The Heat Islands: A Doc Ford Novel (23 page)

Now Tomlinson was lying on the bed eating a mango and listening to National Public Radio, and Harry was in the bathroom, having just returned from the drugstore with a paper sack. Wearing soft jeans and a white cossack blouse, she stood at the bathroom window, watching the last orange remnants of day. In that hushed moment of transition, she felt the sweetness and the sadness of her own life, and also an urge to rush, to hurry toward some indefinable destination; what or where, she did not know.

From the other side of the door came Tomlinson's voice: "You fall in, or what?"

She called back. "I'm going to take a shower—go ahead and eat," then stepped away from the window, unbuttoning her shirt collar. She removed her shirt and jeans and panties, then studied herself in the mirror above the sink: wide, heavy breasts, very dark nipples, thin shoulders, oval face in a frame of black hair and dark Japanese eyes.

With each passing week, it seemed to her, that familiar face was increasingly the face of a stranger.

Through the door came Tomlinson's voice once more: "Only one mango left. You'd better get out here, Harry."

The woman smiled.
Harry.

She had abandoned her old family name of Musashi when, at the age of twenty-eight, she had experienced a spiritual and social awakening that had changed her life and had, over the years, influenced the lives of many of her students—or so Harry hoped.

In that awakening, she received the briefest taste of satori, perfect contentment; an illumined state in which she experienced the letting down of body and mind, and in which she also felt the narrow trail of her own life merge with a greater universal path.

After that awakening, she neither felt nor acknowledged differences in male and female, old and young, healthy and infirm. There was only the infinite breath; the single existing moment, and it was in this moment that she tried to live as bravely and as generously as she could.

After the awakening, she threw away her watch. She wore unisex clothes. She changed her name to Harry, and lived happily and alone for more than five years. Months ago, though, the face that looked back at her from the mirror began to seem increasingly foreign and lacking, and Harry finally acknowledged that there was a change she wanted in her life, a thing she wanted to embrace and experience. That thing was motherhood. Not that she wanted to marry. Nope; never, no way. But she needed a mate, and biology required the mate be male.

So, one night, Harry sat down and listed all the men she knew and admired. It was not a long list, but it was impressive in terms of the power and the credentials represented. Then, in another column, she listed all the qualities she wanted her child to inherit: intelligence, humor, physical beauty, gentleness of spirit.

Tomlinson headed the list in three of the four categories (beauty, Harry hoped, would be passed on through her genes), so Tomlinson was her final choice as father of her child.

Coincidentally, five weeks before, while Harry was still trying to make her decision, Tomlinson had showed up unexpectedly at her apartment outside Boston. Such a karmic sign was nearly too powerful to ignore, and Harry had almost told him then and there of her plan.

But she didn't tell him, even though he stayed several nights.

Now. though, she had told him; asked him, actually, if he would be her temporary mate. To her surprise, Tomlinson had balked at the offer.

"Being a daddy," he had said, "isn't like some dog going out and pissing on a fire hydrant. If I father a child, I want to be with it. It's something I need to think about."

So, in these few nights together, they had slept apart—a fact that made a new realization no easier: After being with Tomlinson five weeks ago, her menstrual period was now a week late.

Harry stared at herself in the mirror, shrugged, stuck out her tongue, made a face, grinned.

Has the hippie knocked you up?

She squatted naked over the old porcelain toilet and, from the paper sack, took the home-use pregnancy test she had purchased at the drugstore. First Response.

From the cardboard box, she took the absorbent stick and held it beneath her. She looked at the ceiling, relaxing, and began to urinate on the little stick. When she was finished, she dried herself and turned on the shower while she held the stick up to the light, watching its tiny clear window for a change in color.

The window seemed to fog, and when it cleared again, it was an unmistakable blue.

Harry put her hand over her own mouth so as not to hoot out loud.

She was pregnant.

She kept looking at the stick, fearful the little window might clear itself. When it didn't, she wrapped the entire kit in the paper sack and shoved it all into the little trash basket beneath the sink.

