Over Exposure Part 8

Tucked into one corner of the lagoon was a flat shelf of cypress planks. When I was a kid, too young to be taken along on the fis.h.i.+ng trip, I remember Dad sliding cypress planks into his car and driving away. One by one he had lugged the boards out across those miles of water, and gradually constructed a platform high above the waterline, las.h.i.+ng it to the st.u.r.dy mangrove trunks.

Even after brushes with hurricanes and the wear and tear of half a century, the platform was still st.u.r.dy. It was a ten by ten deck where Dad and I rolled out our sleeping bags, set up the cook stove, lay back and watched the stars. That's where I got to know my father, listening to him ramble through stories of his youth. After a six pack of beer, he even spoke of the war, his time in the jungles of Southeast Asia, stories of the women he'd loved before Mom. I knew things about him that not even she had known, things about his wild, adventuring mind, his restless imagination, and a sadness in him that came from putting his dreams on permanent hold as he settled into a lifelong marriage, parental duties and a job that brought him into daily contact with sick and dying.

I could feel Nadine watching me as I took the cardboard carton off my desk. My dad's ashes filled a white box that was as anonymous as a take-out carton from a Chinese restaurant. Pork fried Dad.

I thought of saying it out loud. Something to break the gloomy mood, get Nadine to smile. But I checked myself. It was a bad joke. Like so many things I'd been saying lately. Off-key, out of synch. As though some crude teenage kid had taken up residence in my body.

I looked Nadine in the eyes.

She wore only a lacy pink bra and a matching thong. She moved to the doorway of the study with her arms crossed beneath her lush b.r.e.a.s.t.s, giving them a subtle lift. The body language of a woman meaning to ambush me before I could get out the door, lure me into the four-poster so we might spend the afternoon twisting the sheets.

With my spinning rod in hand, I came over. She relaxed and c.o.c.ked her head back an inviting inch and I bowed my face into her cleavage and inhaled her scent. Coconut and warm honey, like a tray of a macaroons fresh from the ovena"an aroma that had triggered countless s.e.xual episodes between us.

Until Dad died, our s.e.x had been frequent and spirited, but in these last two months I'd lost my appet.i.te for her, along with all the other reliable pleasures.

I let her odor fill my lungs, and held it in like dope smoke, trying to feel the familiar erotic high. But nothing stirred in the hollow reaches of my chest.

She pressed her hands against the back of my head and forced me deeper into that tempting flesh. In another moment, I saw my father's stern face, heard his commanding voice. Nadine's spell over me was broken, and I drew away.

"No," I said. "I have to go."

"Four days at home in bed. It could be nice. Like old times."

"You're evil."

"I'm a woman," Nadine said. "We're all evil."

I drew my face from the melt of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and saw in her smile that she wasn't kidding.

"When I get home," I said. "I'll make it up to you."

Nadine stepped back and folded her arms across her b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

"Don't take the gun, please."

"I won't use it, Nadine. Unless it's absolutely necessary."

"At least tell me where to find your body if you don't return. Draw me a map. Do me that kindness."

I shook my head.

"You know I can't do that."

I parked in the western edge of the huge parking lot of at Everglades National Park and hoisted the canoe off the roof top and carried it overhead to the dock. I eased it into the ca.n.a.l, lashed it to a cleat, then trip by trip, I transported my gear and rods and tackle. One spinning rod, one fly, a small plastic box of hand-tied lures and a few jigs. I wasn't fussy about casting only flies. Whatever the fish were biting was good enough, that was Dad's philosophy, and it became mine. Better to catch a few with plastic bait, than lay down flies all day with no results.

As I went through the drill, I felt a presence shadowing me. More than once I stopped and swung around as if I might find Dad standing close, a huge grin on his face as he sprung yet another of his elaborate practical jokes. But nothing was there. Nothing but the muggy morning air, the cries of gulls, the sulfurous vapors that rose from the stagnant waters near the dock.

By noon I'd paddled several miles across the length of Whitewater Bay. I saw my last motorized skiff by three o'clock. The wind was light from the west, the sky cluttered with wispy unthreatening clouds. The forecast called for a week of sun, only the remotest chance of rain. I didn't care one way or the other. Let it rain. Dad and I had been out there once for six solid days of rain. But it hadn't mattered. The rain just made the trip more memorable. The fis.h.i.+ng out there was always good, no matter what.

