“Nice new paint job on that sweet, sweet boat,” Manny said. He appeared to be speaking of a sleek twenty-four-footer with twin engines big enough to make a boat that size really go. Nate’s boat must have cost a fortune, and it must move like a bat out of hell. Not coincidentally, that was its name. Bat Out of Hell was stenciled in black across its platinum gray stern, and matching black pinstripes swooped down its sides. It sat on a trailer behind a charcoal-gray pickup truck big enough to haul this boat that was almost too big to trailer. Even the truck had black pinstripes. Faye thought that the gray-and-black color palette totally suited Nate’s floating bat-boat.
“Thanks. Cody did it. He’s a real pro.”
“I only hire the best. Hey, that was a nice article about the hurricane cleanup, man. It tells it like it is,” Manny was saying. “I mean, I always read your fishing column, but it’s time your old man let you do some real reporting. He was right to put that article on the front page.”
“It was Joe’s picture that sold him the article. I did the reporting first. Talked to a bunch of people. Got their stories about living through the storm. Made sure to pack the piece with plenty of human interest stuff. Then I took it to Dad, but I made sure he got a good look at that picture before he started reading. He said I did a good job on the article, but what he really wanted was that photo for the website. He thought it might go viral and get a lot of clicks, and that’s exactly what it did. It’s a weird way to do business, but that’s how the newspaper biz works these days.”
“Is Joe getting paid by the click?”
“No, he gave it to me. No charge.”
Manny grunted, but he didn’t say anything at first. Faye wanted to butt in and say, “Is that how you treat your friends?”
After that initial grunt and after a moment to think over the situation, Manny said exactly what Faye had been thinking. “You stiffed Joe for a picture that got you on the front page?”
“And all over the internet.”
“Yeah. The internet. I guess that’s where the money is these days. Is that how you treat your friends?”
Nate laughed it off, and Manny didn’t push the issue any further.
Late afternoon was a busy time at the ramp. Some people were coming in off the water, but people with day jobs were rushing out to spend the end of the day enjoying the boats they’d worked so hard to buy. Nate was clearly one of the day job crowd. He was literally unbuttoning a dress shirt while he and Manny talked. His chestnut hair was trimmed razor-sharp, so sharp that a fine white line of untanned skin along his hairline proved that he’d seen his barber within the past twenty-four hours.
After shedding the shirt, Nate removed his dress pants to reveal a light beige bathing suit that was surely chosen to be close to his skin color, so that it wouldn’t show through the fabric of his work clothes. One of his buddies, whom Faye recognized as Cody, was yelling good-naturedly out of Nate’s truck window as he confidently maneuvered the truck and the trailered boat behind it down the boat ramp.
Within minutes, Cody had gotten Bat Out of Hell afloat and was driving the truck back up the ramp. Somebody else, another of Nate’s friends, based on the trash talk being thrown his way, was piloting the boat, easing it up near the dock where they stood. When the boat pilot turned his shaggy brunette head Faye’s way, she recognized Thad from the dive shop.
As if the entire procedure were choreographed and rehearsed—and perhaps it was, since these men probably did this several times a week in the summertime—Nate tossed the dress shirt, the pants, a belt, and a tie over his shoulder into the boat. Based on his carelessness with his dress clothes, Faye inferred that a dry cleaner took care of them for him. Reaching down to grab the dress shoes sitting beside his bare feet, Nate flung them into the boat without looking to see where they fell. Faye wondered how long a pair of dress shoes lasted him. Thad, who seemed like a fastidious boat captain, stashed Nate’s discarded clothes and shoes in a compartment near his feet.
Now that he was stripped down to his bathing suit, Nate was dressed just like Manny, but his I-work-behind-a-desk pallor distinguished them. Stepping easily into the boat, he lifted a hand in Manny’s direction and said, “Later, man. I can hear the fish talking and they say they miss me.”
