Rising Tide

by Wayne Stinnett

  “What’s this room called?” he asked, stepping inside.

  “When you’re aboard, we’ll call this Alberto’s stateroom.”

  His face turned up, glee in his eyes. “Really?”

  “Really,” I replied with a grin.

  His face fell slightly. “When I was in the hospital, they asked me my name and I couldn’t remember. Then they started calling me Alberto.”

  “That was the name that was carved into the wood on the boat we found you on. They said you had a pocketknife, so we guessed you’d put the name there—Alberto Mar.”

  His face contorted, as if trying to force a memory.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “It’ll come back to you. Did the hospital give you your knife back?”

  He shook his head.

  “Follow me,” I said, moving forward and opening the door to the master stateroom.

  “Wow!” he exclaimed again. then looked up at me and smiled. “This is Jesse’s stateroom?”

  “And Savannah’s,” I replied, moving toward the small dresser below the washer and dryer combo.

  I opened the drawer and dug through my clothes until I found what I was looking for.

  “Here,” I said, extending it to him. “A man should always have a knife. You never know when you’ll need one.”

  The Schrade Old Timer had been Pap’s and he’d given it to my dad. When Dad died, Pap gave it to me.

  “Take very good care of that until we get yours back, okay?”

  “I will,” he said, turning the knife over in his hands. “I have a question.”

  “What is it?”

  He looked aft through the open hatch. “I didn’t see a steering wheel up there. How do you drive this boat?”

  Steering wheel?

  I wondered if Andersen had told him what that was while allowing Alberto to turn on the lights. Or did amnesia only affect personal memories? Could his knowledge of what a steering wheel was, have come from a memory of riding in a car with his parents?

  I made a mental note to find out more about what memories amnesia erases.

  “You’re a very observant young man,” I said. “Follow me.”

  He put the knife in his pocket, and we retraced our steps through the salon. Once out in the cockpit, I pointed up the ladder just to port.

  “Up there’s the bridge,” I said. “That’s where you drive from.”

  “Can we go up there?”

  “Sure. Just be careful on the ladder. Whenever you’re on a boat, especially when it’s underway, you should always maintain three points of contact. If you’re lifting a foot to climb a ladder, both hands should hold onto something. When you move a hand, both feet should be standing on something.”

  He went up the ladder awkwardly, consciously keeping three points of contact with it.

  When we reached the bridge, he went straight to the helm.

  “What’s that?” he asked, pointing at the cover over the large chart plotter.

  I removed it and turned the unit on. “This is like a map. Do you know what a map is?”

  “To show you where you’re going?”

  So, it seemed that not all memory was lost when a person developed amnesia. Basic things were retained. He’d seen a map before, maybe in school.

  Or maybe Andersen had explained what the chart plotter on the patrol boat was, as well as the steering wheel.

  “Exactly,” I replied. “But instead of street names and towns, this one shows how deep the water is and where land is.”

  I turned on the other electronics and even turned on the ignition, but didn’t fire the engines up. He asked a lot of questions. Smart ones.

  Footsteps could be heard on the stairs.

  “Sounds like the admiral is coming down for an inspection,” I said.

  “The admiral?”

  “I’m the captain of the boat, but Savannah’s the admiral. She outranks me. That means she’s my boss.”

  “How come?”

  Another good question.

  “You’ll understand later,” I said.

  “When I get my memory back?”

  I laughed. “No, probably not until you’re a few years older—when you have a girlfriend.”

  “Ahoy,” Savannah called out.

  I looked over the side. “Up here.”

  I felt the boat move and knew that Finn or Woden, or more likely both, had jumped over the gunwale into the cockpit. The boat moved again as Savannah came aboard.

  “Y’all get back,” I heard her say as she started up the ladder.

  Alberto looked up at me, standing next to him at the helm. “Who’s she talking to?”

  “The dogs,” I replied, as Savannah joined us.

  “Can they come up here?”

  “No,” I replied. “They’re not very good at going up a ladder and even worse going down.”

  “Teaching him to dive next?” Savannah asked, parroting my earlier question when I saw the fish ID book on the nightstand.

  I grinned down at the kid. “No, we haven’t gotten to that yet.”

  We spent the rest of the day showing our new guest around. We waded the shallows at low tide and visited some nearby sandbars and tidal pools, where he got to see small fish and crabs trapped by the receding tide.

  In the distance to the west, a group of boats were gathered in Content Passage, a shallow, natural channel between the two largest of the Content Keys.

  “What are those boats doing?” Alberto asked.

  It being a weekday, I told him that I wasn’t sure. “Sometimes people just like to come up here and hang out.”

  Later, we cooked fish over an open driftwood fire and ate with our fingers, using banana leaves for plates. As the sun set, we went out onto the north pier to watch it slip below the horizon.

  I told Alberto about the green flash you could occasionally see, though I didn’t think conditions were right on that particular night. He still made a silent wish.

  We stayed out there until it got fully dark—or at least as dark as the first quarter moon, directly over our heads, would allow. Living on an island with few lights, far from the light pollution of the more inhabited keys, allowed a person’s eyes to adjust. The moon illuminated everything around us and the stars were like a million little diamonds scattered across a black velvet blanket.

