I went back to the house, took the keys to my old Chevy pickup truck off the hook over the front door, and went looking for Dewey. I’m not the most compassionate of people, but anyone who hurts a friend and does not swiftly try to make amends ranks, in my book, among the lowest of the low.
There was a second, more selfish consideration. I realized something: I didn’t want to lose the lady. Not like this. Not because of something I said-words I was now already fairly certain I didn’t mean.
I drove toward Captiva Island on SanCap Road, past Sanibel Gardens, past the Sanibel Rum Bar amp; Grille at the intersection of Rabbit Road-Tomlinson’s new favorite hangout. Then past the elementary school where the ball diamond lights were on, a couple of the beer-league softball teams tinging away with aluminum bats.
It looked like Nave Electric was playing the Timber’s staff. I drove faster than normal, windows open, one hand on the wheel, the Gulf of Mexico off to my left, the bay beyond, houses and tree fringe to my right.
A Campeche wind was blowing off the Gulf, stirring the tops of palms. It leached a cumulative heat from the island’s sand face, weighted with the odor of sea grape, palmetto, oak leaves, prickly pear. My truck’s lights created a tunneled, pearl conduit, stars above, vegetation gathered close on this part of the road, traffic sparse.
I looked at my plastic watch: 9:07 P.M.
Dewey had sold her beachfront home because it was impossible to refuse the small fortune a software magnate had offered her. Besides, as she said, the house was never much more than a hotel to her anyway, she’d traveled so much during her years as a tennis pro. There was no vested emotion. In fact, the place had personal baggage and some bad memories.
So she’d banked half the money, and used the rest to buy and remodel a luxury bungalow, bayside, hidden in a coconut grove between Mango Court and Dickey Lane, just past Twin Palms Marina and the Sunshine Cafe on Captiva Island.
At Mango Court, I turned right down the sand drive, her property isolated by high ficus hedges and security warning signs, expecting to see her Lexus parked beneath the open, roofed carport.
It wasn’t.
She hadn’t run home with her tail between her legs, as might have been expected.
Why was I surprised? Dewey almost always does the unexpected. It’s one of the reasons I value her. She is five-ten, 155 pounds or so of pure nonconformist female, highly competitive, though secretly super sensitive despite the fact that her vocabulary has a consistently salty, seagoing flair.
Dewey is different. Maybe it’s because her life has been so different from the lives of most women. Her family is from somewhere in the Midwest-Iowa or Kansas or Ohio, I think. But because her father was a tyrant and a bully, she grew up attending the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy in Bradenton, Florida. She got used to living in a dorm, adjusting to a communal society and life on the road because she never got the chance to experience anything else. For a while, she was ranked one of the top twenty tennis players in the world. But then there was an elbow operation, and a knee operation, and she decided to concentrate on golf, a game she loves.
Something else Dewey concentrated on for a time was Walda Bzantovski, the Romanian tennis great and her long-time lover. But things hadn’t worked out.
Which is why she was now living on the islands, splitting her time between this classy, plush bungalow on Captiva, and my spartan stilt house on Sanibel.
Until tonight.
So where do female ex-jocks go when they’re furious? Or when their hearts are broken?
Probably the same place men go, I decided. To seek comfort and counsel in a best friend. Or in a friendly bartender.
I was her best friend. At least, I had been. Which left option number two. So I drove from place to place, checking the parking lots of bars.
I looked for her car at the Mucky Duck, R. C. Otters, ’Tween Waters, and the Green Flash without results. Back on Sanibel Island, though, I got lucky. I drove through the lot of the Sanibel Rum Bar amp; Grille, and her Lexus was there, hood cool to the touch.
I’d driven right past the place on the way to her home.
The Rum Bar is built into a little strip mall that it shares with a health club and a couple of other island businesses. But it’s still got a tropical feel, the way it’s decorated; plus, it attracts all the fishing guides and service industry locals as well as tourists on their way to and from Captiva Island.
I didn’t see many familiar faces on this Tuesday night, though. The bar was packed, two or three deep, ceiling fans swirling overhead, flags and nautical charts from Central America and the Bahamas on the walls, a local band, the Trouble Starters, singing about what they were gonna do when the volcano blew as I walked through the doors.
Dewey was there. She was in the corner of the room next to the Cuban refugee boat that the owner had salvaged in the Florida Keys and had converted into a table. She was playing a game called Ringmaster: Swing the brass ring accurately and it will arc on its string and lock itself onto a hook six feet away.
Dewey wasn’t alone. Not a surprise. Women as attractive as Dewey spend few lonely moments in bars. She was with a group of five men, the central focus of their attention. The men were drinking mixed drinks. They wore bright Hawaiian shirts or polos, a couple of middle-age bellies showing, and neatly pressed khakis on an island where almost everyone wears cargo shorts in May.
So they were tourists, probably down here fishing or golfing or attending some kind of convention. They had the look of money, with their styled hair sprayed in place, waxed Docksiders, and heavy gold watch bracelets and rings. So I made another guess: maybe corporate executives, or attorneys, or members of the same investment team on Sanibel for a meeting, cutting loose a little, showing off for the tall blonde with the bawdy vocabulary.
Dewey saw me the instant I walked in. Without pausing, her eyes swept through me and away as if I were invisible.
For a moment, I thought she might throw an arm over the shoulder of one of her new buddies; do something to try and instigate jealousy. But, no, she was too classy for that. Instead, she shoved one of the men roughly, tossed her head back, laughing, and took her turn with the ring. First, though, she placed her chalice-sized margarita on the refugee boat-Dewey, a woman who seldom drank alcohol.
I thought to myself: Uh-oh. Trouble.
There was that potential.
At the bar, I paid for a Bud Light, told Mark, the bartender, that Tomlinson-a Rum Bar regular-would probably be in later, and strolled over to the little circle of men clustered around Dewey. They greeted me with cool glances, their body language screening me out, telling me it was their little party, go away.
But I didn’t go away. I stood there watching for a quarter of an hour, listening to the kibitzing, trying to assess, evaluate, hoping Dewey would excuse herself and give me a chance to explain.
Her new friends were salesmen from a national sporting goods chain based outside Chicago. There were four underlings, judging from their ingratiating manner, and there was the big boss, Corporate Vice-President in charge of something.
I never heard what.
Corporate V-P was authoritative, but in the chummy way that head coaches use. He wasn’t overtly arrogant, but he did have a CEO’s knack for assuming center stage. He was shorter than I but much broader, with dense black hair and the layered, geometric facial structure that women seem to find attractive.
There were a couple of more details I noted: His underlings were working hard for him, through deference and flattery, helping him make a play for Dewey.
Something else: There was a wedding-band width of sunburned skin on the ring finger of his left hand.
Salesmen get an unfair rap. Their profession is a favorite target of derision, when in fact I know it to be among the most demanding of occupations. I know because, when it comes right down to it, I’m a salesman. I sell marine specimens-and I’m not the world’s best.