Hell's Bay

by James W. Hall

For a half mile they plowed up a trench of mud and dinged the hell out of the propeller, but in the end they made it to the safety of the Broad River. Then sat for a while floating in the deep channel, whooping with relief.

  In her mind it was fresh as yesterday. Smell of the salt spray, her father’s beer breath, the baloney and mayo in their white bread sandwiches, fish slime on her hands. Sasha learned the ways of men up close, watching him as he decided what risks to take. Her father made no allowances for her being a girl. She knew full well he’d wished for a son, and Sasha tried with all her might to satisfy that desire.

  Cruising along in the flashy yellow boat, Sasha could have spent all day picking through the bones of those happy hours, but Grif hauled her back.

  “Are those second thoughts I’m seeing in your eyes?”

  She shook her head. “Baloney sandwiches,” she said. “Me and your grandpa fishing.”

  “That time on the Nightmare when you nearly got stranded?”

  “That time, yeah. How’d you know?”

  “Mama, you only got about three stories.”

  Grif dragged in a gurgling breath and leaned over the side and spat, using his body to block her view of the bloody spume. Trying to spare her.

  It was months since the chemo doctor called it quits, but Griffin was hanging on with grim resolve. For weeks, his every inhalation was a gasp. Stridor was its medical name. The concluding stages of his cancer. Death clock ticking down.

  Since Christmas, his fingers were clubbed, the tips swollen. He fumbled with knife and fork, was hamfisted in the simplest acts. Worse than any of that, worse even than the ice-pick stabs in chest and spine, was the dyspnea. Air hunger. Her boy was slowly suffocating on his own swelling tissues.

  Sasha cut the throttle to neutral, came to his side, but Griffin waved her back. He could handle it. Needed to do this on his own.

  He settled his butt against the console, puckered his lips, drew air through his nose, whistled it out through his crimped mouth the way the Sarasota doctor showed him. He rotated his shoulders. Relaxing his muscles, struggling to loosen the vise crushing his chest.

  Sasha stepped back behind the wheel and looked away, giving him what privacy was possible on their small boat.

  Rippling across the bay, a dawn breeze stirred an island of mangroves in the east, a breeze as lush as the rising light, as serene and hushed as a lullaby. The oxygen-rich flood teased the bay into ripples and briefly lifted Sasha’s heavy black hair from her shoulders.

  Fresh crisp air. Though to Griffin, choking and coughing, it might just as well have been the black fumes of burning tires.

  “I may need to take a rest,” he said.

  She cut the engine, unrolled his sleeping bag on the deck, and made a pillow from a flowered bath towel. Griffin eased down. Lately, each time he drifted into a nap, she worried this would be the sleep that lasted.

  He smiled at her, blew her a kiss, held her eyes for a second, then settled into a fetal curl.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  At half past eight, Annette and Holland were still loading their bulky gear into Rusty’s skiff, when Mona, John, and I pushed off from the Mothership.

  I was wearing khaki shorts and my lucky shirt. A blue cotton button-down I’d inherited from Doctor Bill. His ini-tials were embroidered on the cuffs. He’d worn it on Sundays or holidays when his hair was spruced and his face shaved and he intended to make a good impression. The shirt had grown threadbare and mostly hung in my closet, but I wore it that morning as my private nod to the stern old gentleman who raised me. And to Kate, his wife, my adoptive mother— for those two were my real folks, the ones who’d spent the hours and offered caring words to guide my way—not this newfound family whose blood had come to me from some reckless mingling I had no inkling of.

  John Milligan took a seat on the bench beside me, and Mona perched on the padded ice chest. Neither had anything to say. They chose their places and looked out at the still water, the lazy drifts of herons and egrets and cormorants, and they waited silently as I cast off the mooring lines and started the engine. Though they’d behaved sociably enough at break-fast, they kept their distance from each other. Now, sitting only an arm’s length apart, it was clear there was tension, the clinging afterburn of high emotion.

