Randy White: Hunter's moon

On a misty, tropic Halloween Eve, an hour before midnight, I stopped paddling when coconut palms poked through the fog ceiling, blue fronds crystalline in the moonlight.

An island lay ahead. Maybe the right island. Hard to be certain, because the fog had thickened as it stratified, and my sense of direction has never been great.

If it was the wrong island, I was lost. If it was the right island, there was a chance I’d soon be detained, arrested, or shot, maybe killed.

I’m human. I was hoping it was the wrong island.

I checked the time as I reached into the pack at my feet and opened a pocket GPS. The navigational display was phosphorous green, like numerals on my watch. It was 11:17 p.m., I discovered, and I wasn’t lost. I’d arrived at my destination, Ligarto Island.

As I drifted, the tree canopy floated closer. Slow-motion fog cordoned off water and palms became brontosaurus silhouettes grazing in moonlight.

Fitting. Ligarto is Spanish for “lizard.”

I’ve spent years on Florida’s Gulf coast, exploring above and below the water. It’s what self-employed marine biologists do and I am a marine biologist. Usually. In all those years, I’d never had reason to set foot on Ligarto. Until tonight. I was here because a powerful man had demanded a favor. Doctors had told him he was in the final weeks of remission, with a month at most before leukemia immobilized him. Would I help him escape?

“Escape to where?” I’d asked. We were in my lab, standing amid the aerator hum of saltwater tanks, the smell of formalin and chemicals. He’d surprised me, tapping on my screen door after midnight.

The man had nodded his approval. “Perceptive. Most would’ve asked, ‘Escape from what?’ Which is romantic nonsense.”

His confidence was misplaced because I didn’t understand the reference. Death? Afterlife? Nonexistence?

“No sentimental baloney, Dr. Ford. You nailed it. The question is, where? I have about four weeks to live, really live, before they hook me up to the tubes and monitors. I want to spend part of that time traveling-but freely. Incognito.”

“Travel anonymously in this country? You? ”

“Yes, this country… and others.”

His wording seemed intentionally vague.

“No specific destination?”

“When I left the Navy, I traveled everywhere. Followed my instincts. What was I, twenty-five? Hitchhiked, worked on a freighter, even hopped a train. That’s the way I want it to be.”

An evasion. He didn’t bother to conceal it so I didn’t pretend to be convinced.

“Relive your youth. Put on jeans, a T-shirt, and blend in. Is that the idea?”

“You’re saying I’ll be recognized. I don’t think so. People expect to see me on television, not the street.”

“Take it from a guy who’s never owned a TV. People know who you are… specially after”-I caught myself-“after the recent controversy.”

Annoyed, he said, “I don’t have time for diplomacy. Are you talking about my wife’s death? Or the million-dollar bounty on my head?”

I knew that his wife had been killed in a plane mishap. I’d also read that he’d infuriated religious fundamentalists, Muslim and Christian, but I was unaware that a reward had been offered. I remained diplomatic.

“Both.”

“That was five months ago-eternity, to the American public. Please stop second-guessing. You’re like the so-called media experts who gave me a ration of crap for being a concept guy, called me a dope when it came to details. Believe me, I’m no dope, and this has nothing to do with revisiting my youth. I’d love to stick it up their butts one last time.”

The media, or the fundamentalists? Either way, his bitterness was unexpected.

I’d been hunched over a microscope studying a sea urchin embryo-it was liquid green, round, and clouded like a miniature planet.

I stood. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Sharing personal information? Because you’ve proven you can be trusted. You know the incident I’m talking about. You refused to discuss it.”

He was referring to something that happened eleven years earlier, in Cartagena, Colombia.

I replied, “You’re giving me credit for something I didn’t do.”

“Wrong. I’m giving you credit for keeping your mouth shut. Remember who you’re talking to, Dr. Ford. I trust you with my secret because I know your secrets. Or should I say, I know enough. Surprised?”

No, I wasn’t surprised.

“Do the feds still call that ‘coercion’?”

“Not in the executive branch. It’s called ‘doing business.’ Something else that may interest you is information I have about a friend of yours. Mr. Tomlinson. Things I doubt even you are aware of.”

Tomlinson is my neighbor at Dinkin’s Bay Marina, Sanibel Island, Florida. He’s part sailor, part saint, part goat. Picture a satyr, with salty dreadlocks, bony legs, wearing a sarong. Tomlinson and I are friends despite a convoluted history, and despite the fact that, as polar opposites, we sometimes clash. We’d clashed recently. I hadn’t seen the man in two weeks.

I returned to the microscope and toyed with the focus. “Tomlinson has secrets worth knowing? I’m shocked.”

He wasn’t misled by my careful indifference. “You may be. When you learn the truth.”

I looked up involuntarily.

The man’s smile broadened.

“Yes. I can see you’re interested.”

Fog isn’t mentioned in guidebooks about sunny Florida because tourists are seldom on the water at midnight, when a Caribbean low mingles with cool Gulf air.

The cloud now settling was as dense as any I’d seen. Gray whirlpools of vapor descended, condensed, then re-formed as moonlit veils. Water droplets created curtains of pearls, so visibility fluctuated. Each drifting cloud added to the illusion that the island was moving, not me, not the fog. Ligarto appeared to be a galleon adrift, floating on a random course and gaining speed. I had to start paddling soon if I hoped to keep up.

I did.

Took long, cautious strokes. Paddled so quietly I could hear water dripping from foliage, drops heavy as Gulf Stream rain. The reason I didn’t want to make noise was because I knew a security team was guarding the island. Pros, the best in the world.

They would be carrying rocket launchers, exotic weapons systems, electronic gizmos designed to debilitate or kill, no telling what else. Probably five or six men and women, all bored-a little pissed-off, too-forced to work on a favorite adult party night: Halloween.

A dangerous combination for any misguided dimwit foolish enough to attempt to breach island security.

Dangerous for me, the occasional misguided dimwit.

Every few strokes, I paused. In fog, there’s the illusion that sound is muffled. In fact, fog conducts sound more efficiently than air. If there was a boat patrolling the area, I would’ve heard it. Instead, I heard only an outboard motor far away-someone run aground, judging from the seesaw whine. I could also hear the turbo whistle of a jetliner settling into its landing approach, as invisible from sea level as I was invisible to passengers above.

Maybe the patrol boat was at anchor… or maybe a few yards away, hidden by mist.

If so, there was nothing I could do. I was alone, in a canoe, miles from my Sanibel home, in a chain of bays that links cities along the Gulf Coast. Tampa was somewhere out there in the gloom, a hundred miles north. Naples, Marco, and Key West were south. Maps in airline magazines show bays but not the smaller islands between beaches and mainland, islands the size of Ligarto.