Hell's Bay

by James W. Hall

  My finger was tracing paths through the familiar maze of islands and rivers and networks of channels. Where the peninsula of Florida ended and the Gulf of Mexico and Florida Bay began there was no distinct coastline, but a messy, tattered mix of marsh and mangrove and rivers and bays as if the land at the tip of Florida was unraveling like an old wool scarf.

  “What’s the idea? Use this as a nautical chart?”

  She winked a yes.

  “Why?”

  “Keep looking, Thorn. Viewing the Glades from the sky, things pop out you wouldn’t notice at water level.”

  It took me another minute before I saw what she was hinting at.

  Dotting the northern edge of the photo was a series of small lakes and ponds, each lake rimmed by mangroves. From a passing skiff they would be hidden from view, and I was certain they weren’t noted on any of the nautical charts I’d used over the years. Most charts weren’t updated for decades, and in the back corners of the constantly changing Everglades, they were virtually worthless. I’d been poking around the Glades all of my life, but I’d never guessed that just behind this or that screen of mangroves were so many lakes.

  “So tell me, Thorn, you still don’t want that job?”

  “You’re a wily woman, Rusty Stabler.”

  “Might require making a few illegal snips in the man-groves. Doing that in a National Park, you could get a hefty fine.”

  “Still not interested. But I have a good pair of loppers I can loan you.”

  She groaned and pulled out a kitchen chair and sat down.

  After two decades of guiding, she’d managed to put aside enough cash to finance the engineering blueprints for a shallow-draft houseboat of her own design. Then she’d taken the blueprints along with her detailed business plan and laid them before a couple of local attorneys who’d scored millions in real estate.

  As luck would have it, Rusty’s business model meshed with some obscure tax need of theirs, as well as providing them an excellent venue to entertain clients, so they’d written some hefty checks and given Rusty free reign to have the ship custom built. Somewhere between half a million and a million bucks. A two-story, sixty-five-foot, multiton house-boat that drew only twenty-eight inches of water and could reach areas deep into the Everglades far beyond the zones where conventional houseboats would run aground.

  The idea was to tow two skiffs behind the houseboat and anchor up as close as she could get to the shallow-water fishing grounds. With a base so far out, there’d be no need to make the long run from the Everglades National Park docks at Flamingo and back again at sunset. That would add several hours to every day of fishing. She could take her time. Use the skiffs to penetrate deep into the backcountry, fish full days, then zip back to the houseboat to indulge in five-star dinners and sleep in air-conditioned comfort. Luxury camping for the well-heeled adventurer. Work the Ever-glades in the winter when the mosquitoes were hibernating, and in summers do weeklong stretches in the Marquesas.

  To make the operation work, Rusty needed a partner who was a reliable handyman and fishing guide and had patience enough to free snagged lures from the mangrove branches for bumbling amateur anglers.

  I seriously doubted the patience part, but I hadn’t met many machines nautical or otherwise I couldn’t jigger into working order, and I’d fished the Glades since I was a kid and knew every creek and tributary from Flamingo at the southern tip all the way north until the navigable rivers ended, and the marsh became impenetrable to anything but kayaks and airboats.

  “It’s a hell of a photograph,” I said. “But these mangroves surrounding the lakes are so thick, it might take weeks to hack through them.”

  Rusty leaned forward and put her finger on a spot on the photo.

  “What do you see?”

  Where she was pointing there was a single faint V in the outer rim of the mangroves that surrounded a large oblong lake. At the point of the V an even fainter crooked trail ran from the open water through the mangroves and eventually led into the lake.

  “Mouth of an old creek,” I said. “Completely overgrown.”

  I became silent, feeling the hard tug of what she was presenting.

  “No way to know how long those creeks have been blocked off,” she said. “A century ago that stream could’ve been twenty feet wide, then year by year the mangroves inched toward the center, eventually sealing it up. Some lakes could’ve been locked tight since the Civil War. I talked to a marine biology guy at the college who said there’s no way to be a hundred percent certain how long they’ve been cut off. Hurricanes come, destroy new growth, open up the creek again. Sun exposure, disease, tides, currents, lots of variables. But a bunch of creek beds are still there. Enough water to get the skiffs inside.”

