RICKETY DOCK
Dock Rudloe limped noticeably and slowly around the huge yard of his biological supply company, humming a three-note tune, his old shoes keeping a contrasting rhythm in soft, sandy earth. Dock’s right knee had begun to bother him and he knew of no cure, short of a wheelchair or death. It was a fine autumnal Saturday morning – the very best season on that half-remembered coast; when the temperatures cooled, the bugs and tourists diminished and the fat silvery mullet schooled for their annual spawning runs. Dock had weathered many autumns in North Florida and they never failed to please him. He picked up a white plastic five-gallon bucket that had several orange starfish resting in six inches of water on the bottom – someone had left it outside of the closed doors of the aquarium’s lab building during the night. Dock wondered if they would be billed for the starfish. He looked down at the handsome creatures, briefly trying to recount the numerous people who had brought specimens of one sort and another to the lab from the Gulf in the past fifteen years or so. But there were so many that he never could have recalled them all. There were, first of all, the older local fishermen, whom he’d come to know when he was still in high school. They were a major reason why he had decided to start a marine lab on that little-known coast in the first place. Daily, he had seen them discarding precisely the small sea creatures that he knew were in demand in laboratories all over America. When he had asked some of them if he could keep the starfish and sea-cucumbers and sea-pansies and seahorses and nudibranchs and remoras and all of the other smallish Gulf creatures that they cast off as worthless, they were astonished. No one had ever had any use for such things in their lifetime. Shrimpers routinely culled their catches at sea and threw myriads of small sea forms back into the water, some alive and some already dead or dying of shock or air drowning. But there were almost always some smallish critters still alive on the boats when they docked – mixed in with the money-fish, or on their decks and nets, or even sometimes kept purposely in their tanks or large ice chests and other storage areas. They occasionally brought in a live toad-fish or guitar-fish, or the odd garfish or octopus to give or sell to someone. The Gulf of Mexico was a very fertile mother.
Young Dock and those grizzled watermen had worked out a basic understanding as to what he needed and how much he could pay for each and when he needed certain ones. Dock had written about those early years in his first-published classic book, The Sea Brings Forth. Dock really liked that book; it was the one that John Steinbeck had read just before his death, after having helped Dock find a publisher. Why, even old Skinny Caldwell had written him several fan letters full of praise for it. Caldwell used to fish in the Panacea area decades earlier during his boyhood in South Georgia. Caldwell’s racy novels could well have been set in Panacea.
In time, as word spread that Dock needed all sorts of things from the Gulf, his irregular collecting volunteers grew in number and discrimination. Clay brought him a live baby shark that he and Murray had caught at the mouth of a local river, using jug-buoyed hooks. Weekend fishermen would bring him an eel or a ray or a skate that they had caught while trolling. Small kids brought him can-fulls of fiddle-crabs, stone-crabs, calico-crabs, and the plentiful blue crabs that they had caught just for the fun of it. Dock would give them some pocket change, and they would leave feeling very rich and practical. His foreman, Duke # 2, made weekly forays into secret water haunts to keep the lab’s tanks full of fish and to fill special orders that had been phoned in or mailed in to Maria Elena – the office manager who oversaw the day-to-day operations of that nonprofit business. Dock, himself, would make occasional trips along the local beaches or out on the Gulf in one boat or another – The Cyclops was the lab’s collecting boat – always with his one good eye out for some useful specimens. Eve and Kirby added this and that to the gallimaufry in the numerous aquarium tanks. Several years before, that couple had read a few of Dock’s books up in their farm in New England and had moved south to Panacea to work with him. Even Mack brought in an occasional crab or sponge or such to the lab.
Dock was especially fond of sea-turtles, but state law would not allow the company to keep them for more than a week or so – and that only for rest and recuperation unless the turtle was very sick. He had written one book about turtles – Time of the Turtle – which also described the small local Diamondback Terrapins. Mack had often noticed that there was something very “turtleish” about Dock himself – his poor eyesight, his slow awkward gait on land, his firm unyielding grip, and even Dock’s increasingly roly-poly figure. Mack had begun to notice any number of such interesting phenomena after he settled into the swamps.