There is a baby in me!

For some reason, she was crying, and she couldn't stop. Harry soaked for a long time beneath the shower, but, when she got out, she was still crying.

Through the door came Tomlinson's voice: "Are you okay in there, Moontree?"

The sound of her old name caused her to bawl even harder.

Tomlinson opened the door, perplexed, then he was holding her in his arms, kissing her, his chest heaving, saying, "Quit, quit; you know how weepy I get when you do this... And he was crying with her.

Then she was naked on her back on the little bed, knees bent and legs spread while Tomlinson undressed before her.

"Are you sure?" she kept asking. "Are you sure?"

She spread her legs wider as Tomlinson dropped down onto the bed with her. and she used her hand to help guide him, her abdomen spasming momentarily as he entered her.

"I'm sure." he said.

Harry had one hand tangled in his long hair, the other on his buttocks, trying to press him deeper, deeper. She was still crying, kissing him, and she whispered, "I'm pregnant, dear one."

Tomlinson said, "What? Not yet you're not."

"I'm pregnant!"

"Almost... almost! Just give me a little time, damn it!"

Nightfall pushed dusk westward, the earth's slow rotation measured by cloud mesas and streaks of peach light that were absorbed by a darkening sea. On barrier islands along Florida's Gulf coast, the darkness seemed to seep out of the bays and mangrove breaks, spreading over beaches, condos, and planned communities as quietly as fog.

Darkness came to Cedar Key. Gibsonton, and Clearwater Beach. Longboat Key and Siesta Key, rolling down the tide-line like a great cloud shadow.

Darkness came to Boca Grande, Cayo Costa, Captiva Island, Sanibel, and Marco Island, sweeping over the whole chain of west coast barrier islands.

Then the lights of the islands came on in the darkness, one by one by one, like bright pearls on a long string.

To tourists in an airliner, two miles overhead, the islands formed pockets of light on the dark water, as isolated as ships and as distinct as constellations in a night sky.

Standing outside Timmy's Nook bar. Suzie Hemphill, Greta Gideon's best friend, saw the passenger plane passing overhead and thought.
If that weirdo Sutter really did marry Greta, like she said he was gonna, she'da called by now to tell me about some honeymoon they 're flying to.
and Suzie resolved to check Greta's apartment first thing before work in the morning.

Opening the gate to the Mayakkatee River Estates construction road, one of the project's backhoe operators, a man named Frank, looked up and saw the plane blinking in the darkness. With him, sitting in the truck, was his supervisor's lonely wife, and he knew just the place for them to have an hour all alone—that little logging trail where he'd glimpsed that white Lincoln parked the day before. Florida was getting so built up. good hiding spots were tough to find, but this was a good one. Frank had the gate keys, he had a six-pack of Pabst, and he had a blanket if they found a soft spot on the ground....

Looking out the window of his cell, Jeth Nicholes saw the airliner, and he thought,
Maybe that's how I ought to spend the next few months. Traveling. Maybe go clear to New York City. See what that's like.

Turning from the window. Jeth wondered if people did any fishing up that way.
I could always show them a few tricks,
he thought.
While I'm around....

Standing beside a bamboo thicket on the Alafia River. Tomlinson looked up and saw the plane, and thought.
I wish

I
was on it, one way to Fumbuck. Egypt. What in the hell have I gotten myself into?
But then he thought of Harry lying inside, the softness of her and the image of her someday swollen with child, and he decided.
Nope. I've done a good thing. Maybe I've finally signed up for the magic bus....

Sitting on the stem of the wood-rotted Chris-Craft, Marion Ford watched the airliner pass overhead, beginning to bank, descending eastward, its navigation lights flashing.

Luck,
he offered, as he always did when he saw a plane about to land or take off.
Safe trip.

He sat on a folding deck chair between the two owners of the Chris-Craft. Rhonda Lister and JoAnn Smallwood, listening to them talk and laugh, as he drank his third free beer—an Old Milwaukee, which the marina guides called Old Immokalee.

