I dropped the lift, turned on the batteries, and ran the blowers while I made sense of the instrument panel—which looked more like a fighter jet than an expensive pleasure boat.
I punched the start button and all three engines roared to life then returned to a low hum and rumble characteristic of over fifteen hundred horsepower. Minutes later, Steady emerged on the dock leading a slow-walking, unstable, cloaked person clinging to his arm. She wore jeans and a dark, long-sleeved T-shirt. He and she stepped into the boat. She descended into the cabin, closing the door behind her. He whispered, “Cut the lights and you two ease out of here.”
My head jerked. “What do you mean, ‘you two’?”
“Security saw me enter. They need to see me leave. Otherwise, I may have to answer questions I can’t answer.”
“But—?”
He waved me off. “Pick me up at the Spear.”
“The what?”
He frowned. Like I should know. He raised both eyebrows. “Piet Hein’s Spear.”
Yeah, I did know the spot.
I eased us out of the slip, through the marina, and into the open water and total darkness of Biscayne Bay—my navigational screen and GPS serving as my guide. I had no idea what I would say if she emerged from her cabin but luckily I didn’t have to figure that out. At least not yet.
We crossed Biscayne Bay, west of the Seaquarium, then turned south where the dark shadow of Biscayne National Park appeared on our port side followed by the lights of the Old Dixie Highway and the Card Sound Bridge. Her cabin door never opened and she made no sound—least not that I could hear over the hum of the engines. The Card Sound Bridge is a toll bridge that hovers sixty-five feet above the water, connecting Florida City to North Key Largo. I have some experience with the bridge and the view from this perspective—from the water up—was strange. It looked taller than I remembered.
The granite obelisk of the memorial, or Piet Hein’s Spear, rose up above the trees on my left. Just past it sat the dock that allowed boat access to the memorial. I nosed the bow of the boat up to the platform, where a white-clothed figure stood smoking a pipe. With surprising agility, Steady stepped in and then hung his arm inside mine.
Wasting no time, I reversed and began easing out into open water. I realized running without lights was in violation of most every law that governs nighttime watercraft use but I doubted if anyone could catch us and if they did I had no intention of still being aboard. I throttled up and planed out. No wind, and glassy water, meant that sixty miles an hour had never felt so smooth. Comfortable inside the pocket of air created by the windshield in front of me, I probed Steady. “How’d you know so much about this boat?”
“She donated a ride in a fund-raiser for the new parish hall. Part of the silent auction.” He made quotation marks with his fingers. “ ‘Buy a hundred-and-twenty-mile-an-hour boat ride with a celebrity.’ It brought a lot of money. Helped us finish the building. She let me tag along.”
I glanced back in the direction of the parking lot. “What about the van?”
“I’ll send someone to pick it up.”
To the north, Sky Seven still sat lit up like the Taj Mahal. “And the letter?”
“Left it alone.”
I looked at him. My surprise showing.
He said, “Throwing away that letter doesn’t change what it says or the person that wrote it. She’s going to have to deal with it sooner or later.”
“What if somebody else finds it first? Like the vultures parked out front.”
“You really think that matters?”
I rarely questioned Steady. “You sure you’re not playing God?”
He paused. Shrugged. Shook his head once. “I hope not.” He looked down at the cabin door. “But sometimes, God wears skin.”
We cut across the channel south of the lighthouse at Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park and, given a rising tide, right through the seven remaining renegade structures of Stiltsville—a community of houses that, as its name suggests, are built on stilts and sit some ten feet off the ocean’s surface. At one time there were more than twenty-five weekend homes in a cluster on the flat just south of Key Biscayne but every hurricane to pass through has skimmed a few off the surface. I’ve always admired Stiltsville and the people who built it. Maybe that says a lot about me.
I took us to open water where a southwest wind had flattened the Atlantic. Two- to three-foot swells welcomed us with a rhythmic roll. I turned south-southwest and soon knew when Key Largo was on my starboard side.
