Shark River (15 page)

“She’s right,” said Tomlinson as he held up the candy-colored fish. He slid it back into the water and watched it swim away. “Nine French grunts it is.”

I told her, “Good job, way to keep track. Tell us when you’re ready for the sea horses. That’ll leave the tunicates and the soft sponges, then we’re finished for the day.”

Not finished with the survey—my contract called for three seasonal replicates, all to be done with cast net and otter trawls like the two I was using. I refuse to use threepanneled trammel nets anymore because they are too deadly, too destructive and there’s too much chance of them being lost, sinking and killing fish for years afterward.

Over the years, I’ve refined my own survey technique: Count the number of fish and the number of species from several specific habitats around an island—I’d already documented 237 different species around Guava Key. Calculate respective totals. Then use aerial photos to measure the various acres of habitat in the adjoining water space, and multiply acreage by the number and species of animals found in similar areas.

Much of it is subjective judgment. You have to make considerations for mechanical biases: The size of net mesh, the speed of the boat. For instance, my slow trawler with its large meshed net is never going to catch a mature tarpon nor a microscopic tarpon larva—but that doesn’t mean they don’t both live in the waters around Guava Key. They certainly do.

Once I consider all the data I’ve collected and match figures from other regions, it’s not difficult to make an objective summary about the health of a body of water and its sea bottom.

From everything I’d seen over the last week, the bays around Guava Key were still healthy enough to be productive, but there were some danger signs. The water seemed unusually murky for February—it had a green turbidity, not the tannin-amber color normally associated with mangrove back country.

Curious, I’d checked the local telephone book. There were more than a hundred public and private golf courses listed in the county that adjoined the bay. My Florida atlas was more specific: Of those one hundred courses, more than a dozen of them were boundaried by brackish water rivers and creeks that flowed directly into the bay.

I’d thought the numbers must have been a misprint until I called several fellow biologists around the state. It turned out that most coastal counties in Florida have at least that many courses, and some of the bigger, tourism-driven counties have far more.

Nothing against golf. I’ve played enough to appreciate the artistry of a well-designed course, and I wish I had the coordination to be good at the game. I also agree that golf courses are correctly considered green space preserve areas by state planners—but the problem is, what does it take to
keep
them green?

In Florida it takes fertilizer. Tons and tons of inorganic nitrogen and phosphorus. Much of that fertilizer is not absorbed by fairway grasses. It washes off into water hazards and the water hazards drain into creeks, the creeks into rivers, and rivers drain into bays. In all brackish and saltwater live, suspended, myriad species of microscopic plant life, or phytoplankton. Microscopic plants react to fertilizer in the same way Bermuda grass does—they turn a bright, rich green.

That’s great for a golf course, but terrible for a bay. When water turns murky, the depth that sunlight can penetrate is reduced. If sunlight does not reach the sea bottom, sea grasses cannot grow. Sea grass is the perfect habitat for the shrimp and crabs on which game fish such as sea trout, redfish, and snook depend. Filtering species such as tunicates and sponges also use sea grass as a necessary anchor.

If murky water kills the sea meadows, then shrimp, crabs, and fish are eliminated as well, along with the very filtering animals required to make the bay clear and healthy again.

It is a hugely destructive intrusion that needs to be taken seriously, yet state bureaucrats spend far more time and money thwarting private homeowners from building docks (which provide excellent underwater habitat) and trying to implement such pointless boondoggles as manatee idle zones. The idle zones can’t be enforced and, worse, will have negligible effect on manatee fatalities because of the simple fact that the draft of a vessel is often more problematic than a vessel’s speed.

There are many fine, intelligent state-employed bureaucrats and biologists working in Florida, but the mandates they receive, and the objectives with which they are charged have, historically, been tragically shortsighted or misdirected.

The woman said, “We get back, I’m gonna fry up some of that conch, what you men think? Catch me a nice snapper, I’ll make that, too, with johnnycakes and some good fish gravy.” Ransom was talking while she studied her clipboards. Apparently, she was adding up numbers without having to be told. I liked that.

