My feelings of guilt and failure are sometimes so power-charged that there seems to be a chemical source, as if some valve in my brain has ruptured, and is leaking acid.
Certain memories flashed so vividly, with such impact, that, floating in the canoe, isolated and insulated by wilderness, I’d groan aloud until the images passed.
The alcohol helped, even though I knew the folly of it.
Being in the ’Glades seemed to help as well.
Tomlinson’s correct. There’s no need to say Florida’s Everglades, because there is no other. Just as California cannot lay claim to the Pacific, the Everglades is beyond the claim of one state.
The Everglades region has its own feel, its own good odor. The odor is created by a fusion of freshwater flowing slowly over limestone, the wheat-stubble odor of sawgrass, the lichen scent of Spanish moss, tannin, wild citrus, and of tropic sun heating cypress shadow.
To fight the depression, I was also doing something else: I was using my brain, exercising the cells, learning something. I was making an effort to use all the senses so to patch together a neophyte’s understanding of a complicated ecological system.
My last night in the ’Glades, Karlita insisted on joining me on my evening paddle. Despite Tomlinson’s claims, I am not an antisocial person. I didn’t know her well enough to have a reason to say no, so I said yes.
Physically, she is an attractive woman by the standards of most: long legged, lean, with a glossy, healthy cowling of Irish-black hair, and the kind of face that looks good on a television screen, or when reproduced on the covers of magazines.
When it comes to the human female face, researchers have identified the five most important components that define our standards of beauty. The male brain, apparently, has been encoded to react both physically and emotionally.
Features include sexual maturity balanced with neonate, or childlike, qualities. Also important are facial expression, the shape of a woman’s mouth and lips, plus a measurable ratio between cheek and chin that is similar to the proportional difference in bust size and waist that keys sexual arousal in most men.
Karlita had all of the above. But I found her decidedly unattractive. I appreciate woman as people, so I tend to evaluate them by the same criteria I use to select male friends.
As we paddled into the darkness, she began a nonstop monologue (“I think it’s so valuable to invite oneness with nature…”).
It was the kind of introspective discourse that is the hall-mark of the self-obsessed. It forbids any attempt at conversation. Her insistence on telling me about my “former incarnations” was a subtle device. It was a way of establishing authority. Her passionate commitment to “spiritual open-mindedness” was a cloaked condemnation of anyone who thought differently than she.
What irritated me most, though, was that she claimed to be an expert canoeist, yet was a sloppy paddler.
I can tolerate pompous assholes in short doses. Fakes and pretenders are a different story.
Even so, I was on my best behavior. Tomlinson’s my friend. To confront her would have been to embarrass him.
When we got back to camp, though, I took him aside. I told him I’d had enough. I’d be leaving the next day. “That woman’s a phony, old buddy. Your instincts used to be better. I’m surprised you didn’t see through her act.”
He laughed, and said that he’d invited her along less because of her paranormal powers than for her paranormal body.
I said, “You’re trying to get the famous TV psychic in the sack? Just when I think it’s impossible for you to shock me, you find a way.”
“I know, I know, I’m terrible. But I comfort myself by believing that shallowness is a key part of being a complicated male. At least, that’s what I tell myself. There are times when my testicles are nothing more than ventriloquists suspended from one big dummy. Absolutely unconscionable. But it does seem to add a little spice to life.”
He added, “I take no pride in admitting that, with the exception of my Zen students, I’ve never been with a healthy, adult woman in my life when I didn’t secretly calculate the chances of getting her in the sack.” He shrugged, disgusted. “As long as she wasn’t damaged, wasn’t vulnerable, it never mattered. Not to me-and usually not to them.”
I had to ask. “Do you think Karlita would stop talking long enough to make love?”
“ No. Play-by-play, the whole time. That’s my guess. It’d be kind’a entertaining. Like playing baseball with earphones on, listening to someone describe how you’re doing.”
I thought that was the end of my days in the Everglades.
I was wrong.
chapter nine
When you shower in the rain, getting dry is not a pressing consideration. The storm cell had spread itself over Sanibel, diffusing intensity, so the downpour had slowed to a steady drizzle and was finally stopping. Big soft drops, the air much cooler now in the tropical moonlight.
I wrapped a towel around my waist, walked to the front door, then paused. I could see Sally through the window, staring at the fire, mug of tea in hand. Across the water, at the marina, there were Japanese lanterns glowing red, green and orange, a bunch of people out there on the docks listening to music, still having fun despite the passing storm.
I tapped on the window to get Sally’s attention, then held up an index finger- Give me a minute, I’ll be back -then clomped barefooted down the steps to the wooden cistern that is my main fish tank. I switched on the overhead lights.
Every morning of my life, my first few waking minutes are filled with mild dread because, more than once, I’ve lifted the lid of that tank to find a soupy mess of decomposing specimens, the filter fouled, or the raw-water intake plugged. Keeping sea creatures alive is a time consuming, demanding job, and I had yet to check on my collection since returning.
Relief. The system was working just fine. The pumps were sucking in raw water, spilling overflow out. The hundred-gallon upper reservoir, with its subsand filter, was cleaning the water, then spraying it as a mist into the main tank where sea squirts and tunicates continued to filter, which is why the water therein is too clear to slow the human eye.
Through the water lens, I could see small snappers, sea anemones, swaying blades of turtle grass, sea horses, horseshoe crabs, whelk shells, the whole small world alive. There were five immature tarpon stacked beneath the exhaust of the upper reservoir, as motionless as bright bars of chrome. There were immature snook, as well, heads turned into the artificial current, a few sea trout, grunts and cowfish, too-strange little animals that look like something dreamed up at Disney World.
My reef squid were the hardest to find because their chro matophores allow them to blend with the sand bottom. But there they were, the entire miniature sea system healthy and well, indifferent to the world of primates going on above and around them.
As I stood looking into the tank, a voice called from the mangroves, across the water: “In that white dress, you look like some fuckin’ Fiji warrior. Or a guy in one of them old Tarzan movies. Put some clothes on or I ain’t crossing over.”
I’d installed shepherd’s-crook lamps along my boardwalk, and so I turned to see Frank DeAntoni in the distance, standing ashore in a circle of light.
Smiling, I said, “She’s agreed to talk to you, Frank. Come on aboard.”
Sally said to DeAntoni, “Before I answer any of your questions, would you mind answering a couple of mine?”
Frank said, “Sure, absolutely. Ask me anything.”
The three of us were on the porch, DeAntoni sitting close to Sally, giving her his full attention. He’d been watching the woman for a while, but this was the first time they’d met face-to-face. It put an unexpected touch of shyness in his voice; seemed to make him eager to please.