  Rusty was silent while I scanned the photograph. After a couple of minutes I’d counted two dozen hidden lakes, many with the faint remnants of creek mouths. Some of the lakes were tiny, some large, a few were interconnected by narrow channels, and all of them were encircled by mangroves and tucked into the remote fringes of the navigable Everglades.

  “So you wedge the skiff beneath the branches, hack your way inside, you’re in waters that no one, not even Seminoles, have ever seen.”

  “Did I bring my pig to a good market?”

  I stepped away from the table and looked at her. Her eyes were filled with giddy light.

  “Why me? All the guides you know, anybody would jump at this.”

  “I got my reasons.”

  “And face it, there’s no way to know what you’d find back there. Fish in those lakes would be seriously spooky. Never seen bait. Never seen anglers. One bad cast, the whole exercise is wasted. Don’t see another fish all day.”

  “Exactly,” Rusty said. “Extremely spooky. Major challenge.”

  I walked past her and opened the refrigerator.

  “Beer? Rachel ale?”

  “Nothing for me.”

  I opened a Red Stripe and took a seat at the kitchen table. I had a long pull, then nudged the laminated photograph aside and set the bottle down.

  “Okay, it’s tempting,” I said. “Fishing a virgin lake.”

  “Now you’re talking.”

  “But I got my routines. Being on a houseboat for a week, guiding a bunch of jackasses around the wilderness, that’s not my idea of fun.”

  “Goddammit, Thorn.”

  I shook my head.

  “You got your routines,” she said.

  “That’s right.”

  “It’s those goddamn routines that’re killing you.”

  Rusty cut her eyes away. She hadn’t meant to go that far. She clamped her lips and looked at the doorway to the living room, the escape route.

  “Never mind. Forget it. I’ll find somebody else.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean, ‘killing me’?”

  She gave her head one small shake. Finished talking.

  “You been listening to Sugarman, haven’t you? That’s what he told you, that I’m withering up, dying. Entropy, a closed system, nothing new coming in the door, I’m starving emotionally. That’s his bullshit, isn’t it?”

  “He’s worried about you, Thorn. We all are. You’re hunkered down in your bunker, or monastery, whatever the hell it is. Months since you been off your property. You’re hiding, Thorn, suffocating. I mean, yeah, I know some ugly shit’s come your way. So you retreated and here you are. Making a few dozen flies a day, watching the sun come up, watching it go down. Pretty soon the windows will be plastered over, and you’ll be eating nothing but pizza or what-ever food they can slide under the door.”

  I looked down at the sparkle of condensation ringing my beer.

  “What if I’m happy with things just like they are?”

  “Are you? I remember a different Thorn. A funny guy, lots of friends. Some hilarious nights.”

  “I can’t believe it. You and Sugar, double-teaming me.”

  “Somebody’s got to kick your butt, get you out in the sun-light.”<
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  I took another look at the photo. All those hours she’d spent flying over the Glades in a small plane, all that labor. But it had been worth it. Now she could introduce her clients to waters that had never been fished. Sixty, seventy miles as the crow flies from downtown Miami was an unexplored wilderness, a place about as inaccessible as any on earth.

  “Give me one trip,” Rusty said. “A week out of your life. It doesn’t pan out, big deal. You come back to your monastery, I find somebody else. Right now the boat is half done. They’ve got the hull complete, they’re framing the interior and exterior walls, then the trusses for the second level. Exterior skin gets riveted on, windows cut and installed, then the electric and plumbing goes in. Five baths, nine cabins. Completion date: early December. By January, assuming we can rustle up four paying customers, we take our first trip. Hack our way into a couple of those lakes. See how spooky the fish are.”

  I shook my head. “Thanks, Rusty. But this isn’t for me.”

  She stood up, looked at me for several seconds, then rolled up the laminated photograph and slid it back into the cardboard tube. She walked out of the kitchen without a word and made it halfway across the living room before turning and coming back.

