Hell's Bay (11 page)

Replenishing our provisions would require a two-hour boat ride back to the public ramps at Flamingo; then, assuming I could hitch a ride, it was at least another hour to a decent food market. A six-hour round-trip. It was possible some of the food he'd just prepared would keep for tomorrow's breakfast or a meal later in the day. But even then we would be stretched impossibly thin.

The fishing on this trip was supposed to be catch and release, but now we'd have to reconsider that—possibly do a little meat fishing. Or else cut the whole expedition short by several days.

I was running through the choices when Rusty entered.

She surveyed the feast, walking quietly through the galley, past the bar, circling the long table for eight that was jammed with food. Nodding her head, saying nothing. I saw her swallow a couple of times as she made the same calculations I'd just made.

“Thorn,” she said. “Could you blow reveille and get every-body up? I'd like to be on the water by eight.”

“And this?”

She gazed around at the food and smiled.

“I'm having a mushroom omelet with cheese grits and bacon,” she said. 'And those fruit pastries look yummy. Better get our anglers out here before I eat this all up.”

But when she looked at me, her eyes were not as nonchalant as her words, silently acknowledging that we'd have to make radical adjustments to our plans, but now was not the time to sort it out. Her concern for her brother's state of mind trumped all practicalities. It was a transaction she must have made a thousand times over the years, and it came so naturally to her, the empathy and forgiveness, the flexibility in the face of disaster, that I felt a rush of admiration for her that stirred some echo of the passion we shared long ago.

I rapped on each cabin door and woke the others, and in twenty minutes they'd assembled in the galley and were digging into the banquet. Fortunately every one of our group was a breakfast eater, and Teeter was right about appetites being stimulated out on the water. Still, even though we did our best, and John Milligan and Holland both had seconds and I managed thirds on the scrambled eggs, we barely put a dent in all that food.

The tensions of the night before had cooled, and every-one, even Mona, complimented Teeter on his extraordinary culinary creations. An unpracticed smile surfaced on Teeter's lips that was touching in its awkwardness. As it was to turn out, that meal would be the last festive occasion we would enjoy.

 

“Hell's Bay is back that way. Real shallow, but damn good fishing.” Sasha waved eastward, then motioned north. “Camp Lonesome's over there. Not really a camp, just a chickee at the end of a little narrow dock.”

Griffin nodded, then his eyes followed the flight of a great blue heron, but he said nothing. He'd been quiet for the last hour. Now and then a hacking cough convulsed his emaciated frame, and always there was the wet rattling in his chest. His eyes were the faint gray of rain. They were working the distances like he was searching for some truth hidden in the dawn light or the patches of mist edging the mangroves.

Sasha had been taking it slow, just fast enough to keep the boat on plane, giving Griffin the tour. No reason to hurry. They'd used the ramp at Flamingo, motored up the Wilderness Waterway into Coot Bay, then took Tarpon Creek into Whitewater Bay, that big sprawling expanse with mangrove islands in every direction. The GPS was set, red arrow steering them toward the coordinates.

 

25 degrees 17′ 17″ N Latitude
80 degrees 59′ 35″ W Longitude

 

About a half hour away.

Their craft was a yellow Skeeter with a 150-horse Merc outboard, twenty-footer, about a ten to eleven-inch draft, fifteen hundred pounds, maybe as much as seventeen hundred. Brand-new. On open water, a vessel like that would fly, out-run most flats boats and backcountry skiffs. But Sasha knew it wasn't the ideal boat for the super-shallow waters of the Everglades. A backcountry skiff was half the weight of the Skeeter and could float fine in only four or five inches of water.

But this heavy rig was the best she could find in the boat dealership she'd broken into last night. The Skeeter would have to do.

She had charts and the GPS and a fair recollection of that part of the Glades. Twenty-five years earlier, she and her daddy spent a full week working the creeks and coves out there. Sasha, in her early teens, trying like hell to earn the old man's respect. They'd made the same drive down from Summerland, west across Tamiami Trail, then south on High-way 27 to Florida City, then another hour to the Flamingo ramp, where they put their jon boat in. They'd stayed over in the cabins at the national park. Fished all day, swatted mosquitoes all night. Her father drinking beer, shooting the breeze with the other fishermen, flirting with their wives and girl-friends.

Most memorable moment of that trip was her dad taking her across these same bays up to where the Broad River branched east, then cutting south down a narrow fork into a creek known as the Nightmare, which was navigable only during high tide.

Back then the name was scary to her. Going up a river that could drain away beneath you at low tide and leave you stranded atop a hill of muck and squirming creatures was creepier still. Lose track of time, you could be stuck out there all night, feasted on by mosquitoes, stalked by gators and snakes of every poisonous kind.

“If there ain't no risk,” her father liked to say, “can't be no reward.”

One afternoon when her dad was reeling fish after fish into the boat, Sasha sat watching the tide ebb, but didn't say a thing for fear of seeming a girl·y worrywart. Finally her father looked around, threw his rod down, cursed, and grabbed for the crank cord, yanked it half a dozen times, and got only a sputter from the outboard. Sasha felt the terror rise but fought it.

When her old man finally had the motor roaring, the small tributary was turning to solid marsh.

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.

 

 

 

 

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 shiny green leaves.