injured reserve, so they flew to Mexico last week for that sawfish project she's been doing, plus so steroid man can see what life is like in the true tropics. The football player, I'm talking about.'
When I didn't say anything for a moment, he clapped me on the shoulder as he crossed the room. 'Those two, they're not going to hit it off. So maybe it's not too late. Anyway, Kathleen told me to deliver this if you stopped being stubborn long enough to ask about her.'
He held out a blue envelope, which was addressed to me in her tiny, precise hand. When I started to open it, O'Rourke said, 'Christ, don't read the damn thing in front of me! I feel bad enough as it is. Go back to your boat, catch us some more fat brood snook. You still owe me five or six fish, right? We need them by Saturday, don't forget!' He pointed me toward the dock before adding, 'That way you can suffer in private.'
In the afternoon, I found a deserted stretch of beach on one of the barrier islands, Cayo Costa, and I camped between a fringe of coconut palms and the water. I stayed two nights.
By the end of the first day, all the beer was gone and most of the food. The morning of the second day, depressed and feeling sluggish with a hangover, I told myself that twenty-four hours of fasting and a marathon workout was not only what I needed but what I deserved.
It has been a lifelong practice of mine. When things are going badly, or when I'm dissatisfied with my own work or behavior, I devise a new and improved Dumb Ass Triathlon. The events are determined by my environment. There must be at least two different disciplines and three different punishing events.
For me, it's an effective way of stopping negative momentum and of jump-starting a change in personal behavior. It is also an effective way to give myself a personal kick in the butt.
Punishment is the order of the day.
So I punished myself.
I stripped down to Nikes and running shorts and lumbered along the beach to the north point of the island, then all the way back to my camp, about eight miles.
Then I traded in the shoes for goggles and swam almost to the south point of the island-three miles, and all the harder because, toward the very end, I was pulling myself along against an outgoing tide.
Finally, I jogged and hobbled barefooted back to camp, where I drank a half gallon of water, cleaned my glasses, then laid down beneath a sun tarp to read.
Kathleen's letter was troubling. It was troubling because she wrote without anger nor any attempt to manipulate. There is no criticism so unsettling as the truth, and her observations were logically presented. Perhaps they were accurate, perhaps not.
Certain sentences stood out. I read and reread them.
She wrote: Marion, You have a wonderful brain and a heart that is bigger than you know, but you are a strange man. Your heart and your brain don't seem to be connected…
She wrote: I remember the look on your face when that drunk stumbled out of the bushes and surprised us. I learned something I couldn 't have learned any other way. I learned that you have a capacityfor violence without emotion. No emotion that I could see. No anger, no fear. The only primate who has that capacity is man, and very, very few of them. It frightened me. It should frighten you…
She wrote: I've found few men as attractive as you, but neither have I felt so isolated during intimacy. As thoughtful as you are, part of you is always in some faraway place. I wish I knew that place. I would have gladly traveled there with you…
She wrote: Humans aren 't driven to behaviorfor which we are not coded, nor do we long for something unless we've lost it. One or both may explain how you are different from other people. You have always been alone, Marion. I think you will always be alone…
The portrait that emerged wasn't very flattering. How long had Kathleen and I dated? Seven months off and on, then four months exclusively. Could she really have gotten to know me so well in so short a time?
As I lay on the sand listening to the respiratory wash of waves, the whistle of sea birds, I considered the validity of her observations.
I remembered the night that the drunk had come charging at us out of the shadows. We'd had dinner in downtown Sarasota and were walking along the waterfront to her car. We were talking, looking at the mast lights of sailboats. Unexpectedly, a big man was reaching for her, only a few meters away. Yes, he'd stumbled, but there was no way I could have known that.
I consider my reaction very practical, not extreme. I'd turned the man without much effort, then pinned him to the sidewalk until I was certain of his intentions. It had been methodical, not violent. Of course I hadn't been emotional. In such a situation, of what possible value was emotion? Yet, the woman found fault with my behavior. It made no sense.
I was also surprised by the depth of her affection. She mentioned her attraction and implied that she would have traveled with me anywhere. Yet, she'd never openly voiced her feelings, so how was I supposed to know? Had I missed some signal?
Perhaps. I thought about the night Kathleen had played at a big bayside folk concert, several hundred people listening. This was on the grass of pretty Coolidge Park, just across the bridge from Saint Armand's Key-could picture her seated, head tilted above guitar, lost in the music, brown hair hanging down over strings that her fingers touched knowingly, lovingly, long legs crossed, her face in the spotlight.
I thought about a particular song she'd played. It was a Judy Collins song or maybe a Joni Mitchell song, one of the vocal greats from an unstable decade. The song was wistful and resigned, something about a woman yearning to follow her cowboy lover. After the song, Kathleen had looked pointedly at me and nodded.
Was that the sort of cryptic message that I was supposed to process and correcdy interpret? If so, I'd missed badly. It was surprising. Such silent dialogue is something that I'm usually good at deciphering. At least, that's what I've always thought.
Finally, there was her most troubling claim: that I was a loner and would always be alone.
No, that definitely wasn't true, I told myself. I liked people and people seemed to like and trust me. I had a family at Dinkin's Bay Marina. The point could not be argued. There were people there to whom I was dedicated and who reciprocated without question. There was Tomlinson, Mack and Jeth, Janet, Rhonda and JoAnn, plus several others.
See, I wasn't alone. No way. Not me.
Five
I found out about the grave robbery on Friday afternoon. I came cornering across the bay, doing sixty easy, a smoky, lucent veil of rain and electricity right on my tail. In hurricane season, squalls come blowing up out of nowhere.
I'd just dropped off the last of the snook to Mote. I came swinging up to the dock, to find JoAnn standing above me on the porch outside my stilthouse. She was wearing faded cotton slacks and a pale pink jersey banded with horizontal stripes that I associate with French painters or British seamen of long ago. Her eyes were red; she'd been crying.
As I ded my boat, she said, 'They dug her up, Doc. I've been trying to get in touch with you. The county people, the ones from Marco, they called Delia.'
I said, 'They what?'
'Someone dug up Dorothy's grave. She was in the old town cemetery down on Marco Island. They dug her up and tried to get into her casket. Who knows what they took out? Tomlinson says it's time for you to get involved. He needs your help down there.'
'Let me get the lines on my skiff,' I told her, 'then we'll talk.'
Delia had called that morning in hysterics. JoAnn could hear Tomlinson in the background trying to comfort her. 'I picked up the phone and she's yelling, 'Oh, they've hurt my little girl again. They've hurt my baby!' Panicky stuff. Terrible, like after a car wreck. I thought she was drunk or the pressure had finally pushed her over the edge, until Tomlinson took the phone and told me what happened.'
JoAnn and I were sitting in caneback chairs in the little roofed walkway between my house and lab. In gentler days, such passages were known as dog trots. Listening to JoAnn's story, I was reminded that the gentler days of