We passed Islamorada and Lignumvitae Basin, which led into the Florida Bay. I turned northwest at Long Key, crossed under U.S. 1 at the viaduct and across the southern tip of Florida Bay toward the deeper water and grass flats of the gulf. Without the navigational system, I’d have never made it. Maybe Totch Brown, but not me. The waters of Florida Bay are shallow—averaging zero to three feet—and rife with Buick-size chunks of limestone sitting inches below the surface. Depth charts are essential. I swung wide, taking us around most of it, keeping to deeper water. We serpentined through the deeper channels of Little Rabbit and Carl Ross Key, and into the open water just outside Northwest Cape. At the Shark River, the water deepened, and I pressed the throttle forward and started skimming across the surface at over seventy miles an hour. I looked behind me. A frothy wake spread in the shape of a long Y. I smiled. I’d just done something I’d never done—cut across the southern tip of Florida in about thirty minutes. North of us flowed Marjory Stoneman Douglas’s “river of grass” and the first of the Ten Thousand Islands. If conditions stayed calm, we were ninety miles and less than two hours from home. The drive would not be a straight one as shallow water would force us through more channels only wide enough for one boat. Navigating the flats of the Keys is dicey. On the surface it all looks the same, wide open and inviting. Underneath, it’s anything but. Much like those who live here.
I’d fished this area a lot, and Steady knew it as well if not better than I, but more than one newcomer had sunk his boat because he got overconfident. Local charts are all printed with fine print that says “Local knowledge is essential to successful navigation.” I kept my eyes on the screen and depth gauge.
Given the wind, the water was a sheet of black. Deeper water opened up beneath us and I pushed the throttle forward and trimmed the tabs. Our speed climbed from seventy-two to seventy-seven to eighty-six and finally eighty-nine. We were flying. Yet in a boat that big and heavy it felt like thirty. I wouldn’t want to fish out of it but it danced across the surface of the gulf.
I turned my baseball cap backward and drove in silence—tucked in the vacuum. Steady sat to my left, staring well out beyond the bow. His robes waving in the wind. His lips tight. A wrinkle between his eyes. I don’t know if what Steady was doing—what we were doing—was right or wrong, and I don’t pretend to know what’s best for that poor creature of a woman, but, I will offer this—if God wore skin, I think it’d look a lot like Steady’s.
CHAPTER FIVE
Once in the gulf beyond Shark River, we passed several river mouths, including Lostmans and Chatham. The mouth of the Chatham meant home wasn’t far. Tide was up so we motored across the grass flats at Chatham Bend, beyond Duck Rock, and around to the leeward side of Pavilion Key. Years back, somebody had built a house on stilts that backed up to the mangroves and looked out over the gulf. A great view and great proximity to the fishing, but given that its location sat in the direct path of most every hurricane to pass through, it proved unlivable. Later, it served as a fish camp or trading post for guys like me. As only the twelve barnacled posts remain, the camp did not fare well against the hurricanes, but it did allow safe anchorage for my home on the water, the Gone Fiction.
At three a.m., I came in out of the wind, cut the engine, and tied off the go-fast boat to the stern of mine. The woman was hard asleep so I lifted her off her bed in the cabin and carried her onto my boat and into my cabin where I set her quietly on the bed and pulled the door behind me. Sh
e never stirred. Whether she was acting, or truly asleep, I knew not.
Steady waited for me in the galley, only shrugging when I walked out. Having experienced more personal contact than I had in years, I climbed up on deck, and hung my hammock. Nighttime here is magical. I’ve stood on my roof and watched the shuttle spiral into space, followed satellites in their arc across the sky, and watched Mars creep across the black marble floor of heaven.
The Florida Everglades start as a river flowing south out of Lake Okeechobee, sixty miles wide and a hundred miles long. It flows across a limestone shelf to Florida Bay at the southern end of the state into two parks: Everglades National Park and Big Cypress National Preserve. Together they total 2.22 million acres—the largest roadless area in the U.S. While their map lines are set, their boundaries are somewhat fluid as they’re shaped by water, fire, and man. They flood in the wet season: May to November, where they average five feet of rain a year, followed by drought in the dry months of December to April. The Glades’ most famous spokesperson, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, coined the phrase “river of grass.” The Seminoles called it Pa-hay-okee, or, “grassy water.” And the Spanish called it the “Lake of the Holy Spirit.” The terrain shifts between cypress swamps, mangrove forests, hardwood hammocks, and pine rock land. Some have said it is quite possibly the most primitive wilderness remaining in the lower forty-eight. Maybe. I wouldn’t know how to measure that other than to say that it’s certainly not civil.
