Randy White - Dead of Night

I’ve had a long-standing interest in bull sharks; spent a lifetime traveling the same jungle rivers and remote sea places they inhabit. I find their ability to prevail in dissimilar environments fascinating. They roam tropic waters worldwide, commonly forage hundreds of miles up rivers, and can thrive in freshwater lakes.

Because the species is identified by various names-Zambezi River shark, the Lake Nicaragua shark-it’s not widely known that it’s responsible for more serious attacks on humans than great whites.

In popular literature, bull sharks are often described as “ferocious,” which is misleading because the word implies emotion. Efficient-that’s more accurate, and the way I prefer to think of them.

I’d discovered these five pups while doing a necropsy on a two-hundred-pound female one of the guides brought in. Finding living young inside a shark isn’t uncommon. But three of these fish were uncommon, which is why I’d rigged this big tank. Like the mother, three of the five had visible spinal deformities. It was probably a genetic defect, though it might have been caused by waterborne contaminants. Whatever the source, the deformity was unusual in the cartilaginous fishes. A first, in my experience.

The big female had found a way to survive. Would her young?

On a table near the aquarium was a leather-bound day-book in which I’d been keeping lab notes, a things-to-do list, a few personal observations on people and events. It was novel-sized, with SHIP’S LOG embossed on the cover. A salty touch, but a tad theatrical. It was a present from my son, so I used it.

That morning, as had become habit, I opened the log and noted date, tides, and moon phase, before writing:

5 immature specimens, C. leucas, 18 cm long +/-. 3 exhibit obvious spinal deformities rarely reported in sharks or rays, but common in bony fishes. I’ve found only two cases of deformed elasmobranchs, both bull sharks, both collected in Florida waters (Eugenie Clark, 1964; Mote Marine Laboratory). Deformities include: scoliosis (lateral spinal curvature), lordosis (axial spinal curvature), and kyphosis (humpback curves)…

I also made some personal notes. Wrote more than usual, referencing Lake, my girlfriend Dewey Nye, and Tomlinson. No one is entirely the person he or she appears to be. We all inhabit a more solitary dimension in which we deal with our secret aspirations and fears; frailties seldom suspected even by those closest.

It’s true for me. I didn’t realize to what extent until I began keeping daily notes. Writing allowed me to fret or inspect on a private level, so I now carried the journal even when I traveled.

It wasn’t long before I transitioned back from personal matters to the more interesting subject of sharks:

No field observations on immature sharks with skeletal abnormalities have been published. Does deformity = handicap? Am I wrong to suspect lineage between these fish, and the abnormal bull sharks collected by Dr. Clark several decades ago?

I was excited about the project. Which is why I was proportionately pissed off at myself for saying yes to Frieda. Did I really want to go off and leave the sharks, leave my work, to look for some oddball biologist who lived on an island in the middle of the state?

No, I didn’t. Hell no. Didn’t want to leave Sanibel. The longer I live where I live, the more I dislike being away. Hate missing a good sunset. Hate missing the 5:00 A.M. silence of a fresh tropical morning.

But the woman had me.

Before I’d received her first Internet message, I’d even already formulated a plausible excuse for not making the surfing trip. But now I was committed.

Tomlinson and I are close enough that it would have been okay to bail. He’d have understood. But I didn’t know Frieda well enough to disappoint her.

LOG

10 Dec. Friday Low tide: 10:21 a.m.; Tortuga’s wind 15 knots. Night jasmine, and owls during talk with Laken about paternal genetics.

He’s interested for a reason…

Checklist: 1. Cat food @ Bailey’s. 2. Reserve hotel, Vero Bch. 3. Learn to say no, dumbass.

– MDF

LOG

11 Dec. Saturday (Driftwood Motel, Sebastian Inlet)

… too clumsy for surfing, shins all bruised. Tomlinson’s weird pals driving me nuts amp; worried about my sharks. Home tomorrow. Prefer windsurfing.

– MDF

So it was on a blue bright Atlantic Coast Sunday, just before sunset, the twelfth of December, and only slightly more than twelve days before Christmas, when I detoured to check on Frieda’s brother. I’d left Tomlinson with his gaggle of new surfer pals, old doper buddies and adoring Zen students, dropped off the crappy rental at Ron Jon’s Surf Shop in Cocoa Beach, and drove my truck inland.

I could have stopped at Applebee’s home two days earlier, on my way to Sebastian Inlet, but procrastination is a powerful copilot when it comes to unpleasant duties. I wanted to put this one off as long as I could.

Later, my conscience would play the inevitable game of “What if. ..”

What if I had stopped by the man’s home on Friday instead of Sunday night? What if I hadn’t interrupted the two people who were interrogating and beating him? Would he have lived? Or would he have died? And what would have happened then?

I had Frieda’s directions on a square of paper stuck to the truck’s dashboard, so I knew he lived on a lake twenty-some miles south of Orlando, and slightly southeast of Kissimmee, on a little unincorporated island I’d never heard of, Nightshade Landing, Bartram County.

Nightshade grew wild on the island, Frieda told me. The bushes were something to see come spring, all those white blooms. Even so, locals had shortened the name to Night’s Landing. Typical. Boat access only, she said, which is why the place had never really flourished-even though real estate values had soared because of Orlando’s theme park boom.

“Night’s Landing is about a hundred acres, but the population can’t be more than a few dozen people. In the early nineteen hundreds, some New York developer tried to create his own little Cape Cod. But he so sufficiently pissed off the local power structure that they refused to build the bridge he was counting on. Plus, most of the properties have title problems. It’s tough to sell or resell what you can’t prove you own. Which is why he never finished the project.”

She’d added, “I think the island’s a little creepy. A few sand roads, all Victorian houses. Some abandoned. Lots of gables, turrets, towers, and New England porches. The kind of architecture that a New Yorker would think of as classy. The island’s perfect for Jobe, though. It’s the sort of place that people don’t go to live. They go there to disappear. Or hide.”

The scrap of paper also contained her brother’s phone number. On my way to Kissimmee, I used my cell phone. Tried three times. Got nothing but his short, shy phone message: “I am not available. Try again. Or leave your name, number and the first four digits of your birth date, zeros included.”

Birth date, zeros included?

Weird. Did that suggest an interest in astrology? It didn’t mesh with what I knew about the man-nor any responsible scientist I’ve ever known.

Another unusual thing was that he spoke with the careful, halting diction that I’ve come to associate with people who have speech impediments, or drunks who are trying their best to convince police that they are not drunk.

I’d read his papers.

The man wasn’t a drunk.

When I got to Kissimmee, I dialed and listened to his recorder for a fourth time. Wrestled with the decision to launch my boat and go bang on his door, or buy time by having dinner. Maybe he was outside taking a long walk, or just getting back from a research trip, or maybe working in his lab.