I heard a car approaching the dock. Gator. I turned and saw him get out of the car. He stood stiffly alert, feet apart, his eyes wide with concern as he scanned the boat for my location. I caught his eye. I wanted to give him a gesture to indicate my situation and what I wanted him to do, but I wasn’t sure what either of those was. I considered making a throat-cutting gesture to indicate that he shouldn’t say anything, but he might take that wrong and think I was in trouble. Maybe I was. So I waved bye-bye instead, no doubt looking like the scared idiot I was.
It was quickly getting light out. I could see down through the porthole to a clock on the chart desk. It was five ’til six.
Sea Dingo
came to idle a few hundred feet from the railroad bridge. Still uncertain what to do, I lay down on my belly so that I could move up closer to the portholes without being seen. I waited. Five minutes crawled past. Ten. I told myself,
We’ll be through the bridge in a few minutes, then into the lock. It looks like I can climb ashore there. Yes, that’s what I should do.
I heard Miles key the microphone on his radio, say, “Moore Haven Lock, this is the trawler
Sea Dingo
. We’re waiting west of the railroad bridge. Will it be opening soon?”
“Thank you,
Sea Dingo
. I’m sure he’ll be along in a moment.”
The microphone clicked back into its holder. “Fuck,” said Miles Guffey.
“What’s keeping him?” said Waltrine.
“Fuck if I know. Whyn’t you gimme some coffee, wouldja?”
Waltrine yawned. “Sure, boss; send the black girl for the coffee.”
“Oh, go fuckerself, Waltrine,” Miles said conversationally.
“I do regularly. Black or white?”
“The fucking?” he inquired.
“The coffee, asshole.”
Now Miles yawned. “Man, we are testy this morning.” “You started it.”
The day was only minutes old, and it was already going to hell.
Coffee,
I thought.
That would be nice. A bathroom would be even nicer
.
Give up,
I told myself.
Easy for you to say. Here I am in the chase scene of my own damned stupid home movie, and it’s moving at a snail’s pace. Probably the worst danger I am in is dying of a burst bladder.
“Oh, good,” Miles said. “You found the guava Danishes. You warm them up in the microwave?”
I wanted to growl, but my stomach got there ahead of me.
I am going to die a miserable, embarrassing death soaked in my own piss on the roof of a boat that belongs to a mad scientist who is eating guava Danishes that smell so good I am drooling,
I informed myself.
Waltrine said, “No, I didn’t use no microwave, I just breathed fire on them. It’s in my job description. And I am
gonna
be breathing fire if this sonnabitch don’t get this show movin’! Fuckin’ Cal gonna be an old man by the time we get there!”
Ah! That confirms it! They are off to pick up Calvin Wheat. So: Was the missing man routine a ruse, or did it really happen?
Miles clicked the mike again. “Moore Haven, this is
Sea Dingo
. Any update on that bridge opening?”
“Sea Dingo,
sorry about that. He’s got a train coming through in ten or fifteen minutes. He’ll open after that.”
I looked back toward the dock. Gator was still waiting by his car. He had produced a pair of binoculars, and was watching. They looked big and expensive. I wondered how a man who wrestled farm alligators, chauffeured swamp buggies for a living, and drove an old, beat-up Toyota could own such equipment.
And night-vision goggles,
I remembered.
They have to cost a grand or so. Did I miss something here?
Suddenly, the ludicrousness of the entire situation moved me to action.
How bad can it be
? I decided.
This is just a couple of my scientific colleagues down there playing games. I’ll go on down and present myself. If it’s a bad deal, I’ll ask to be put off at the lock, tell them there’s a witness right back there on the dock, watching.
But then another thought occurred to me:
What if they’re armed? I don’t want to surprise them
… .
But right then, Waltrine spotted me. “Holy shit!” she bellowed. “Miles! There’s somebody on the upper deck!”
I whipped my head around. She had come up the ladder behind me. I about peed my pants. So much for the macho stowaway act.