  I pointed out some of the clusters of stars that could be seen close to the horizon and told Alberto the stories of what early man thought he saw in the night sky; pictures to describe the different constellations.

  “How long have you lived here?” he asked, as we gathered up our things to head back to the house.

  “Oh, a little over twenty years,” I said.

  “I like it here,” he offered. “That’s what I wished for when the sun went down. That I could stay here.”

  “Aw, that’s sweet,” Savannah said, as we crossed the dark clearing toward the house.

  “Who lives in those other houses?” Alberto asked.

  “That one,” I said, pointing to Jimmy’s place on the west side, “is where my first mate lives. A first mate works for the captain.”

  He looked up at Savannah and smiled in the moonlight. “And the captain works for the admiral.”

  Savannah laughed.

  “What about the two by the pier?” he asked.

  “Our daughter, Flo, lives in one,” Savannah said. “And the other one is going to be Jesse’s workshop.”

  “You have a daughter?”

  “She’s away at college,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “College?” I asked. “It’s the school you go to after high school.”

  Alberto stopped dead in his tracks, turned and looked back at the bunkhouses. Even in the dim light of the moon, I could see fear etched on his young face.

  I knelt beside him. “What’s wrong?”

  He looked at me, concentration replacing some of the fear I’d seen in his eyes. “I don’t like school.”

  I looked
up at Savannah; she quickly knelt in the sand beside me. “Do you remember something?” she asked. “Even if it’s something you don’t like, it will help to try to remember it.”

  He seemed to study her face for a moment as he thought. Then a tear came to the corner of his eye and slowly trailed down his cheek.

  “I can’t remember,” he said.

  She took the boy in her arms and held him. “Don’t worry,” she said. “You’re safe with us and your memory will come back. Remembering might be scary at first, but soon you’ll remember happy things too.”

  That night, after Alberto had gone to sleep, I checked the provisions on the Revenge and did a complete systems analysis, except for starting the engines. We didn’t have enough groceries aboard to sustain five men for more than a day, but there was a small grocery store near the marina in Fort Myers.

  When I returned to the living room, Woden and Finn lay sleeping on either side of Alberto’s bed, and Savannah was sitting in one of the recliners, reading.

  When she looked up, I nodded my head toward the open bedroom door.

  I woke early, well before sunrise, and slipped quietly out of our bedroom without disturbing Savannah. Woden raised his head as I walked past Alberto’s bed, but I held a halting hand up to him and he remained where he was.

  The coffee, set on a timer, was ready. It was the smell that had awakened me. Better than any noisy alarm clock. I poured a cup, then headed downstairs, flicking on the dock area lights.

  Once aboard the Revenge, I powered up my laptop, which connected wirelessly to the onboard modem. That device could connect to WiFi, but it could also connect to a second encrypted modem, which was hard-wired to an antenna, mounted to the roof of the house. While the boat was under the house, that was the only way to connect to a satellite in geosynchronous orbit, thousands of miles up in space.

  I sent a message to Billy, asking what his status was, then started searching the news outlets for anything of note in the Fort Myers area.

  I found three news stories dated within the last week about gang activity.

  One was about a shooting between rival gangs, in which more than a dozen shots were fired, resulting in one person being slightly injured. It was no wonder gangs were on the rise—they couldn’t shoot for shit.

  The other two stories revolved around drug arrests in the area. Primarily methamphetamine and crack, the current drug of choice in American cities.

  But none of the three stories mentioned MS-13. It made me wonder.

  How many gangs could there be in a small town?

  Fort Myers wasn’t Miami or Orlando. I remembered as a kid, I’d learned that the population was under forty thousand. Even today, I doubted it had grown to more than eighty thousand. By comparison, Cape Coral, just across the Caloosahatchee River, had grown from being smaller than Fort Myers to almost two hundred thousand people today.

  There were also quite a few news articles about the discovery of the bodies of two known prostitutes in the area—Shaniqua Raines and Carmel Marco—though all of them were short, page-two reports from different news outlets. One of them mentioned that other prostitutes in the area were missing.

  I looked at public police reports going back ten years, noting an alarming rise in drug-related and violent crimes over the last few years.

  Fort Myers had changed since I’d first left there for Parris Island so long ago. In the years since then, I’d only returned maybe six or eight times. Most of those had been taking leave with Rusty during my first enlistment. Since my grandparents’ funerals, I’d hardly been back at all. I just hadn’t had a reason to return. The Keys were my home.

  But in the last couple of years, I’d been to Fort Myers three times. All with violent outcomes.

  The laptop pinged an incoming message. It was a reply from Billy.

  First night. Nice ride. All quiet.

  I heard footsteps above. Savannah was up.

  Closing the laptop, I returned it to its cabinet and left the boat.

  “Oh, there you are,” Savannah said, as I started up the steps.

  “Just running one last check,” I said.

  “Alberto’s up. And guess what?”

  “He’s hungry.” I looked at my watch. “We can leave now and y’all can eat at the Anchor if you want.”

  “That would be faster,” she said, then turned to Alberto. “Would you like a banana to hold you over until we get there?”