I glided past the last chickee hut where campers were allowed to pitch tents and build cooking fires. A narrow dock of weathered pine jutted from a nameless mangrove island. Back in April it was to that very dock that I had transported my father's corpse and laid it out as if this had been his final resting place.

It was a ghastly journey, hauling his rotting body in the small canoe. My father lay at my feet as I paddled, his face destroyed from the pistol blast, and the days of rot. There were missing chunks of flesh and long lacerations where scavenging animals had feasted on him.

Ever since that afternoon those images haunted my dreams and waking hours and the vile gas of his decay still gagged me at unexpected moments. The horror of that hour alone with his body had driven me to a despair beyond simple grieving. I couldn't fathom what he'd done. I couldn't connect the images of the ravaged and shriveled corpse with the vital, dynamic man I'd revered from my earliest days.

When I found his body in the Lost Lagoon, I had not debated it for a moment. I knew the authorities would be required to thoroughly investigate his death, and their presence in the Lost Lagoon would forever desecrate the place. By relocating his body and was.h.i.+ng down the original death scene, I'm sure I committed numerous crimes, but neither the Metro detectives or Park Rangers had seemed suspicious of the body's location. The investigation was hurried and minimal.

It was ruled a suicide. The gunshot to the head and the weapon still in my father's grip made it obvious. Even if the police had tried to dig deeper, it would have been difficult to prove anything. After days of decay and the ravages of vultures and racc.o.o.ns, and several hard thunderstorms, forensics were all but impossible.

I paddled on beyond the nameless island, retracing the route I'd made two months ago. By the time I crossed the final bay and slid the tip of the canoe into the mouth of Homestretch Creek, my shoulders were aching and blisters were forming on both hands. Homestretch Creek was our private name for the narrow twist of water that led into the Lost Lagoon. Neither the lagoon nor that narrow creek had official names, for neither showed up on any navigational chart. The creek was a half mile long, but usually took an hour to negotiate, threading beneath the slick and knotty mangrove limbs, b.u.mping past their exposed roots. It was barely wide enough for a canoe to pa.s.s, and on every trip Dad and I had to clip back a few encroaching branches just to wedge through. From anywhere out on the bay, a pa.s.sing boater would see only an impenetrable wall of green.

As I paddled deep into the snarl of branches, ducking and twisting out of their way, small green herons eyed me from the shadows and spider webs shone in the golden afternoon light. Overhead, against the empty sky, a flock of snowy egrets drifted by like the spirits of departed souls, in no hurry to get where they were going.

Fifteen minutes into the thicket I came upon a fresh cut branch.

I held my paddle still. I peered around me in every direction into the tangle of green and brown leaves, but saw no movement. Off in the distance an osprey shrieked in alarm. I smelled the fetid stew of mud and exposed barnacles, and a fishy incense that breathed through the mesh of vegetation. I dragged the canoe close to the snipped branch and bent its pointed edge down. The meat of the wood was still green. It looked clean and new, but I was no expert on such matters.

I sat for a while till my heart calmed.

There was no way anyone could have discovered this sanctuary. The place was too remote, too hidden, too veiled by growth. Several million people lived only fifty miles away to the north and east in Miami and Ft. Lauderdale, though this part of the Everglades was as primeval and desolate as the far side of the moon. It was legally off-limits to gasoline powered engines, and the few kayakers or canoeist who journeyed this far into the wilderness invariably camped at the National Park's primitive sites which were at least an hour's paddle west of Lost Lagoon. In all our years here, Dad and I had never seen another soul within two miles of the lagoon.

The cut branch, I decided, must have been from my last trip out. A snip I had made in my haste on that frantic afternoon when I'd come searching for my father, hoping beyond hope that I would discover him alive. Sorting out my mother's death, trying to revive his spirits.

I forged on, paddling a few strokes, then I had to drag the canoe by hand past overhanging branches and intruding roots. It was just after five o'clock when I squeezed through the final narrow pa.s.sage and coasted out into the calm waters of the lagoon.

The smooth surface of the water was pocked here and there by fish rising to feed. I caught the silver flash of a single tarpon cruising deeper into the lagoon.

After tying off the canoe and lifting my gear onto the platform, I fortified myself with a long breath and climbed up onto the shelf of cypress.