Miles Guffey’s eyes appeared close up to one of the portholes. “Well, well, well, if it ain’t our little private eye come to join us,” he said jovially. “Nice t’see ya. How d’ya take your coffee?”
Lucy opened her private notebook and prepared to write in it. She sat on the edge of her bed in the house NASA kept at the Cape for departing shuttle crews. The clock was ticking down.
Endeavor
was almost done with its crawl back out to launch pad B. Tomorrow they would begin the long process that would bring them to final readiness. At dawn on the following morning, they would lift up into the sky.
She sighed. If she did not hear from Jack by midnight, she knew what she must do. She must tell Mission Control of the threat.
But between that time and now was a whole day, and he might still call … .
As was her custom, she turned to the back of the notebook, a fine, leather-bound journal in which she wrote only a few sentences at the beginning of each day, and pulled out a photograph. The picture was eighteen years old, and soft from handling. She smiled pensively into the little face depicted there, a newborn infant staring out into the world. Tiny Lily, born in Switzerland during her first summer out of college, quick while nobody was watching. Her deepest secret, almost perfectly kept.
As always, her heart wobbled a moment, tumbling through the irresolvable uncertainty that this moment always touched. Could she have learned to care for her? Could a life as mother and wife have filled her? Was it
sane or acceptable that she had given her to her great-grandmother’s people to raise? Would she ever find the strength to visit her, now that her dream of space was almost realized?
And why, of all insane things to do, had she told
him
that Lily existed?
She ran the tip of one finger along the edge of the photograph. Sighed. Put it away. Began to write.
Dearest Lily, Daddy promised to keep you safe. Mommy is going to space very soon. She’ll bring you home the brightest star.
…
Calvin Wheat stood on the dock in Freeport, just down from the Old Bahama Bay Hotel. This was the West End, the customs dock where Miles Guffey and Waltrine Sweet had agreed to meet him.
It was early morning but already stifling hot. No breeze. Perspiration beaded on his forehead and ran down his temples, leaving streaks in his spiky hair. The aches from the impact of falling three stories from the bow of that cruise ship intensified if he stood still too long, so he paced, now and again swinging his arms to fight the odd numbness that settled often in the small finger of his left hand. He must have jammed his neck pretty badly. He’d hit the water at modified attention, toes pointed, as he had been taught in the Navy, but he had hit hard. It had been too difficult to gage the descent. At least he was alive. Alive, and still walking. Hell, as long as he could move, he would take his revenge. Yes, by God, he would!
There was one single thing that he required in order to wreak that revenge, and he knew now exactly where to find it.
Twenty-four hours to launch. In half that time, he must slip out with the fast boat again, hurry west to Stuart, where he would hide it in the marina, then take his car up the coast
to Cocoa Beach and dig up his special tool.
Bang, bang,
make an angel out of Lucy!
Except that he was being watched. He was certain of it now. The instrument he had found stuck up inside the hull of the fast boat was tiny, but he knew a tracking device when he saw one. Lucky that he had found it before his employers did.
The man in the sailboat had been anchored off the next cay too long now—three days—and he never left, not even to take a swim or walk on the island he was pretending to visit. And the stupid fucker had screwed up. The setting sun had glinted off his spotting scope. Stupid fucker. Stupid. Did he have any idea what firepower existed on this island? Did he think he could give chase in that puny sailboat, for shit’s sake?
He had surreptitiously monitored the marine-radio scanner the men from the east had brought to the island, and had never heard a peep out of the man in the boat. But someone had tried to reach him.
He imagined that he would go over there and shoot the bastard, just as he had spun a thousand fantasies that he could face a man in combat, or in the smallest argument … .
His employers were watching the man in the boat as well. They were staying shy of his end of the island, and covered their heads with foolish fishing caps when they went out, as if that could disguise their ethnicity.
He itched to be moving. Perhaps he could slip out from the dock on the far side of the island, and that fucker wouldn’t see him go. But no, he must wait. Wait, wait, wait.