Steady Eddie would often bring live specimens and dead “food-fish” to the lab from the marina, where he was the ace handyman. Dock had come to rely on Steady Eddie for a number of reasons over the years. Eddie was a lifelong resident of that often-ignored coast, the youngest of a family of welders, fishermen, and hell-raisers. Eddie had served a few years in a state prison and had used his jail-time wisely; he learned to read and to love books while incarcerated. He decided to be a better man when he returned to Panacea, where he quickly became a friend to all of the boaters at the new marina, which had been built in his absence. For Eddie knew a lot about boats: building them, operating them, securing them, fixing their engines – and also about shrimping and all the other sorts of local fishing. He had grown up with it all. It was during those years at the Marina that he came to be known as Steady Eddie. If anyone had a problem with their boat there – even during a hurricane, when it was a very dangerous place – Eddie would help the boat owner and ask nothing in return. A checkers champ from childhood, he learned to play chess in prison and became the local chess champion also. Eddie liked the ladies; he liked to drink, and he was even learning how to handle large sailing vessels – which Eddie called “blow-boats.” In short, he was becoming an indispensable man in Panacea. He would listen to Dock’s problems and even give him tips on writing about nature. Dock revered him, and so did many others in that small fishing village.
Awakening from his reverie, Dock continued humming his tuneless song as he dumped the starfish ever so gently into one of the flat, shallow tanks of sea-creatures in the bay water in shed # 1. The sound of saltwater pumping constantly through the lab’s labyrinth of plastic piping was music to Dock’s tin ears. How many years of trial-and-error had it taken to perfect that jury-rigged aquarium? He laughed out loud, recalling how one local contractor had built him a cement tank that actually had exploded one night . . . the noise sounding like a big bomb in that quiet town. Fortunately, no one was around to get hurt. That contractor soon quit that business and became a deputy sheriff, where bomb noises are more a part of their duties.
Dock remembered that someone had brought a small octopus to the lab that week, and he walked into the big, round middle tank in shed # 2 and looked in the water. The octopus quickly saw him and swiftly propelled itself over to where Dock’s had rested on the cement ledge. The octopus slipped a rubbery tentacle up the tank wall and touched Dock’s fingers, as if to say “Good Morning.” Dock had had that happen before with cephalopods – among the most intelligent of all sea creatures. The tentacle felt friendly; Dock wiggled a finger in response. “It’s just like a snake,” he thought. Once a King snake had coiled itself around his arm and from that day on Dock had no fear of nonpoisonous reptiles. “Good morning, Ozzie,” Dock said aloud, withdrawing his hand slowly from the ledge. He stepped over to the crab tank, picked out a large male blue crab and dropped it into the circular tank. The unlucky crab immediately began scuttling sideways, searching for a hiding place. But there is no such haven from the smart octopi: breakfast was served in about five minutes on the half shell.
Dock mused over one of the many old fishermen’s tales in the Gulf: that a stone crab would regenerate one of its fat claws if it were put back in the open water with one claw to fend for itself. Personally, Dock had never seen a stone crab grow a claw from scratch ‑‑ he wondered only if it was possible. Similarly, a Dutch friend had insisted to him that most sharks, under most circumstances, will not attack humans. There were so many such stories among watermen . . . great food for thought in their solitary profession . . . .
Dock hummed on. The phone rang, buzzing crudely over the static-laden loudspeaker. He answered it reluctantly. No, they didn’t have any robin-fish or bat-fish, but they might get some in in the next week or two. Could the party please call back, preferably on a weekday? He hung up. Dusty, his brownish mongrel bitch, lay in the golden sunlight outside of the lab buildings, utterly at peace with herself and her own sense of reality. Dock had rescued Dusty from the county dump a few years previously, after an alligator ate his second, previous Airedale – Magen – at Otter Lake. Dusty was the luckiest dog in the county, for she had no particular duties and was spoiled rotten by Dock’s boys and their chums. Her leftover seafood banquets were scrumptious; she waddled when she walked. To see her and Dock walk together was eye-catching.