  “Let me ask you something, Thorn.”

  I was silent. I looked out toward the lagoon, my fly-tying bench, the glow of the lightbulb, the whirl of insects.

  “Go ahead. Ask your question.”

  She waited a moment more, staring at me hard.

  “Can you remember the last time you blazed a new trail? Did something fresh, something totally new?”

  I looked at her but said nothing.

  “Think about it,” she said, then turned and left.

  I did. I thought about it. For weeks I thought about nothing else.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Six months later, on a January afternoon, I was kneeling on the rear deck of Rusty’s brand-new houseboat, gashing my knuckles against the razory flanges of the water purifier, trying to get the cranky machine into working order. The air was still chilly from the cold front that had passed through earlier that week. The sky was peeled open, exposing its most perfect blue.

  Three days earlier from the rooftop of the houseboat, I’d watched thunderheads gather in the northwest as a trough of brisk Canadian air muscled up against the sultry Florida atmosphere. All that morning it grew like a vicious bruise, until at noon the heavens hemorrhaged and a downpour like none we’d seen for months drenched the Upper Keys for most of the day.

  Next day, with lows in the forties, my fingers were stiff and toes icy, and the sunlight was so astringent my face grew chapped and took on a ruddy glow. I hauled out a musty sweatshirt and traded my shorts for jeans and brewed pot after pot of coffee just to warm my hands on the mug.

  For two days the chill lasted, but now the old marine smells were returning, those lush sulfurous gases rising from the tidal flats and the shadowy waters within the mangroves, the sweet rot of barnacles and spawning shrimp. Hour by hour the air was softening, and the strip of shoreline that had hardened in the cold was turning back to sandy slush. All of it was another reminder of what rude changes regularly race in off the sea. How vulnerable we are on our outcropping of rock, how fully exposed.

  It was three in the afternoon and our first two anglers, John Milligan and his daughter, Mona, were due at any moment. Instead of mixing them a welcoming cocktail like a proper host, I was on my knees with my arm poked into the bowels of that water purifier. Before we could set off on our seven-day cruise into the wilderness, I had to get the thing up to speed. I was hoping that could be accomplished by replacing yet again one of its micron filters that was clogged with flecks of broken shell, stringy seaweed, and other rank emulsions of the sea.

  The water maker was crucial hardware. Twelve thousand bucks, the size of a small refrigerator. Using a high-pressure pump, it forced seawater through a series of ever finer cylindrical filters, and after cleaning and recleaning the water, the machine finally shot the particle-free water through the main membrane at very high pressure, separating out the salt and funneling the waste back into the ocean. Then the salt-free water passed through two more filters, a charcoal one and finally a UV treatment to kill any residual bacteria. The machine was meant to supply all the needs for the six passengers, four of whom were paying several thousand dollars apiece for the angling adventure and would be expecting freshwater from their shower heads.

  Ever since the houseboat had been delivered in December, Rusty and I had been dealing with dozens of glitches, large and small. Breakdowns in the heat pumps and the 15KW Westerbeke generators, shorts inside the wiring harnesses and more shorts in the anchor windless, and plugs and fuses flickering or just going dark. The sewage processor broke down, too, and now the reverseosmosis water maker was falling far short of delivering the 800 gallons per day the manufacturer promised. The Mothership, as we called her, was one complicated vessel, and I was sure our maiden voyage was about to expose a whole new array of gremlins.

  When I finally snapped the micron filter into its slot, I smoothed its gasket back into the groove. With the socket wrench I tightened the plate and looked up at the sound of a small plane circling overhead.

  It was a bright yellow seaplane with bright aluminum pontoons. A Cessna, single-engine, four-seater. The 185 Sky-wagon, a favorite of Alaskan bush pilots and the barefoot buckaroos who did the run from Key West to the Dry Tortugas three times a day. The Cessna circled overhead then came in for a long smooth landing about two hundred yards east.