Itch, itch, itch.
Wait, the men were coming toward him. They were bringing him something. He didn’t like to talk to them, didn’t trust them. Knew they laughed at him behind his back. Blond devil, they called him. “Hey blond devil, here’s a gun,” they were saying. “We have an errand for you. See that man in that sailboat over there …”
The center of Lake Okeechobee is like no other place I’ve been on Earth.
The colors are wrong. The water reflects the sky a disconcerted gray instead of blue, and it it’s so full of tannic acid that it curls off the bow like Coca-Cola, complete with the foam. The sky itself is a confusion of vague tints all smeared into each other.
The surface is wrong. The horizon is lost, and the water does not appear flat; instead, implausibly thick with humidity, the boundary between lake and sky seems to curve upward like an inverted bell jar except with no clear edges, just a blur of moisture fading from more to less distinct. The sides thus hemmed in by humidity, the zenith seems unreasonably high.
And yet the lake is beautiful, reaching up from its own depths of strangeness to captivate the heart and break it all in one overwhelmingly soft and lonely moment.
The air itself is so humid that my body was soon slick clear down my torso, but the motion of the boat through the air kept the experience from being cloying. Perspiration poured down between my breasts and from under my arms in rivulets.
I stood up on the flying bridge, doing just that: flying. I had decided, after a decent cup of coffee, followed by eggs, bacon, and three glasses of water, that life on a boat could
be good. Waltrine lent me shorts and a tank top, and I kicked off my shoes and went barefoot. With my hair pulled back in an elastic band, I felt at one with the elements.
Clouds built steadily all around us, fiercest in the west, cumulus rising by seven-thirty and thunderheads appearing by nine; they were dark as gunmetal by ten and growing wider, which meant they were coming straight for us.
The boat plowed steadily through the dark water, creating a constant kissing sound where the bow wake slapped itself falling. We moved on autopilot, chugging relentlessly from marker to marker, now passing small islands formed of dredging spoils and populated by troops of white pelicans crammed in next to cormorants.
I had been on the lake less than two hours, but already the rest of the universe seemed far away. The train that had finally come through at quarter to seven was hauling twenty or more gondola cars full of crushed limestone. Miles Guffey had watched it broodingly. I had thought at first that he was merely annoyed at being kept waiting, but then he opened a drawer and pulled out a newspaper story from the
Washington Post
that reported where that limestone was coming from and why, and where it was going to: It seemed that real-estate developers had bought themselves a huge loophole in the law, thwarting the professed federal plan to “replumb” the Everglades from a ghostly relic back into a thriving ecosystem. Using a mining law dodge, they were excavating vast quantities of the underlying limestone between Miami and Lake Okeechobee, digging down into the ground water, which created both rubble to sell as concrete aggregate and lakes around which to build expensive houses. Guffey was pissed because not only were the aquifers within the limestone thus forever crossed and the vitality of the ecosystem further ruined, but the rock was being sold for seven cents on the dollar. I sighed. It seemed that Florida was indeed a land of extremes: extreme beauty, extreme fragility, and extreme greed.
Once finally through the bridge, we had headed into the
lock, cut through the flood-control levee. The concrete walls of the lock had loomed above our heads. Genteel men in uniforms had handed us lines and informed us that we’d be coming up about a foot. Doors had closed behind us, and others cracked open ahead of us, letting in a surge of water that sent us sloshing back like we were in a huge bathtub. After a minute or two, the forward doors had opened further, and we were handed into the canal that ran along the west shore of the lake. It was bordered by a ghost forest of dead trees that evoked the fierce but inanimate ceramic army found buried in China. The bases of their bleached trunks were lined with the lush greenery and bird life that I was coming to know as essence of swamp. Alligators floated somnolently about us like semisubmerged logs, and anhingas slid in and out of the water. The canal hugged the inside of the levee, whose unnatural uniformity and steep bank surprised the eye in this land of subtlety.
