The orderlies had had more than their share of trouble with Joseph, and when they found him, they knew what to do. They tied his hands and feet with plastic tie wraps and threw him facedown on his bed. Four hours later, when he was released, old Bright Eyes in the next bed made an observation about Indians that Joseph found offensive. In his dark mood, there seemed only one honorable thing to do-beat the little bastard to death. He would have done it, too, if one of the fat nurses hadn't banged into the room, looking for the individual she referred to as "the perverted son of a bitch who stole our TV Guide."
The orderlies tied his hands and feet again; left him bound all night.
On the morning of the fifth day after Tuck's visit, Joseph awoke, finding a mature but attractive rest home volunteer standing over him. The woman had a sponge in her hand and a name tag that read MARJORIE. Joseph rubbed his eyes clear and saw that she was staring at him, a vexed expression on her face. Which puzzled Joseph until he noticed that the sheet over his hips peaked with the abrupt contours of a two-man mountain tent. He peeked under the sheet to see what created the tent, then returned from beneath the covers, surprised and pleased.
"Mr. Egret," the woman said, "I hope you're not hiding something under that blanket." She said it primly, but kindly, too. Her hair was gray-blond, she had nice brown eyes, and the pink volunteer's uniform brought out the color of her face. He had never seen this woman before; they rarely got volunteers.
"Please," the woman said, "I'm giving you a chance."
Joseph combed his fingers through his hair, hoping he looked as good as he felt.
"I'm scheduled to give you a sponge bath, but if that's a liquor bottle under the covers, I'll… well, I won't report you-just as long as you take it to the bathroom right now and dispose of it."
Joseph settled himself, folded his hands behind his head, and smiled rakishly.
"Please, Mr. Egret. If you don't cooperate, I'll have to notify the nurses, and you will be in a great deal of trouble." The woman tried to sound stern, but sounded nervous instead. Maybe it was her first day as a volunteer. Maybe it was her first sponge bath. Joseph wagged his eyebrows and said nothing.
The woman took a deep breath, reached up, and pulled the privacy curtain around his bed, then threw back the sheet that covered Joseph's hips.
The woman was astonished. Joseph would have known that from the expression on her face, even if she had not sputtered, "Goodness gracious!" Surprised and maybe a little bit pleased, too, for Joseph was guilty of hiding neither a wine nor a whiskey bottle. He was only in a romantic mood. "Why… I'm very sorry!" The woman's face was red, and she was smiling but trying not to, and he hoped he recognized a flicker of interest in her eyes.
Joseph didn't mean it, but he said, "I sure am sorry about this, too, ma'am. But a woman pretty as you, I just can't help myself." Testing the sincerity of her interest, watching her face.
"You don't have to apologize… I should have been more… then I was just so surprised…I mean, it's not like I haven't… I mean, I have a gentleman friend, but we don't… then to see that…"
She was stammering so badly, Joseph reached out and took the woman's hand. Then he held her when she made a unenthusiastic effort to pull away. Joseph was no bully, but it had been his experience that a woman came to a man's bed only for one reason.
"Please, Mr. Egret, I'm working."
He was pulling her closer, closer, then he pressed a friendly kiss to her mouth, tasting the lipstick.
"You can't do this, Mr. Egret… We can't… I don't even know you: I'm not well; I'm not. I have this heart condition… please!"
Joseph interrupted modestly, "Aw ma'am, I'm pretty sure your heart's outta my range."
But the woman would not consent, and so she sat and talked to him for nearly an hour. He told her stories. He made her laugh. He knew white people liked to hear the old stories about what it was like to be an Indian in the Everglades. A few of his stories were even true.
She gave him a hug and a little kiss before she left, and Joseph had the feeling she might be back. He was right. Long after dark, she leaned over his bed as if to see whether he was awake, and Joseph kissed her. The volunteer whispered, "Hi there yourself!" and immediately assumed the sexual offensive, attacking him with a vigor that startled Joseph and made him feel almost meek.
Later, she gave him a sponge bath and rubbed his back. The next day, when she was supposed to be at her gentleman friend's country club selling baked goods for the greenskeepers' fund, Marjorie returned instead to the rest home with a tin of Copenhagen snuff and a brand of chocolates that Joseph Egret said he loved.
THREE
Late Monday morning, October 19, Ford was standing over a half dozen five-gallon buckets, all of them filled with seawater. Along with the seawater, each bucket held odd-looking mobiles made of wood and rope. From each of the five wooden crosspieces hung nine short lengths of rope knotted into another wooden crosspiece on the bottom. And each strand of rope was alive-or so it seemed to Ford. Each was a solitary host to a small world of living, siphoning jelly masses and sea growth: sponges, soft corals, tunicates, sea squirts, barnacles, oysters, and tiny skittering crabs.
"Biofouling assemblies," the books called the strange mobiles. Ford had made these himself, then set them out in the bay beneath buoys to attract sea life. One month later, this was the result.
Ford bent over the buckets and looked into them. A few of the crabs had jettisoned from the hanging mass and now crawled around the bottom. He wanted to weigh each assembly so that he could calculate how much growth the units might be expected to attract on a week-to-week basis. Later, after they had spent more days and nights floating in the bay, he wanted to be able to arrive at the optimum growth potential for each assembly. Set up a cubic-inch ratio.
For the research paper he wanted to do, such bits of datum would be important.
He stared at the buckets, hefted the weight of the sea mobiles experimentally, then gently returned them to the water. He scratched his nose, then hefted another.
I'm wasting time, he thought.
His notebook and pencil were at his right on the stainless-steel dissecting table. But the screened window was on the left-a window through which, if he bent just a little, he could see the lone sailboat out there near the mouth of Dinkin's Bay. So his mind kept wandering; kept thinking about the woman. Not consciously thinking of her-not much, anyway-but a steady undercurrent of musing and projecting going on in the cerebral layers that should have been considering the biofouling assemblies.
Not that he wasn't interested in his creations. He was. It was a new hobby, a fresh little project. Ford always had a short list of new projects and a long list of old ones. He was compulsive about it, as if he didn't want a free moment in which his mind might be allowed to wander. It was always one species or phenomena after another: bull sharks or tarpon or redfish or red tide. Filling notebooks with diagrams and observations in his tiny fine print. Dissecting or photographing or collecting and cataloging. Spending orderly hours in an orderly day interrupted only by his nightly timed runs (from Dinkin's Bay Marina to Sanibel Island Elementary and back), calisthenics, and a swim in the bay.
But Ford's mind was wandering now. Taking the lithe brown shape he'd seen through the telescope and giving the woman a more detailed face,- supplying her with a cool, sure personality. Putting himself on the boat with her, relaxed and lost in interesting conversation. She'd be intelligent, of course. Many sailors were, though their egos too often were proportional to their intellect, which was a sign of immaturity. But that wasn't an absolute; no proof that she would be that way. And sailing a boat single-handedly along this shallow-water coast implied a rogue spirit that he liked. And to strip off her clothes like that and dive into murky water where lesser, prissier people worried about sharks and stingrays…