Tomlinson groaned. “My dear, you are wrong. So wrong. All of you.” His voice sounded pained and apologetic, and he was holding up both palms- Please stop. “I’m not worthy to teach you or anyone else. Not anymore. I’m… I’m a terrible person. I abuse drugs. I’m a fornicator- nothing’s beneath me. My God, I tried to strangle a man a few days ago! Basically, I’m an absurd wanderer. I… I was sent to this planet to conduct inhuman experiments on the human liver.”
Tomlinson put his hand on my shoulder, and pointed to me, adding, “Ask this man. He knows me. I’m the island drunk-and that’s saying something on these islands.”
I was nodding. “Oh, he’s a drunk, all right.”
“In the entire history of the Sanibel Police Department, I’m the only person to have ever been stopped for DUI while on a skateboard. And the police chief is a distant relative.”
True.
“I’m no longer fit to teach!”
We were idling away, nearly out of earshot. Touching my hand to the throttle, I said to them, “This man’s scum. Worthless trash that I wouldn’t trust with my daughter. Do yourselves a favor. Leave him alone.”
Tomlinson said, “That’s right, I am scum-” but then stopped. Looking surprised and offended, he turned to me and said, “Hey. That’s pouring it on a little heavy, isn’t it, man?”
Smiling, I said, “Why are those kids following you?”
He sighed and sat in one of the three seats bolted into the stern platform. “Remember that paper I mentioned? The one I sent to Mr. McRae to help him deal with his wife’s condition?”
I pretended as if I had to think about it. “Yeah. That’s the one you were supposed to send to me, too. But didn’t.”
“I wrote it when I was in college. I’d drunk a case of Bud weiser, eaten two blotters of acid and a candy-looking substance that might have been mescaline. I’m not sure. Or it was an M amp;M. Whatever the hell it was, I sat down and wrote this paper for a class I was taking on world religions. The whole thing in one frenzied sitting. ‘Twenty Ways to Duct-Tape Your Life.’ That was the original title. Then I changed it to ‘One Fathom Above Sea Level.’”
I said, “So?”
He sounded sad and concerned, saying, “So someone’s been circulating it on the Internet. People all over the world have been reading the thing. It’s been translated, for Christ’s sake, like, into twenty-some languages. People who read it get the entirely wrong idea about the kind of person I am. There are some-an increasing number-who come looking for me, thinking I’m… well, that I’m some kind of prophet. Tomlinsonism. That’s what some are calling it. My own religion. Like Taoism.”
“That’s scary,” I said.
Tomlinson was standing now, rummaging through the ice locker. “You got any beer in here?”
A few minutes later, a Bud Light in his hand, he said, “You’re telling me.”
I followed the markers across Dinkin’s Bay to Woodring Point, cutting behind the fishhouse ruins. Pelicans and egrets flushed off the spoil islands, their wings laboring in the heat and heavy air, gaining slow altitude as their shadows panicked baitfish in the shallows.
I ran straight across the flats, but at reduced speed, concentrating on the mangrove fringe to my left, then on the horizon of water that opened before me.
My skiff’s big 225-horsepower Mercury made a pleasant Harley-Davidson rumble as we sped along, but it was still quiet enough to converse in a normal tone.
Mercury Marine, once a maker of classic American outboards, had had a bad couple of years in which their image and their reputation took a beating. It was not a good time for the company, or boaters who used their product.
Those of us who make our living on the water are necessarily fussy about equipment. We talk freely about what is good and what is bad. A year or so back, I’d begun to hear the rumors that Mercury was back on track. They’d finally gotten it right again.
So I made the switch. A lot of the guides were making the switch, too.
It was a nice day to be on the water. The bay was a gelatin skin that lifted and fell in broad sections; moving with the slow respiration of distant oceans, faraway storms. The air was balmy, scented by the tropics, it had a winter clarity. The sky was Denver-blue, and on the far curvature of sky, beyond Pine Island, were cumulous snow peaks. The clouds were coral and silver: vaporous sculptures, carved by wind shear, adrift like helium dirigibles.
Standing at the wheel, I could look down and see the blurred striations of sea bottom. I could see white canals of sand that crossed the flat like winding rivers, and I could see meadows of sea grass-blades leaning in the tide as if contoured by a steady breeze. Ahead, there were comets’ tails of expanding water as redfish and snook spooked ahead of us. The fish created bulging tubes on the water’s surface, as if they were trapped beneath Pliofilm.
Behind us, in our slow, expanding wake, the tiny clearing that was Dinkin’s Bay Marina-wooden buildings, a few cars and docks, the Red Pelican Gift Shop, my house on pilings-was the only break in the great ring of mangroves.
Sitting to my right, Tomlinson finished his beer, crushed the can in his hand and said, “When’s the last time you and I did a Bay Crawl?”
“Bay Crawl” is a local euphemism for an afternoon spent going from island to island, barhopping-or pub-crawling-by boat.
“It’s been a while,” I said. “Too long. But I have to fill that order for horseshoe crabs. This time of year, it’s not going to be easy.”
Which was true. Each winter, horseshoe crabs appear on South Florida’s mangrove flats en masse; a slow, clattering minion plowing blindly to copulate. Thousands of creatures ride the floodtides into the shallows; the big cow crabs dragging smaller males behind, each tuned in to the instinctive drive to exude and spray; to lay and fertilize. They are animals as archaic as the primal ooze to which they are attracted, dropping bright blue eggs in the muck; hatching one more generation of a species that has not changed in two hundred million years.
Come spring, though, they are not as easily found.
Tomlinson said, “I don’t want to go back to the marina for a while. So I’ll help you collect the little darlings. Then let’s say we start at the Waterfront Restaurant at St. James City, have a few beers and say hello to the twins. Then hit the Pool Bar at ’Tween Waters. After that, work our way up to Cabbage Key, and maybe even Palm Island. The Don Pedro softball team’s supposed to play the Knight Island team tonight. Plus, Passover begins at sundown-what better reason to celebrate?”
I touched the throttle; felt the pleasant, momentary G-shock as we gained speed, a jet-fighter sensation, as I listened to Tomlinson add, “Speaking of baseball, I got an e-mail from Marino today.”
Marino Laken Balserio is my son. He lives in Central America with his brilliant and beautiful mother, Pilar. Having Marino was unplanned; a surprise to both of us.
I said, “I know. We trade letters a lot now.”
“He told me he loves the Wilson catcher’s mitt you sent him. Said the Rawlings mitt is a piece of junk, plus he hates the way that Rawlings does business in Costa Rica. Can you believe they’re still connected with Major League baseball? Bionts have infiltrated our sport.”
I chuckled. “He inherited his mother’s intellect, and her heart.”
“So there’s another good reason to go bay-crawling. You have a brilliant son.”
“I’ll drink to that,” I said, pushing the throttle forward.
Much of what Tomlinson and I did that night remains a blur. Like most drunken intervals, the evening came back to me in a series of lucid snapshots rather than a continuous flow of memory.