Miles had greeted my presence on his boat with equanimity. He had not seemed dismayed, or even particularly surprised. He had given me breakfast as if I were just some customer dropping by his cafeé, and began to tell me stories of his life in Florida and in the profession. I had settled in surprisingly quickly, rationalizing that I should wait half an hour or so to work my way into his confidence before asking the question Tom wanted him to answer. A cell phone awaited me, plugged into a charger to the right of the wheel. I would ask to borrow it, citing that I needed to reassure Faye. I would take it out of earshot and make my call.
But a half hour stretched quickly into an hour, an hour into two, and somewhere in there, I realized that he had unplugged the cell phone and hidden it. Where? Clearly, he had read my intentions. A game of cat and mouse had begun.
I played my end of the game with small talk. “In the Rocky Mountains, there’s a small pool of water in the center of a wide valley,” I told Miles. “It’s called San Luis
Lake. Indian myth says it’s the navel of the Earth, that man first climbed up from the underworld through it.”
Miles returned tit for tat. He chuckled at my story, tapped the key on the autopilot with one deft finger to correct his course by one degree, and leaned back again in his captain’s seat. “I’d believe that easily about this place,” he said. “I heard it said once that in the beginning, the sky loved the ocean, and she gave him children in the form of clouds. Then the sky grew fickle, and he tried to love the Earth, but she did not know how to receive him, and lay barren. Even so, the ocean became jealous, and sent her children to rain down upon the Earth and sting it with their lightning bolts. But she was foiled, because in raining on the Earth, she made her rival fertile.”
“Is that a Seminole myth?”
“Nope. I just made it up. Everything’s about sex here in Florida.” He laughed his mischievous laugh, then flared his eyes at me, grinned even more widely, and said, “I love it on this boat. It almost makes me forget how pissed I am.”
I took this as some sort of opening. “Who are you pissed at?”
Miles giggled raucously and made a wide circle with one hand. “Everybody. I’m pissed at the Survey, of course. They should be funding this damned project. But more than that, I’m pissed at the whole profession. Things seem to be decaying, going into a state of bureaucracy that’s so far from our original raison d’être that I’m about to scream. It’s all just paperwork now, and justifying our positions. I’m past sixty-five, you know; I was about to retire in plain old disgust when this project developed, kind of caught my interest. I decided, out of sheer cussedness, that I was going to jam it in their faces.”
I knew that in part I was hearing the trumpeting of a mired bull elk, but I spoke to the kinder side of that equation. “You’re an idea man, Miles. That’s a dying breed.”
“God, I hope not. I’m too young to die.” He sobered abruptly, and gave me a dark, impenetrable look. “That’s part of it, I suppose. Kids aren’t taught to think anymore.
They’re taught to fill out forms. Little answer for each slot. Everything’s digital. Hell, it’s an analog world out here. Look at it! It’s a continuum of interlocking, blended qualities, not discrete little quantities. Where’s the lake stop and the sky start? I mean really. We’ve been taught to think that things have edges, but they don’t. It’s all one planet. Explain that to some bureaucrat with a time card to punch. The damned paperpushers want prepackaged, predetermined results, everything in its separate little slot. I’m not kidding you! When I propose a project I’m supposed to fill out a computerized form that asks what the results of my investigation will be. Well, that don’t work in a world where half the data are missing and another quarter are hiding where we don’t know where to look for ’em. How’re we supposed to get the broad view on things if we think inside of preset slots to fill in? How’re we supposed to quantify ambiguity?”
I understood what he was saying. His was a world of observation and inspiration, of integration, of simplicity and originality of thought. I had stumbled across genius more than once in my life, and it was always thus, the ability to stand back far enough to see what was simple and obvious in a field of information that seemed chaotic and inchoate to everyone else.
I moved to the chart desk and began to pick idly through the messy stack of books and charts. “Where are we going?” I asked, wondering where in hell that cell phone had gone.
Miles laughed, a quick grunt. “I ain’t telling
you
. Y’all’s getting’ off at Stuart.”
