Troubles in Paradise

by Elin Hilderbrand

  All through high school, instead of dating or hanging out at the Green Turtle with her friends, Caroline would sit at her desk and tie flies. Caroline Powers became famous for her flies; grown men paid good money for them—good money, the price jacked up to an almost absurd level because Caroline didn’t want to sell them. Her flies were works of art; she had the patience, the attention to detail, the slender, nimble fingers. She had the love and devotion.

  While Huck was in Vietnam at the tail end of the war, 1974 to 1975, Caroline went to college in Gainesville, met a boy from the Florida Panhandle, followed that boy when he went to law school in Tallahassee, married him, and gave up fishing altogether. That, Huck didn’t understand. Whenever Caroline and her new husband, Beau, came back to Islamorada to visit, they would go sport-fishing with their father on the big boat, and although Caroline was impressive the way she cast and reeled in the big fish, Huck yearned to see her with her fly rod again. He even suggested it once, the two of them out together on the flats at dawn in the pontoon. She shut him down immediately in a hushed voice: “No, Huck, I can’t.” As though fly-fishing were something embarrassing she used to do as a kid, like going roller-skating in just a bikini and a pair of red knee socks.

  Caroline was diagnosed with a brain tumor the week after her fortieth birthday and was dead by forty-one. Soon after, her husband, Beau, gave Huck a flat tackle box. When Huck opened it, he saw Caroline’s flies, one in each sectioned compartment like so many jewels. He has them still.

  Before she met Huck, Kimberly Cassel was a bartender at Sloppy Joe’s in Key West. In those days, Huck was not yet Huck—he was just Sam Powers—and he was not yet a captain; he was first mate for a guy everyone called Captain Coke. Every Sunday, Coke would invite Sam to go out on the water “just for fun,” and nearly every Sunday, Sam said no because Sunday was his only day off and he had to do things like laundry and grocery shopping, and sometimes he hitchhiked up to Islamorada, where his mother would cook him dinner. But one Sunday in March of 1978, Sam said sure and Coke said, “Finally! I’ve been wanting to introduce you to my sister.”

  Huck remembers that he’d bristled—he did just fine in the women department on his own and he’d been looking forward to a day of real fishing (instead of baiting clients’ hooks and turning back early if someone got seasick), and he wasn’t sure he’d enjoy the presence of anyone’s sister, aside from his own, on a fishing trip.

  But then Kimberly came striding down the dock wearing cutoff army-surplus fatigues, a red bandanna around her neck, and a white visor; her sandy-blond hair was up in a ponytail. Huck recognized her as the bartender from Sloppy Joe’s, the famous Key West watering hole where Hemingway used to hang out and where Huck liked to fish for women from time to time. Somehow he’d never realized that the most popular bartender in Key West was his crusty, hard-living boss’s sister.

  Well, okay, Huck thought. She was nice to look at, but could she fish?

  Oh, yes. Like Huck, Kimberly was born and raised in the Keys, on and around boats. During that first trip together, Huck watched her land a one-hundred-fifty-pound sailfish, sitting in the fighting chair, screaming like she was having a baby.

  He vowed then that he would marry her.

  But first he had to beat out scores of other men—the salty locals and rich, sunburned tourists alike, all calling her name, throwing down money, telling her she was as beautiful as one of Charlie’s Angels. It took endurance to get the first date. Huck had to stay at the bar drinking but not getting drunk until Sloppy Joe’s closed at four a.m. This was no small feat when his wake-up for the morning charter was only two hours later.

  Looking back, Huck realizes that he’d been so dazzled by Kimberly’s obvious charms and—he’ll just say it—so invigorated by the chase that he ignored the warning signs of a deeply troubled person. Kimberly routinely did shots with customers, sometimes as many as five or six. She never appeared visibly drunk at work, but after her shift ended, there was always a margarita or three or five. Back at the beginning, Kimberly had been happy and pliably good-natured when she was drunk.

