whatever happened to Jimmy

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO JIMMY?



The freezing rain trickled down his neck, finding its way only marginally blocked by cap and collar, and chilled the flesh below.
Concentrating hard, his mind still registered the fact that he was losing body heat rapidly, and his inbuilt body clock told him that he had another 5 minutes at best before the effects of hypothermia began to put him at risk.
Dressed in full camouflage and well hidden, for the last 25 minutes he had not moved a muscle other than his eyes and the normal bodily rhythms that kept him alive, the slow beating of his heart and shallow breathing not generating enough heat to keep out the bitter cold as he watched the small clearing in the trees.
Another 3 minutes passed, and reluctantly he admitted to himself that he had got it wrong, and it wasn’t going to happen…not tonight.
He arose slowly, his joints and muscles screaming as they unlocked themselves, and began a series of exercises, slow and steady at first, but ever increasing in speed and intensity, to get his blood flowing and heart pumping once again and regain the lost body heat.
Warm now, his breath huge plumes of steam in front of him like a dragon breathing smoke, lit by the remains of the moon now sinking out of sight below the tree line, he turned away from the clearing and began to slowly and silently make his way back through the darkening trees.
Still travelling at 2800 feet per second, the hollow point bullet struck him just below the left shoulder, punching a neat, smoking hole through his jacket and rapidly changing shape as it entered his flesh, sizzling and splintering as it tore itself to pieces inside him. Like a small explosion, the projectile released its kinetic energy inside his chest cavity, ripping, tearing and generally pulping his heart and lungs, the massive hydraulic shock was instantly fatal, and his eyes began to glaze even as he fell…as the old cliché goes, he never even heard the shot that killed him.
As the echoing of the shot died away, frozen silence returned once again to the woods, punctuated only by the sound of the gentle rain dripping from the trees, as the moon looked on in passive indifference at the still steaming mound on the cold wet earth.

“Well it’s just crap basically” said Tony Storch, handing the manuscript back to Robert Flynne, “we both know you can do a lot better than that old son!”
Robert looked away, not daring to meet the publisher’s eyes and face what he knew he would see there.
“Your last book was an instant success that made us both a lot of money, but I can’t even get past the first page of this one without falling asleep…what’s going on mate?”
“I’m sorry Tony, I know it’s not great but I’m having a hard time with everything lately...I’ll rewrite”
“Robert, look at me and blah blah blah, yada yada yada and so forth.”

Jimmy re-read what he had just written and decided, sadly, that should probably give up trying to write this novel about an author and his troublesome life, and so with no compunction whatsoever he deleted the file from his desktop, and then deleted the copy from his hard drive to remove any temptation to continue it at a later date.
The cursor blinked at him mockingly as he sat there staring at the blank page on his computer screen for a full 5 minutes, hypnotized by its mindless devotion to duty, daring it to miss a blink, just one, to prove that the world was not as boring as it appeared to be, but of course it never did, it’s smug attitude mocking Jimmy even further until he finally tore his gaze away from the screen in disgust and let his eyes wonder to the framed picture sitting on his desk. The photograph of jimmy at his last book release that showed him smiling broadly as he signed a copy of ‘Murder in Antarctica’ for one of his devoted fans now seemed unreal, as if it were not him in the picture at all, but a stranger, an imposter who had sneaked into his head somehow.
“Time to get off your arse sunshine” thought Jimmy as he shook himself back to reality and looked around his small office guiltily as if someone might be watching him, ”go fishing for a week or two and forget the whole crappy world for a while.”



