Blackwater Sound

by James W. Hall

  Slowly the bill appeared as Andy hauled it up.

  “Jeez, it’s way over a thousand pounds. Maybe fifteen hundred.”

  Andy had the fish at the transom. Its bill was longer than any she’d ever seen in photographs, on walls, anywhere.

  Johnny leaned over the edge to touch the fish.

  “No, Johnny. Let Andy do his work.”

  The fish must have seen their shadows because it shied away. Andy braced his knees against the transom, leaned back, using all his weight to drag the fish back into place. Morgan could see the muscles straining in his back, in his arms and shoulders. A wiry boy, narrow-waisted, wide shoulders and rawhide-tough. But the fish was strong, very strong.

  Andy cocked his arm, held it for a second, then plunged the point of the harpoon into the second dorsal.

  “It’s set, Dad! I felt it lock on.”

  He shouldn’t have done it. Shouldn’t have turned his back on the fish to beam up at their father. With a fish that big, it was reckless. But he was so proud, so hungry for a morsel of their dad’s approval. In that half second his back was turned, the fish swung back and made a slow pirouette, disappearing into the transparent blue.

  Andy was jerked backwards, his hip banging against the transom. Johnny reached out for him but it was too late. Andy lurched overboard, his hand trapped in the wire. Morgan heard his scream, heard it stifled as he was dragged under, saw him moving quickly through two feet of water, three, four, five, saw him turning back toward the light, trying to swim one-handed toward the surface, a useless stroke against the horrific power of that fish. She saw his face, his blond hair pulsing like a jellyfish around his head, she saw his white flesh turning blue, blue as the water, blue as the fish.

  “Reel, Morgan! Reel, goddamn it!” A. J. was screaming.

  A second later he was beside her. He tore the rod from her hands, cranked the fish back up, cranked. But the line continued to unspool, the sharp ratchet of the reel clicking faster than she’d ever heard it.

  A. J. heaved back on the rod, tightening the drag as he did, pulling with all his weight, all his life and breath and muscle.

  Morgan couldn’t scream, couldn’t breathe. A dull paralysis had taken hold of her. Shock and terror and utter exhaustion.

  She rose from the fighting chair, watched the water, saw a flash of white. Andy’s face, his shorts, something. Down in all that blue, his body dragged deeper and deeper into the airless depths. A bear hug crushed her chest, a pressure greater than bones and flesh could possibly withstand.

  Her father was groaning as he reeled against the power of that fish, winning back a few feet, a few more. Johnny dropped to his knees, holding to the transom as if he were seasick, peering out at the water. From the flybridge Darlene screamed. Her boy, her precious son. Her wail ripped apart the air.

  And then the crack of a rifle shot as the heavy monofilament snapped.

  Her father crashed against the side of the chair and crumpled to the deck.

  Without a thought, Morgan kicked off her boat shoes, climbed onto the transom and dove into the water and clawed her way down into the blue. She swam deeper and deeper until the light was flickering in her head and the crushing pressure against her chest was unbearable, then swam deeper still, squinting into the blurry distance, into the blackwater depths where the sounding fish had disappeared, but she could make out nothing in the darkness of the cold currents.

  Then out of those murky depths a trail of bubbles rose toward her, a ghostly silver cloud climbing fast, spreading out, surrounding her, tickling across her bare arms, her belly.

  Andy Braswell’s last breath. Her brother. Her love.

  Ten Years Later

  One

  Thorn had brought along the .357 magnum not because he was worried about being attacked by pirates, but because he wanted to give the pistol a long-overdue burial at sea. Maybe have a little ceremony, just he and Casey, say a few words, something short and funny, then sling the goddamn thing out into the water. Stand around afterwards and watch the ripples die out, have a sip of wine, put his arm around Casey and hold on.

