Randy White - Shark River

That, at least, sounded more like the old Tomlinson. “Anyone I know? Or is it confidential?”

“You remember Barbie and Bobbi, the Verner twins who work at Hooters?”

I said, “Sure, the two redheads.” Hooters was where we went for cold draft beer and chicken wings after playing baseball.

“Barbie and Bobbi, they are two smart ladies. Both’re working their way through college, majoring in psychology with a minor in comparative religions, which is one reason we’ve become good friends over the last year. They’re not kinky, they’re not promiscuous, but those two girls have the instincts of surgical nurses. They’re familiar with the problem; they know I need help. I called and spoke to both of them before I came to your place. So guess what? Didn’t even hesitate; they both volunteered to get naked with me, bless their hearts. They’re coming to the party, then we’re going for a short midnight shake-down cruise on No Mas. ”

I was laughing now. I couldn’t help myself. “Then why are you so depressed? You ought to be grinning like you just won the lottery. You know how many men in this country who’d give anything to trade places with you? Two Hooters girls, for Christ’s sake.”

He shook his head from side to side, disconsolate. “They don’t know about this pill. What if it doesn’t work? If I can’t make it with two Hooters girls, I might as well stick my dick in the dirt and use it as a tomato stake. The worst thing, though, man-and this is what’s really bothering me-if the pill doesn’t put serious lead in my pencil, I’ll never be able to face those girls again. After something like that, where can we go to eat wings?”

Dinkin’s Bay Marina is three hundred yards or so up the shoreline from my lab. If the mosquitoes aren’t swarming, it’s an easy walk along the shell road. If you want to get to the marina by boat, you head north under the Sanibel Causeway, then turn left just past the power lines and run in close along the deepwater of Woodring’s Point. To get there by car, follow Sanibel’s Tarpon Bay Road past Bailey’s General Store, down the shell road, into the mangroves, and through the gate to the bay.

Lots of people come by boat and car and bike because Dinkin’s Bay is an unusual place.

Beyond the shell parking lot, there’s a community of old wooden buildings that extends out onto the water via a latticework of wobbly docks. It is a welcome anachronism on an island known for tourism, busy beaches, thousands of real estate salesmen, reclusive artists, designer homes, and elegant restaurants. There are plank tables for cleaning fish, a big wooden bait tank whose pump hisses twenty-four hours a day, and picnic tables beneath a tin roof so visitors have a place to sit while they eat the marina’s fried fish and crab cakes and chowder. There is a gift shop, too. It’s called the Red Pelican, and it smells of incense and imported cotton and silk. It offers blouses and dresses, sarongs and knickknacks from all over the world, plus paintings by local artists.

Next to the Red Pelican is the marina office and store. It’s a two-story building. Stocky, pragmatic Mack, owner and manager of Dinkin’s Bay, runs the office below. Jeth lives in the one-bedroom apartment above.

As I walked toward the office, I heard a woman’s voice call, “Hey there, Doc! You coming to the party tonight?” I looked to see JoAnn Smallwood waving at me. JoAnn is part owner of the soggy old Chris Craft cruiser Tiger Lily, one of Dinkin’s Bay Marina’s gaudier floating homes. She’s a skinny-hipped, busty woman who, along with her roommate and partner, Rhonda Lister, runs a very profitable weekly newspaper, The Heat Islands Fishing Report.

I stopped to talk with JoAnn for a while while the other liveaboards worked or washed their boats, or carried grocery sacks or coolers along the docks, everyone seeming to move faster than usual. Nearly every person who passed me had to stop, say hello, and ask why my arm was in a sling.

To each and every one, I told them, “Fell off a dock.”

To the few who said they’d met my sister, that she was gorgeous and charming and funny, I replied, “Funny’s right. That’s her little joke. She’s actually my cousin.”

It was Friday night, the official end of the workweek on the connected barrier islands of Sanibel and Captiva. Saturday and Sunday were the busiest days of the week, but Friday night is still the traditional gathering time for the liveaboards and marina employees, a brief quiet time before the weekend rush, when all the locals come together as a community to drink and laugh, to complain about the traffic and the tourists with no one around to offend.

It was nearly five P.M. JoAnn and Rhonda had hung Japanese lanterns on the stern of their boat, a sure sign that it was a party night. Music was already booming from inside the trawlers and sailboats and cruisers that lined liveaboard row. I could hear showers running; could smell the shampoo odor of soap mixed with the more common marina smells of diesel and rope and varnish. Could see that Mack and Jeth had already set out the big Igloo coolers filled with ice and beer. Could see Eleanor and Joyce and Kelly loading the picnic tables with food. Knew that, within an hour or so, Mack would walk out, close the steel gate and lock it, a necessary ritual that is also symbolic: The outside world could no longer intrude on our small marina stronghold.

Now JoAnn waved me closer and said, “Did you hear what happened while you were away? Between Jeth and Janet, I mean.”

It’s impossible to avoid marina gossip so I usually listen politely, then pointedly try to forget what I’ve just heard. I said, “Someone told Tomlinson, because he mentioned it. But no particulars.”

JoAnn has short copper hair that now looked bright red, perhaps because of the satin sheer pink dress she wore or the yellow hibiscus blossom behind her ear. There was a pleasant bounce of hair and cleavage as she made the waving motion again. “Then come aboard. You’re gonna need a beer after you hear it. It’s that damn sad.”

I looked at my watch: 5:10. Almost sunset time. Almost party time. It was the first day in weeks that I hadn’t worked out, and I still felt sick and sore from my run-in with Clare.

“A couple of beers, maybe that’s just what I need,” I told her. “But then I need to go talk to Mack about something.” I used my good arm to pull me up the old Chris’s boarding letter, through the railing gate.

JoAnn said, “Jeth and Janet, we all know they’ve had their problems. But what do you expect if you date someone from your own marina?” She gave me a meaningful look, sitting there in her party dress, one chunky leg crossed over the other, a margarita in her hand.

A knowing look because we’d both felt a long-standing sexual attraction for the other. We had come close to acting on that attraction a few times, but had been smart enough to defuse it on each occasion. JoAnn wasn’t beautiful or even pretty by general standards-which is to say the predictable and often perverse standards of New York advertising gurus. She had nice hair, a Rubensesque body and the kind of wide, plain face that I associate with corn-fields and small Midwestern towns. But there was a commonsense sexuality about the woman that I felt on a bone-and-marrow, abdominal level. Apparently, she felt the same for me. So we took pains never to be alone.

We were in deck chairs, sitting on Tiger Lily ’s stern, where we could look across the docks to the marina office and the shallow-water mooring where the fishing skiffs-the Bonefishers and Makos, the Aquasports, Egrets, and Lake and Bays-sat motionless on their lines, big outboard engines tilted upward like the wings of old fighter planes on a carrier. Through their silence, the engines implied velocity and a certain competence.