TOURIST SEASON by Carl Hiaasen

“Skip punched you?”

Bloodworth nodded. “He said I burned one of his sources.”

“Did you?”

“It was a misunderstanding. I didn’t know the guy was off-the-record. Anyway, he gave me a helluva quote.”

“So,” Mulcahy said, “you printed his name in the story.”

“Right.”

“What happened?”

“I think the guy got fired.”

“I see.”

“And possibly indicted,” Bloodworth said.

“Hmmm.” Mulcahy thought: When it’s all over, I’m getting rid of this asshole. Send him up to the Okeechobee bureau to cover Cucumber Jubilees for the rest of his life.

“The whole thing was just a misunderstanding, but Skip was totally irrational about it. He blamed me for everything.”

“Did he now?” Mulcahy’s ulcer was shooting electric messages.

Bloodworth said, “The point is, I don’t want Skip to go on the warpath again. He’s a violent man.”

“Ricky, let me worry about it. Just take a crack at the column, all right?”

It had arrived as a lovely little piece, one of Wiley’s traditional holiday tearjerkers. It began like this:

Rollie Artis rowed out to sea last Thursday dawn.

You could watch him from Cable Beach, paddling out Nassau harbor, his thick black arms flashing at the oars.

Rollie went to hunt for conchs, which was his livelihood, as it was his father’s. And, as his father, Rollie Artis was a splendid diver with strong lungs and sharp eyes and an instinct for finding the shellfish beds.

But on Thursday the winds were high and the water was ferocious, and the other conch divers had warned Rollie not to try it.

“But I got to,” he had said. “If I don’t go fishin’, there, be no Christinas for my babies this year”

At dusk Rollie’s wife Clarisse waited on the dock behind the Straw Market, waited; as she always did, for the sight of the bright wooden skiff.

But Rollie Art is never returned. The next morning the seas calmed and the other fishermen searched for their friend. Not a trace was found. A few of the men were old enough to remember that the same thing had happened to Rollie’s father, on another winter’s day. An act of God, the old divers said; what else could explain such tragic irony?

Yesterday, at Rollie’s house in Queen’s Park, Clarisse put up a yule tree and sang to her two small children. Christmas carols. And the song of a fisherman.

Ricky Bloodworth took Wiley’s column to his desk and slaughtered it. It took less than an hour. Cab Mulcahy was surprised at Bloodworth’s aptitude for turgidity; it came naturally to the kid.

This, unedited, is what he brought back:

The Bahamas Coast Guard has some real explaining to do.

Nassau fisherman Rollie Artis disappeared from sight last Thursday and nobody except his fishing pals seem to give a hoot.

In our country, Artis would have been the object of a massive air-and-sea rescue effort. But in the Bahamas, nobody lifts the first helicopter. Is it money? Manpower? Equipment? Makes you wonder where all those tourist tax dollars are going—especially when you consider what they’re gouging for a decent hotel room these days on Paradise Island.

It also makes you wonder about a supposedly modern government that fails to enforce basic safety regulations for boaters. If a law had forced Rollie Artis to carry life jackets, he might be alive today. And if his boat had been properly equipped with an outboard motor, he might have made it back to port.

He might have been home for Christmas.

Ever since its independence the Bahamas has been telling the world community what a prosperous advanced nation it has become. Well, it’s time to start acting like one. It’s time this little country, which so loves rich foreigners, took an equal interest in the fate of its own people—especially the poor and feckless.

Cab Mulcahy nearly gnawed through his upper lip as he read Ricky’s rewrite.

“I thought Skip was being a little too sentimental,” Bloodworth explained. “I think he really missed the big picture.”

“Yes,” Mulcahy said pensively. “You’ve turned a sentimental anecdote about a missing fisherman into a blistering indictment of a friendly foreign government.”

“Exactly,” Bloodworth said proudly. “The column’s got some guts to it now.”

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