Randy White: Night Vision

On an Everglades-scented evening in March, as I drove my pickup truck west, toward the Gulf of Mexico, my hipster pal, Tomlinson, reached to switch off the radio, saying, “Life is the best thing that can happen to any of us. And it’s also the very worst thing that can happen to any of us. Problem is, our luck begins with mom’s location when the womb turns into a slippery slide. That’s why I self-medicate. It makes the shitty unfairness of it all almost bearable.”

We had just dropped my chatty cousin, Ransom Gatrell, at Regional Southwest, and I was eager for a few minutes without conversation. I nodded toward the radio and told him, “Hey, I was listening to that. We can talk later.”

“The Guatemalan girl deserves your full attention,” Tomlinson reminded me. He leaned back in his seat and stuck his hand out the window, surfing the Florida night. “She’s gifted. And she’s in trouble.”

He wasn’t referring to Ransom, although my powerhouse cousin, and my other neighbors at Dinkin’s Bay Marina, Sanibel Island, Florida, are a gifted, eclectic bunch.

“Your friends are always in trouble,” I said. “Your female friends, anyway. Percentages suggest the problem is you, not them.”

“Tula isn’t a female. She’s an adolescent girl,” he replied. “There’s a big difference. Tula’s at that age-a magic age, man-when some girls seem to possess all the wisdom in the world. They’re not screwed up by crazed hormones and menstrual periods. They exist, for the briefest of times, in a rarefied capsule of purity. The window is very, very narrow, of course. It’s afterward that most women go a little nuts. Hell, let’s be honest. All of them.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

Tomlinson pressed, “I’m trying to give you the background so you understand what we’re dealing with. This girl traveled three thousand miles on freight trains, riding in the backs of semis, to get to Florida. Hell, she even hiked across a chunk of Arizona desert. It’s because she hasn’t heard from her mother in almost three months. Her brother, two aunts and an uncle are somewhere in Florida, too, and she hasn’t heard from them, either. Something’s wrong. Tula came here to find out what.”

I said, “An entire family goes off and leaves a girl alone in the mountains of Guatemala? Maybe they’re not worth finding.”

“One by one,” Tomlinson replied, “whole villages migrate to the States. You know that. They watch television at some jungle tienda. They see the fancy cars, the nice clothes. Meantime, they don’t even have enough pesos to buy tortillas and beans. All the volcanic eruptions and mudslides the last few years in Guatemala, how do you deal with something like that? The coffee crop has gone to hell, too. Another revolution is brewing, and there’s no work. What would you do if you lived there, and had a family to feed? That’s what I meant when I said a person’s luck-good or bad-begins with where they’re born. Are you even listening to me?”

An instant later, the man’s attention wandered, and he said, “Holy cripes, another Walgreens. If they keep piling up the concrete, building more condos, this whole damn peninsula is gonna sink. Just like Atlantis. It could happen.”

I downshifted for a stoplight, and I turned and looked at Tomlinson, the odor of patchouli and his freshly opened beer not as penetrating as the magenta surfer’s shirt he wore. “Not listening, huh? The girl is thirteen-year-old Tula Choimha from a mountain village northeast of Guatemala City, not far from the Mayan pyramids of Tikal. Did I pronounce her last name right?”

“Choom-HA,” Tomlinson corrected, giving it an Asiatic inflection, which is not uncommon in the Quiche Mayan language. He spelled the name, then added, “Does it sound familiar? It should. Choimha is mentioned in The Popol Vuh. She’s the goddess of falling water.”

He was referring to a book of Mayan mythology, one of the few written records to survive the religious atrocities of the Conquistadors.

I thought, Oh boy, here we go, but I pressed ahead, saying, “Tula just turned thirteen, you told me. Her mother’s first name is something unpronounceable, so she goes by Mary. Or Maria. Tula arrived in Florida about eight days ago, and you met her-you said you met her-by coincidence at a trailer park the owners are trying to condemn so they can build condos. She lives with five other people in a single-wide.”

“Meeting her wasn’t coincidental. I would never say coincidental, because I don’t believe in-”

I interrupted again. “But you didn’t tell me the whole truth, did you? You didn’t say that, about once a month, you cruise the immigrant neighborhoods, buying grass or fresh peyote buttons. The illegals smuggle in peyote from Mexico because it’s safer than carrying cash they probably don’t have in the first place. You used to drive your VW, but lately you’ve been taking your electric bike. What? You think it makes what you’re doing less obvious? Just the opposite, pal.”

I waited, glancing at the rearview mirror until I saw the man’s smile of concession, before I added, “See? I was listening.”

Tomlinson disappeared into his own brain as I drove west, his right hand still surfing the wind, his left fist cupping a can of Modelo. Disappeared is a fitting description. Tomlinson has spent so many nights alone, at sea, he says, that he has constructed the equivalent of cerebral theme parks in his head for entertainment. Books, religion, music, whole communal villages populated, presumably, with Jimi Hendrix and Hunter S. Thompson types. All probably landscaped with cannabis sculptures trimmed to resemble objects and creatures that I preferred not to imagine.

Tomlinson is a strange one, but a good one. His perception of reality has, over the years, been so consistently tinted by chemicals that, my guess is, he has reshaped reality into his own likeness. And it is probably a kinder, brighter reality than the one in which most of us function.

Tomlinson is among the most decent men I know-if you don’t count sexual misconduct, which I am trying to learn not to do. He’s brilliant and original, something I can say only about a handful of people, and I count him among my most trusted friends-again, his behavior with women excluded. He had come into my little marine lab earlier that day asking for help. And when a friend asks for help, you say yes and save the questions for later.

It was later. Almost ten p.m., according to the Chronofighter dive watch on my left wrist. March is peak tourist season in Southwest Florida, so beach traffic was heavy, both lanes a bumper-car jumble of out-of-state license plates punctuated by roaring packs of Harleys.

After several minutes of silence, Tomlinson’s attention swooped back into the cab of my truck, and he said, “This place we’re going on San Carlos Island, the trailer park’s named Red Citrus. It’s not far from the shrimp docks. And, lately, it’s become a bitch of a dark space, man. I should have warned you before we started.”

I said, “The shrimp docks? That sounds close to your new restaurant.”