I live on the outskirts in the Everglades—beyond the southern tip of Florida—in that magical soup of mangrove keys called the Ten Thousand Islands—a band or swath of trees and roots that grow up off the shallow shelf between the grass and the deep water of the gulf. A place with no beginning and no end. Where the roots of the mangroves weave through the water like interlocking fingers looking for safe purchase, anchoring themselves against the next hurricane.
Both the islands and the Glades are too low to live on except for about forty small oyster-shell island mounds probably built by the Calusa and Tequesta Indians. They range in size from two to twenty feet above sea level and from fifty feet across to a hundred and fifty acres. I’m never far from one of these. The last to live here were the Seminoles—the only Indian nation never to surrender to the U.S. The closest town is Chokoloskee, pronounced “chuck-a-luskee,” which sits eighty miles west of Miami just off Tamiami Trail (U.S. 41). Note: I didn’t say I lived “close.” It’s simply the closest place on the map.
Out here sugarcane grows wild. Along with guavas, sugar apples, oranges, limes, grapefruit, papaya, avocado pears, and hearts of palm—called “swamp cabbage.” Trees are buttonwood, poinciana, and coconut palm. Oysters grow rampant on the roots of mangroves. There’s bear, deer, fox, raccoon, alligator, Burmese pythons, and more birds than most have ever seen. Whip-poor-wills, mourning doves, owls, turkeys, osprey, and eagle are common and plentiful.
Given so much water, I live on two boats. One is home. The other is play. There is a third, but we’ll get to that. Home is a forty-eight-foot trawler built in the 1930s that drafts about three feet. Twin diesels, holds five hundred gallons of gas, four hundred gallons of water, two hundred of propane. If I’m frugal, I can stay gone for months at a time. About nine years ago, I was driving north on U.S. 1 and saw her lying on her side, weathered and rotting in a cow pasture miles from the water or the smell of salt. She had beautiful lines, peeling paint, and a yellowed waterline that spoke of gentle moments spread across the cutwater. Foreign shores. Tropical destinations. I paid the farmer five hundred dollars, hauled it to a warehouse, and spent a year, five thousand hours, and five hundred gallons of sweat turning it back into a faint reflection of her former self. When I got into the hull, I found a picture album and captain’s log wrapped in oilcloth.
In her heyday, the Blue See cut her teeth running from Key West to Cuba chasing marlin and tarpon as a charter boat. The log and accompanying charts gave a detailed history of the men and women who fished her and when, where, and how many and what kind of fish they caught and on what bait. In 1943, the boat was voluntarily taken out of charter service and used by the Navy to spot submarines off the Florida coast. Following her service in the war, she returned to charter service, though this time on the high end. Three of the most notable passengers were Eisenhower, Hemingway, and Zane Grey.
I don’t know what happened to the captain or how his boat ended up in a cow pasture providing shade for Florida cows and rattlesnakes but the last entry read: “November 3, 1969. Starboard engine dead. Port fading fast. Sunset behind me. Been a helluva run. If I had any guts, I’d bury us both at sea where we belong. Seems a shame—the stories this girl could tell.” The farmer said the boat had been in his pasture since he bought it in ’71 and he didn’t know how it got there or anything about the owner. In honor of the captain, and given the boat’s penchant for stories, I renamed her Gone Fiction. Thought maybe he’d like that.
My second boat is where I spend most of my days. A twenty-four-foot Pathfinder called Jody—for reasons that matter to me. If you don’t like to fish, chances are you won’t like this boat—it’s designed by fishermen, for fishermen. By now, she’s well seasoned. I’ve fished her from south Texas, to Louisiana, Key West, the Bahamas, Matanzas Inlet on up to Sea Island and Charleston. But most of the time we find ourselves in the waters of the keys and the Ten Thousand Islands and as a result I’m rarely more than a two- or three-hour boat ride from Miami. The caveat to this is the migration. If the hundred-plus-pound tarpon are schooling in the Matanzas or the waters off Sea Island, well then so are we.