Cody parked the truck that was pulling the empty boat trailer and hustled back to the ramp, wading out toward the boat and hauling himself up the ladder. Thad had just finished raising a black bimini that set off the boat’s crisp black pinstripes. He held up a bottle of something unidentifiable, wrapped tight in a plastic bag, calling out, “Nate and Cody! Time to celebrate!”
Nate slapped Manny on the shoulder, said, “Later, man,” and stepped into the boat. He took the captain’s seat as Thad handed Cody and Nate each a plastic cup.
“What are we celebrating?” asked Cody as Thad poured something golden-brown into his cup.
“We’re celebrating making it through another day, dudes! And we’re celebrating this afternoon on the beautiful water. It’s been…well, it’s been at least a couple days since we were all together. We’ll toast…um…we’ll toast Nate’s dad for buying Nate the boat that’s making this fine moment possible. How ’bout that?”
Nate seemed about as happy with his father as Amande was with Faye, most days. He held his empty cup in his lap until Thad snatched it up and sloshed an oversized shot into it.
“You don’t wanna toast your dad?” Thad asked. “You should try running the business your dad built, every day that rolls, like I do. He’s dead and I’ll still never measure up. If I make it big and take home millions, it’s just because he handed me the business and conveniently died. But if I fail, the whole town will say I disrespected his memory by running his business into the ground. I can’t win.”
Nate and Thad looked at Cody, as if hoping he’d unload some daddy issues, too. And he surely had them, because he said, “I showed my old man my back on the day I turned eighteen,” but he didn’t tell them why.
Faye cringed at the thought of these guys being miles from shore and drunk, but Florida had no open-container law to keep passengers from drinking. As long as the person piloting the boat stayed sober, these men were perfectly within their rights. And Nate wasn’t drinking yet. He had let Thad pour him a drink, then surreptitiously set it on the deck, holding it upright between his feet.
Thad held the boat in place, holding the bottle in one hand while he kept the dock at arm’s length like a man determined to protect Nate’s flashy paint job. He gave a hard shove. As the boat floated away from the dock, he lifted the bottle to his lips for a long swig. “Just a pick-me-up, y’all, nothing that’ll impair my ability to help Nate captain his ship like the pirate captain that he is! Yo ho!”
As the boat moved slowly away, it passed Amande’s oyster skiff, tied up in its usual place. So Faye’s weary brain had been right that she and Joe could take Faye’s skiff home now.
She was ready. More than ready.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Manny turned toward Faye. She hadn’t realized that he knew she was there.
“I saw you looking at Nate and his boat.”
“That thing’s huge. Why does he trailer it? If he can afford that boat, surely he can afford to keep it here in a slip.”
“Well, rich folks are cheap. But to be fair to Nate, he lives on a lake, and you can’t blame him for wanting to keep it at home. He trailers it down here when he wants to kick back with his dude bros.”
“If it was a single inch bigger, he’d have a hard time doing that, even with his big ol’ truck,” Faye said.
“Yeah. And if he wore those swim trunks a single inch lower, I’d have to call the sheriff to come haul him in for indecent exposure.”
Now Faye was embarrassed to be caught watching Nate take off his clothes.
“I wasn’t eavesdropping on purpose.” She blushed and Manny noticed. “It’s a little distracting when a
man unexpectedly strips down while he’s standing a few feet away from me, that’s all.”
As the word “distracting” came out of her mouth, something else distracting cropped up in her peripheral vision. When she turned her head, she saw Greta Haines backing a center console cruiser down the ramp. The long blue boat was as big as Nate’s, or close to it, and she too was pushing her luck when she hauled it around on a trailer. Greta’s boat was so sleek that it looked fast while it was still sitting on the trailer. Faye wouldn’t have thought that insurance companies paid their adjusters that well, but now she knew that Greta was self-employed as a public adjuster. She also knew that Greta just might be supplementing her fees with money pilfered from the old and the sick.
Manny was still talking about Nate’s strip-tease act. “More days than not, Nate’s standing in just that spot at just this time, taking his clothes off. I’ve been thinking of charging admission. And maybe taking out a few ads. ‘Handsome, rich man takes it all off!’ I could set up a cooler right about here,” he pointed in the general vicinity of his feet, “and sell beers. People would come.”