He liked Rhonda and JoAnn just fine; big, plain, healthy women who were full of fun and independent as hell. Smart, too—judging by the sharp looks of appraisal they leveled at him from time to time, and he knew what was going on: the subliminal process of selection, of who would end up with whom.

Sitting in the chair, watching the airliner and pretending to listen. Ford calculated all the possible scenarios. If he took Rhonda to his bed, his friendship with JoAnn would be immediately replaced by a forced cordiality. JoAnn was a modem woman, but she was also human—and no one liked finishing second to a roommate.

Same if he chose JoAnn.

Another option was to make a pass at both of them—an idea not so farfetched, judging from the body language and constant knee contact they kept up with him. But Ford knew, in time, that would alienate them both, and it wasn't worth losing the goodwill of neighbors. Plus, it seemed a little too weird, not to mention demanding.

Nope. Wasn't worth it. As much as he needed to, with one or the other, the uneasiness, the complications and self-recriminations were a price too high. Ford was about to contrive an excuse why he must leave when a car swung into the marina's shell parking lot: a shiny red Corvette.

"Hey," Ford said. "Hey, looks like I have company." Then, to please JoAnn and Rhonda, he added, "Damn it all."

Dewey Nye—tall woman with blond hair—came striding down the dock in dark shorts and fresh dark blouse, squinting through the weak light. "Ford, is that you?"

"How you doin'. Dewey'' Forgot you were going to stop by." He was standing, already moving across the deck toward the dock.

"We had a date tonight. Get your keister over here." Ford made his farewells to Rhonda and JoAnn, then he was walking with the tall woman toward his house built on stilts.

Rhonda looked after them, and she said to JoAnn, "That's one pushy bitch."

JoAnn nodded. "Yeah. Blond dye probably leaked into her brain and made her mean."

Both women laughed, then JoAnn said, "Doc could do a lot better than that."

"You're saying she's not pretty? My God. I wish I was as ugly as that."

"I just mean better."

"Like you?"

"At least I'd be nice to him."

"And I wouldn't?"

"You've got Barry."

"Barry's an asshole."

JoAnn watched the tall woman put an arm over Ford's shoulder, the two of them disappearing into shadow. "Doesn't look like either of us can do much about it tonight. Say, why don't we change and go to the Lazy Flamingo, get something to eat?"

Rhonda grinned. "That's what I like about you. Smallwood—you never give up."

Because the door to Ford's house was not locked, Dewey led the way in, turning on lights, the overhead fan, kneeling by the stereo to find music, flipping through albums.

Ford said, "Mind if I get something to drink?" As if it were her house, not his; a mild joke.

"What? Oh." Dewey was still concentrating on the stereo. "Help yourself. You got any wine?" Missing it completely.

"You don't drink wine."

"Hell, I didn't drink margaritas till Cabbage Key. You never know what I might decide to try tonight."

Ford caught the suggestiveness of that, thinking.
What's going on here?

He made a show of going to the little refrigerator, looking for wine, even though he knew he didn't have any. "Nope," he said finally. "But I can run up to Bailey's Store and get some. I need to get food for Jeth's cat, anyway. Crunch & Des. He's been staying here."

"Naw, I don't need any wine. It was just an idea." She was moving her head around on her shoulders, as if she was tense. "I thought it might help me relax. Bets put me through a hell of a workout today. And it's so damn hot. When are you going to stick an air conditioner in this place? I'm already sweating so bad, I can smell myself."

Ford said. "Or I could ride my bike, get a nice Chablis. That's what they call white wine, right? Or take your car down to Huxters. Wouldn't take two minutes." Thinking,
Every guy on earth keeps wine just for a moment like this, except me. What a maroon.

"No. Maybe some iced tea. Or a sip of your Coors. Just so long as it's cold."

