Randy White - Shark River

I read: Dear Marion, Your Uncle Tuck is drunk as usual and passed out, which took longer than most nights because it’s after midnight. He give me this letter to address and send, so I decided to write you a letter of my own. I’m sleeping out in the barn and it is a real pretty night here on the ranch with stars over the water and the shrimp boats in close enough I can hear them and there are lights in the windows of those little houses down on Mango Bay where Sally Carmel lives. I know you remember how it was and always liked it when the two of us went out in the pasture and looked up at the sky at night and we could hear the little diesels of them shrimpers working in shallow. Don’t that seem like a long time ago? Marion, I have been having powerful dreams. Most the frog-eaters I know would not understand but you were always different and might. My dreams tell me I am not going to be in this world much longer. I believe that I will be passing into the next world soon. This may be good because if it is an Indian afterworld there will not be so many frog-eater automobiles and I will be with people of my own kind. That is a good thing because I have become an old man and lonely. Your uncle has become an old man and lonely, too. We were partners all our lives and now we will soon share death, too, which may be the first time I ever heard Tucker quiet for more than a few hours. That is why I write. Judge Flowers is supposed to send these papers to Tuck’s daughter after Tuck and Sinclair Benton die. If my dreams have been wrong, and I am still alive when you read this, come get me right away so we can go straight to Cat Island, which will save you a lot of time. Your uncle cannot do anything the simple way. We both know that. This time he has a reason, though, and it’s not just some crazy trick. At least I think he’s got a reason and not just being tricky again. You will find out for yourself, and maybe we will find out together. If I am dead when you read this, good luck. There are a couple of things I’d like you to know. You have met your cousin, Ransom, who has a strong heart. I doubt if your uncle told you that you also might have a cousin who lives in Cuba. He fathered a son there. Or I might have fathered the son. We’ve never seen the child enough to be sure, but the boy’s mama was romantic with us both. That was often the way when we was on the trail. Something else you don’t seem to know is that Tucker Gatrell is like Ransom. He has a heart that is strong and good. He may be a drunken liar and half crazy but he is a decent man, plus my partner, and always will be. I hope you will honor his wishes, Marion. He’s always felt real bad about how things turned out. Sincerely, Your Friend

Joseph Egret

I stood when I’d finished Joseph’s letter. Took off my glasses and cleaned them, smiling. Frog-eaters-Joseph’s name for tourists and modern Floridans, white and black, because he knew them to eat the legs of Everglades frogs, something his people would not do.

I turned and went into the lab and filed the letter away before returning to my house and bolting the door behind me. I rummaged through the desk until I found the two silver keys on their ring, then got down on my hands and knees, pulled the fireproof lock chest from beneath my bed and opened it.

One key fits the door, the second key fits the lock on the drawer’s false bottom, which I also unlocked and removed, thus revealing neat stacks of folders and notebooks, five bogus passports, some clothing, and other detritus from a life I thought I had abandoned long ago.

For a moment I was taken aback when I realized that two very important manila envelopes were missing. Over the years, I’d grown used to seeing them each time I opened the little secret compartment. One was labeled OPERATION PHOENIX, the other with the words DIRECCION: BLANCA MANAGUA written on a label in red felt-tip pen.

I felt a mini-moment of panic because, in a very worst-case scenario, they are my only wedge against potential legal problems from which no statute of limitations would ever protect me.

Harrington had been right about that.

Then I remembered that the envelopes were presumably right where they were supposed to be: in the bank’s safety-deposit box where I’d stored them several months before.

My notebooks were still there, though, and I removed them carefully, pausing to linger over the names I’d written in precise block print on their covers, each notebook catalyzing visual memories, some good, many bad. Coast of Bengal

Borneo/Sandakan

Nicaragua/Politics/Baseball

Havana I

Havana II

Ox-eyed Tarpon/South China Sea

Masagua’s Ridley Turtles and the Magnetic

Mountain

Singapore to Kota Baharu (with 3rd Gurkhas)

The Hannah Smith Story

There were others.

All contained the carefully kept details of my most private life, much of that lifetime spent traveling alone through the Third World tropics, necessarily duplicitous years spent doing clandestine work as well as the work I still care passionately about: marine biology.

I set the notebooks aside and found what I’d unlocked the box to find.

I squatted there staring, for a time, at the nine-millimeter Sig Sauer P226 semiautomatic handgun that lay, in its shoulder holster, atop a black Navy watch sweater that I had not worn in a long time. I removed the Sig Sauer from the holster, feeling the weight of it. Popped the clip, flipped the slide lock and removed the barrel. The weapon had an industrial, black finish… the spring and metalwork, though, had gathered a couple of small spots of corrosion.

Why did I find the marring of this old weapon so distressing?

I took a can of WD-40 from the cupboard beneath the sink and polished until the rust was gone. Then I disassembled the entire weapon and cleaned every element to a mirror finish before I took up the clip again and layered in ten silver-jacketed nine-millimeter hollow-points, the slug of each round copper-bright and symmetrical. Each cartridge singular… dense.

I lifted up the sweater and found the brown case made of cowhide leather. Unsnapped it to see a six-inch custom-built sound arrestor resting on its own cradle so perfectly that it gave the impression of a surgical instrument.

I screwed the silencer onto the barrel of the Sig, aware of its frictionless threads and flawless pitch. Swung the weapon in a fast arc, the balance of it no longer as comfortable and familiar as it had once been. Recalled the amplified blowgun noise it made when fired.

Nothing comforting about that memory, either.

I stood and placed the weapon under my mattress. Hung the sweater in the closet. Then neatened everything and locked the door behind me before returning to the marina.

It was getting late, but the party was still spinning along. I noted that Tomlinson’s sailboat, No Mas, was under way, the little engine he seldom used straining to push the boat’s mass toward the deepwater opening of Dinkin’s Bay. I pictured him out there at the wheel, a Verner twin on each side, and wished him a silent good luck.

I had another beer. Mingled around listening to Ransom on steel drums, still playing with the band.

When she was done, I told her I’d go with her to find her inheritance. That I would help her if I could. First, though, I needed a couple of days to finish up some work. And that we couldn’t travel together. It was too dangerous.

She kept asking why.

I didn’t tell her why.

I spent the weekend dragging nets, wading the flats, collecting specimens, then working in the lab. The biology professors at Grinnell and Waldron College would have been heartened. Maybe even proud. The thing is, I never receive an order without feeling an obligation to provide what I can as fast as I am able. It creates a specific, physical connection between my small lab and the wider world. For reasons I don’t pretend to understand, that connection is important to me. The image of starfish and sea anemones taken from the Sanibel littoral sitting in heated classrooms, snow and cornstubble through the windows outside, is oddly satisfying.