Dock limped into the shark-and-ray tank building, wanting to check on the water system and the animals’ health. Two or three middle-sized nurse sharks were resting motionlessly near the incoming bursts of bay water; they rarely moved, except to eat a fish dropped in their tank on feeding days. Those sharks would reach a maximum length of about six- or eight-feet over the years. Tourists and other visitors who paid a small fee to tour the lab always wanted to see sharks. “They’re a good draw,” Dock thought, “but, of course, they’d like to be free, too.” He automatically checked and counted the skates and rays and inspected the horseshoe crabs for any dead ones as he walked slowly through the tin building. His wife, Anna, was a world-renowned expert on horseshoe crabs, which bred in seemingly endless numbers on that shallow coast. Their multiple eyes and their rare blood made them valuable to biologists, for experimentation and for use in blood testing the world around. Those oval-shaped antediluvians were alleged to be about a half-billion years old, as a species, having changed very little over that span of time. Anna had written her doctoral dissertation on those odd amphibians at the state university in Tallahassee.
Leaving that shed, Dock walked back out into the sunlight, headed over to the small wooden building where the pickled specimens were kept and where Dock stored his old manuscripts – “The Pickle Building.” As he did so, he recalled his various expeditions to Madagascar, Surinam, Costa Rica, and the Orient. He could use another trip soon, he reckoned. He hoped to go to Hong Kong or China to talk to some Chinese about the Gulf Coast’s cannonball jellyfish, which Orientals found to be a culinary treat. Oh, if he could only find somebody to pay for his trips! Among his many unpublished manuscripts was one he wanted to rewrite: his awkward novel about dope smuggling on his secretive coast. He’d used several working titles for it: “Potluck,” “Seaweed,” “Funny Money” – but none of his agents or publishers had much liked that manuscript. Still, he wanted to rewrite it one last time. He dug through cardboard boxes and piles of fading yellowed manuscript, finally grasping the thick sheaf that represented a year or two of seemingly wasted labor. He carried the bulging folder back out into the fresh air, coughing as he left the stale, acrid confines of the pickle building. He’d have to clean all of that one day soon, he vowed for the hundredth time.
As he limped back to the office, he saw Mack coming out of the tool shed with a four-foot-long crowbar in his hand. “What’s up?” he asked his mythical neighbor.
“Gotta fix my front porch. Curwin nearly fell through a bad spot the other day and skinned his ankle. He won’t visit me again unless I fix the porch. I’ll return it.” Mack hefted the heavy tool.
Dock accepted that promise. Mack did return things, usually. “Wanta take a beach walk in a while?” Dock asked the old hobo. Dock could never quite bring himself to believe that Mack was who – or whom – he said he was. Dock was not even sure if he wanted to know if Mack had really been in Steinbeck’s books; if he was, it was a cosmic coincidence . . . while, if he wasn’t, it would ruin their joke. Still, Dock wished for the umpteenth time that John Steinbeck was still alive or that he had come to Panacea before he passed away in 1968.
“Yeah,” Mack answered casually, picking up a handful of large nails from the jumbled miscellany in the tool shed. “Maybe in an hour or so?”
“Great. Then maybe later we’ll have a beer at the Brown Dog?” Dock assumed that’s where they’d end up – they usually did.
“Oh, No!” Mack answered with conviction, shaking his head negatively. “No more of that stuff for me!”
Dock stopped short as he approached Mack. He couldn’t believe his ears. “Off the Beer? You sick?” He peered into Mack’s eyes.
“Nope.” Mack seemed coy and distant.
“You sure you’re all right?” Dock persisted.
“I’m fine.” Mack said belligerently. “Just Fine.”
“No beer?”
“NO BEER! Okay? I don’t want to talk about it.” Mack looked away, in the general direction of the midday sun. His face was inscrutable, and his lips were puckered up.
Dock started to press the subject but thought better of it. “Okay. We’ll leave in an hour or so. I’ll take my wagon . . . I don’t like to ride with you without a driving license. When you gonna get one?”
“Oh, maybe one of these days, “Mack shrugged, unwilling to discuss his problem: he was too old, his eyes were bad, and he had no legal I.D.
“I’ll bring Dusty and we can take South Dog, too, if you like. I’ll honk twice.” That was their usual signal to each other.