Dewey was having trouble choosing an album. She kept hesitating and reading, her expression pained. She had on a dark blue pleated blouse that billowed out when she bent over, and she wore her hair in a ponytail. She had recently shaved her legs—Ford noticed the chafed pores on the inside of her thighs, clear up where the black Patagonia shorts were stretched tight against her.

"The Moody Blues," she said, reading an album cover. "This looks pretty weird."

"It's some kind of transcendental experience, the whole album. Tomlinson can explain it. That's the only reason I have it, Tomlinson. There're one or two songs I like, not that I understand any of it."

"Did you ever find Tomlinson? You were looking for him."

"No."

"He'll show up."

"I hope."

She was putting the album on the turntable, placing the needle, her face so concentrated, flushed, that she looked like a fourteen-year-old who'd just gotten out of gym class. But pretty ... no, not just pretty—beautiful with those eyes and those lips. The crooked nose didn't matter. Ford liked the nose. Eyes set a little too close together, but he liked that, too. And she had those odd kind of hips, where the hinge joints angled out, which he suddenly found endearing.

When Dewey said, "What the hell are you staring at?" he jumped slightly.

"Oh ... just looking. Your hair looks nice that way."

"Since when did you start noticing my hair?" She pulled the ponytail around so that it was right in front of her eyes. Chiding him. but Ford could tell there was something different about her; something on her mind.

The music was playing now. violins and orchestra with acid guitars, and Dewey took the bottle of beer from his hand and sat beside him on the little couch. She took a drink, made a face, took another, then handed the bottle back. "Tastes like horse piss. I'm not surprised you like it."

Ford said, "I think it's your sophistication—that's what I like most about you."

"Just so long as you like me."

"I do."

"Like a buddy."

"Well—"

"I mean, that's the way we are together... buddies. I'm like just one of the guys." She was talking to him like he'd done something wrong; trying to prove a point.

"You don't look like any guy I've ever known."

"You notice that, too?"

"Of course I notice that. A man made out of cobalt would notice it."

She was leaning toward him, nervous or intense—it was hard to tell the difference in Dewey—but not too close, so Ford had to reach a little to get his hand in her hair. He pulled her to him and kissed her tenderly, then harder, and she did not resist.

"See?" he said, expecting her to lean her face against him. Instead, she drew away.

"I was just about to say you'd never tried to kiss me before."

"No longer a legitimate question."

"I was going to ask you why."

Ford took her and kissed her again, holding his mouth on hers, longer, longer, breathing with her, but feeling no passion in return. "Sometimes you talk too much," he said.

Dewey had her big hand on Ford's thigh. "Bets said she went to your room Monday night and you guys made out for a while."

Ford said. "Ah."

"Ah yourself."

"I didn't know who it was, you or her. It was dark. But I'm not surprised."

"But you didn't mention it."

"Nope. Didn't want to get anybody in trouble."

"But if you'd known it was Bets, that would've been okay?"

"I like Walda. I like her a lot. So it would have been just fine."

"You're just flattering as hell, aren't you?"

"I try to keep my lying to a minimum. We're not close enough to be honest?"

Dewey was grinning at him, smiling for the first time. "I think she was trying to get you stirred up: make you decide to come to my room. We've talked about you. Why you never put a move on me."

Ford said, "I did come to your room. Your door was locked." But he was thinking,
A hell of a strange thing for Walda to do.

"I'm glad you did."

"Are you?"

Dewey moved her hand up Ford's leg, touching the hem of his shorts with her finger, and Ford thought.
She's nervous, hut she wants to go through with it.

Dewey said, "No locked doors around here."

Ford put his hand in her hair and kissed her again.

"Nights in White Satin" was playing, although Ford always thought of it as "Knights in White Satin." A slow, moody, driving song with strange chords that struck a deeper, stranger spirit and fixed the heavy rhythm of Dewey's body atop Ford's.