There was no sign of his blood. No evidence of violence. The bullet that exploded his skull had left no trace in the surrounding shrubs. I had a momentary dizzy sense that none of what I remembered had truly happened. As though some terrible nightmare had taken root in my memory and borne its poisonous fruit.

I sat on the edge of the platform and looked out at the gathering darkness, at the metallic water, and watched the green mangrove leaves s.h.i.+ver as a sunset breeze pa.s.sed through. With Dad gone, the isolation I felt in that place was total. No one knew where I was. No one knew such a place existed. If I chose to use the pistol and end my life, there would be no son to find my body. I was lost to the world.

It was when I was laying out my supplies, placing them into the customary corners of the platform that I noticed the photograph thumb tacked to a branch at eye-level in the northwestern corner of the deck.

I inched over to it, peered at the image. It was a faded black and white snapshot, a vintage photo so washed out that the two figures in it had almost disappeared. A man and a woman were leaning against the fender of a'57 Ford. The man was most certainly my father. He was maybe nineteen or twenty at the time, a few years before he married my mother. There was a jaunty expression on his face. Tight jeans and a snug T-s.h.i.+rt showed off his athletic build.

The woman snuggled in beside him was black-haired and smiling. She had large dark eyes and heavy eyebrows and wore a light-colored summer dress and the garland of flowers in her abundant black hair had come undone, a strand of it falling down along her smooth cheek. It was not my mother. It was no one I recognized.

On the previous trip, in my frenzied state, I must have missed the photo. For some reason my father had fixed it there as he struggled with his fateful decision. Was this the love of his life? A woman he returned to in his imagination after my mother's death? A haunting reminder of the romance he'd lost as his existence was gradually defined by routine family responsibilities and the grind of work?

He had told me about some of his early loves and I had imagined them vividly, but this young woman's face did not match any of the images in my mind. She was too stunning. Somehow both a cla.s.sic beauty yet strangely exotica"as though her heritage was a wild mix of Slavic and Caribbean.

I studied the photograph until the light was nearly gone, then I rolled out my sleeping bag, ate the turkey sandwich Nadine had made for me, downed a beer in three swallows. I watched the stars appear, listened to the changing of the guard in the mangroves, night creatures stirring, the creaks and sighs of the branches. A splash, then another as the warfare between the predators and prey resumed.

I took out the pistol and held it in my hand. Its heft was oddly rea.s.suring. The despair, the bleak hopelessness I'd been feeling was still there, but it had subsided by a degree or two like the momentary dulling of a migraine.

The photograph seemed to glow through the darkness. Two lovers leaning against that old car. A beautiful woman whose memory had some deep and special significance to my father, but not enough to save him from his suicide.

I raised the pistol and touched the barrel to my temple. Held it there for several seconds as I listened to the wilderness around me. I felt a communion with my father in his final moments, a gun at my head, death so close by. A slight tightening of my finger could end it all. Such power, such finality, such terror.

I exhaled and lowered the pistol and set it on the platform beside me. I could feel my bones trembling.

For decades I had marched side by side with my father, matching his stride, harmonizing my values to his. No other friends I had, not even Nadine, could compare. He was my model, my ideal. Calm, commanding, full of joy and fun, engaged in the rough and tumble world, smart and inquiring, endlessly curious. That he had gone off to this spot to end his life still seemed an unfathomable mystery. My mother's death had shaken him, of course, but my father was too strong-willed and independent to succ.u.mb to suicidal despair. Unless there was a side of him that he'd managed to hide from me.

I squinted at the pale unnatural moonlight s.h.i.+ning from the photograph. Dad would have known that only I could have found it. Which meant he must have left the photo for that reason, like a confession, or the key to a puzzle he meant for me to solve.

I climbed into the bedroll and stared at the endless sky. The pistol lay at my side within easy reach. The sc.r.a.pe of branches and plinks and splashes and rattle of leaves keep me company for an hour or two as my eyes roamed the heavens.

When sleep came, it was agitated and cluttered with sc.r.a.ps of dream. My father was alive again, wearing the same ghoulish mask of death he'd worn on the last day I'd seen him. His jaw was missing, one eyeless socket wept blood, deep gouges grooved his cheeks and throat. He was speaking in an hysterical gibberish that sounded like two racc.o.o.ns locked in a mortal battle. As I tried to speak his name, my father's hand reached up and took hold of the flesh of his cheek, and peeled away the macabre mask as if it were rubber. His normal face was revealed. He smiled in his sheepish, good-natured way yet I could see the smile was not for me, but for someone beyond the frame of the dream.