Chasing the fish like this means that I seldom stay in one place for more than a week. There are always more fish to catch and always a better place to do it. Over the years, I’ve caught tens of thousands of fish and learned that if the fish aren’t biting, I’m either not throwing at them what they want to eat or not throwing it in the right spot. Truth is, the fish are always biting. It’s the fisherman who’s wrong, not the fish.
I suppose some may find it strange but I like living in a boat. I have no grass to mow, no property taxes, and no last-known address because it changes every few days. Between selling what I don’t eat, my crab traps, odd jobs for Steady at the church, and boat repair work for cash in Chokoloskee, I manage.
Sunrise found me awake. One leg dangling. Swaying slightly. A book on my chest. My boat is packed with books. Thousands. Stacked up like cordwood. I never met a used bookstore I could live without. On the other hand, I don’t own a TV, read the paper, subscribe to magazines, or listen to the radio, and I’ve only had meaningful conversation with one other person in the last decade. But don’t think me friendless—I have hundreds. All tucked within the pages of these stories.
A breeze washed across me. Not really cool, but not hot either. I climbed out of my hammock and stretched, staring out over the flats into the first glimpse of daylight while one of the ten trillion swamp angels in the Everglades buzzed my ear. I used to swat them. Now they land, suck, gorge, and fly away.
I slid on my flip-flops, and hung my Costa Del Mars around my neck. Sight-casting is awful tough when you can’t see “into” the water. Costas do that. Thinking Steady might be hungry, I grabbed the cast net, and checked it for holes. It took me six months to make the thing so I’m a little particular about mending it. I found two snags and knotted them closed. I hopped in Jody and eased toward faster-moving current in the leeward side of Bonefish Island. The wind in my face, I turned my hat around. Wheel in one hand, throttle in the other, glass all around—it was one of my favorite places—before you… all possibility. All future. Behind you… a deep cut that heals. A quickly forgotten past.
I cut the engine, walked to the bow, studied the surface, and slung the net. The surface popped with bait fish—I caught breakfast in one cast. Four trout feeding on the surface bait. I threw two back.
From the serenity of the water, I returned to the sound of slamming pans and shattering plates. Along with the screaming of a v
ery angry woman. I tied off Jody, hopped downstairs into Gone Fiction, and found my houseguest making a mess of almost everything I owned. Steady was trying to talk her out of her rage and, judging by the pile of broken plates and glasses that surrounded her, not having much effect. She held a frying pan in one hand, interrupted in mid-rant about how she got here, and pointed it at me when I walked in. “And, who is that!”
Steady spoke softly. “He’s the guy that saved your life and drove us here.” He pointed at his feet. “This is his boat.”
This registered in her mind, only serving to douse her anger with more gas so she reared back and launched the pan at me. “Why?” she demanded. It glanced off my shoulder, flew out the cabin door, and splashed behind me. Her face was red and a vein had popped out on her right temple. Her top lip was twitching. She was sweating. “What are you looking at? What do you want?”
She was maybe five and a half feet tall. Distinct features. Large, round, expressive eyes. Her body screamed aerobics, yoga, and Pilates. Julie Andrews meets Audrey Hepburn with a little Sophia Loren and Grace Kelly thrown in for spice and that lady from Terminator, Linda Hamilton, mixed in for spunk and attitude.
I looked at Steady as a plastic plate Frisbee’d past my head followed by a full water bottle. Over the last decade, I’d spent considerable time lining available wall space with shelves and then filling the shelves with books. An old habit. Given the abundance of stories shelved about her, she turned her attention to them. She pulled hardcover editions of The Old Man and the Sea and The Count of Monte Cristo. I didn’t care if she threw every pot, pan, and dish I owned in the water, but those books were another story. She reached back and heaved both at once. I did my best to deflect them. Knocked them to the floor, picked them up, and tucked them safely under my arm. Then I held up my hands in stop-sign fashion. She was reaching for Les Misérables. The sight of raw, blistered, and torn skin on my palms gave her pause. She raised an eyebrow. “What’s wrong with your hands?”