Faye laughed. She’d never denied that Manny was charming and funny. The problem was that he put way too much effort into charming her daughter.
“I think you’d turn a profit,” she said. “I wonder how he’d take it if you made money off of him without at least giving him a cut.”
Manny shrugged. “I’m not sure he’d notice. Rich people are funny about money. One minute, they’re squeezing you for every cent. The next minute, they want to act like money rains out of the sky for them and they never have to give it a single thought. You can’t talk to them about the way things really are for most people. They don’t have a clue, or they like to pretend that they don’t.”
“But you did say something to him about how he treated Joe.”
“No, I never said straight out that he was wrong. That’s what it takes to get the attention of somebody like Nate. If I did, it would be real interesting to see if he realized what he’d done and ponied up the money. He’s certainly got it. His daddy runs the newspaper because he likes to stay busy, but he makes his real money from real estate. A hundred years ago, probably more, his great-granddaddy had the great good sense to buy up a big chunk of Micco County. I bet it never once crossed Nate’s mind that he was taking advantage of Joe when the paper printed that picture for free. You know, I think I will say something to him about it. I wanna see what happens. Maybe I’ll sell tickets to that, too.”
“Oh, now I get it. Nate’s one of those Petersons. The only person around here who ever had more of a knack for making money than the Peterson clan was my friend Douglass, Emma’s late husband.”
“So I hear,” Manny said. “But there’s a big difference between him and Nate. Emma’s husband started out from nothing, and he earned his own money. No Peterson alive has done that.”
“What about the newspaper?”
“I doubt it breaks even. Nate’s daddy feels strongly about the free press. It seems that he’s read the First Amendment. The paper’s a rich man’s project, for sure, because he doesn’t care if it makes a cent, but it gives him something useful to do. To tell you the truth, I respect that. Many’s the week that he wrote every word in it. Or so I hear. Now that Nate’s home from college and helping out, the old man’s able to kick back a little. He loves to fish. Used to go fishing with the captain from time to time.”
“Sounds like letting Nate do more at the paper is good for Nate and good for his old man, too,” Faye said.
“Yeah, but Nate’s pay probably covers the upkeep on that boat we just saw. Maybe. He has a trust fund that covers his bills. He never paid a cent for college, not even out of the paycheck he got for covering high school football for his daddy’s newspaper. He ain’t never gone on a job interview. Ain’t never wanted a job he didn’t get. I ain’t sure he’s ever wanted a woman he didn’t get. Nate’s not a bad guy, but he’s not quite a grown-up. Life’s gotta knock you around some before you really grow up. If you know what I mean.”
Faye did. It seemed to her that Thad, another of Nate’s friends, had been handed a successful business that he didn’t appreciate, so he wasn’t much of a grown-up, either.
Cody? She wasn’t sure about Cody. He did a good job of fitting in with his mildly jerkish buddies, but her heart went out to a man that young who was making his own way in the world without the benefit of a dad who gave him a great big head start.
Manny had clearly spent some time stewing about how lucky Nate was. He couldn’t stop talking about the man.
“Nobody alive in Nate’s family remembers what it was like to be short on money,” Manny’s hand moved, probably unconsciously, toward the bathing suit pocket where he kept his cash in a plastic bag. “I don’t know how many ways they’ve found to make money off that land. The captain told me that their family bought it just so they could clear-cut the virgin longleaf pines. Then they grew more trees and more trees, so they could spend the next hundred years selling logs to the paper companies. Over time, they diversified into whatever was profitable—lumber, cotton, tobacco, soybeans, sorghum, corn, whatever. The captain said that the Petersons and all their industries have run the Micco County economy for a century or more. These days, they build property developments on their land, so that more people can move down here and wreck what’s left of the place.”
Faye cocked an eyebrow at him.
“Yeah, I know I just moved here. But I took over a business that was already here and I live in an apartment that was already here. It’s not like I’m tearing things up just to make a place for myself.”
