Randy White - Twelve Mile Limit

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.

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.”

I told him, “I can’t leave you here. You get sick when you’re passed out, you could choke and die.”

Tomlinson used his hand to wave me away, then settled himself back in the sand, eyes closed, curled in a fetal position. “Demon rum,” he said. “Not a bad way to go. Only thing I’ll miss is going into town and playing ball come Sunday.”

We both played Roy Hobbs baseball, a fairly serious brand of ball.

Beside me, Ransom said, “I’ll stay with him.” She sat herself in the sand, using Queenie the totem pole as a backrest, and combed her fingers gently through Tomlinson’s long hair. “Poor old bony hippie man. This boy drive me crazy, but he in my heart and ain’t nothin’ I can do about it.” She looked at him for a moment, shaking her head. “He got a toothache in his soul, my brother, and there ain’t nothin’ I can do about that, either.”

I said, “Yes, he does. I think he probably always will.”

I left the two of them to sleep in the sand, because that’s what they wanted, and headed back to Dinkin’s Bay, determined to get Amelia alone long enough to ask her about the boat. Maybe it was possible. Maybe Tomlinson and Amelia were both right-there was a chance Janet had been picked up and was still alive.

Now, sitting by the fire, Amelia said to me, “I’m going to stay at your sister’s house-if we ever get to bed. She says you’re a runner. How about we go for a run tomorrow, and I’ll tell you all about it. A couple miles along the beach, maybe?”

I told her that would be just fine. She was probably right. Certain subjects are appropriate for drunk talk, other subjects are not. The fate of three missing people deserved elevated status. So I asked her about something she probably would feel comfortable talking about-how the fight started back at’Tween Waters.

“I’ve almost gotten used to it,” she told me. “I was sitting at one of the big tables with Jeth, Ransom, and the two women who live here-JoAnn and Rhonda?-and Claudia, too. Claudia was asking me more questions about Janet. What did we talk about when we were hanging on to the anchor line? She asked a lot of little details about what went on after we were set adrift. That sort of thing.