  As I idled to a safe distance from the Mothership before hitting the throttle, Milligan turned to me.

  “So where we headed?”

  “Those lakes I showed you on the photographic chart.”

  “What are their names?”

  Mona craned around to look at the two of us.

  “If it has a name,” I said, “I’m not much interested in going there.”

  He nodded sagely and was about to reply, but I flattened the throttle and the sixty-horse Yamaha thrust us forward, pitched up the bow, and in twenty feet we hopped up on plane and were skimming the flat morning waters that were gray and sleek with a faint mist hanging like ancient smoke around the distant mangroves.

  I kept the gas full open, going faster than I would ordinarily, faster than would be considered polite. Too fast to talk above the roar of the wind and the flapping clothes.

  We had nearly an hour’s ride back out the Shark River into Ponce de Leon Bay, then north along the coast past Harney River and the Broad. And I’d decided the best way to handle that long stretch of time alone with my newfound family was to proceed in flat-out silence.

  The aged mangroves along the western shore had grown as tall as twenty-year oaks, and all of them along the water-line were solidly brown, dead or dying, blasted by Lance, last summer’s category 4 hurricane, which had churned into the Gulf of Mexico and sat for a day over this shallow portion of the Florida Bay. They were tough, resilient plants, and sometimes hurricanes brought new life to mangrove forests by supplying them with a large dose of freshwater. But it wasn’t clear yet if these mangroves and the buttonwoods scattered among them would survive the blow, or if it would take years for the new growth to spread from within the marshes to push their dead elders out of the way and reclaim this area with the green and vibrant look it usually had. It might stay brown forever as far as anyone knew.

  For miles the devastation stretched along the shoreline until we reached the wide mouth of the Broad River and turned east into its ample expanse. Inside the river channel the mangroves were still green and flourishing, for this area had been considerably less exposed to the hundred-mile-an-hour lashing of that storm.

  Mangrove leaves were the cornerstone of the food chain for the region. An acre of mangrove forest shed around four tons of leaves per year. Because the tree is an evergreen, its leaves fell steadily through the twelve-month cycle. That constant supply of decomposing vegetation was broken down by protozoan and bacteria in the brackish water, and the nutrients released became an organic stew of minerals, carbon dioxide, and nitrogenous waste, which in turn provided the food source for worms, snails, crabs, and finger mullet. Those creatures were born and developed to adolescence back in the safe nursery within the mangrove mangle. When they left the protection of the forest, they became the prey for the larger game fish we were seeking that day—tarpon, snook and redfish, sea trout. Ospreys, bald eagles, sharks, and even dolphins also depended on those same crabs and schools of mullet that were a step up the food chain from mangrove leaves.

  Mangrove roots acted as filters. Without them skimming out the sediment runoff created by heavy rains inland, the turbidity of the water in the Gulf and around the coral reefs of the Keys would grow so milky that marine life of various kinds, including the reefs themselves, would be in even greater peril than they already were.

  Those simple trees, with salt-filtering roots and salt-excreting leaves, were a crucial resource, buffering the land from storms, year by year setting out new roots and expanding the boundaries of the islands and coastlines they protected. To the untrained eye they seemed humble, barely more than weeds, no bright flowers, no towering branches. Simply a dense tangle of slick brown limbs and shi
ny green leaves.

  Mangroves were the forests of my youth. They were my sequoias and my hemlocks and my giant sugar maples. Scrubby vegetation, unlovely, nothing awe-inspiring about them, mangrove forests were frequently thought to be dismal wastelands, mosquito-breeding habitats with no useful purpose. As with much of the Everglades, a sensitive eye was required. Any fool could stand at the rim of the Grand Canyon and experience awe. But the majesty of those low-lying, unvarying mangrove-lined estuaries and bays was far quieter and harder to grasp, which was one of the many reasons why the ever-growing legions of newcomers to the state were so dangerous.