Tomlinson was still shoveling his hands through mounds of grass. “How ’bout you let us buy you lunch at the Tarpon Lodge? That old restaurant on the hill.”

She smiled, still calculating. “Oh man, I like the sound ’a that, but I don’t have no clothes for a place so fancy. I got me a pair of jeans, a lil’ ol’ black skirt, but nothing good enough for rich man’s place.”

Tomlinson said, “Oh, baloney—excuse my language. See what I’m wearing?” He touched the sleeve of his tattered, hibiscus-pink Hawaiian shirt before plunging his hands back into the pile. “We’re on an
island.
This is considered formal wear. Pair of flipflops and cutoffs, you can go anywhere but a funeral, which they don’t have out here anyway. They don’t have funerals because the rules don’t allow members to die while on club property. So when we get ashore . . . awwww-OUCH!”

Tomlinson’s scream was oddly high-pitched, so feminine that I would have laughed had he not tumbled hard over onto his side, holding his right hand as if he’d been stabbed.

The woman and I were both immediately beside him, helping him up. He was breathing hard; seemed a little dazed and was still holding his wrist. “I just got the shit shocked out of me! Like there’s a fucking 220-volt line in there!” He was staring at the last pile of grass and gumbo, but wary of it, keeping his distance.

I looked at his hand. No puncture wounds, no blood, but it was streaked with red.

“Damn, that
hurt!
”

I was on my knees again. I had the little wooden-handled dip net, searching through the grass. At first, I thought he’d grabbed a saltwater catfish or stingray—unassertive animals with painful defensive systems. A stingray’s spine has serrated edges and two groves that run the length of it, venomous glands in each. A thin layer of skin called the integumentary sheath covers the spine, and a complicated proteinous toxin is released when that sheath ruptures upon penetration. I stepped on a small stingray once, and it took all my resolve not to sit down and bawl like a baby.

Saltwater catfish are almost as bad. Their dorsal and lateral fins are serrated like double-edged saws, and the slimy venom secreted from axillary glands in the sheaths of their spines is an extremely painful protein-based poison. Because there was no puncture mark on Tomlinson’s hand, though, I figured he’d grabbed some kind of jellyfish—the stinging nematocysts of a Portuguese man-o’war, in sufficient number, are potent enough to hospitalize a grown man.

I saw that it was neither. Lying on the deck, beneath the gumbo, was a banjo-shaped animal that was a little less than two feet long. It had the round body of a ray, but the truncated tail of a fish. Its milky gray body was covered with peculiar triangles, circles and semicircles that were suggestive of military camouflage or some weird alien, computer coding. An unusual and highly adapted animal.

“What the hell is that thing?”

I touched it gently with the tip of the wooden handle. The fish moved ever so slightly, its black eyes indifferent, gill clefts moving rhythmically, secure in its own defense system.

I said, “It’s an electric ray. We don’t get a lot of them around here, but when we dragged along that sand beach? That’s probably where he was.” I used the handle to lift it slightly, then amended. “Sorry, where
she
was. The way you tell is, they’re kind of like a shark. The males have elongated claspers.”

We were all three crouched over it now. I turned the misting water spray on the ray to keep it cool, and still it did not react.

Tomlinson’s eyes were wide, very excited. “Its skin was really smooth when I first touched it. Then it was like he flipped the power switch. Zap! Serious voltage that went straight to my brain, then arched down to my toes. Awesome! Like a bright red light flashed on behind my eyes and I could see a wiring schematic for my entire nervous system. Far out, man!” He paused; was looking at the ray, thinking about it. “Hey . . . what happened was, it hurt like hell, yeah, but it also gave me a kind of weird high. It wasn’t just painful, it was . . .
interesting.
In a chemical-electric way, I’m talking about. A really far-out sort of rush.”

Ransom said, “Lordy, Lordy, some pair, you two white men. My brother, he have a bullet cut his arm, it don’t even bother him. Mr. Thomas get a shock, he like the feeling.”