  Shortly after they were married, things changed. In year three, Captain Coke’s own substance abuse got the best of him. He was spending all his money on cocaine and, apparently, none on his business. He’d taken out a line of credit on the equity he had left in his boat and then failed to pay. Just as the bank was ready to claim the boat, Huck stepped in and bought not only the boat but the whole charter business. Kimberly called Huck a savior, though she wanted Huck to keep Coke on as captain. No, sorry—that wasn’t going to happen. Huck didn’t want Coke anywhere near the boat or the business, though he was happy to pay for rehab. This went over poorly with both brother and sister, but Huck stood his ground. He took over the charter business, hired a new young mate, and made so much money the first year that he was able to buy a second boat.

  Huck wanted to start a family and Kimberly claimed she did too, but she refused to quit her job at Sloppy Joe’s. It brought in too much money, plus it was her identity. Huck didn’t say that if she had a baby, she would have a new identity.

  He wouldn’t dare.

  Kimberly did go off her birth control but she continued with the shots and the after-shift drinking.

  “For God’s sake, Kimmy,” Huck finally said, “any baby we have will be born pickled.”

  Kimberly didn’t like this one bit, though it did make her slow down a little—and sure enough, she got pregnant. Huck remembers the mixture of giddiness and terror at the news; it was as though someone had told him he could travel to the moon with the astronauts or star in a movie with Clint Eastwood. Did he want to? Hell yes! Did he really want to? He wasn’t sure. What did Huck know about having a child, about being a father? He was also afraid that Kimberly wouldn’t be able to stay on the wagon for nine full months—it seemed impossible—plus both of them smoked like fiends, and that would have to stop.

  Kimberly bought prenatal vitamins and went to see an ob-gyn in Miami and she changed her post-shift drink to one white-wine spritzer. She cut down to four cigarettes a day—breakfast, lunch, dinner, and late at night—and Huck thought, Okay, maybe this will work. He couldn’t expect her to quit everything cold turkey; that was how people failed.

  Then, late on the night of December 1, 1983—Huck still remembers the date and probably always will—Kimberly came home stinking drunk, waking Huck up when she slammed into their bungalow on Catherine Street singing “Piece of My Heart” at the top of her lungs and crying.

  Huck jumped out of bed. He would never lay a hand on a woman but he wanted to throttle her. He took her gently by the shoulders, pulled her in close, and whispered, “It’s not just you anymore, Kimmy. You have to think about our baby.”

  Kimberly said, “Baby’s gone, Sam. I started bleeding at work.”

  Huck was crushed; Kimberly was worse than crushed. She was riding a pendulum of emotions. When she swung one way, she was fine—it happened to a lot of people; they could try again. When she swung the other way, she was a mess—it was her fault, she was damaged and broken and unfit to be a mother.

  Kimberly went back on the pill.

  Huck felt like he was on a bike without brakes careening down a mountainside. He was afraid to jump off even though he knew he would crash when he got to the bottom. What followed was three years of Huck fishing and Kimberly drinking, drinking, drinking. This ended only once a beefy, tattooed loudmouth on one of Huck’s charters bragged to his buddy that he’d gotten to third base with the bartender of Sloppy Joe’s the night before.

  “Oh yeah?” Huck said, blood pulsing in his ears. “Blond gal?”

  “Ass like a valentine,” the loudmouth said, and it took every ounce of Huck’s willpower not to stab the guy in the forehead with the gaff.

  When Huck confronted Kimberly, she admitted to it right away but said it was more like second base, maybe not even. She couldn’t remember and wouldn’t have been able to pick the guy out of a lineup. “The men are an
occupational hazard, Sammy. They don’t mean anything.”

  “Men?” he said, and he realized then that Kimberly hooked up with her customers all the time, maybe even every night. Was the baby she lost even his? She had made him a laughingstock, an absolute fool for love.

  He told her it was rehab or he was leaving. She agreed to rehab, and once she was safely inside the facility, Huck served her with divorce papers, which broke her heart but broke his heart even worse.

  Once Huck left the Keys for St. John, it was only a few weeks before he met and fell in love with LeeAnn Small, who was Kimberly’s opposite in every way. Maia liked to throw around the word queen—Beyoncé is a queen, J. Lo is a queen—but in Huck’s life there had been only one queen and that was LeeAnn. She was statuesque, bronze-skinned, dark-eyed. She had a rich laugh and a slow smile that she shared with Huck like a secret.