She had undressed herself quickly, as if ashamed, or as if chilled by the way Ford studied her, for he could not take his eyes off the way she looked in the light of the room's lone reading lamp. Unbuttoning the blouse to reveal the crescent lift of her breasts, wide and round and heavy, nipples pointed up and outward. Reaching to drape the blouse over the table, her ribs showing, blond hair brushing her bare back, muscles flexing beneath the skin, like watching the glossy shoulders of a racehorse.

All Ford could say was, "Good God, you are a picture, woman."

With her back to him. Dewey had slid the shorts down around her ankles, tilting pale buttocks as she stepped out of the shorts, the underside of her showing a hazy tangle of pale pubic hair. Then she turned to him, arms crossed over her breasts, and asked with a nervous laugh, "You going to make me start alone?"

"Not a chance...."

So now they were naked on the foldout bed. Dewey was atop him. a moving weight, lifting and sliding with every stroke of the music, her hands on his shoulders and her face pressed hard against his—her body pounding such a frenzied rhythm that Ford should have been swept up by her passion, but he was not; was not. for he felt no passion in her. Instead, he felt only a grim resolve; a sense of burning determination, as if he were the final station of a difficult exercise course. He could feel it in the way Dewey tensed at his touch; the way she fought him. for an instinctive moment, each time he tried to move her or shift positions.

She had wrestled herself on him, affixed herself as if on a spindle, and now she was going through all the motions, using the proper technique with a sort of tireless precision that had been the hallmark of her sport. Like something she'd read in a book, or seen in a movie: dispassionate passion, and giving it all her concentration, but doing it quickly, as if she was frightened and wanted to get it finished quickly.

Ford lay beneath her, feeling her breasts slap his chest, feeling the sweat of her face on his face, wanting to stop her; wanting to find a way to tell her it was okay to stop, but couldn't, and he'd never felt so alienated from her, so distanced from her friendship than now, when they were making love.

But then his mind would think only of the way she looked, of the way she felt on him, and, for whole minutes, nothing else mattered.

After a time, she said into his ear, "Aren't you getting close?" without missing a repetition in what had become a thumping marathon.

Ford lied. "I'm done. I am."

"What?"

"Already. If you are."

"But you're still—"

"I stay that way sometimes."

"Damn, the girls must love you." Catching herself there, what she'd said. But let it pass without amendment.

Ford helped her roll off, holding her in his right arm, both of them lying on their backs looking at the ceiling fan. He turned and kissed her gently on the cheek, and it was as if they'd never met; like kissing a stranger.

Dewey sighed and said, "I guess I'm not so good at this, huh? Sorry."

"You're beautiful. I think you're great."

"Look at you. You look like a damn sundial, the way you're pointing. Or something for horseshoes."

"Don't talk about it anymore. You don't need to."

"I've always been kind of a loser this way. It's not like it'll hurt my feelings."

"Dewey—"

"We're all born different. Doc." She was talking to the ceiling, her eyes open and unblinking, telling him things but speaking to herself.

"Dewey, it doesn't matter to me. Not a bit."

"Hah! You didn't want to become lovers? They all do. They always have."

"It crossed my mind, damn right. But it's not important. I never would have pressed it. The way you showed up tonight, though, it was like the only thing you had on your mind."

"I wanted to give it another try, that's all. With someone I care about."

"That's the nicest thing I've heard in a while."

"I do. With someone who didn't try to push me or trick me or try to get me drunk. I've got some decisions to make."

Ford said. "I know you do."

"About tennis. And some things."

Ford found her hand and locked his fingers into hers. "You need to do what you want to do."

"You don't even know what I'm talking about."

"Don't be so sure."

"It'd shock the hell out of you if you knew." Telling him, through the tone of her voice, that she wanted him to know.

Ford said, "If you don't enjoy tennis, quit it. If you enjoy living with Walda, five with her. Either one, you're not doing anything wrong."

Dewey started to say something. Instead, she rolled over and threw her arm across Ford's chest, burying her face into his ribs.

For Ford, in that instant, the sensation of being with a stranger disappeared.