The Deep Blue Good-By

I was born and raised near Bahia Mar, the Fort Lauderdale yacht basin where Travis McGee moored his poker-prize houseboat, the Busted Flush.

Slip F-18, as every true fan of John D. MacDonald knows.

Here roamed one of American fiction's most popular recurring knights-McGee, knockabout retriever of lost fortunes, saver of spiraling souls; McGee of the deep-water tan, scarred knuckles, and untender mercies.

Rugged and sentimental, fearless and flawed, he was everything a connoisseur of private-eye capers could want. 'Wary of all earnestness, is how McGee described himself although he made exceptions when it came to his love life.

Perhaps he'd have been an equally appealing character had MacDonald consigned him to Manhattan, Chicago, London, or Marrakesh.

But McGee lived on a boat, and there's no better place for one of those than Fort Lauderdale.

Today South Florida is a prime destination for crime novelists and their ambivalent, salty, sun-baked, raw-boned heroes. This was not the case in the 1960s. When you thought of the Gold Coast, you thought of bikinis and not MAC-10s, Connie Francis and not the Cali cartel.

I was only eleven years old when Travis McGee parked the Busted Flush at Bahia Mar for The Deep Blue Good-by. In those days, Lauderdale had been the scene of several bad movies and scarcely any books. Imagine the kick in discovering a clever action novel set in one's own hometown! McGee and I ran on the same beaches, rambled the same roads, fished the same flats, ate at the same seafood joints, and avoided the same tourists.

His bittersweet view of South Florida was the same as my own. For me and many natives, some of McGee's finest moments were when he paused, mid-adventure, to inveigh against the runaway exploitation of this rare and dying paradise.

If a cypress swamp got plowed to make way Introduction Vii for another shopping mall, he took it personally: 'This was instant Florida, tacky and stifling and full of ugly and spurious energies."

Every McGee saga guarantees such splendidly mordant commentary. The customary targets are greedhead developers, crooked politicians, chamber-of-commerce flacks, and the cold-hearted scammers who flock like buzzards to the Sunshine State. For John D. MacDonald, these were not just useful fictional villains; they were villains of real life.

When he passed away unexpectedly in 1986, millions of fans worldwide wondered what would become of Travis McGee. Not me. I wondered what would become of Florida without him.

Most readers loved MacDonald's work because he told a rip-roaring yarn. I loved it because he was the first modern writer to nail Florida dead-center, to capture all its languid sleaze, racy
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sense of promise, and breath grabbing beauty.

He had the same sort of wise, cynical eye that Raymond Chandler cast so stylishly upon the misled mankind of Los Angeles, yet MacDonald's McGee seems more outraged than Chandler's Marlowe.

Standard McGee commentary drips citric acid:

"Now, of course, having failed in every at tempt to subdue the Glades by frontal attack, we are slowly killing it off by tapping the River of Grass. In the questionable name of progress, the state in its vast wisdom lets every twobit developer divert the flow into drag-lined canals that give him 'waterfront' lots to sell...."

MacDonald wrote those words thirty years ago, long before most politicians knew or cared what an environmentalist was, or gave any thought to 'saving' the Everglades, which is now a standard campaign anthem. More remarkably, MacDonald fit that splendid little diatribe into the mouth of a boat-bum private eye, and let him deliver it In the pages of a crime novel Most writers are delighted to achieve, on that rare occasion, a true and full sense of place--whether it's a city, a country, a valley, a jungle, the bowel of a volcano, or the bottom of the sea. MacDonald wanted his readers to do much more than see Florida. He seemed to want them to care about it as deeply as he did; celebrate it, marvel at it, laugh about it, grieve for it, and even fight for it.

His passion surfaced often in a pensive McGee, reliving canoe trips down the Withlacoochee, adrift in a slow current, seeing the morning mist rising at the base of the limestone buttes, seeing the sudden heart stopping dip and wheel of a flight of birds of incredible whiteness..."

... or recalling 'that slow slide of the gator down the mudbank into the pond, see his eye knobs watching me, see a dance cloud of a billion gnats in the ray of sun coming through Spanish moss."

Most hard-bitten sleuths could not pass for a poet-naturalist, or a political wag. Travis McGee was special. Is special. He would not be McGee without his reflections. Once, while tangled in a particularly foul mess, he wondered why he bothered to remain in Florida as the place went steadily to hell. it's a question many of us have asked ourselves.

Here's how McGee answered it:

"Tacky though it might be, its fate uncertain, too much of its destiny in the hands of men whose sole thought was grab the money and run, cheap little politicians with blow-dried hair, ice-eyed old men from the North with devout claims about their duties to their shareholders, big-rumped good old boys from the cattle counties with their fingers in the till right up to their cologned armpit&-it was still my place in the world. It is where I am and where I will stay, right up to the point where the Neptune Society sprinkles me into the dilute sewage off the Fun Coast."

Sometimes I wonder what McGee would think of the place today. In the eight years since John D. MacDonald died, the Florida peninsula has swollen with about 2.5 million newcomers.

Urban-gauge crime, crumbling schools, job shortages, water shortages, floods, pollution, traffic gridlock, killer toads, walking catfish, and even a respectable hurricane have failed to discourage these intrepid fortune seekers. The accelerated clotting of population has made the social climate commensurately more corrupt, more stressed, more violent, more bizarre, and more rootless.

Scoundrels abound. McGee would find no shortage of adventures.

So maybe now it is time to wonder: Where is he? What happened to the Busted Flush?

in all the years, I've never stopped to look for Slip F-18 at Bahia Mar. It is, after all, a very large marina. Quite possibly the old houseboat is tied there still; McGee on deck, tending a few fresh bruises, sipping his Plymouth, and watching the summer sun slide from the sky over Las Olas Boulevard.