“No, no, what you don’t understand is, I am a scientist, Ransom, a very dedicated karma explorer. Pain and pleasure—they’re not that far removed. Or maybe I . . . what it could be is, I’ve been desensitized by some very high voltage.” He lifted his hair and pointed to the tiny lightning bolt scar. “Mother nature zapped me once. I also spent a couple weeks doing a little table dance which some Freud-geeks used to describe as electroshock therapy. Didn’t have much choice about either one, but this, yeah, it wasn’t too bad.”

I said, “This is what they call a lesser electric ray. It’s got chemical tissues”—I pointed without touching—“there and
there
on its body which can generate something like forty volts. Maybe not even that. But it’s got a relative in the Atlantic—I’ve found a couple in the Gulf, too—an animal called ‘torpedo ray,’ maybe because of its shape, but probably because it packs such a jolt. A torpedo ray can knock you on your butt. It’ll produce a lot more than a hundred volts.”

Before I could consider stopping him, Tomlinson reached out and touched the ray again, then looked at me, still holding his fingers to the fish, breathing fast and shallow. I watched his expression transition gradually from pain to exhilaration and then studious delight as he began to speak as giving dictation. “Not bad . . . not bad . . . whoa, got a little surge there! Yes, a very natural high. Yep, beginning to move through the cerebral cortex down into limbic Happy Valley. There . . . there . . . yes! My plumbing’s now on-line! Doesn’t really hurt, man, once you . . .” His eyes widened. “Oooh-lah-lah! Man, this is like a neurological cleansing!” He yanked his hand away and sat back heavily. “Phwew!”

He was suddenly concerned. “I didn’t hurt the fish, did I? Like drain it or something?”

I began to lift the ray by the tail—it couldn’t shock from the tail. “No, it’s fine. They spend all day cruising the bottom, shocking sand worms, then sucking them out whole. Long pink worms almost exclusively, I can’t remember the Latin name. Shocking things is what they do.”

“You’re going to release it? Doc, why don’t we keep it? You study the fish, then I’ll drop by every now and again and I’ll let the fish do little experiments on me. When I was touching it? I could feel every part of my body come to life.
Every
part of my body—if you catch my drift.”

I lowered the electric ray into the water, skated it back and forth a few times to make certain it was healthy, then watched it flap away with birdlike grace. “He’s always joking around, Ransom.”

He threw his hands up—the ray was gone. “Man, I wasn’t joking!”

The woman was kicking dead turtle grass and goop toward the stern, cleaning up to go. Same as with calculating the clipboards—she knew what to do without having to be told. I was already starting to like her despite the fact I didn’t know her and had been convinced I didn’t want to know her.

“You two coconut-headed men, it gonna be fun going with you and getting daddy’s money.”

She’d asked and asked, but I’d yet to give her an answer.

“We’ll talk about it,” I said. “I’ll look at the things Tucker sent you, then come up with a solution that’s acceptable. Something to make you happy.”

“Uh-huh, that good, man. What I want right now, though, is to get myself cleaned up. Gonna bathe myself, put on my little black skirt, and let you buy me that expensive lunch just to celebrate.”

I told her, okay, but first I had a phone call to make.

 

 

 

C
alling from the portable phone in the master bedroom of my cottage, I listened to the fourth ring, hoping no one would answer. I felt like some guilt-ridden adolescent schoolboy who’d been caught misbehaving and who dreaded a confrontation with the principal.

I was on the verge of hanging up, when a man’s voice said without hesitating, “Okay, so we finally get a chance to talk, Dr. Ford. And if I sound a little agitated, it’s because I’ve been waiting all morning for your call. I asked them to make it clear the message was urgent. The woman at the desk didn’t tell you that? Do the lady a favor and
say
she told you it was urgent. I’m on the island’s corporate board.”

Caller ID is one of the minor irritants of this digital society.

He sounded middle-aged, no older. He had a very deep voice, lots of testosterone, just a hint of southern accent but an articulate airiness that told me this was a man who was used to giving orders, not taking them, a man accustomed to sitting back and listening, an intellectual counterpuncher. Oddly, his bullying threat—
I could have the lady fired
—seemed forced, overly theatrical. Something about it didn’t ring true.

When I didn’t respond immediately, he said, “This
is
Doctor Marion Ford, isn’t it?”