  To have an unobstructed view of blue waters, those idiots were eager to raze the lowly mangroves, to call in the bull-dozers and dredges and hack them away. Though it was illegal to destroy those crucial trees, in the rare instances a developer was actually caught and fined a few thousand dollars, most of them considered the penalty simply part of the cost of providing their clients a million-dollar vista.

  As we entered the Broad River, pelicans and great blue herons broke loose from their perches and circled away from our unnatural racket. When we were safely past, they floated back to their watchtowers in the highest branches of that primordial forest. Our wake sloshed into the warren of roots, agitating the alluvial silt and the rich brew of decomposing vegetation, no doubt jostling whole communities of organisms into radical readjustments, exposing some, hiding others, initiating some new challenge in their never-ending struggle for survival.

  The sky was still polished to a faultless blue from the re-cent cold front, and the air blasting into my face was so oxygen-rich I felt light-headed.

  Inside the console, the laminated photographic chart was tucked into the webbed pocket, but I doubted I’d need to consult it. I’d spent so many hours tracing the intricate maze of bays and tributaries, creeks and snaking waterways, each twist and jog of the journey was imprinted into my long-term memory banks.

  We were heading directly toward the southernmost tip of mainland Florida, but it was our intention to push as far northward as the winding waterways would allow. Where the water dropped from two feet to one foot, then inch by inch gave way to the muck, then the hard-packed marl and lime-stone of terra firma.

  Just as the Broad River was narrowing to a few dozen feet across, I swung the wheel and carved a sharp path through the tranquil morning water southward, then swung east into the Wood River. The lakes I’d chosen to explore were a few miles east up the Wood. There were no markers back there, no dramatic turns I could use to measure off the distance to the hidden creek that appeared on the photographic chart to be the only possible entry point. So from this moment on, I had to count down each kink in the river’s path and measure them against the image in my head, because I suspected that at water level the creek mouth would be all but obscured by mangrove branches.

  John Milligan was gazing around at the scenery, his expression set in a solemn pose, as though even he, a man not easily impressed, could not help being stirred by the primal vibrations of the wilds we were passing through.

  Mona, dressed in jeans and a long-sleeve white T-shirt, stared forward, her hair whipping around her face. She made no effort to rein it in, seemingly content to take the full blast of our forty-mile-an-hour clip.

  That brush she gave my hip last night came back to mind. A gesture more intimate and bold than the rest of her self-absorbed behavior, as though she’d been seeking a connection with me, an alliance she couldn’t bring herself to admit any other way. I watched her hair twist and snarl in the wind and wondered for the dozenth time what the hell I’d gotten myself into by leaving the safety of my house and my quiet routines.

  For months I had been hankering for this day. In all my debates and calculations about making this foray into un-charted waters, I’d tried to weigh the effect of sharing such a rousing experience with complete strangers. I knew that hav-ing others aboard would be, at the very least, a distraction— that it might even blunt the pleasure in some major way, just as it might also, given a lucky break and the right companions, give the whole experience an added dimension. But I had not factored in the possibility that I would be escorting members of my own newly discovered family—people whose motives for joining this expedition seemed to lie somewhere between murky and treacherous.

  I counted down the twists in the river’s path, and studied the northern shoreline of the Wood for any break in the density of the mangroves. With my head turned, my left ear out of the wind, I heard an unnatural rumble behind us. I cut the engine back to idle, and as we lurched to a halt, I turned to peer back down the river.

  “What is it?” Milligan followed my gaze.

  At the last turn we’d rounded, through the dense screen of roots and branches, there was a flash of yellow. Then the low, sleek hull shot past the jutting mangrove roots and around the sharp bend.

  “We have company.”

  As the boat came into our stretch of river, it dropped off plane and its huge wake died away behind it, the waves over-taking the boat and crashing into the mangroves we’d just passed.

  A tall woman was at the wheel. Dark black hair braided and tucked down the front of her clothes. White-skinned and lean, she wore black wraparound shades and a green camouflage hunting jacket and jeans and sported a red baseball cap.