  Alberto nodded, sitting cross-legged on the rug, and petting the dogs, one on either side of him.

  He was wearing the same clothes he’d worn the previous day.

  “We have some new clothes waiting at a friend’s place,” I told him. “If we leave now, you can eat all the breakfast you want there. Old Rufus makes the best breakfast burritos you’ve ever tried.”

  He got to his feet and looked down at the dogs. “Will they be coming with us?”

  Finn and Woden looked up at me, as if waiting for an answer, too.

  “Yes,” Savannah replied. “But if we’re going to eat soon, we’d better get going. It’s about thirty minutes in the boat to Tank and Chyrel’s, then a short car ride to get to the Rusty Anchor.”

  Both dogs rose and with tail and nub wagging, headed for the stairs.

  “They understood you,” Alberto said.

  “They’re pretty smart,” Savannah agreed, as we followed the dogs down to the dock area below the house.

  Ten minutes later, we were idling into Harbor Channel. Alberto sat up on his knees in the second seat so he could see all the gauges and over the helm. He didn’t want to miss a thing.

  Savannah had opted for the forward-facing seat in front of the helm. Her hair was pulled back with three bands holding it in place and she wore a light sweater against the morning chill. The sun, just beginning to peek over the horizon, gave her skin a rich glow.

  I increased speed to a high idle.

  “Is this as fast as your boat will go?” Alberto asked.

  “Oh, no,” I said, then pointed to the island at the entrance to Harbor Channel. “A friend lives there and we don’t want to wake his boat.”

  “His boat sleeps?”

  Savannah and I both laughed. “He means the wave that a boat makes,” Savannah explained, turning back to face us. “It’s called a wake, and if we go too fast, our wake will rock Mac’s boat.”

  Once clear of Mac’s place, I brought the Revenge up on plane, much to Alberto’s delight. I turned the wheel slightly to starboard and the big boat leaned into the wide turn like a Thoroughbred at the end of the back stretch.

  Setting a course that would take us toward Tank’s house on Grassy Key, I checked the chart plotter and explained to Alberto how it worked.

  “I don’t cross these waters in this boat often, so we need to know where the deep water is.”

  “How come?”

  “It’s a big boat,” I replied. “If we try to go in water that’s too shallow, we’ll run aground and be stuck.”

  “No. How come you don’t take this boat here?”

  I glanced down at the boy. I knew that kids that age were always asking questions. Pap used to tell me the only dumb question was the one I didn’t ask.

  “You saw the smaller boats under the house, right?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “Those boats are better suited for shallower water,” I explained. “Like here on the Gulf side. We call this kind of boat a blue water boat, and we usually only use it offshore, where the water’s very deep.”

  On the chart plotter, I pointed to Bluefish Bank and Bamboo Bank, just beyond it. Both were close to our course, so I turned slightly, ensuring that we’d pass well to the north of them. The course line on the chart plotter moved to the left of the shallows.

  Alberto craned his neck and looked out over the bow. “I don’t see anything.”

  “They’re still several miles ahead,” I said. “And we’ll pass them a mile to the north. From a distance, it’s hard to tell shallow water from
deep.”

  Alberto looked back and I followed his gaze. The wake we left in the water could be seen far astern.

  “That’s a big wake,” he said. “Good thing we didn’t go fast when we passed Mac’s island.”

  I looked at him and grinned, remembering my first ride in a big, offshore boat. I was about the same age as Alberto when I went with Pap and a couple of his friends on an offshore fishing trip. We slept on the boat, miles from shore, and I remember catching a wahoo. From that point on, I was hooked.

  In no time at all, I slowed and turned toward the dock extending out from Tank and Chyrel’s house. Tony and Paul were standing at the end of the T-head, behind Tank’s boat, waiting to catch lines.

  Right after buying furniture for his new house, Tank had bought a slightly used twenty-six-foot Proline with a walk-around cuddy cabin. It’d only had sixty hours on the twin 200-horse Mercs. Over the months that followed, he’d tripled that, making daily runs out from the dock, fishing and exploring, sometimes overnight.

  “Who are those men?” Alberto asked, as Savannah went down to toss lines.

  “A couple of friends of mine,” I replied. “You and Savannah will go with another lady named Chyrel to get breakfast. Then the three of you and the dogs will follow me in Savannah’s boat.”

  “How come?”

  “Me and my friends are going to take this boat,” I said. “We’ll all meet up in a few hours, probably about lunch time.”

  I laid the Revenge against the dock, and Tony and Paul quickly made her fast. Then they picked up three black, tactical bags and came aboard, stashing their gear inside.

  “You must be Alberto,” Chyrel said, as she and Tank approached the T-head.

  Savannah made the introductions and each of them greeted the boy with big smiles.

  “Later, there’s gonna be a test on everyone’s name,” I said to Alberto.

  He looked over at the dock and rattled off each person’s name.

  “Okay, maybe there’s no need,” I offered, as I helped him up to the dock.

  I kissed Savannah goodbye, then she and Chyrel led Alberto toward the house.

  Tank heaved a cooler from the dock, passing it over to Tony. “We made some food for the trip.”