Tourist Season (52 page)

They found the trail and, ten minutes later, the mooring where the outboard was anchored. The tide was up so they had to wade, skating their feet across the mud and turtle grass. Jenna lost her footing and slipped down, without a word, into the shallows. Keyes grabbed her under one arm, Kara Lynn got the other. Together they hoisted her into the boat.

The engine was stone cold.

With trembling fingers Keyes turned the key again and again. The motor whined and coughed but wouldn’t start.

“You flooded it,” Kara Lynn said. “Let it sit for thirty seconds.”

Keyes looked at her curiously but did what he was told. The next time he turned the key, the Evinrude roared to life.

“Dad’s got a ski boat,” Kara Lynn explained. “Happens all the time.”

Keyes jammed down the throttle and the Mako chewed its way off the flat, churning marl and grass, planing slowly. Finally it found deeper water, flattened out and gained speed. Already the rim of purple winter sky was turning yellow gold.

“How much time?” Jenna asked numbly.

“Three, four minutes,” Keyes guessed.

They had to circle Osprey Island to reach the marked channel that would take them to safety.

‘‘Brian!” Jenna blurted, pointing.

Keyes jerked back on the stick until the engine quit. The boat coasted in glassy silence, a quarter-mile off the islet. They all stared toward the stand of high pines.

“Oh no,” Kara Lynn said.

Keyes was incredulous.

Jenna said, “Boy, he never gives up.”

Skip Wiley was in the trees.

He was dragging himself up the tallest pine, branch by branch, the painstaking, web-crawling gait of a spider. How with a smashed leg Wiley had climbed so high was astonishing. It was not a feat of gymnastics so much as a show of reckless nerve. He hung in the tree like a broken scarecrow; ragged, elongated, his limbs bent at odd angles. From a distance his skull shone three-toned—the russet beard; the jutting tanned face; the alabaster pate. In one hand was Tommy Tigertail’s red bandanna—Wiley was waving it back and forth and shrieking at the top of his considerable lungs; plangent gibberish.

“Brian, he wants us to come get him!”

“No,” Keyes said, “that’s not it.”

It was sadder than that.

The object of Wiley’s expedition was perched at the top of the forty-foot pine. With its keen and faultless eyes it peered down at this demented, blood-crusted creature and wondered what in the world to do. As Skip Wiley advanced, he brayed, flailed his bright kerchief, shattered branches—but the great predator merely blinked and clung to its precious fish.

“He’s trying to save the eagle,” Brian Keyes said. “He’s trying to make the eagle fly.”

“God, he is,” said Kara Lynn.

“Fly,” Jenna murmured excitedly. “Fly away, bird!”

“Oh please,” Kara Lynn said.

That is how they left him—Skip Wiley ascending, insectine, possessed of an unknowable will and strength; the eagle studying him warily, shuddering its brown-gold wings, weighing a decision.

Brian Keyes turned the ignition and the boat shot forward in a widening arc. The Mako was very fast, and Osprey Island receded quickly in the slick curling seam of the speedboat’s wake. Within minutes they were far away, safe, but none of them dared to look back.

Off the bow, at the horizon, the sun seeped into a violet sky.

Somewhere out on Biscayne Bay, a flat red barge emitted three long whoops of warning, the most dolorous sound that Brian Keyes had ever heard. He clung to the wheel and waited.
“
Fly!” he whispered.
“
Please fly away.”