“Pelican” he thought to himself,”is an odd word.”As he sat in the warm sunshine, enjoying the balmy breeze that kept him at a very comfortable temperature, Jimmy pondered many odd words, words that came from nowhere and perched on the edge of his mind like hungry crows perch in leafless trees in wintertime, waiting for who knows what to emerge from the mist.
The boat rocked gently with the ceaseless rhythm of the ocean, anchored in a sandy bay on the western side of the tiny island that Jimmy had selected for his retreat from the world, one of many such dots in the vast Pacific Ocean, unnamed, uninhabited and largely ignored as it quietly went about its business.
Jimmy didn’t really know where he was himself, and had only reached the island with the aid of the onboard GPS system that did all the navigating he needed, and the coordinates programmed into it by an old friend, a retired pilot who understood such things. He could have found it on one of his charts if he really wanted to, but he preferred to not know where he was, working on the theory that if he didn’t know, then nobody else did either, and that suited him just fine.
“When you see the island, just watch for the reef and steer around it to the west…it’s easy enough to see, and there looks to be plenty of room to get through to the lagoon” was the only advice that was offered, but it was accurate enough, and the four day trip had been so pleasant and uneventful he could scarcely remember it.
While no expert ‘sea-dog’, Jimmy had done a bit of sailing over the years, and had bought the old 38 footer at an auction for a fraction of its actual value only a couple of months previously, for no other reason than the fact that he could, so navigating through the narrow reef channel had not over-taxed his abilities.
The lagoon was stunning; an absolute paradise of dazzling white sand, turquoise water and impossibly green tropical vegetation, even boasting a fresh water stream that crossed the beach at one end, the kind of place that Jimmy had thought only existed in Hollywood films. As a writer he had imagined such places many times, and described them in detail, but never had they been as amazingly beautiful and vibrant as the reality that surrounded him now, the colours were so intense they could almost be felt rather than seen, and the scent of tropical flowers mixed with the salty smell of the ocean was almost a drug, and Jimmy, for the first time in his life, was happy, feeling a flow of energy like nothing he had ever felt before.
For another hour Jimmy sat and pondered words that sneaked into his mind, randomly considering banana, swivel, balmy, vacuum, hypotenuse, arbitrary and aardvark in no particular order and with little result. He sipped his rum as he pondered each word in turn, its meaning and application, the possible history of it and whether he liked it or not, but rarely, if ever, reached a definitive conclusion except that he liked sipping rum in the tropical sunshine and that he felt like he had come home somehow.
As the tide reached its peak and the gentle breeze shifted position, Jimmy ceased his idle speculation and prepared to catch his dinner. That he would catch dinner was never a question that occurred to him, the shallow lagoon was well stocked with fish that he could see 20 feet below him through the crystal clear water, but what type of fish he would eat tonight was.

Lunch had been some type of snapper that he couldn’t identify, the white, firm flesh hidden beneath its shiny scales had been amazingly good, and he hoped for another of those, but in the tropical water below him were a myriad of species all eager to offer themselves to him, so which one would reach the bait first was anybody’s guess, and that, for Jimmy, was one of the main reasons he loved fishing. Some fishermen specialize on a single type of fish, and spend their entire fishing career focused on it, but for Jimmy it was the thrill of the unknown when a fish took his bait that gave him the greatest pleasure, and he never ceased to marvel at the amazing variety of shape and colour that met his eyes at the end of the line, the electric blues and metallic gold and silver, the fluorescent yellows and incredible shades of green, every colour in the spectrum was there to be found dancing in the sunlight.
Fish fascinated Jimmy. For as long as he could remember he had been in love with them, in love with their beauty, their stark terror and enviable freedom. All his life he had kept fish as pets, nurturing and breeding them, or dragged them from the oceans, lakes and rivers on lines or in nets just to look at them, admire them, and release them…and yet he could still kill and eat them without remorse, knowing that death was the inevitable consequence of life.
Jimmy had a ball for the next two or three hours, catching a stunning variety of fish, some of which he was sure didn’t even live in the Pacific, and many that he could not identify, which troubled him a bit as he considered himself a bit of an expert on fish. He photographed the unknown ones for later identification, released most of the rest, and kept two coral trout for dinner that night. He would have fished longer, but a huge grey shadow cruising below his boat had scared everything away, the teeming aquarium below him was now a fishless desert, as bare and barren as the Sahara.
“Tiger shark” said Jimmy out loud. ”beautiful.” He knew the shark would not stay in the lagoon for much longer, that it would follow the falling tide back out to the ocean side of the reef, where it could hunt in peace in the deep azure water and leave the lagoon to the small white tipped reef sharks that called it home.
As a child, Jimmy has swum with tiger sharks easily 4 times his size and had never heard of anyone being attacked by them until much later in life, and while he had a healthy respect for their size and dental equipment, he had never learned to fear them, but rather marveled at their sleek design and strangely hypnotic pattern of bars and blotches, their creamy underbelly and their absolute dedication to the task in hand as they pushed their blunt noses anywhere they wanted to. What many people called ‘mindless primitive killing machines’ Jimmy knew to be calculating hunting animals with honed instincts and a dedication to duty that would shame the finest U.S. Marine, and about as primitive as a nuclear submarine.
Jimmy scanned the lagoon and noted the grey shadow, about 14 feet of it he reckoned, cruising the inside edge of the reef, slowly making its way towards the gap that led to better hunting grounds beyond. While the lagoon teemed with fish, a large predator needs large prey, and chasing comparatively smaller fish in shallow water was more trouble than it was worth to the shark, the sandy bottom was too easily disturbed, and sand in the gills is not pleasant for sharks.
“Probably looking for turtles.” mused Jimmy, watching as the 14 feet of death cruised slowly to the channel entrance, turned its nose to the open sea and then powered through the channel like a missile, vanishing into the blue in an instant. Peaceful harmony returned once again to the lagoon, and the fish returned to their adopted home in the shadow of his boat.
That evening Jimmy went to bed perplexed but happy, having puzzled over the identity of several of the fish he had caught, which he now knew for certain were not supposed to live in this particular ocean, happy because---well he had no idea really, he only knew that he had never felt this way in his life, and full of the delicious coral trout he had cooked for dinner as the sun sizzled its way into the ocean on the horizon.
As he lay in his narrow cot, now set up on the deck with a mosquito dome covering it, he slipped into sleep rocked by the gentle rhythm of the ocean, the white noise of the waves on the beach, and the scent of unknown flowers filling his head.
Sometime during the night Jimmy awoke to the dazzling light of a billion stars that hovered just out of reach above him as the tide turned and the boat swung slowly on her anchor, and it occurred to Jimmy that there was absolute silence in this place, no insect had he seen or heard since his arrival.