On this point, Faye had to side with Manny.
“Me living in my little old apartment isn’t a bit different from you and your family living in your big old house that somebody else built a long time ago. Which I hear is very nice, by the way, so thank you for giving my girl Amande a cool place to live. Speaking of your family, didja know that Nate’s been trying to get a date with Amande?”
Faye had not known that, and she didn’t know how to respond.
“Asks her every day if he can buy her a drink, usually after he’s stripped down to a bathing suit and flip-flops so he can show off his pecs.”
Faye cringed and Manny saw.
“Yeah. I feel the same way about Nate and his manly chest. They don’t belong in the same room as Amande. Every day, before she tells him she’s not old enough to drink and walks away, he runs down the list of things he wants to buy her. A Coke, dinner, a bag of chips, a pair of sunglasses, a fine bottle of champagne. If I sell it in the store, he’s tried to buy it for your daughter. Well, I guess he was planning to go to Tallahassee to get the fancy champagne, but all the rest of it was stuff he planned to give her on the spot.”
“She hasn’t let him?”
“Nope. Don’t know why. He’s maybe five years older than her, which isn’t so bad. She’s got him on maturity, though. He’s probably pretty cute, if you’re into the frat boy look. Apparently, Amande isn’t. Or else she’s playing hard to get, but that doesn’t seem like her style.”
Now Faye was wondering whether Manny was jealous of the man’s money or jealous that he wanted to spend time with Amande.
Manny wasn’t finished tweaking her maternal anxiety. “Nate’s not alone, you know.”
“What?”
“This marina stays full of men who’d like to buy your daughter a drink. All three of the guys on that boat, matter of fact. Frat boy Nate. Surfer dude Thad. And then there’s Cody, who is, to be fair, a hardworking individual. I wouldn’t pay him to work in my store, and I wouldn’t rent him barn space, if I didn’t think it was true. As far as I know, she’s told them all no, and there’s no arguing with her taste. There’s not a one of ’em that I’d like to see spending time with her.”
Faye was speechless. How could this be true when Amande was usually standi
ng right there next to her? Or next to Joe, who was six-and-a-half-feet tall and mildly terrifying to people who didn’t know him?
Manny laughed at her confusion. “If young people didn’t know how to sneak around behind their parents’ backs, the human race woulda died out a real long time ago. I thought you should know what was going on.”
“Tell me more about Cody. He works for you. You have to know something about him.”
“It’s a real part-time thing, mostly in the mornings before he starts fixing boats for his own clients. And off and on through the day, when I need help at the fuel pump.”
“Is he a frat boy like Nate? Or ex-frat boy? How old is he?”
“Naw. Don’t think he went to college. Don’t know how old he is. I’m getting old enough that it’s hard to tell the difference between an eighteen-year-old and a twenty-four-year-old. I don’t see any sign that the daddy he ran away from was rich, that’s for sure. Lives by himself upstream a ways.”
He gestured up the creek that his marina fronted.
“Cody has got himself a little bitty place. His dang boat’s longer than his house. The folks that rent it to him used it for a fishing shack, but he lives there year-round. The farther you go up the creek, the easier it is for a boat mechanic to afford waterfront property.”
“But he can afford a big boat?”
“Think about what the man does for a living. Some people can’t afford to pay for repairs so they leave their boat at his shop forever. Then Cody keeps it or he sells it or he fixes it up and sells it. Other people want a better boat and they like that fixed-up boat, so they trade up and Cody makes money on the deal. And then he pours that money into a better boat for himself, maybe one that he can get cheap ’cause it ain’t running. Run through that cycle a few times, and a poor man can absolutely be the proud owner of a rich man’s boat. The only way Cody will ever live in a house that’s better than his boat will be if somebody trades him a houseboat.”
Faye thought that there were worse things than living on a houseboat. She’d done it for a while. Amande had grown up on one. Her hat was off to Cody for his entrepreneurial talent. No wonder Manny trusted him with his own business. They understood each other.
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