Black Tide (2 page)

But at least I could now make sense of the local geography. Our island looked smaller by day. A single dune, if you could call it that, rose in the centre, then tapered at both ends, which trailed into shallows. The water itself was quite shallow until you entered the channel, which lay about 500 metres to our north. The mainland began about 500 metres to the north of that. It was lined with boat docks and seawalls, and above the treetops you could see the roofs of what looked to be fabulous houses. You could see people about their business on the shore. On the other side of the island, to the south, about 200 metres of sluggish water separated us from Okaloosa Island. And I supposed the geography would continue that way to Pensacola. Santa Rosa Sound was a narrow ribbon of water bounded by a barrier island to the south and the mainland to the north. It seemed hardly worth all the fuss.

The occasional tugboat chugged down the channel pushing a herd of barges, the pilot blowing long, mournful blasts from the tug's horn, not that there were any pleasure craft to warn out of the way. We were also on the flight path of Hurlburt Field, a nearby military base. Overhead, four-engine C-130 gunships roared in low, their turboprops shrieking as the fat planes waddled down the landing approach toward a runway that lay just across the northern shoreline.

I'd soaked myself with insect repellent after nearly being eaten alive by whiteflies. They came at me viciously and would not stop – I suppose because my body was giving off more CO
2
due to my lack of physical conditioning. This struck Scotty and Heather as funny – more so Scotty – although they both made a point of stressing that
they
weren't bothered at all. I knew Heather understood the mechanics of insect predation but with Scotty I guessed he attributed his immunity to the intrinsic superiority of youth and good looks. That was consistent with the character model anyway. Scotty wasn't a student at the University. At some point, I gathered from one of my late-night beer sessions with Heather, he'd enrolled at the school as an art major but had run out of money and signed on as bartender at one of the ubiquitous beer halls in Gainesville. The plan was to save his tips and re-enroll, but the danger of that happening didn't seem very real or imminent. I'd seen his type. They inhabited the fringes of the campus
demi-monde
, living the student life – until even they became embarrassed about their lack of direction. Scotty probably had two more years of slinging drinks before he signed up at a community college much closer to Mom and Dad – assuming Heather didn't figure into the equation. That thought caused my stomach to twitch uncomfortably.

Moments later Scotty had joined me in the Fraternity of Clowns by cutting his heel on an oyster shell. The mud flats surrounding the island were dotted with clumps of oysters whose shells jutted above the oozy muck like slime-covered machete blades. I pointed to my Wet Shoes and winked, feeling smug. Scotty glanced quizzically at Heather, who was also wearing soggy tennis shoes. He poked out his bottom lip and Heather made a fuss of washing and smearing ointment around the cut, which was not deep and presented no threat to life, damn the luck, apart from the risk of an infection. These waters were thick with faecal coliform bacteria. She tied a bandana around his heel and left it at that. I felt a little better as I smacked at tiny biting flies which buzzed around us.

Our gear was piled on that part of the beach where wet sand gave way to dry sand. I'd brought more than I needed, really, but I'd wanted to come prepared. Our inventory included a field compound microscope with 10X and 40X objective lenses, a Palmer chamber for counting our toxic little friends in the water, surface and subsurface niskin bottles, Pasteur pipettes and bulbs, a hydrometer and hydrothermometer, a salinity and conductivity meter, secchi disks, sample-collection bottles – many of the comforts of a proper lab but made portable and rugged for the field. Apart from the equipment we'd also brought the basics of camping – tents, waterproof matches, the insect repellent, sunblock, my cell phone, drinking water, and food, enough military meal packets to last three days, though I'd planned to be here only two.

And masks. The all-important masks.

They'd laughed back at the campus, but truth is I'd been exposed to brevetoxins before and I seemed especially sensitive to them. Not allergic, but sensitive. I hadn't wanted to repeat the experience. So I'd brought two masks and a spare, which would now go to Scotty if a sustained wind came up and disturbed the water – that is unless he followed up on his offer to wear Heather's bathing suit top.

But I was more interested in another kind of water disturbance and had kept busy through morning and into early afternoon setting up some of the measuring devices I'd brought, particularly the flow hydrometer and the conductivity meter. The new pass in Navarre was supposed to have been opened at noon and I wanted to measure the immediate effect, if any, of water transportation on this end of the sound. I imagined other measuring sites were running along the sound. The Florida Marine Institute had dispatched monitors, for instance. But our team was the only representation from the University of Florida and it was a matter of pride that I gather my own data. Nobody really knew what would happen when the pass was opened, but many folks like myself predicted a drastic change in the sound ecosystem, the way Choctawhatchee Bay had been converted from a freshwater to a saltwater body of water when the Destin East Pass was cut in the 1920s. Considering the present state of the sound, maybe a change wasn't such a bad idea. Development had destroyed the watershed all across Northwest Florida, and Santa Rosa Sound was only the latest of several estuarine systems ruined by poor planning and overbuilding. Even without the massive outbreak of red tide taking place now, the sound was foul with stormwater runoff, point-source pollution, inefficient wastewater treatment and other water quality issues. Sadly, the sound's ruination was typical of Florida, which would never grow fast enough for the developers or slow enough for the people who cared about the natural world. I'd never thought of myself as an ‘environmentalist' but I increasingly found myself propelled into that role, not by morality but scientific necessity. The natural world had simply absorbed more punishment than it could take. And when that happens, nature usually figures out a way to solve its problem – usually the solution is something drastic, and horrible. In this case,
we
were the problem. But with luck, we could solve the problem before nature solved us.