Anyway, that's what I want to believe. If he's really gone, I prefer not to know.

Carl Hiaasen Islamorada, Florida December 1994

IT WAS to have been a quiet evening at home.

Home is the Busted Flush, 52-foot barge-type houseboat, Slip F-18, Bahia Mar, Lauderdale.

Home is where the privacy is. Draw all the opaque curtains, button the hatches, and with the whispering draft of the air conditioning masking all the sounds of the outside world, you are no longer cheek to jowl with the random activities aboard the neighbor craft. You could be in a rocket beyond Venus, or under the icecap.

Because it is a room aboard, I call it the lounge, and because that is one of the primary activities.

I was sprawled on a deep curve of the corner couch, studying charts of the keys, trying to work up enough enthusiasm and energy to plan moving the Busted Flush to a new mooring for a while. She has a pair of Hercules diesels, 58 HP each, that will chug her along at a stately six knots. I didn't want to move her. I like Lauderdale. But it had been so long I was wondering if I should.

Chookie McCall was choreographing some foot thing. She had come over because I had the privacy and enough room. She had shoved the furniture out of the way, set up a couple of mirrors from the master stateroom, and set up her rackety little metronome. She wore a faded old rust-red leotard, mended with black thread in a couple of places. She had her black hair tied into a scarf.

She was working hard. She would go over a sequence time and time again, changing it a little each time, and when she was satisfied, she would hurry over to the table and make the proper notations on her clip board.

Dancers work as hard as coal miners used to work. She stomped and buffed and contorted her splendid and perfectly proportioned body. In spite of the air conditioning, she had filled the lounge with a faint sharp-sweet odor of large overheated girl. She was a pleasant distraction. In the lounge lights there was a highlighted gleam of perspiration on the long round legs and arms.

"Damn!" she said, scowling at her notations.

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing I can't fix. I have to figure exactly where everybody is going to be, or I'll have them kicking each other in the face. I get mixed up sometimes."

She scratched out some notes. I went back to checking the low tide depths on the flats northeast of the Content Keys. She worked hard for another ten minutes, made her notes, then leaned against the edge of the table, breathing hard.

"Trav, honey?"

"Mmm?"

"Were you kidding me that time we talked about... about what you do for a living?"

"What did I say?"

"It sounded sort of strange, but I guess I believed you. You said if X has something valuable and Y comes along and takes it away from him, and there is absolutely no way in the world X can ever get it back, then you come along and make a deal with X to get it back, and keep half. Then you just... live on that until it starts to run out. Is that the way it is, really?"

"It's a simplification, Chook, but reasonably accurate."

"Don't you get into a lot of trouble?"

"Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Y is usually in no position to make much of a fuss. Be cause I am sort of a last resort, the fee is fifty percent. For X half is a lot better than nothing at all."

"And you keep it all sort of quiet?"

"Chook, I don't exactly have business cards printed. What would I say on them? Travis McGee, Retriever?"

"But for goodness' sake, Trav, how much work like that can you find laying around when you start to get so broke you need it?"

"So much that I can pick and choose. This is a complex culture, dear. The more intricate our society gets, the more semi-legal ways to steal. I get leads from old clients sometimes.

And if you take a batch of newspapers and read with great care, and read between the lines, you can come up with a fat happy Y and a poor X wringing his hands." "I like to work on pretty good-sized ones. Expenses are heavy.

And then I can take another piece of my retirement. instead of retiring at sixty, I'm taking it in chunks as I go along."

"What if something came along right now?"

"Let's change the subject, Miss McCall. Why don't you take some time off, and make Frank highly nervous, and we'll assemble a little group and cruise a little houseboat party on down to Marathon. Let's say, four gentlemen and six ladies. No drunks, no whiners, nobody paired off, no dubious gender, no camera addicts , nobody who sunburns, nobody who can't swim, nobody who - -."

"Please, McGee. I'm really serious."

"So am I."

"There's a girl I want you to talk to. I hired her for the group a couple of months ago.

she's a little older than the rest of us. She used to dance, and she's working back into it very nicely, really. But... I really think she needs help. And I don't think there's anyone else she can go to. Her name is Cathy Kerr."

"I'm sorry, Chook. I've got enough right now to last for months. I work best after I begin to get nervous.". "But she thinks there is really an awful lot involved." I stared at her. 'She thinks?"

"She never got to see it."

"I beg your pardon?"

"She got a little drunk the other night and very weepy, and I've been nice to her, so she blurted it all out to me. But she should tell you herself."

"How could she lose something she never saw?"

Chookie wore that little fisherman smile which means the hook has been set. 'It's really too complicated for me to try to explain. I might mess it up. Would you just do this, Travis? Would you talk to her?"

I sighed. 'Bring her around sometime."

She padded lithely over to me and took my wrist and looked at my watch. Her breathing had slowed. Her leotard was sweat-dark and fitted her almost as closely as her healthy hide.

She beamed down at me. 'I knew you'd be nice about it, Trav. She'll be here in twenty minutes!

I stared up at her. 'You are a con artist, McCall."

She patted my head. 'Cathy is really nice.

You'll like her." She went back to the middle of the lounge and started her metronome again, studied her notations, and went back to work, leaping, thumping, making small grunts of effort.

Never sit in the first row at the ballet.

I tried to get back to channel markers and tide levels, but all concentration was gone. I had to talk to the woman. But I was certainly not going to be shined into some nonsense project. I had the next one all lined up, waiting until I was ready. I had enough diversions. I didn't need more. I was sourly amused that Chook had wondered where the projects came from. She was living proof they popped up all the time.