I groaned and broke away from sleep, my heart flailing, sweat soaking my clothes. For the rest of the night I lay with my eyes shut, asleep and not asleep, my body clenched and feverish until finally a gray light began to fill the Lost Lagoon.

Still groggy, I felt the platform trembling beneath me.

I lifted my head and squinted. Five feet away, sitting on the edge of a platform, a naked woman held my spinning rod. Her line was tight. A big fish was bending the rod almost double, but her arms and back seemed unstrained by the tension.

This had to be a continuation of the nightmares I'd been having all night. She had the same dense black hair of the woman in the snapshot. The k.n.o.bs of her spine gleamed unnaturally as if her skin were translucent and the shadow of her skeleton was visible through the sheer flesh. I could see the muscles flex and relax as she worked the fish closer to the platform.

I tried to sit up, but discovered I couldn't lift my head more than a few inches from the planks. I fingered my throat, and felt the braided cord I'd brought along. I tried to tear the noose away, but it was knotted too well. I traced the single strand, finding that it was wrapped around one of the cedar planks, leaving just enough slack so I could lift my head a few inches.

"Tarpon," the woman said. "A hundred and five pounds, maybe one-ten."

She horsed the fish to the right and made it jump, a wild silver flailing before it crashed against the surface of the lagoon. Bigger than any catch my dad and I had ever made in these waters. It jumped a second time and a third, my rod bending so deeply I thought it might snap.

I fumbled with the cord around my neck but the fibers were so tough even if I'd had a knife at hand, it would've taken half an hour to saw through it. I clenched my eyes and opened them again. This was no dream. The pain was real, and the woman too. I lifted my head, straining against the ropes to see the tarpon jumping again high into the dawn light.

When she'd reeled the tarpon close to the deck, she stooped forward and with one hand she held the tarpon's mouth and with the other she pried the hook free. I could hear the swoosh of its departure.

"Who are you?"

She stood up and turned around, smiling with the glow of her catch. She set my rod on the deck in the same place my dad and I stored them.

Her body was long and lean and tanned all over. She was a few years younger than I, with large brown eyes and a plump lower lip. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s were small and her hips boyish. A swimmer's body, or a long distance runner's.

She came over to me and squatted down and picked up the white carton that contained Dad's ashes.

"The woman in the photograph. You're her daughter."

"That's right."

I gripped the noose and tugged.

"Let me go. I won't hurt you."

"You couldn't hurt me if you tried."

"So let me go."

She eyed me for several moments.

"That tarpon," she said. "That's the smallest one I've caught in a month. You ever caught any that size?"

"No."

"I didn't think so. I guess I got the fis.h.i.+ng genes."

"What do you want?"

"I wanted to meet you. Face to face. See what you're made of. It took you a d.a.m.n long time to return here. I've been out here for a month. I've been eating so many fish, I'd kill for a hamburger."

"You're his daughter? He brought you here, to this place?"

"Oh, yes. You and I have been sharing him," she said. "We've been dividing the old man all our lives. But you didn't know that, did you? You thought he was all yours. All those conferences he went to, the golfing trips, that was my time with him."

"Let me go."

"That makes me your sister," she said. "Half-sister."

"No, you're not. I don't believe it."

"So don't believe it. Keep your fantasy. You and the old man were best buddies. You and the old man had a unique bond. You had this secret place. Well, you didn't. None of that was true. He was unfaithful to you, unfaithful to your mother. He was living a parallel life."

"You're lying."

"You can't wish me away. I'm here. I've always been here."

I lay still. I looked up at the sky where a single pelican was coasting past.

She kneeled beside me and worked at the knots with one hand while she held the white carton in the other. I could smell her aroma, like a bale of hay baking in the sun, or wildflowers withered on the stem. She was smiling at something, her eyes off in the distance as if she were listening to a voice.

When I was free, she rose and stepped away.

I struggled to sit up, feeling faint and weak.

"Sorry about the noose," she said. "I had to be sure I could handle you."

"Give me the ashes," I said. "Give them to me."

"Pork fried Dad," she said.

I couldn't speak. I felt the blood drain from my skull.

"It looks like Chinese takeout," she said. "Moo shoo Dad."

I saw my father's irreverent smile on her lips.