Blackwater Sound

by James W. Hall

  So he and Casey had come out on a shakedown cruise and the new hull hadn’t leaked. Thorn was pleased with the hull, and a little amazed. But he was deeply disheartened by what he saw beneath the glittery surface. Last night, after two rum drinks and a long dose of starlight, he’d proposed that the two of them take another trip. Cross the Gulf Stream, go over to the islands, poke around. He’d heard about a place near Andros, the blue holes, the wall. Go diving in the deep stuff. Fish on flats where the bonefish had never seen human shadows. Maybe search out some fresh place to set up shop. A new home where the tourist Huns had not yet arrived.

  Casey said nothing, and Thorn dropped the subject.

  Now in the fading daylight, Thorn started in on Andros again. And those other little islands where wild goats and rats and iguanas were the only residents. He’d been down there as a kid with the folks who’d raised him, Doctor Bill Truman and his wife, Kate. They’d crossed the Gulf Stream on the Heart Pounder. It’d been his first experience with deep-sea fishing, sailfish, marlin, and yellowfin tuna. Thorn was only ten, but he remembered it clearly. Great fishing, wild landscape.

  “Leave the Keys?” Casey said. “All this?”

  She levered herself up to a sitting position. Naked and oiled and squinting at him through the harsh sun. He looked out at the water where his fish was taking a breather, hiding behind a rock, probably hoping this was all just a terrible dream.

  “I’m ready for something new,” Thorn said. “I’ve got an itch.”

  He cranked the reel, brought the fish a foot closer to the boat. Then another foot.

  “I think this is the end, Thorn.”

  “The end?”

  “Of you and me. Our romance.”

  He gave her an uncertain smile.

  “Because I want to go to the islands?”

  “No,” Casey said. “It’s been coming for a while. It arrived just now.”

  “What?”

  “The end. The end of our affair.”

  He cranked the fish closer. It seemed to have given up. Just a dull weight now.

  Casey said, “We’re different. I thought it would work out, you being how you are and me being who I am. But it hasn’t.”

  “It’s working for me.”

  “You like me because I’m shallow, Thorn.”

  “You’re not shallow.”

  “Hey, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. It’s who I am. How I was raised. I don’t have a complicated view of the world. I don’t have dark places. Brood over stuff, get all tangled up in my thoughts. You like me because I’m easy. A lick and a dash and you’re on your way.”

  Thorn looked out at the bright water. His eyes hurt and his shoulders were tired from hauling in the damn fish on such light tackle. Casey was right. There was no reason to be sporting when all you were doing was catching your supper. Just put ten-pound test on the reel and haul them in as efficiently as possible and be done with it.

  “Are you listening to me, Thorn?”

  “Oh, yes. I’m listening.”

  “You’ve just been using me to relax. I knew that. My girlfriends told me from the beginning. All the women you’ve been with, what they were like. I’m not like any of them. But I thought I’d give it a try. And sure, it was fun most of the time. The sex was fine. But we’re not the same. We’re just not. It’s pretty simple when you get down to it. We have fun, but we don’t exalt each other.”

  “Exalt each other?”

  “Maybe it’s not the right word. I don’t know. But you know what I mean. We don’t push each other up the incline. We’re just hovering in the status quo.”

  Thorn cranked the sea trout up to the side of the boat. He climbed down from the platform and used the scoop net to bring the fish aboard. It lay inert on the deck, all its fight gone. Thorn squatted down. He withdrew the barbless hook from its lip and eased the sea trout back over the side and washed it back and forth through the water till it was revived. When he let it go, the fish hesitated a moment, sinking several inches through the water, then with a couple of flutters of its tail it was gone.

  Thorn looked out toward the small mangrove island, at the bright water stretching beyond it, the vast silvery plain that ran for miles up toward the mainland.

  “You sure, Casey? I like you a whole lot. I’m very happy with you.”

  “Happy isn’t good enough, Thorn. Sorry.”

  “It’s not?”

  “Happy is pretty low on the joy scale.”