  She didn’t know yet about the gun being aboard. He’d told her about some of the violent incidents in his past, but if he got too specific, she always winced and turned away. Casey had inherited her light and airy view of human nature from her hippie parents. Growing up in Islamorada in an apartment above the gift shop where they sold rolling papers and hookahs and conch shells and custom-made sandals. Now in her late thirties, after years of waiting tables, Casey had started a roadside business in Tavernier, selling life-sized manatees and alligators that she made from plaster casts, then painted in garish sunset colors. The manatees and alligators stood up on their hind legs and gripped U.S. Postal Service mailboxes in their flippers and claws. She was doing well with the mailbox stands. You saw them on nearly every street in Key Largo and Tavernier. People dressed up their manatees with goggles and snorkels or straw hats, cocked fishing poles and scoop nets up against the gators. Put witches’ hats on them at Halloween and white beards for Christmas. Lately, Casey had moved on to a few non-Keys animals. One of her new creations, a full-sized, neon pink buffalo, now stood like some crazed sentinel between Thorn’s house and the water’s edge, where it stared out at the sunsets.

  The .357 was inside his tackle box that lay on the deck near where Casey was sunning. When he finally landed the sea trout on his line, he was going to let her know what he had in mind. He’d been holding on to the damn thing too long, and now that they were several hours out into the deserted Florida Bay, it seemed like the right time to dump it.

  For the last two years a long string of wonderfully unremarkable days had come and gone. Each night the breeze stirred the curtains and the cardinals trilled their evening song, each morning at first light the mourning doves lowed from the upper branches of the tamarind tree, and almost every hour of the day palm fronds tickled against the tin roof like the whispers of angels. Not even the weather seemed to vary, with steady tropical trade winds pouring up from the south, a constant cinnamon-scented flow.

  But even amid that unceasing peace, Thorn often jerked awake in the middle of the night, sheened with sweat, thinking about the pistol wrapped in oily cloths, tucked in a bottom drawer of his desk across the room. He thought about its history, the dark karma that clung to it. More than once he’d taken it out of the desk and walked out to the end of his dock to pitch it into Blackwater Sound, where it would sink into the silt and begin its long chemical unraveling. But something in him had resisted. Some wary voice had murmured in his ear. You are not finished with it. A bad day is coming.

  But now, by God, he was determined to heave the thing away. Far enough from shore where no one would ever stumble on it. Far enough away from home that Thorn would forever be beyond its magnetic field. Today he would officially and irrevocably lay down his arms and the voice would go still, the fist in his stomach would unclench, and the days would once more stretch out lazily ahead of him, and he’d take one easy breath after the next, savoring the juicy Florida Keys air for the rest of his stay on earth.

  “You going to catch that fish, Thorn, or bore it to death?”

  Casey squeezed more suntan lotion into her hand and slathered it across her bare breasts. She was stretched out on the forward deck, while Thorn stood on the platform perch above the outboard. In the four days they’d been out on the water, Casey had been nude most of the time and her bikini lines had vanished. She had a narrow face, bright green eyes, an easy smile. After all those hours in the sun, her shoulder-length hair was a few degrees blonder than when they left, and even the patch between her legs had lightened. Now when he lowered his face to it, he could smell the golden afterglow of the sun along with the faintly tart citrus scent that rose from Casey when her flesh was heated.

  “It doesn’t feel bored to me,” Thorn said. “It feels kind of excited.”

  Thorn cranked the reel, two careful turns. It was wrapped with three hundred yards of f
our-pound-test monofilament. Line so wispy, if you thought about it too long it would snap. He figured the sea trout probably went about ten pounds and it’d already stripped off two hundred and fifty yards. For the last ten minutes he’d cut the drag back to zero, letting the trout take all the line it wanted in ten-, fifteen-yard surges, then when the line went slack, the lunker taking a rest, Thorn would win back a yard or two. Letting the water wear the fish down. Water and time and the weight of that three hundred yards of fragile monofilament.

  “If you used ten-pound test, you’d have that fish filleted by now.”

  “If it’s too easy to catch,” Thorn said, “it doesn’t taste any good.”

  Casey finished oiling her breasts. Head to toe, she was now as glossy as fresh varnish and her nipples had tightened into dark buds. Thorn could feel a tingle working its way down from his navel. Things shifting inside his cutoffs.