I closed my eyes. So that was it, he wasn’t upset by my presence because he saw it as merely an odd ornament in the background of life’s occurrences, something with which to amuse himself along the way. He was en route to mess with destiny, and I had fallen fanglessly into his world for a moment, a blink of time.
With this insight came an electrifying realization: I had
observed him observing me. The student had just surpassed the teacher. I knew something he did not.
Or perhaps, with our differing angles of observation, he saw one field of data and I saw another, and the two fields overlapped. Yes, that was it, because he understood the dust business from a height and breadth of vantage I could only guess at; he saw time and space as only four of perhaps ten dimensions that turned in concert; I saw perhaps five or six, if you counted one or two modifying processes that affected the march of time through space or space through time. And here we hung together, immersed in a time and space both fluid and sticky, caught like two flies in the amber of a vast ecosystem that was both lushly sensuous and dying. In that moment, I perceived the slowing of time always ascribed to the South; it was not a lassitude, but rather a surrender to the march of events, whatever the pace. Miles had cursed the bridge man for making him wait unnecessarily, but once moving at maximum speed, eight knots was what there was available and therefore plenty.
So the puzzle took on a new character. It was a matter of divining the overlap between two fields, mine and Miles’ s.
As the far shore of the lake began to resolve itself from a smudge to a blur, Waltrine brought another round of iced teas up to the pilothouse, and I said, “Tell me more about the connection you made with the astronaut who’s about to go up on the shuttle.”
“Lucy?” Miles asked. “Why, she’s a friend of your Molly Chang’s, that’s how I got to know her. You knew Molly wanted to be an astronaut.”
Oh my God, yes
… . I had forgotten that. Our conversation seemed long ago, almost in another lifetime. Knowing that the astronauts were human beings who had friends pricked at my conscience. I had gotten this far by thinking of them as mere cultural icons, so much Spam in a jumpsuit.
But now one astronaut in particular was entirely too real to me.
Miles said, “No, I’ve never met her. We put a proposal across her desk to get her involved in the program. You can see the headlines: ASTRONAUT TRACKS KILLER DUST CLOUD FROM SPACE.” He panned a hand across an imagined page of newsprint.
“I suppose that would help publicize your cause,” I said dryly.
“
Our
cause,” he said, smiling, giving me a wink. His attention wandered. He stared out at the shoreline, which had now sharpened from a blur to a line, something drawn with a blunt chalk on a sidewalk. “I was on this lake when
Challenger
exploded,” he said. His gaze shifted to the north, toward Cape Canaveral. “You could see it right out there, clear as anything. It was cold that morning, real cold, and I was listening to the countdown on the radio and thinking, they’re going to go up in this weather? And they did, and that was that.”
I said, “You could see it this far away?”
“Sure. It was cold, so it was clear, and there’s no mountains in the way nor nothing. You can see a long way. We’re not much more than a hundred miles from the Cape here. But hell, if conditions are right, you can see them lift off from most anywhere in the state, clear as a bell.”
Waltrine snorted. “This state is
so
flat.”
Her sardonic humor clanged against my skull. This time, I did not find her wisecracking funny in the least. Like the rest of America, my brain had become imprinted by the image of Christa McAulliffe and her ill-fated fellow crew-members being blasted from the sky by a leaking O-ring, the scene ground into my memory by an overzealous news media. And, inextricably part of a nation in grief and trauma, I still reeled from the image of jet aircraft crashing into tall buildings in New York City, forever expunging from our hearts our naïve sense of safety.
And I knew something Miles and Waltrine did not. In my mind’s eye, the great wall of sky had once again filled
with a disaster that yet could unfold if I did not help Tom find the right island.
“Tell me where you’re going,” I demanded.
Miles laughed unkindly. To Waltrine, he said jokingly, “Lock her in the hold.”
“It’s important.”
Miles did not even bother to make eye contact with me as he replied. “You want to swim home from there, or do you prefer being put off in Stuart, where you can at least rent a car?”