Personally, I think the soft but constant gurgle of the many aquarium pumps keys a urinary restlessness.
While I was questioning her, she happened to mention that she liked boats; hoped to one day buy a sailboat and do some cruising through the islands. So I said boats? She liked boats? Then how about the two of us go roam around the docks, do some window-shopping?
Dinkin’s Bay is among the last of Florida’s old-time fish camp marinas: wobbly docks, bait tanks, tackle shop, fish market, some deep-water dockage on the bay side and lots of shallow water slips along the mangrove shoals. Everything built of wood, everything sun-leached gray. It was a Sunday in Apriclass="underline" busy day with lots of Sanibel day-trippers roaming around, lots of cars coming and going in the shell parking lot. And all the slips were full.
People with the boat bug-and it was apparent that Amanda had a bad case of it-are never happier than when they are poking around marinas, fantasizing about owning other people’s boats. It’s a disease that costs more to cure than any other single common learning disability.
So we crossed the walkway to shore, skirted the hedge of mangroves and the two-story marina office, where we saw Jeth walking down the steps from his apartment. Heard him call to me, “Your uncle Tuh-tuh-tuck… he’s inside speaking with Mack.”
I waved him off-let Mack deal with the neurotic old fool-and steered Amanda past the Red Pelican clothing shop and down the long main dock so that she could look at sailboats to her heart’s content. I stopped only briefly to say hello to a couple of the fishing guides who were in for lunch, and then to introduce Amanda to JoAnn Small-wood, who lives aboard the soggy old Chris-Craft, Tiger Lily. Stood there listening to the two of them talk, then, as we parted, JoAnn gave me a little wink-a private sign among our small marina community that indicates approval of an outsider.
It spoke well of Amanda… and it also said quite a bit about the quick assessment process common to women in general and to the ladies of Tiger Lily specifically. JoAnn had inspected, interviewed and evaluated Amanda as quickly, as efficiently, perhaps as accurately, as two dogs unexpectedly met on a sand road. It is something most of us pretend that we don’t do. But the ladies of the Tiger Lily do not posture. They are precisely what they seem to be. Not that I pretend to understand their own particular reality. They are honest women; they speak their minds. It is a rare thing and enough for me.
As we moved off by ourselves, Amanda said, “I like her. There’s something very… solid? Yeah, solid about her.”
I said, “I’m glad to hear that. JoAnn and Rhonda-Rhonda Lister, that’s her roommate-they’re two of my closest friends.”
“Do you mean roommate as in someone who shares the rent? Or as in ‘Roommate’?”
“The former. Not that I’d ever impose by asking.”
“I wasn’t being judgmental. Just curious. In fact, I’m surprised it even crossed my mind.”
“From the signals they give out, they’re happy, healthy heterosexuals. A nice change in this day and age, huh? Mostly they’re nice people… good ladies. Men come around sometimes. If the guides approve of them, sometimes the men even spend the night. I’ve watched a couple of those guys leave. The smile on their face, it’s hard to describe. Do people still use the word dreamy?”
She seemed amused. “People your age probably do.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“I didn’t mean to offend. It’s what I was thinking.”
“Well, it’s an eloquent word, dreamy, and it fits. What goes on when Rhonda and JoAnn don’t have men guests is none of my business.”
“The tone of your voice, I can tell you’re protective. You look after the both of them.”
“More like the other way around. They treat me like their slow-witted brother. And for good reason.”
“You strike me as being anything but slow-witted. But what I meant was, you guys take care of each other. I’ve got friends like that. Not many but, yeah, I’ve got them. That’s why she was giving me the eye, trying to figure out what my intentions are toward you.”
“This is a very small marina, and it is a very large and dangerous world outside the marina gate. We’re careful about who we let in.”
Amanda said, “A safe place, that’s good.”
I said, “Yeah. They’re getting harder and harder to find.”
I could tell that she’d been thinking about it, how to get me back on the subject of her father. Looking at her, seeing the intensity-being so careful about how to bring it up-it crossed my mind that her unanswered questions about Bobby were nearly as important as telling me about Jackie Merlot.
I listened to her soften me up before risking the subject: “It explains a lot,” she said, “meeting you. I can see now why you and my dad were buddies. About why he said to come to you if I needed help. It tells me a little. I look at you, his friend, and I think, okay, that’s the kind of man he was. This is the kind of man he was.”
“I guess I’m flattered,” I said.
“It’s been strange thinking about him so much lately. I mean, I’m an adult now, close to the same age he was when he died, and finding these old love letters to my mother, it’s like he’s become a real person. It’s like meeting the man for the first time.”
“He was a good one.”
Me saying that, it meant something. I could see it in her face.
“You wouldn’t lie about a thing like that, would you?”
I thought for a moment before I said, “Yeah, I would. A guy I knew nearly twenty years ago? His daughter shows up out of nowhere and she asks me what he was like? Yeah, he could be the biggest jerk of all time and I’d tell her he was a nice man. But Bobby was something special. He was a friend. And a good man. A very good man. I don’t say that lightly.”
She was nodding, letting the subject build its own momentum. “We’ve got a lot of unanswered questions about him. My mom and I, we used to talk about it. Not much and not very often. She married Frank, started a whole new life, plus it hurt her, remembering him, because they were so much in love. But the times we did talk, she didn’t know a lot. About what happened, I mean. My father never said what he was doing or where he was doing it, and the Navy never gave us much of an explanation.”
I waited for her to ask and she finally did: “So… maybe you know. At least you have to know more than they told us. You were there. You were the military guy he was closest to when he was killed.”
Feeling increasingly uneasy, I said, “It’s a minor point, but I wasn’t in the military.”
“You weren’t? But he wrote about you. You had to have been there with him-”
“I was there. Yeah, we were together a lot. All I’m saying is, I was over there for a different reason.”
“See? I don’t even know where ‘over there’ is. It’s with little things like that you can help. Fill in some of the holes if you don’t mind talking about it. Bobby Richardson was killed in an explosion during a training exercise, that’s all my mom was told. A couple of times in his letters he mentioned Thailand, so we assume it was in Asia. She wrote and made phone calls, but never got another speck of information. Something else she said was that she tried to get in touch with an old buddy of his. She musta meant you. Who else? But that she never heard back.”
I was shaking my head. “I wrote your mother a letter after it happened. Whether she got it, I don’t know. I never received any calls or letters from her. That doesn’t mean she didn’t try. More likely, I was out of the country, on the road, no way for me to receive mail or messages. That was pretty common in those days.”
“I don’t get it. You weren’t in the military but you were that far out of touch?”
I said, “I was talking about the area your father and I were in. Primitive, that’s the point I’m making. You want me to answer questions about your father, I’ll answer as best I can. Ask me anything you want. But I’d rather deal with the present than talk about the past.”