  On their first real date, at Chateau Bordeaux, Huck told LeeAnn about Kimberly. LeeAnn tsked him—because who couldn’t have predicted how that story was going to end—and then said, “If you’re looking for more crazy, you’re in the wrong place.”

  LeeAnn didn’t fish but she checked the wind, watched the sky, passed along fish sightings from their West Indian neighbors that Huck would never have heard about otherwise. She introduced Huck to the people at restaurants who would buy his catch. She never gave him a hard time about how long he spent on the water or tinkering on the boat. And, man, could she cook—conch ceviche, Creole fish stew, fresh tuna steaks with lime and toasted coconut.

  LeeAnn was tough, stubborn, uncompromising, but unlike Kimberly, she stuck to a moral code and was utterly beyond reproach. Huck was a little scared of her at times. She was a nurse practitioner and the most competent person up at the Myrah Keating Smith Community Health Center, where she treated everything from ankles sprained on the Reef Bay Trail to jellyfish stings to STDs. LeeAnn was strict with Rosie, but despite this—or because of it—Rosie broke the rules again and again and again, eventually getting pregnant by one of the rich men she waited on at Caneel Bay.

  There were six golden years when Huck lived in the house on Jacob’s Ladder with LeeAnn, Rosie, and Maia. He can remember sitting down to dinner in the evenings and seeing their bright faces and hearing their chatter or their squabbling and thinking how blessed he was to be among them.

  He missed that sweet spot in his life now that it was over.

  LeeAnn died of congestive heart failure.

  Rosie died in the helicopter crash with Russell Steele.

  Now here’s Huck, five years after LeeAnn’s passing and one month after Rosie’s passing, in danger of falling in love with Irene Steele, the wife of Rosie’s lover.

  As his friend Rupert would say, You can’t make this shit up!

  It comes as no surprise to Huck that the Invisible Man, Russell Steele, was just another Caribbean pirate. Evading taxes and laundering money were nearly as common down here as snorkeling and drinking rum. Irene has now lost the villa in Little Cinnamon as well as her home in Iowa City, and the latter, Huck understands, is the greater loss by far. Most people down here are from somewhere else. They have another place they call home. It must feel pretty rotten to have that taken away, to be left with little more than the clothes on your back, the shoes on your feet.

  Irene isn’t bankrupt. She has twenty thousand dollars in an account down here, money from her magazine job.

  “Twenty thousand isn’t nothing,” Huck says. They’re standing out on the deck of Huck’s house, elbow to elbow on the railing but not touching, gazing out at the water and the faint outline of St. Croix in the distance. A lot of people would call them lucky—people in Iowa City whose cars were buried under three feet of snow, for example.

  “It’s not enough to live on for very long,” Irene says. “Both you and I know that. I need to find a decent place to live with reasonable rent and I’ll need to buy a car.”

  Huck is relieved that she seems to be talking about staying on St. John, even though they both know that her money would last a lot longer if she lived almost anywhere else. “You can stay here as long as you want,” Huck says. This turn of events doesn’t seem all that bad to him. He likes having her here. He likes being the person who can put a roof over her head and food on her plate, though he would never, ever reveal this to Irene.

  One trait all the women in his life have shared: They were “born on the Fourth of July.” Independent.

  Irene bows her head. Her hair is out of its braid; it’s wavy and long as it falls around her face, a chestnut curtain shot through with strands of silver. When she looks up, she says, “I’m grateful for your friendship and the job on the boat—”

  “You’re an asset on the boat, AC,” he says. “I need you on the boat. Today alone was hell on me.” That morning, Huck had a Master of the Universe type on board—guy in his early forties, world by the balls, gung ho, let’s go—and his four sons. The older three were complete hellions from the second they stepped onto the boat still in their basketball sneakers.

  “Take your shoes off,” Huck told them.

  The oldest kid, maybe fifteen, said, “These are Cactus Jacks.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Please take them off.”

  “It’s Travis Scott’s shoe,” the kid said.

  “This isn’t Travis Scott’s boat,” Huck said. He didn’t admit that he had no idea who Travis Scott was. He hadn’t paid attention to basketball since Jordan retired. “It’s my boat and you are to remove your shoes, please.”