  She reached over and picked up her yellow blouse and slipped it on and buttoned it. She looked at him for a moment, then looked out at the water again.

  “Tell me the right words. I’ll say them.”

  She smiled at him.

  “At a time like this, one chance is all you get. It’s over, Thorn. But don’t worry. You’ll find somebody else. That’s how you are. A week, two weeks, you’ll be on to the next thing. Making some other girl all swoony.”

  As they motored south the western sky turned pale gold. Along the horizon it was shot full of purple streaks and eddies of red. To the north, out over the Everglades, the sky was bluish-black with thunderstorms—a late cold front stalled just north of Miami. Thorn guided the boat around the shallows and Casey sat in the fighting chair drinking wine and looking back at the froth of their wake.

  They were maybe ten miles southwest of Flamingo, the primitive national park that covered the extreme southern tip of the state, about as far from civilization as it was possible to go and still be in Florida waters. Thorn pulled open the tackle box and drew out the .357. He held it in his right hand, steering with his left. Behind him Casey was still facing the wake, sipping her wine. Thorn gripped the pistol by the barrel, and without ceremony, he hurled it over their starboard bow. More heavy metal added to the seabed. An empty gesture. It proved nothing, ended nothing. If the bad shit started again, he could always go buy another gun. He’d tossed the thing away but felt not one bit better about anything. Still stuck in his own tight skin. Cramped by his own mulish ways.

  Before him the water lay flat with a spreading scarlet sheen. The twilight air was mellow and seasoned with the tang of barnacles and muck clinging to mangrove roots. The red sun was a smudged thumbprint a few inches above the horizon. Maybe an hour of light left.

  Thorn had his face in the wind, steering them around a small mangrove island rimmed with white sand, when he sensed something off to the northwest, and turned to see the silhouette of the jet, a black cutout against the crimson sky.

  Casey felt it, too, and swiveled the fighting chair halfway round and stiffened. Thorn pulled back on the throttle. The plane was growing larger by the second.

  “Please tell me that’s a fighter jet going back to Homestead Air Base.”

  Thorn shook his head.

  “Wrong color, wrong shape.”

  It was skimming very close to the water, headed in their direction, maybe a mile or two away. A 747 or 767, he wasn’t sure. But big, very big, and closing fast. A great blue heron wading on a nearby sandbar squawked once and untangled into flight. To their south a large school of mullet splashed the surface and quickly disappeared.

  “Hear that?” Thorn said.

  “I don’t hear anything.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Engines are dead.”

  “Shit!” Casey dropped her wineglass on the deck, stood up.

  The Heart Pounder was too old and slow to dodge anything hurtling that fast. Anyway there was nowhere to hide, and no way to be sure he wasn’t putting them even more squarely in the jet’s path.

  Thorn shifted the engine into neutral and watched it come.

  Two

  Minutes after takeoff, Captain Kathy Dubois was still holding at three thousand feet, just passing beyond the southern tip of the state, when she felt the first jolt. No more than a hard buzz in her sinuses, then a quick double blip in her pulse. Miami Departure was keeping them at three thousand because of a jam-up of inbound traffic from the south at five thousand. The Departure c
ontroller was sending everyone south over the Everglades to dodge the line of level-five thunderstorms to the north. A dark, roiling mass parked over Fort Lauderdale, extending ten miles out to sea and halfway across the state.

  “You feel that?”

  Mark Hensley, the copilot, was staring down at the instrument panel.

  “Just a fritz in the system,” he said. But he didn’t sound so sure.

  She glanced over at him.

  “A fritz?”

  “You know, some little hiccup, dirt in the fuel line. Like that.”

  “Dirt in the fuel line?”

  “It’s from Bonnie and Clyde, the movie. Some auto mechanic is working on their car…”

  Out the windscreen of the MD-11, Kathy could see the sun about to melt into the Gulf, splashes of purples and pinks rising up from the horizon. They had one hundred and forty-three aboard, seven crew. American, Flight 570. On their way to Rio.

