes in Nokomis Village. ‘You brought the necessary document?’
‘Yes indeed, Judge.’ Wayland opens his big square attorney’s briefcase and removes a thick document bound by a heavy clip. The pages aren’t vellum, as they would have been in the old days, but they are rich and heavy just the same. At the top of the first, in heavy and forbidding type (what the Judge has always thought of as graveyard type), are the words Last Will and Testament of HARVEY L. BEECHER.
‘You know, I’m kind of surprised you didn’t draft this document yourself. You’ve probably forgotten more Florida probate law than I’ve ever learned.’
‘That might be true,’ the Judge says in his driest tone. ‘At my age, folks tend to forget a great deal.’
Wayland flushes to the roots of his hair. ‘I didn’t mean—’
‘I know what you mean, son,’ the Judge says. ‘No offense taken. But since you ask … you know that old saying about how a man who serves as his own lawyer has a fool for a client?’
Wayland grins. ‘Heard it and used it plenty of times when I’m wearing my public defender hat and some sad-sack wife abuser or hit-and-runner tells me he plans to go the DIY route in court.’
‘I’m sure you have, but here’s the unabridged version: a lawyer who serves as his own lawyer has a great fool for a client. Goes for criminal, civil, and probate law. So shall we get down to business? Time is short.’ This is something he means in more ways than one.
They get down to business. Mrs Riley has left decaf coffee, which Wayland rejects in favor of a Co’-Cola. He makes copious notes as the Judge dictates the changes in his dry courtroom voice, adjusting old bequests and adding new ones. The major new one – four million dollars – is to the Sarasota County Beach and Wildlife Preservation Society. In order to qualify, they must successfully petition the state legislature to have a certain island just off the coast of Pelican Point declared forever wild.
‘They won’t have a problem getting that done,’ the Judge says. ‘You can handle the legal for them yourself. I’d prefer pro bono, but of course that’s up to you. One trip to Tallahassee should do it. It’s a little spit of a thing, nothing growing there but a few bushes. Governor Scott and his Tea Party cronies will be delighted.’