  For the last half hour Rusty had been idling nearby, awaiting the plane’s arrival. I watched her scoot across the shallows to meet up with our guests.

  Minutes later she was heading across the light chop toward our vessel. Standing next to Rusty was a tall man with wide shoulders. From a couple of phone conversations with the gentleman, Rusty had learned only that Milligan and his daughter lived upstate on the Gulf coast, that he was an avid fisherman and had found Rusty’s houseboat venture on an Internet search. His personal check in the full amount arrived a few weeks back and cleared just fine, and his reservation was set.

  The other couple who would share the houseboat for the week were arriving later in the day. Shortly after Milligan booked his trip, Rusty got a call from Annette Gordon, a writer for Out There magazine doing a feature on luxury adventure vacations. She was in her late twenties, a New Yorker, and was bringing along one of the magazine’s staff photographers, a guy named Holland Green. Rusty was thrilled. Great free promotion. Annette hadn’t even asked for a reduced rate. She’d done travel writing all over the world: New Zealand, South America, the Seychelles, Tibet. Rusty thought she sounded low-maintenance, the kind who made it her goal to slip into the background.

  As Rusty cut the wheel to dodge a final sandbar, Milligan raised a hand in greeting and I waved back. He looked to be in his middle sixties and just past six feet tall, and even from thirty yards away I could tell he had the shoulders-back, flat-belly physique of a man of high confidence. He wore a red golf shirt that showed off his broad shoulders and the kind of swollen arms I’ve always associated with one who dug a great many postholes as a boy, strength he’d earned through backbreaking labor in the sun.

  Rusty slowed and the boat dropped off plane. Perched on the padded ice chest in front of the console was Mona Milligan. She wore a white fleecy sweatshirt and black jeans, and her auburn hair ran wild in the breeze, tossing like a warning flag as the boat muttered toward the stern platform where I waited.

  I tied off the bow line, then leaned over the loading platform to help our first two guests aboard.

  Mona looked at my outstretched hand, then met my eyes and held them as she took hold of a bow rail and hauled her-self aboard without assistance. Milligan shrugged an apology to me then held out a big paw. I heaved him up, and while he still held my hand, he gave it a firm how-do-you-do.

  “Good to meet you, Daniel. Or do they call you Oliver?”

  As
his words registered, a cold weight shifted within my chest. The man looked at me steadily with a slender smile as though we shared a delicious secret. If I’d followed my instincts, I would’ ve shoved him backward into the choppy sea and hauled the anchor and set out toward the horizon, leaving him to swim the half mile back to shore.

  “What’s wrong, Daniel? You look ill.” A goading tone.

  The blood tightened in my veins.

  “My name is Thorn,” I said.

  “Whatever you like,” he said, holding to his smile.

  As Rusty handed Milligan his duffel and the rest of his gear, I gave him a careful look. Plainly he was an outdoors-man from the melanoma-be-damned school, for the flesh around the open collar of his shirt was as charred as a steak forgotten on the grill. His mustache was barbered so primly it gave his rugged features an air that was faintly unsavory. An echo of Clark Gable as a riverboat gambler. A man who could damn well deal from the bottom of the deck if the spirit moved him.

  Rusty gave me a chastising glance and pushed past me to show the Milligans to their staterooms. My bad manners were already disheartening her. I stood on the rear deck and took careful breaths while I stared out to sea.

  It was true my given name was Daniel Oliver. Son of Elizabeth and Quentin Thorn. Born in a hospital in Home-stead, Florida, rushed home by my parents in the first twenty-four hours of my life so by local custom I would be officially pronounced a Conch—a title bestowed on those lucky enough to be born in the Florida Keys.

  A Conch I was, a Conch I remained. Hard shell, gristly meat, trundling across the floors of silent seas.

  Though everyone knew me as Thorn, more than once in private I’d spoken the words Daniel Oliver aloud to see how they sounded on my lips. It was a name with some special meaning to my parents, but it was a cipher I’d not broken. I would never know its origin, for my father and mother died in a car crash on the way home from the hospital, a collision that through some supernatural physics their baby boy survived.