The water was cool and refreshing, and felt marvelous on his skin as Jimmy dived from the bow of the boat and entered the water like a javelin, a trail of bubbles marking his passage through the water and foaming at the surface, glittering in the early morning light.
He had slept like a baby, and woke refreshed and ready for anything, so full of energy and enthusiasm it was almost more than he could stand.
He swam slowly around the boat, diving to the bottom to see the wonders of the aquarium that was the lagoon, the sandy patches and the brilliant corals both having their own unique beauty and their own unique residents, then rising through the water in a column of bubbles to take another breath and do it all over again.
The tide was low, and sunlight streamed through the water and lit everything as masterfully as any lighting engineer could ever hope to do, so perfectly illuminating the tiniest of details on every shell that Jimmy could hardly believe his eyes, and he marveled as he slowly explored his magical kingdom.
After an hour or so…he had completely lost track of any sense of the passage of time…Jimmy climbed back aboard the boat, toweled his hair, and sat and looked around at the beauty that surrounded him.
Every detail was perfect, not a single blemish to be seen either in the water or on the island, the weather balmy and the breeze perfumed and invigorating…here indeed had Jimmy found his Paradise.







“He’s crashing!” yelled the paramedic as he hurriedly prepared a hypodermic syringe and jammed it into Jimmy’s forearm.
The wreck was a messy one, one of the worst the rescue squad had ever seen. A semi had lost its load on a tight bend, and the oncoming sedan had no chance of avoiding 10 tons of scrap steel and iron that had smashed into it at a combined speed of nearly 200kph.
Like an exploding bomb, the destruction was mind blowing, and it was impossible to tell where the car ended and the scrap steel began...it was a scene of total devastation…and yet, 20 meters away was a driver’s seat still containing the shattered remains of a man.
The paramedics had arrived soon after the accident, by chance they were travelling only 5 minutes behind Jimmy, having just delivered a baby in the back of a taxi, and they themselves were shocked, both by the devastation around them and the paradigm shift of emotions.
“We’re losing him.” He said to his partner as he felt Jimmy’s pulse start to falter and become more erratic.
“Stick him again, more Eppie.”
“No point…he’s had all he can use and it’s not working.”
“Adrenaline?”
“Tried that too.”
“You want the paddles?”
“No…his chest is so crushed I don’t know how he’s still breathing at all” said the paramedic sadly, “He’s a fighter but he’s not superman.”
“God I hate it when they smile like that.”
“Yeah, it’s creepy…almost like they are happy to die.”

In Jimmy’s lagoon, the shark once again cruised the warm, shallow waters of Paradise.