like Bobby Richardson, you don’t forget.
I said, “Amanda is Bobby’s widow?… wait a minute. That doesn’t sound right. His wife’s name wasn’t Amanda. Her name was…”
I couldn’t remember. What the hell was the name of Bobby’s wife? He’d talked about her often enough during those long, soggy nights in the rain forests of Asia. It was stored somewhere in my memory, but I was having trouble bringing it to the surface.
Tucker said, “The girl says her mamma’s name is Gail-”
Gail. That was the wife’s name. Gail Richardson.
“-but this is his daughter; she’s the one I’m talking about. Amanda. She’s the one who wants to see you, this man’s little girl. Or was the man’s little girl, I guess. She said he died when she was, what, less than five years old?”
I said, “Bobby died when his daughter was a child. That’s right.”
“Then she’s the one. The one who called me trying to find you and that I’m bringing with me to Sanibel tomorrow… now that you said you’re not too busy. ‘Cause she wants to talk to you and needs to ask a favor.”
Bobby’s daughter? Just hearing the man’s name brought back memories of a time in my life and of a style of life that now seemed as remote as the far side of the Earth or as distant as a comet’s bright contrail.
The girl was wrong about one thing, though. I had seen her before. I’d seen her in a photograph, long, long ago…
When I hung up the phone, I wandered around the lab putting things away, getting dissecting table and instruments clean and neat so I could start fresh the next day. But I was operating on autopilot. My routine in the lab is so entrenched that it takes no conscious effort. Good thing, too, because my mind had locked onto the task of digging out and dusting off memories that were nearly two decades old.
The photograph… I could still see the photograph of a little girl named Amanda Richardson in fairly precise detail… probably because Bobby had pulled it out and showed it to me so many times.
It was one of those quick-print Polaroid shots, Easteregg bright colors, that someone back in the States had had the good sense to have laminated before sending it to our APO address in Bangkok.
There’s lots and lots of rain in the jungles of Southeast Asia. Metal rusts. Cloth rots. Paper turns to paste. But, because it was laminated, the photo survived our months there.
Unfortunately, Bobby had not.
Here’s what I could reconstruct of the photo: a tiny girl with hair the color of freshly sheared copper wearing a frilly yellow dress, as if ready for a birthday party.
That was it: the photo had been taken on Amanda’s birthday. Third birthday or fourth, I couldn’t remember.
And… the girl wore plastic-rimmed, nerdish glasses… and gloves. Yes, gloves. Her small hands folded.
Nothing very distinctive about that, but what I remembered better than the glasses was that the child’s left eye was turned slightly inward, a malady that I knew to be strabismus, or lazy eye, as it is sometimes called. Bobby said they’d have it fixed when the girl was old enough, not that he was worried about it. And buy her some more stylish glasses, too.
To me, her wandering eye, that slight imperfection, implied a depth of character… or of vulnerability… that made the child’s face distinctive, lovely to look upon, and I told the proud father that he should think twice before getting the thing fixed. It was harmless flattery that he took seriously.
“Doc,” he’d told me, “the only reason you say that is because you know absolutely nothing about the intrinsic vanity of women. Or about women at all for that matter.”
True enough… but this from a man with a film-star face, a quarterback’s body, who was a little bit vain himself.
No, not a little bit vain. Bobby was one of the sharpest, toughest and most dependable men I’d ever met, but that did not alter the truth that he was vain; very, very vain indeed…
It was strange thinking about him after all the years that had passed. It was strange and unexpected and oddly, oddly unsettling, too.
I am not a nostalgia buff. I do not prefer to haunt a past softened and brightened by imagination. The past is constructed of memory, the future of expectation. I live most comfortably in the present, because that, in truth, is the only reality. It is all a reasonable person has.
Besides, my memories of Bobby and Asia weren’t all that rosy. And I certainly hadn’t planned to stay up long past midnight thinking about old friends, old battles and long gone losses…
No, what I had planned was a quiet night alone at home…
I was looking forward to it: just me and the microscope in my lab, sea specimens arranged neatly and in order over the stainless-steel dissecting table… gooseneck lamp adding precise illumination… music on the stereo, if I wanted, or maybe the portable shortwave radio.
I’d rigged an external antenna off the wooden water cistern outside, so I could pull in programs from Hanoi or Jakarta or Beijing, even Australia Broadcasting out of Perth, no problem at all.
And there was, of course, the comet.
When I needed a break from the microscope, it was a nice thing to walk outside and look into littoral darkness, still listening to some solitary radio voice that was ricocheting off stars from the other side of the globe. The electronic connexus is deceptively personal. It seemed to flow down out of space and directly into my remodeled fish shack which is built on stilts over water.
So no, I didn’t expect or want to hear from Tucker Gatrell, and I certainly didn’t want to be drawn into a revisitation of my former life, my former occupation.
Absolutely not. Lately, in fact, I had been restricting all my socializing to the guides and the liveaboards at Dinkin’s Bay Marina.
Just wasn’t in the mood for outsiders.
There was a reason, a very specific reason.
My friend Tomlinson said it was because I had entered a reclusive period. The man is part savant, part goat, so he is usually at least half right about everything he says. An example: “Unrequited love, man. What a serious green weenie that is. Remember: love is what goes out of us, not what we take in. It’s the union of two solitudes, yeah. Two solitudes willing to protect and trust. But just ‘cause it didn’t work out doesn’t mean that you have to spend all your time alone.”
Tomlinson talks like that; he really does. He says it is because he has evolved spiritually after years and years of study and meditation. I think it’s because his thought processes have been chemically altered during years and years of abusing marijuana and hallucinogenics.
But it was also Tomlinson who, after cracking a cold bottle of Hatuey, told me, “Amigo, if it’s got tits or tires, you’re sure to have trouble with it down the road. Face it, man, she’s committed to Central America. Nothing you can do is gonna change that. So, the way I see it, it’s time for us to find you a new ride.”
He was talking about a woman I knew, a woman I shared history with, a woman named Pilar. Pilar was a former lover.
I had to keep reminding myself of that: Pilar was my former lover.
It was not an easy truth to acknowledge.
So, yeah, I’d entered a reclusive period. For weeks, I worked in the lab. I listened to my shortwave radio. I lived alone in my little sea-cabin house. At night, I’d sit on the porch listening to the mountain-stream gurgle of tide rivering past the pilings beneath me. I’d listen to the snap-crackle-pop of pistol shrimp and the bee-whah groan of catfish.
I looked at the comet.
Daytime was different. When the sun’s out, it seems reasonable to pursue goals. I defined mine by writing them each and every day in one of my notebooks. They were simple goals.
Twice a day, seven days a week, I rededicate myself to getting back into shape. It was none too soon. I’d let myself go over the last several months, and in that very short time I’d gained maybe fifteen pounds. I felt soft and slow and grainy. I felt as if age and gravity were vines that were working their way up my legs, taking control. I was eating too much, drinking too many beers, sleeping way too much.
So the rules were simple: beer on Fridays and Saturdays only. Absolutely no food of any kind after 8:00 P.M.
