I tried to get some sun while she was fishing, but ended up pacing my top deck, wondering if the emotional damage which made me so edgy was permanent. Then I heard her whooping. She was standing up in the dinghy. There was some great commotion going on out there. I ran and got the glasses and put them on her.
She was keeping the rod tip high, and as she circled toward me I could see that her face was practically bulging with intensity, determination and excitement. At about the moment I realized she had a reasonably good bonefish on, she lost her balance and fell out of the dinghy without foundering it. But she didn't drop the rod. She scrambled up. The water came just below her waist. She turned a grinning face toward the Busted Flush and whooped again.
I watched her work him, and get him close, and move cautiously to the dinghy, make about four false tries, and then swoop up that gleaming silver length with the landing net. She piled aboard, did some bailing, and then came chugging home. I made the dinghy fast and then helped her over the rail. Her little blue sunsuit was sodden.
"Hey, isn't he glorious! Isn't he the damnedest thing? He went a thousand miles an hour! Around and around and around. What is he? Can we eat him?"
"He's a bonefish, and he's a nice one, and it is early for them around here. We can't eat him."
"No?"
"No."
She bit her lip, dropped to her knees, and worked him out of the net. His gills were working. She grasped him around the middle, lowered him and carefully dropped him into the water. He floated on his side, tail making weak movements. "Hurry along," she told him. "Go on about your business, Bonefish. You are a nifty fish. Go warn your relatives there's a girl around here named Gibson who's going to raise hell with your whole clan." He slowly righted himself, and gave a more powerful flicker of that tail, and went angling slowly down and away. "Come back yourself, any time," she called.
And, she spun, joyous, grabbed me with round tan arms and fishy hands, pasted wet sunsuit against me, gave me a happy noisy kiss.
"Congratulations," I said, and kissed her in return.
She looked at me speculatively. The next kiss was longer. Her face changed and softened. "Bit on a little white dude," she said dreamily. "Little crabs are better."
The next kiss, was imperative. I swung her up and took her below. It was all back for us, more than before -a deeper, richer and more demanding hunger.
* * *
February March, and into the loveliness of April.
Sometimes we moved to other coves, other beaches. Always private. We had no need for anyone else. She could sleep in my arms and sense the looming presence of nightmare and waken me, quiet me, soothe me. And little by little they went away. There was laughter aboard. And a vastly diminished laundry problem. Clothes were for when you got cold, or thought you heard a boat coming, or when you had to go ashore.
There were a thousand permutations and combinations of love. By day and by night, very quick and very lengthy, comical and saddened, bawdy and spiritual, simple and complicated, mild and stormy. It seemed that we could never wear away that hard enduring edge of need, that the pace would never slacken.
But at last of course it did. A little less compulsive magic, but more of something else. The product of love and of the ten million words of history and revelation we spoke to each other. One day there was the unspoken awareness that we had to get back to the world.
On a trip to Key West she had purchased, almost apologetically, tools of her trade. She began to do a little more drawing each day. And her lust for bonefish dwindled.
We sat topside one evening, holding hands, watching a vast fiery sunset. She was silent for a long time.
"Trav?"
"Yes, darling."
"I don't want you to think... I mean, I don't want to seem like..."
"Hush," I told her, and raised that small and valuable hand to my lips, kissed her fingertips and palm. "We'll take our time getting back to Lauderdale. How about five days?"
"How did you know?"
"The same way you knew it was time."
"And two days there, and then put me an a plane, darling. And don't let me look back, because if you do I won't be able to leave you. You knew I would?"
"When you were ready. Yes."
"I'll always love you. Can you understand that?"
"Yes, but don't ever try to make anyone else understand it, Nina."
"It will always be too private to tell."
And so it was an April magic, going back. Hauntingly sweet, because we knew this was the end of it. There was nostalgia in each caress.
Perhaps those weeks of us were, in one sense, a memorial. People have built imposing structures out of far meaner materials. I cherished her and celebrated her, and we restored each other.
The End
John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 02 - Nightmare In Pink Page 18