  Thorn’s skiff was pole-anchored in about two feet of water over some grassy beds where schools of silver sea trout had flickered past all morning. In the last few days they’d seen dozens of tarpon and permit and bones skimming the flats, lots of rays and more sharks than they could count. The sky had been clear all week and Thorn’s eyes were dazzled and aching from staring into the shallows. A good ache.

  On that April morning, Monday or Tuesday, he wasn’t sure, the breeze had died off and the Florida Bay stretched out as flat and silver as a platter of mercury, running off toward the western horizon where it turned into a blur of blue chrome. The air and water were within a degree or two of his own body temperature. Dipping in and out of the bay, one element to the other, he hardly noticed.

  A hundred yards east of their spot, the Heart Pounder, his thirty-foot Chris-Craft, was anchored in four feet of water on the edge of the flats. Their mothership. A couple of narrow bunks, a stove, a cooler full of fruit and cheese and a few bottles of a cut-rate Chardonnay. They’d towed the skiff behind the big boat to have some way to get into the skinny water, chase the fish.

  The Heart Pounder was a teak and white oak beauty. Built before Thorn was born, it was low and slow, with the ancient grace of an era when getting from here to there as quickly as possible wasn’t the point. Thorn had spent all of March and half of April replanking the hull. Tearing out a dozen rotting boards and fitting the new ones into place. Harder job than he’d anticipated. Made harder by the fact that he had absolutely no idea what the hell he was doing when he started. He’d torn out too many planks, used the wrong screws, applied the wrong caulk to the seams between the new boards, then wound up having to pull off his planks and begin over. Finally he’d found a boatwright in Islamorada who gave him a few lessons in carvel-planking, and the use of bunged screws and stealers, those triangular-shaped strakes that allowed Thorn to slightly alter the hull profile. For several weeks with the old man standing over him puffing on his pipe, Thorn managed to learn just enough to get the Heart Pounder watertight again. Skills he hoped he never had to use again.

  “What’s another word for blue?”

  “Blue?” Thorn looked over at her. “What’re you, depressed?”

  “No, that.” Casey lifted her hand and pointed lazily up at the cloudless expanse. She was propped on one elbow now, her breasts doing nicely against the pull of gravity. “I’m thinking of doing a rhino in that color. I want the right word for its name. Blue rhino sounds dull.”

  “A rhino?”

  “I’m tired of manatees and alligators. I’m artistically restless.”

  “Azure,” Thorn said. “Cerulean.”

  “Too hoity-toity.”

  “Sapphire.”

  To the west across the flats was a small mangrove island. Gulls dove into the shallow water rimming it. A great blue heron stood in the flats just a few yards from the snarl of mangrove roots. On the charts the island was unnamed, but he and Casey had been calling it Mosquito Junction. A dark haze of bloodsuckers that’d probably never tasted human flesh before hovered over it like an evil bloom of radiation. Last night the little bastards had followed the wisp of light from their kerosene lantern across a mile of motionless air right into the Heart Pounder’s cabin to dine on their exposed flesh. He and Casey had to decide whether to douse the lantern and stop reading, or put up with the itchy nuisance. They read. Swatted and read.

  “Cobalt rhino,” Thorn said. “Or navy.”

  “Okay, you can stop. I’m sticking with blue. It’s not great, but it’ll do.”

  “Turquoise.”

  Casey gave him a quick, precise smile.

  “You know too many words, Thorn.”

  “Is that possible?”

  “All those books you read, you’re clogged with words.”

  “I’m just a simple guy with a simple vocabulary.”

  “Yeah, right. Sure you are, Thorn. You’re so simple.”

  “Indigo,” he said.

  Casey aimed her chin at the sky.

  “That,” she said. “That color. Whatever it is.”

  Casey stretched her arms, pointing both hands up at the unnameable heavens. Her breasts shimmered, taking the light and playing with it and sending it on its happy way.

  “So what’re we having for supper?”

  “I was thinking fish,” he said. “In fact, that fish. If it ever gives up.”

  “Fish again?”

  “You like fish.”

  “Four days ago I liked fish. At the moment I’d kill for a hamburger.”