Mack nodded and walked around the chain-link fence with the crowbar to his nondescript cabin. Dock watched him go. What could have caused Mack to quit drinking? He’d never refused a drink in the decade that Dock had known him. With Dusty following at a distance, Dock limped into the office and prepared to make a long-distance phone call. He checked his watch . . . almost noon . . . “Gotta call now, I promised.” Dock picked up the pale yellow rotary phone and dialed the operator with a pencil head, thinking, as he did so, that the lab must soon replace those museum pieces with new digital equipment . . . just as soon as they could afford it (which might be a long time). One always had to dial “O” for operator when placing a person-to-person or collect call. “ The rotary” was a real nuisance, reminding him of much else of the lab’s old equipment.
For the next hour or so, Dock talked passionately to a journalist in St. Petersburg, explaining his lifelong crusade to slow down the development of the marshes and wetlands in Florida’s Big Bend. Those precious swamps were where many fish and birds and amphibians spawned and were allowed to survive before moving out into deeper water and their inevitable deaths in the planetary food chain. Dock had told this story so many times that he felt like a tape recorder. He and Anna had written journal articles about it beyond the counting. He’d published books about it, none of which sold very well. Dock was considered to be a “mid-list” author in the publishing trade, which meant that, in plain English, “Ecology does not sell.” One enterprising businessman had even published one of Dock’s books, while planning in advance to use it as a tax write-off! That publisher ran off only 2,500 copies of that book, an unheard-of figure in the business. It all rankled Dock to his very soul. He had been interviewed on radio and TV stations all around America. He had spoken to universities and state legislatures. He had been a burr in the saddles of several governors. He even had spoken personally to various high-ranking federal officials in Washington (AC/DC) about his beloved coastal wetlands. Dock was known – and loved or hated, depending on the person – all over the state of North Florida and the American Gulf Coast. He was infamous among developers and bureaucrats – the latter ones liked to visit his lab and issue trivial citations to justify their jobs. He was the ultimate nightmare of illegal or shady coastal land clearers. He had once single-handedly stopped a wealthy consortium of Atlanta businessmen from building high-rise condominiums right across Ducks Bay from his dock; one poor man had whipped a dozen millionaires and their lawyers! He’d even managed to get that pristine point of land set aside permanently for public use.
Still, all of his efforts seemed to be coming to naught. Year by year, mile by mile, lot by lot, the swamp coast was changing. Handsome old trees were being cut down for pulp or lumber, or just because an owner had a whim. Dock knew that one big tree provided enough oxygen for one adult human to live on – a humbling statistic. Tide flats were being bulldozed and filled in for real estate development. Lifelong commercial fishermen were moving out; weekend sports fishermen were moving in. Old-fashioned picturesque houses were disappearing with half-million dollar fenced-in estates replacing them. The fish and the turtles and the waterfowl and the deer and the wild hogs and the frogs and the crabs and the oysters and the mullet were fewer in number with each passing year. Yet the tourists and real estate salesmen and the money hustlers were more numerous and obvious with each successive winter.
Dock had been an early believer in the theory that manmade pollution was contributing to the so-called “Greenhouse Effect” – which raised global temperatures, caused ice caps to melt at both Poles, and raised global sea levels. For this, also, he and Anna had been ostracized and ridiculed among the academic and scientific communities. But it was a fact. Dock and Anna and their devoted crew at Gulf Biological Supply Company had fought the good fight. The company was internationally known. Dock’s books were praised by critics and naturalists. Anna was a well-known academic in the field. And yet . . . and yet, neither of them were making more than a bare living, if that; nor much headway . . . neither from the business nor the books nor the tourists nor the lectures nor whatever. True – they had their loyal friends, supporters, and readers; but it was obviously always going to be an uphill battle – and a largely thankless task – to raise the public’s consciousness about the environment. Greed whipped Read, almost every time. Mother Nature seemed to be saying to Dock and his associates: “I need you to do this work, but I can’t pay you at present. You’ll have to trust me on this one.” It did finally come down to a matter of faith. It was almost a spiritual quest. Sometimes Dock felt like Mad Mack . . . Don Quixote’s ghost. At other times, he wanted to weep.