  Running across other anglers this far back in the Glades was rare but not unheard of. A woman alone, however, was another thing. I’d seen it only once—a cast-iron cracker from Chokoloskee or Everglades City making the long run into the vast national park, intent on packing her ice chest beyond the legal limit with snook and reds. Later on she’d be selling her illicit catch out of the back of her pickup on the shoulder of Tamiami Trail.

  Any encounter in such isolated spots generated heightened suspicion. The chance for menace was greater, and the vigilance was more acute than it would be closer to civilization. This far into nowhere, when two strangers met, a rank, animal tension always filled the air.

  And because I was so near the turn into our fishing hide-away, I had an even greater desire to make no lingering contact with this woman. A polite nod would do.

  As she approached, I made that nod, but the stranger did not return it. She continued idling in our direction without a break in her posture.

  I recognized the brand of boat as a cheaply made fiber-glass craft used to chase bass and corral them in the back bays of freshwater lakes. It was fitted out with an electric trolling motor mounted on the bow and a flip-up seat for the lazy beer-drinking crowd. The boat appeared to be brand-new, and I saw there were no Florida registration numbers affixed to its hull. A second after that I noted that the rod holders were empty.

  I turned the wheel and nudged the throttle to give her more room to pass. The raven-haired woman took off her sun-glasses and set them on the console, then fixed her gaze on us, moving her eyes from my face to John Milligan’s then on to Mona’s. Studying each of us, then returning to me.

  She kept her focus on my face as she coasted not five feet off our starboard rail. During the instant she passed abreast, I felt something like the crackle of current, black and invisible, arc across the narrow gap between us. My neck hair bristled and something in my chest rotated off-center. Our skiff seemed to rock out of all proportion to the wake that swelled under it, as though this woman had momentarily disrupted the force field that governed our small corner of the planet.

  In silence the Milligans and I stared back at her, and when she’d passed ten feet beyond our boat, the woman fitted her sunglasses back in place and mashed her throttle. The heavy boat shot forward and lifted her up onto the slick steel-gray surface. She traveled not more than fifty feet before she veered the bass boat close to the right side of the mangrovelined waterway and executed a tight U-turn, then came roaring back toward us.

  There were only a few seconds to react. I swung the wheel sharply to the right and gunned forward, but there was no way I could dodge her speeding craft if her intent was to ram us hea
d-on.

  But she did not. She skimmed past our port side not more than an arm’s length away and her wake splashed high and doused us all. She kept her eyes trained on the river before her until the boat fishtailed around the bend and was gone.

  “What the hell was that?” Milligan brushed water from his face.

  “Who knows,” I said. “Maybe a warning, something ter-ritorial. People in these parts can be very protective of their fishing holes.”

  Mona stood up and came around the console. Her shirt and jeans were sopping and ribbons of seawater seeped from her hairline and ran down her face like steam-room sweat.

  In the confusion, I’d failed to monitor our position and the skiff had swung around and the bow was stabbing into the mangroves. Branches scraped the hull and swatted at the console, and one poked Mona in the back and made her yelp.

  I reversed the prop and backed us on a hard angle toward the center of the waterway. Ten feet out, as we swung around, I saw it—the opening in the dense growth I’d been looking for—that elusive entrance to the ancient stream that led back to the three joined lakes.

  At the mouth, just as the aerial photo had shown, there was a slight indentation in the undergrowth. Oddly, the opening had been more discernible from a speeding plane several hundred feet in the air than from where I stood, twenty yards away at water level.

  “What kind of weapon do you carry?” Milligan asked.

  I pulled a clean towel from my waterproof duffel and handed it to Mona. A smile crinkled the corners of her lips. Good humor getting the better of her for the moment. Then she turned away to scrub the water from her hair.

  “Don’t tell me you come out here in the boondocks unarmed?”

  “This is a national park,” I said. “No firearms allowed.”

  “Not even on the houseboat? Nothing?”

  I held his fuming gaze for a moment, then stepped back to the wheel.

  “A woman in a passing boat has you spooked? She splashes you and you’re ready to start shooting?”