  Mark was still chattering about the movie scene when all the cathode ray screens went blank. Kathy stared down at them. Everything gone except the analog backup instruments.

  Mark rapped a knuckle on one of the instrument display screens. All the panels were dead, even the overhead lights were off. They were down to four instruments: airspeed indicator, whiskey compass, altimeter, and the ADI, the artificial horizon. Bare essentials.

  “Shit, we’ve lost the glass. Everything’s dark.”

  A second later the engines began to wind down, reverting to a preset power setting.

  “Oh, man, oh, man.”

  “We can still fly,” she said. “We’ve got power. No ailerons, but the rudder’s still there. Thank God for cables.”

  “Jesus, what the hell is this?”

  “Call the tower, tell them we’re coming back.”

  He tapped a fingernail against his microphone.

  “Radio’s gone,” he said. “Everything’s fried. Absolutely everything.”

  Then she felt another jolt, an electrical stab in her belly, like the first wild kick of her only child.

  That’s when the artificial horizon indicator began to spin. At night or in clouds, the instrument showed their upright position, sky above, ground below. It was hooked to a dedicated battery. So whatever they’d just experienced was more than a general electrical failure; their backup systems had been zapped, too. Without the artificial horizon, she’d have to rely on her senses to keep their wings level, stay right side up. Senses that were already more than a little scrambled.

  Then the yoke went loose in her hands.

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  “All three engines flamed out.” Mark tightened his shoulder harness. Took a quick look out the windscreen at the Florida Bay a half mile below.

  The big jet slowed like a roller coaster reaching its steepest crest. She heard a single piercing scream from the cabin.

  Kathy Dubois drew a long breath, tried the yoke again, but it was still dead. She swallowed hard, realigned her microphone, bent it close to her lips.

  She whispered something for the black box. A few words to her daughter. Then as the plane began to drop, she and Mark went to work, cycling the hydraulic systems, the electrical panels, trying to crank the auxiliary power unit.

  “It’s back,” she said. “It’s back.”

  She wasn’t sure what they’d done, but the yoke was alive. And Kathy Dubois started to pull them out of the free fall. Fifteen hundred feet, a thousand, seven-fifty, five hundred, enough time left, drawing up the nose, getting it level for a water landing. But no time to make announcements, pull out the manual, go over ditching procedure. She had to keep the landing gear up, flaps down, that much she knew.

  There was nothing on the Florida Bay. Calm seas. A long silvery runway. She had to keep the wings level with the water, not the horizon, she remembered that. Get speed down. She was thinking of the flare and touchdown, rotating ten degrees nose high, she was thinking of the APU and engine fire handles that she would have to override. Or would she? The engines weren’t turning. She stifled the half second of panic, got her focus back.

  Mark said something, but Kathy wasn’t listening, keeping the wings level, bringing it down, feeling the ground effect, that aerodynamic cushion that kept the plane skimming the surface of the sea like a pelican.

  She was ditching the plane on the shallow bay. A strange serenity flushing her, the yoke alive in her hand. A single fishing boat appearing in the distance.

  The nose of the jetliner pitched up, transforming speed into lift, but this couldn’t go on forever. Kathy would have to get the speed as low as she could manage, then do what no other wide-body pilot had ever accomplished, make a successful water landing.

  Thorn watched the jet scream out of the northwest, darken the sky, and pass so close overhead that its brutal tailwind lasted for half a minute, a hundred-mile-an-hour squall buffeting them broadside, nearly capsizing the Heart Pounder. The tidal surge that followed slammed them a second time. Casey was hurled backwards onto the deck and slid on her butt to the transom. Thorn managed to hang onto the wheel, trimming the engine down, and digging through the sudden surf, until he got the vessel back under control.

  “You okay, Case?”

  She lifted her head and squinted at him.

  “Jesus,” she said. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”

  A half mile to the east, the jet exploded. A greenish-red plume shot ten stories into the air and a few seconds later the blast-furnace whoosh swept over them. Casey ducked below the gunwale and began to weep.