The journalist took copious notes over the phone. He was writing a series about the state’s ecological crisis for the Times. With about 2,000 miles of shoreline, Florida was second only to Alaska in that category. Dock ended the conversation with a loud, almost-paranoid denunciation of all developers, bureaucrats, lumber mills, politicians who disagreed with him and – seemingly – almost everyone who wanted to cut down even one single tree on his adopted coast! Dock’s childhood memories of over-urbanized Manhattan always goaded him to press on, like Cervantes’ immortal hero, to help other citizens see the future ecological holocaust that he envisioned – rightly or wrongly. How many environmental lawsuits had he been involved in? He couldn’t keep track of them all – he had a court hearing scheduled for the following week.
Then there were the aggravating incidents with some local troublemakers who had been feuding with Dock for years. It began in the ‘60s when some driver had deliberately killed his pet Airedale, Linda, on the road out in front of the lab. It escalated over the years until he was actually legally charged with sinking his own boat at his own dock, and with stealing from his sons’ piggybank! All to tie up his time and limited resources in endless snafus in the county courts. It was some kind of blood-feud, which went way back to when he and his mother had first come to that isolated coast. His brain-damaged mother had made a few enemies – none of who ever forgot or forgave him, though Dock’s mother had been dead for years. Dock was afraid that he was nearing a physical and/or mental breakdown himself.
Hanging up the phone, Dock sat quietly in the sunlit corner of the office. Dusty came over and licked his dangling hand. Dock sighed audibly and got up from the well-used green swivel chair. How had he gotten into this damn business anyhow, he wondered. Why hadn’t he chosen some safe and sane manner of making a living? But what would that be? His father had been a visual artist who barely eked out a living. His mother was a certified crazy woman. His brother was a self-employed computer programmer up north. Dock, himself, was dyslexic, with one of his eyes also damaged in a childhood accident. How he read what he needed to know and wrote his books and articles was a mystery – even to himself. One of his sons had inherited his dyslexia and already was having difficulties in school. Anna held a Ph.D. in Marine Biology but could only manage a permanent adjunct instructorship at the state university in town, no matter how many journal articles she published or scientific expeditions she was a part of. Was there any sensible way to make a living in the modern madhouse? He pondered the question, looking out the window toward the bay.
Then he twitched, recalling a recent episode with Scrounger – an acquaintance whom he’d hired as a house-helper for his young boys. As he and Anna were kept busy with their hectic schedules, they had offered Scrounger – who was, as usual, broke and unemployed – room and board and a small salary to help them out. It was only a few weeks later that Dock found drug needles in his bathroom. Confronting Scrounger, his worst fears were confirmed: Scrounger was shooting heroin and watching TV all day. Somehow, those two bad habits did seem to reinforce each other, Dock thought. Promptly fired from his cushy job, Scrounger was then arrested in Crawfordville for breaking into people’s garages, apparently looking for a warm place to stay. The last Dock had heard of him, he was out of jail and back home in South Florida. In the course of his two decades in Panacea, Dock had become a skeptical, world-weary man. He was very close to joining the absurd anarchists. Still, he knew that EVERYTHING COMES FROM THE GREAT MOTHER! She IS the World Bank! “We Can’t Eat Money!” Dock said aloud – surprising himself as he walked out to his beat-up station wagon. “Come on, Dusty,” he said forlornly, as the dog leapt into the rear of the vehicle by habit, knowing exactly where they were going.
Dock then drove the 100 feet over to Mack’s yard and honked twice. Mack had just finished replacing several worn boards on his homemade porch. The “new” boards all came from Dock’s previous bay dock down the road, which had been destroyed by a severe hurricane a few years before. Those creosoted boards were ideal for an uncovered porch such as Mack’s. He waved at Dock, went into his house for a few minutes, and came out wearing his walking boots and a light jacket. South Dog followed him and they both got into the car. Off they all rode to the seemingly endless and deserted beaches of Alligator Point, just across the Ocholockonee River bridge.
Dock and Mack had made that drive so often in the decade or so that they’d been neighbors that it had become almost a ritual. Once in the car, Dock would vent all of his pent‑up frustrations over his latest combat with “The Blitzkreig of Progress,” as he called it. Then he’d talk about the new or old book that he was working on, which would, in all probability, never see publication. Mack would look out the window at the blue sky and listen in silence; aware that Dock was indeed carrying a heavy load in a crazy country and that it didn’t hurt Mack to give him a little bit of his time. Mack had all of Eternity, as he envisioned it. Mack had played a similar role for Doc Rickets and Jay Beckstein in California some 30 years previous; he had the script down pat.
