So far, it looked as if Jeth had gotten the worst of it. His face was swollen, and blood was pouring from his nose. I watched Camphill use his nasty side-kick to batter Jeth into the canoe rack, then almost drop him with a spinning back elbow to the ribs. Jeth staggered, nearly fell, but managed to keep his feet.
I badly wanted to help him, but I couldn’t. You can’t fight another man’s battle. Jeth wasn’t going to quit, and he would have taken my intrusion as an admission that he was beaten.
But he wasn’t.
I watched him take a deep breath, charge Camphill, and manage to wrestle his arms around the man’s chest. The actor knew all the pressure points, all the dangerous places to hit. But Jeth held on and, with the slow determination of a boa constrictor, worked his way upward until he got Camphill’s neck cradled in his strong right arm, then used his left hand to apply pressure-a headlock.
That’s when the momentum began to turn.
Jeth grabbed a fistful of Camphill’s hair and levered him over his hip onto the sand-a weird thing to see because a cap-sized patch of the actor’s hair actually came off in Jeth’s hand. Jeth looked at the thing, shocked, and then flung it into the water.
It made no sense at first, but then I realized-a small crown toupee. Camphill wore a hairpiece.
Maybe the psychological impact of being exposed had something to do with it, or maybe Camphill was just exhausted. Whatever the reason, Jeth ended it quickly, using his fists to pound away at the man’s face until Camphill rolled into a fetal position, hands protecting his head, calling, “Enough! Enough! I quit, goddamn it!”
Jeth stood shakily; he seemed a little surprised that it was over and he had won.
But it wasn’t over yet. He still had a small mob to deal with, pointed-face and tennis player among them, plus a couple dozen women and men. The little mob began to walk toward Jeth as he retreated, backing away faster and faster until he was running as they pursued him.
He chose exactly the right escape route. I watched him vault over the railing of the dock where we stood, then sprint toward us, not realizing, at first, that we were there-he probably had planned to jump into the water to get away.
His expression, when he saw us, was touching. It’s a frightening thing to have a mob after you, and his face registered panic, then puzzlement, as his brain scanned to identify us and analyze the situation. Then his expression changed to pure relief.
I pushed him past me, saying, “You okay?” not expecting an answer. Then I began to walk shoreward, toward pointed-face and tennis player, who were leading the mob.
Both men stopped abruptly when they realized who I was. The men and women behind them suddenly went quiet, perhaps sensing pointed-face’s uneasiness. They saw the way he was looking at me, seeming to get smaller as he took a step back, then another, retreating as I continued to walk toward him, his little mob bunched up behind him now, blocking his escape.
When I was just a couple of paces away, hearing sirens warbling in the distance, he yelled, “Stay away from me, damn you! Don’t you touch me!”
He looked at me blankly when I asked, “Can you swim?” Then I lifted him and vaulted him into the bay.
9
Amelia told me, “You’ve sobered up a little-maybe we all have-but not enough for me to talk about the boat. The one that maybe picked up Janet, Michael, and Grace.”
“You’re absolutely certain you saw it?”
“It wasn’t light yet, but it wasn’t dark. You know that time of morning when it’s powdery gray, like fog? I hadn’t heard the Coast Guard helicopter in a while, or the search plane. Like maybe they’d gone back to base or something to refuel. That’s when it went by, maybe a mile off. No lights, like a ghost ship, and it stopped out there. But what I think might have happened, the way I feel about it all, let’s save for the morning. Maybe because I’m a public defender, dealing with all those indigents in trouble, I’ve learned never to discuss anything serious when I’m drinking. That’s what nails them each and every time. And this is about as serious as it gets.”
It was a little after 3 A.M. We were back at Dinkin’s Bay, a couple dozen of us, bruised and scarred a little, but the whole group intact, no one arrested, no one hospitalized, although Jeth was going to need a doctor to check out that crooked nose of his. Camphill had almost certainly broken it.
We were in a small open area of grass and sand by the seawall near the boat ramp and canoe racks. A couple of the guides had built a fire of driftwood, piled the wood on high, and now we all sat around it, feeling the heat, watching sparks comet skyward, little pockets of us set off in shadows, the familiar faces of friends suspended like orange masks above the flames, a tribal effect. There was a tribal feel, too. We’d drawn blood and been bloodied together, and now we were back in camp, our secluded mangrove village.
The feeling was not unknown to me. But it had been a very, very long time since I’d experienced it.
Only two of us were missing: Tomlinson and Ransom. After leaving the ’Tween Waters docks, I spent half an hour searching around, convincing myself that someone hadn’t knocked him unconscious during the brawl and left him to die in the condo parking area or facedown in the shallows.
Instead, I found Tomlinson near the water facedown in the sand at Jensen’s Marina, passed out at the base of the palm tree totem pole there everyone calls Queenie. When I rolled him over to make certain he was still breathing, he pulled a curtain of scraggly hair away from his face, struggled to focus, and, after a few beats, finally realized who I was. “Ah… my compadre. Back from the Crusades, I see. Did Jeth slay the black knight?” He slurred the sentences together, wincing as if it pained him to form words.
Ransom came up beside me, as I said, “Yeah. His nose is a few inches off center, he took some bad shots, but he won.”
“You realize that actor’s handlers are never going to look at him the same again. In fact, man- poof, like prestochango- his career may be over once word gets around. Him and his small, teenager soul. See? Good sometimes does triumph, Marion. Not always, but sometimes. You should find that reassuring.”
I took his arm. “We need to get you up and back to the No Mas. ”
He shook his head. “No. I want to lay here and feel the earth. I’m hurting, my friend. Deep, deep in my Bodhi-mind, my Dharma-kaya, the pain, my God, the pain. All my life, I’ve wondered how I stand it. But no matter how many times my heart breaks, it still refuses to turn to stone.” He burped, burped again, then made a groaning sound before he added, “So I’ve just got to lay here and suck it up until the fat lady finally sings.” From the sound of his voice, the look of his face, I could see that he’d been crying.
I said, “What? You’re so drunk you’re making even less sense than usual.”
“Hah! ’Cause you don’t understand, Marion. It’s Janet. Our Janet. She was still out there when the Coasties called off the search. I know it. I could feel it, man, Janet’s strong vibes. That’s why I stayed at sea for a couple more days. I could communicate with her spirit, but I couldn’t find her physical body. Maddening!”
I said slowly, “You mean her dead body. Her corpse.”
“No! She was still alive!”
I don’t believe in fortune-tellers or parapsychology, but I’ve been around Tomlinson long enough to know that his intuition and perceptions are sometimes eerily accurate. How he does it, comes up with some of the things he knows, I don’t pretend to understand.
I said, “What about now? Do you think she’s alive now? It’s been three weeks exactly.”
He groaned again as he got up onto one elbow. “I don’t know. I can’t find her anymore. Her spirit, I mean. The first week after the boat sank, she’d come to me at night, in dreams, if I’d really smoked a lot of my good Colombian and chanted the Surangama sutra. Janet and the two others. I could see what happened, what they were doing, how they felt. I could even hear what they were saying. Phrases. Snatches of emotion. That’s why I overmedicated myself tonight. I was trying to break through again. I’m still trying to break through, trying to find her, but no luck.”