Heather had gone about making our camp and pitching the tents. Only two, I noticed. And the one she would share with Scotty was virtually next to mine. That raised the spectre of more giggling, or worse, and I wondered what I would do later that night if the two of them became noisy. The island was only a hundred metres long and had no significant vegetation short of the paniculata to absorb sound. I'd be stuck, immersed in their passion while my own frustrated interest simmered like the toxic waters surrounding this spit of sand. Was that also part of her plan? To punish me? Or was she merely trying to emphasise that she was taken? I felt bad, then, which was worse than feeling outmoded. I felt
unattractive
. Suddenly I wanted to be away from them both. I wanted DeVries to come back and take me to a different island, or let Heather collect the data and get me the hell out of here altogether. My shame redoubled, and this time I
could
feel my face burning. I was hammering a line of stakes into the water for anchoring collection bottles and I gave the stake such a whack with my ball-peen that the shaft quivered and nearly snapped.

‘C'mon, Heather. Bag it and let's go do something.'

It was Scotty, cavorting on the beach with the only equipment he'd thought to bring, a neon fuschia-coloured Frisbee. If I'd known then that a damn Frisbee would probably save our lives I wouldn't have provoked a confrontation with him. Heather was burying tent spikes in the soft sand and had the last one all but covered.

‘C'mon, girl!'

‘Do you see what I'm doing here?' she answered, almost giggling again. ‘I'm building our homestead. Our house.
Su casa y mi casa
.
Comprendes
?' She brushed a string of hair from her eyes and resumed moving sand.

But Scotty persisted, whining, ‘C'mon. You can do that later. Let's relax a minute, OK? You've been at it since dawn. I think you've earned a break, and besides, I'm sooooo bored –'

‘If you need something to make yourself useful, Scott,' I shouted at the water as I continued to pound the stake, ‘why don't you collect some firewood?'

He didn't say anything for a moment. Then he asked snidely, ‘Uh, Professor?'

‘It's Miller, Scotty.'

‘Listen, um, I know you're the college professor and all, and I'm just a stupid bartender …' I glanced his way. He'd ambled to the water's edge and was facing me. ‘… but where am I supposed to get firewood? There aren't any
trees
on this island.' He yanked his wifebeater down tight over his skinny chest and sneaked a quick peek back at Heather, who studied her tent stake-burying job with ferocious intensity. I felt my irritation heat up to real anger.

‘Well, Scott-
eee
, here's the way it works,' I began, laying as much sneer into my voice as I could put into it. ‘Now, that's a very astute biological observation. There are no trees on this island.'

He began wading out toward me, his legs creating a swishing sound as they went through the water.

‘But there
are
trees on other islands. And there are trees on the mainland. And sometimes those trees fall into the water.' I raised my forearm so that it was perpendicular to the sky, my fingers pointing straight up, then let my arm fall 90 degrees to the left. I whistled as it fell, the sound of a bomb dropping, and when my imaginary tree had struck my imaginary body of water I whispered ‘
Splash
!' Scotty was nearly out to me and he was smiling the smile of somebody who was anything but happy. ‘When the tree hits the water, it
floats
! Why? Because trees are made of wood, and wood has positive buoyancy! So when the trees from those other islands, or from the mainland, fall into the water, they sometimes drift ashore on
this
island, thus becoming
driftwood
. And driftwood we can burn.'

He had reached me and was standing only a foot or two away. I could see cold rage in his eyes, and I could hear it in his voice when he said, ‘That's why you make the big bucks, Professor. But explain something else. Why do we need a fire? Did you bring marshmallows too?'

Heather had stopped working on the tent. She was watching over her shoulder, her ass pointed toward us. Her body seemed taut with tension, ready to spring loose at a moment, like a wire looped and bound in the middle, and her expression was augured into real worry, almost a frown. Even when she was afraid she presented a rare, graceful beauty.

I looked back into Scotty's smirking face. I said, ‘We need a fire to drive away all the blood-sucking pests.'

He stopped smiling. He raised a forefinger and used it to stab at me, and damn it all, I flinched, betraying how nervous I really was. He smiled at that. ‘I hope you're not expecting me to pay tuition for this science lesson 'cause I don't have the bucks, but maybe we could work a deal. You don't send me a bill, and I don't kick your ass.'

For a moment, I felt a pounding inside me. It seemed to boom through my body, resonating with particular force in my temples. I could not believe what he'd said, or how he'd said it. But before I could react, he went on, ‘You've been a real shit to me all day. I don't know what your problem is but you need to get over it …'

‘You're interfering with the work I'm trying to do here,' I blurted lamely.

‘What work is that, doc? Collecting slime from the water – or something else?' He jerked his head back toward Heather.

Now
I
wanted to grab him by his skinny throat and squeeze until something snapped, but at the same time a layer of frost had formed around my heart. Was it that obvious how I felt about Heather?

‘I'll tell you something. I don't give a damn if you're a college professor or King of the fucking Moon, you keep chapping my ass and we're gonna have more than words, old man. I'm not one of your students, I don't work for you, and I damn sure don't take orders from you. So lighten up and we'll get along fine.'

Human beings produce tears under a remarkably diverse set of circumstances. The eye continuously lubricates itself with what is called basal tears, while adverse stimulation, the proverbial ‘sharp poke in the eye', produces reflex tears. Psychic tears occur in response to emotional stimulation such as grief or fear. And then some of us are afflicted with a rare disorder that produces tears at inappropriate moments. I share the disorder with other men, most notably author George Plimpton, who pointed out in an essay that this type of crying is not the indication of weakness most people take it to be. Yet as I felt the tears beginning to well, I knew I must do something. The bastard would accept anything less than a punch in the snoot as either an admission of guilt or a concession to fear. But I didn't know
what
to do. The department looked even
less
favourably on professors who assaulted young people than those who tried to romance them. Luckily, or maybe unluckily, Heather came to my rescue.