Once at the beach, Dock would open the cargo door and let the dogs out. Then he and Mack would each take a stained off-white plastic bucket: Mack to collect aluminum cans and other trash on the beach; Dock to pick up specimens and sea-things in the inter-tidal area, as they walked and talked.
“So, you’re off the sauce?” Dock asked, burning with curiosity about that rarity. They walked out into the ever-glorious sunshine: the pungent, tangy sea breeze in their nostrils; their footprints temporarily marking a trail at the water’s edge, soon to be erased.
“Finished,” Mack said inscrutably.
“Mind telling me why?” Dock asked, picking up some pink sea pork and putting it in his bucket. “I never knew a man who liked to drink as much as you do.”
“Did,” Mack said somewhat grumpily.
Dock turned his good eye to Mack. “Neither did Jay Beckstein, I’ll bet.” He watched to see if Mack would rise to the bait.
But Mack seemed suddenly very preoccupied, watching the two dogs trot along with them, now ahead, now behind them. Watching them brought that singular dog at the motel back to Mack’s mind. He shook his head briefly to clear away the awful memory of that bizarre night of a few weeks previous. He made a strange, almost sobbing noise in his throat, which was audible to Dock.
“What did you say?” Dock asked him, still trying to unravel the mystery.
“Nothing,” Mack replied stoically, stooping to pick up an empty beer bottle, which he dropped noisily into his bucket, staring at the faded label. It seemed to have been “Red Dog,” but he wasn’t sure. He quit looking at it and grit his teeth tightly together. “Frogs and Dogs,” he mouthed inaudibly.
“Don’t want to talk about it, hey?” Dock commiserated. Mack was known all over that misbegotten coast for his drinker’s elbow. Dock stopped to pick up a large orange devil-fingered sponge and placed it in his bucket.
“Nope,” Mack muttered through clenched teeth. “It’s over. Okay? Let’s just leave it at that.” He looked briefly at Dock. “Okay?” He couldn’t bear to tell Dock – or anyone else! – what had happened to him on that mother-foggy night. Or what he only thought had happened to him, which was even worse! Would he be thought crazier to have heard a dog talk? Or to only think that he had heard a dog talk. Mack couldn’t figure it out. And then there was that undeniable Sprite at the Wedding-party. Mack knew he had to get off the sauce and stay off it this time. He didn’t know what would happen if he became a sober man . . . but he was finally ready to find out. Damn near anything was better than some of the drunken nightmares that he had been through. Hell, who knew? Maybe he’d even enjoy sobriety. But he was doubtful. He stopped to pick up two crumpled aluminum cans – a root-beer and a ginger-ale – and slammed them down into his bucket where they clanged loudly, hitting bottom. “Bottom!” he cursed through clenched teeth. “That’s what I’ll drink now,” he mused sadly to himself, “Rooty-tooty-beer and ginger-damn-ale!” He exhaled audibly and walked on far ahead of Dock, his teeth still clenched together.
Dock heard him muttering but couldn’t make out the words. He picked up a wriggling wrasse and placed the small fish from the inter-tidal pool into his bucket, sloshing some water in with it.
Dusty and South Dog trotted along as joyously as only country dogs can be in a paradise so vast and wonderful that it takes a naïf or a child or a dog to see it with clear eyes. Yes, citizens, it was a day like millions of other days that the human race has experienced on this planet since Adam and Eve. An aged Huck and a lame Tom were at play; their dogs were keeping them easy company; the sun was shining high and golden; a fresh gulf-wind was blowing; greenish dogwood trees and bushes were growing in wild profusion along the shore; wide-winged seabirds were gliding quietly and gracefully over the waves and the sand bars; sporting porpoises roiled just below the Gulf’s surface, herding their sea-snacks together; smallish beach creatures darted along the sand or into the countless hiding places among tree roots and driftwood, and so on, ad infinitum.
“God works her many wonders, her miracles to perform, tum tum tum,” Dock sang quietly to himself as he limped slowly on into infinity.