  “You’re a vegetarian.”

  “My point, exactly.”

  Thorn fished for a while and Casey basked. She was excellent at it. Basking seemed to be one of her gifts. She had such a remarkably even disposition, nothing seemed to rouse her to anger or even mild distress.

  For the last couple of months they’d been sharing his small stilt-house and his monotonous days. She went off to her roadside shack every morning to make her plaster animals while he tied bonefish flies. After work, he helped her unload her latest creation from the back of her ancient Chevy pickup and she set up her paints out near Blackwater Sound and spent the next few hours covering that dull gray plaster with the gaudiest colors she could swirl together.

  While she painted, Thorn tied flies or crafted the wooden lures he carved for a few longtime clients who believed his handiwork had some kind of supernatural power to catch fish. God bless their superstitious butts. The lures Thorn made were torpedo-shaped pieces of gumbo-limbo or live oak ornamented with a few dabs of paint and glitter and glass bead eyeballs, nothing more or less. But if those fine folks wanted to give him cash money to carve them and sand them and fine-tune them with a little color, then fine. Go with Allah.

  Last week after he’d finished replanking the hull, Thorn decided he needed a break from the routine. A shakedown cruise seemed just the thing, putter out into the backcountry, deep into the Florida Bay, and see if the dignified old lady still leaked.

  It’d been a long while since Thorn had motored so far into those waters, and though he’d heard the backcountry was in bad shape, seeing it firsthand was something else entirely.

  The Florida Bay was a flat, shallow basin that lay at the tip of the Florida peninsula. Bordered on the east by the upper Keys and running west to the other side of the state where its waters merged with the Gulf of Mexico. For centuries the bay had received the freshwater outflow from the Everglades and had converted it gradually to saltwater by the time it reached the Keys and the coral reefs. The eelgrass had once grown in thick beds, covering most of the bay, providing the nutrition-rich nurseries for shrimp and the other lower-pecking-order creatures. When Thorn was a boy, exploring the nooks of the Florida Bay in his wooden skiff, he’d assumed such abundance would last forever. That the water would always be crystal, that the undersea kingdom would ceaselessly flourish.

  But since those days Miami and its suburbs had quadrupled in size and were trying to quadruple again and the people up there were stacked butt-to-jowls twenty stories into the air without room to turn or bend over to
tie their shoes, and now that the sugar growers had intimidated or paid off all their foes and were once again happily scattering phosphorous and mercury and a long list of other unpronounceable toxins across their vast acreage, the end result, a hundred miles downstream, was that the pristine Florida Bay was now teetering on collapse.

  A never-ending flood of solvents and cleaning fluids and petroleum products and every other form of exotic contamination had been oozing out the rectum of the state, a spew of caustic wastewater and runoff and overflow and toilet flush, leaching into the bay, poisoning the shrimp with its acid, overheating the water with its super-mambo genetically indestructible fertilizer spillage, causing great blooms of algae that stole the oxygen right from the water, leaving the fish to writhe and float to the surface. Decades of abuse. An endless tonnage of disregard. All of which would’ve killed the bay long ago if it weren’t for the steady string of hurricanes bringing in their million million gallons of diluting fresh water. Nature’s irony, using one disaster to neutralize another.

  Because of several busy hurricane seasons in a row, the bay water was not as salty or as acidic. You could see the bottom again. Patches of eelgrass were growing. Clusters of shrimp snapped by. But there was no cause for celebration. The rebirth was only temporary. The ever-sprawling masses up the road would win eventually. They’d kill the Keys. One day soon, one of those weekend visitors would snap off the last finger of coral, snatch up the final living conch. And no matter what anyone tried to do, you could absolutely count on the fact that those toxins would continue to pump into the Everglades and filter into the bay until it was all as bleached out as the whitened bones of a desert coyote ten years lying in the sun.

  This was death-throes time. Time to bring your ear close to the lips of the dying creature and hear its final rasping words. Thorn couldn’t help being gloomy about it. The only way not to be gloomy was not to know it was happening or not to give a rat’s ass. He’d tried the rat’s-ass approach, tried it and tried it.