  A flock of egrets that had been hunched in the high branches of the nearby mangroves burst into the air, white and stalky and deathly silent. Thorn swung the wheel and mashed the throttle forward. He made a wide arc to the south, then cut back his speed and headed east toward the crash site. Through the dusk, he saw the flames dotting the water like the campfires of some ghostly, defeated army. Five-foot swells pounded their hull and all around them the twilight was tinted a sickly green.

  “What the hell’re you doing, Thorn!”

  “Going to help.”

  “Are you crazy? All that fire, we’ll blow up.”

  Casey staggered to his side, stood at the windshield looking out. Blurry ripples rose from the surface of the water like heat off a summer highway.

  “I’ll get a little closer, then I’ll take the skiff. You can stay here.”

  A caustic breeze flooded the cabin with the fumes of jet fuel and bitter smoke and the sweet, sickly reek of charred flesh.

  “I want to go home, Thorn. I want to get the hell out of here.”

  “So do I,” he said. “But we can’t. Not yet.”

  He motored forward into the haze. Billows of smoke curled up from the surface of the bay; the water smoldered and fires flared to life as if spurts of volcanic gases were breaking through the earth’s crust. As he worked closer, Thorn saw the outer edge of the debris field scattered several hundred yards from what he took to be the center of the crash site, a single wing that jutted up like some senseless monolith planted in the sandy bottom. Next to it, a twisted section of the aluminum fuselage glowed in the strange green light.

  Mats of insulation floated on the surface, a stack of white Styrofoam cups bobbed past, life jackets and seat cushions, a black baseball hat and several blue passports. As the flotsam thickened, Thorn shut down the engine and while the boat coasted forward, he went to the stern, unknotted the rope from the cleats, and hauled in the skiff. Casey watched him, shivering, holding herself tightly.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “Get on the radio, channel sixteen, make a distress call. I’m going to look for survivors.”

  She opened her mouth but found no words and clamped her lips together and looked away.

  Thorn climbed down into the skiff and popped loose the long white fiberglass pole, and he mounted the platform over the outboard. He planted one end of the pole against the soft bottom of the bay and leaned his weight against it and shoved the skiff forward. If there were in fact survivors f
loating out there, it was no time for a propeller.

  He drew the pole out of the muck and planted it again and heaved the skiff ahead. The water was less than four feet deep. Shallow enough for an average adult to stand flat-footed with his head out of water. But Thorn saw no sign of life, no movement at all as he poled past a floating cockpit door, more seat cushions and drifting clothes and baby bottles and a blond-haired doll.

  He was fifty yards from the jutting wing when he heard the first splashes and made out the whimpers and soft cries, and a low, wet snuffling like penned-up horses. He poled faster, sweating now, as the boat skimmed ahead, the last ticks of daylight dying in the west. Everything was coated with gold. The bay, the shadowy people floundering up ahead, the suitcases and duffels that hung like dark icebergs just an inch or two below the surface.

  The first two he came upon were women. One in a blue business suit, another in a white sweatshirt. They thrashed over to the skiff and clambered aboard before he could get down from the platform to help. One was dark-haired with a bad gash across her forehead. The one in the white sweatshirt was a frail woman with weak blue eyes. A triangular chunk of flesh was missing from her cheek. The business suit thanked him and the other woman peered at him, then her face collapsed and she began to sob. The large woman took the small one in her arms and held her tightly as Thorn pushed on.

  “There’s a first-aid kit in the console.”

  The woman looked back at him.

  “Who are you?” she said.

  “Nobody.”

  “You wait out here for airplanes to crash?”

  “You’re my first,” he said. “You should put something on those cuts. You’re losing blood.”

  She tightened her hug on the small woman.

  “We’re all right. Believe me, there’s others who need it more.”

  Behind the broken fuselage he heard voices, cries and blubbering, the first moments of numbness and shock wearing off. He shoved the pole into the sucking mud, withdrew it, shoved it in again, and the skiff coasted forward.

  “On your right,” Thorn called to the woman in the business suit. “Coming up on your right.”