  The youngest of the kids couldn’t have been more than five; he was too little to be out on the boat without a dedicated caretaker, which his father—whose sole focus was catching mahi—most certainly was not. The father mentioned that the mother was having a spa day at Caneel, and he admitted that he wasn’t used to having the kids by himself. The father took the first fish (Huck hated when grown men did this, ahead of their own kids, in the name of “Let me show you how it’s done”), and he also took the fourth fish, forgetting about son number three, who was rightfully pissed off. Kid number three retaliated by grabbing his father’s phone out of his pocket and dangling it over the side of the boat. This wasn’t the first time Huck had seen this—it happened at least once a month, usually when Huck had a bachelor party on the boat; guys got drunk and bent out of shape or were screwing around—but Huck had never seen anyone flip out the way the father flipped out. He roared so loudly that even Huck flinched, and when the father went to grab the phone from his son, it fell in the water.

  You deserved that, buddy, Huck thought.

  Chaos ensued. They had to stop the boat, get the diving mask and the bait net, and go fishing for the phone, which was most certainly resting on the seafloor twenty feet below. The littlest kid fell when no one was looking and got a bloody nose but the father was only concerned about his phone. He couldn’t live without it. Was there a store on this “stupid little island” where he could get it replaced that afternoon?

  “St. Thomas,” Huck said, his fists itching.

  It had been a terrible charter and Huck was convinced that if Irene had been there, she would have established an order for the fish so that no one got overlooked, no one got angry, no one got hurt, and Huck didn’t have to hear his home of the past twenty years insulted by a man-child.

  He wants to tell Irene this story and let her know what a joy it is to have a woman in his life who understands the particular texture of his days, but she’s in no state to hear it. He’ll save it for later, after all this has been resolved and they’re back to normal.

  Will this be resolved?

  Will they be back to normal?

  “I appreciate your generosity but I can’t impose on you forever,” Irene says. “Unfortunately, I have nowhere else to turn right now. I feel like such a burden.”

  “You’re not a burden,” Huck says. “Maia wants you here and so do I.” He moves an inch closer so that their elbows are kissing, and she doesn’t move away. Huck wonders if he should hug
her. He places an oh so tentative hand between her shoulder blades and she snaps to attention, ramrod straight. Huck lets his hand drop.

  Okay, he gets it. No touching.

  “This isn’t a fairy tale where I’m a damsel in distress and you’re the hero swooping in to save me.”

  “I know it’s not, AC,” he says.

  “Please,” she says. “Stop calling me that.”

  “Okay,” Huck says, and now he’s hurt. AC stands for “Angler Cupcake,” which, she’d told Huck, was what her father used to call her. Huck likes the nickname. It doesn’t exactly suit her—Irene is too sensible and straightforward to be any kind of cupcake—but he likes that he has a nickname for her. It suggests intimacy, friendship, something special between the two of them. But fine; she wants him to stop, he’ll stop.

  “I can’t do this,” Irene says. “I told you last night that I need more time.”

  But that was before ten FBI agents showed up to seize the villa, Huck thinks. That was before she learned her Iowa home was gone as well. Huck thought maybe that had changed things. But apparently not.

  “I promised I’d give you as much time as you need,” he says. “And I meant it.”

  “Except now I’m living in your house!” Irene says. “Mooching off you, taking advantage of your kindness! Don’t you understand how…confusing that is?”

  “No,” Huck says. “I don’t. We’re friends, Irene. Okay? And coworkers. If you want to keep it just friends and coworkers, I’m good with that. I’m not exactly inviting you to share my bedroom, am I?”

  “But you want to, don’t you?” she asks.

  “Want to what?”

  “Invite me to share your bedroom!”

  Huck can’t figure out if his answer should be yes or no. The truth is yes. Should he be truthful? “I want you to sleep where you’re comfortable. You know my feelings for you, AC. Sorry—Irene. But I’m not interested in forcing this along.” He’s so agitated that he lights a cigarette. This is the kind of conversation he likes the least—murky, ambiguous. They’re middle-aged. Why can’t they just say what they mean? “If it moves forward, it will be when you’re ready. I’m a patient man, Irene. I’m a fisherman.”