Salty Sky (8 page)

Cale cut down hard over the mangroves and landed with a small splash. The runway he’d chosen led away from the cigarette boat into the middle of the lagoon.

After the plane’s momentum dissipated, he turned and brought the plane slowly back toward the mangroves. There was still no movement on the cigarette boat. There was little wind, and Cale cut the engine and coasted toward the trees. Gonzalez got on the loudspeaker.

“This is the United States Drug Enforcement Agency. We have a plane and patrol boat in the area. We need to come aboard your craft. Please come out and identify yourself.”

There was no response. Maybe it was abandoned or stashed for later. Or perhaps the four Haitians hiding with their Kalashnikovs’ scopes on the plane’s cockpit didn’t understand English.

Thirty yards from the trees, the plane coasted to a stop. No Haitians yet. Cale unbuckled, pulled on a bulletproof vest, grabbed a collapsible bone fishing pole, and opened the door so he could push the plane the rest of the way. When he stepped onto the pontoon, he knew. The smell of a large decaying mammal was unmistakable. They looked anyway. They both threw up. Cale pushed the plane back and waited for the tide to rise and their friends to tow the vessel out. A great industry, the drug trade. You rarely had to worry about retirement benefits.

Seeing today’s floatplane in the sky, the smell came back to him, and bile rose up in his throat. He took his eyes off the sky, cut the Whaler’s wake, slipped past the waiting boats, and went under the bridge. The channel broadened, and he pushed the throttle down. The Whaler planed, and he trimmed the Mercs up. The sun, salt spray, and wind cut Cale’s hangover.

The channel narrowed. The clearance on the next bridge was nineteen feet, and marinas blanketed both banks. The mate on a forty-two-foot Hatteras sport fisher heading north lowered the boat’s antennas to squeeze under the bridge rather than wait for the half-past noon opening. The west bank’s bar was slinging beers, tequila shots, steamed shrimp, and fried fish sandwiches. At the east bank’s, a guitar man entertained the shrimp-and-grits crowd. The fuel docks had boats rafted up and waiting.

Normally, sport fishers plied the inlet separating Harbor Island from the seven miles of uninhabited sand, saw grass, and turtle nests of Masonboro Island. Today, the high seas advisory kept all but the charter fishers docked. Why did someone who got on a boat every third year think an eight-hour trip to the Gulf Stream in high seas would be fun? The wahoo may bite, and if you weren’t chumming the waters, you might reel a few in. You’d get—say—fifteen minutes of excitement over eight hours. Even those lucky few would feel compressed spines the whole drive back to Ohio. Hemingway fished the Caribbean for a reason.

On Masonboro’s west coast, the waters were calm. Runabouts tossed cinder block anchors in the shallows, and their passengers waded in the eighty-degree water. The beaches were covered in canned beers, baseball hats, bikinis, menthols, tattoos, and dogs. In the deeper water, a seventy-two-foot Ferretti with Long Island port of call markings sat at anchor, with midsize local cabin cruisers bobbing on either side. Dance music pounded from its decks, and liquor bottles lined its mid-deck bar.

Cale dropped a hook off the bow. Blake and Van wanted to stay with the Whaler to fish. Phil wanted to explore a bit. Dan and Jay took paddleboards to sweat it out. Barry and Cale grabbed surfboards and headed across the island.

At first sight, the ocean confirmed the buoys’ report: chest- to head-high swells, nicely spaced. The jetty and its turbid water and
bull sharks were a mile north. Cale really didn’t like bull sharks—too much testosterone. Every two hundred yards, a surfer pod gathered past the break. Longboarders, far out, caught open swells, while those on short boards chased fully formed curls closer to shore.

Cale took a board of his own, waded through the whitewater, duck dived a breaker, and paddled into the lineup. Breathing hard, his hangover forgotten, he watched a set form, slipped into position, picked the second wave, waited one-two-three, and paddled. The wave was a left arm break, the board angled down the line, and he rode from the curl onto the face and popped back to the curl. The swell built as the water got shallower, and he got three more turns in before popping over the lip as the break caught him.

The blue sky, consistent waves, no wind, and no chop made ten minutes flow smoothly into an hour, an afternoon. At one point, bobbing in the waves, Cale noticed three bikinis walking on the beach. The tall blonde in the middle looked like she was here to shoot
Sports Illustrated
’s swimsuit issue. The muscles of her long legs flexed with each step. Thin straps connected the triangles of her black bikini, which covered her most private areas and highlighted her fit, tan, feminine figure. An hour later, Cale noticed the girls again coming back up the beach. He rode a wave all the way into the whitewater to get a better look at the goddess. Except for his realization that she was his daughters’ age, the closer look was worth the hard paddle back through the breaking waves.

Barry took his board back to the boat and brought over a surfcaster and a cooler. Pods of surfers left, appeared, and left again. At five, Cale rolled up the leash. His calves were sunburned, his nipples raw, and his elbows aching. His orthopedist had told him he had bursitis in his left elbow. That sounded to him like something you got in middle age. (Kind of like having an orthopedist.) Wincing, Cale pulled off his rash guard, reached past the twenty-five-inch red drum in the cooler, and slipped a can into a koozie.

The low tide had doubled the width of the beach. Three drinks later, the guys headed for the Whaler. A bikinied mom whose kids were with their dad for the weekend floated next to the Whaler in a life jacket, sipping not her first Natural Light of the day. On second glance, Cale recognized Phil floating beside her, hiding underneath a wide-brimmed hat he hadn’t possessed earlier.

Barry asked, “Have you seen the rest of our crew?”

The mom pointed, “Two of your friends went to the big cabin cruiser. I haven’t seen any others.”

Phil climbed aboard the Whaler and grabbed two beers. He asked the mom, “You want a fresh one?”

She climbed aboard for her drink. And sure, she accepted Phil’s offer of a ride to the bar. Which bar? Did it matter? Was it appropriate to be there in just a bikini? Why wouldn’t it be? The place was on the water, after all.

She hollered to her friends. Her younger dental technician coworker—equally lit, less endowed but with a flatter stomach—joined up. The guys whose beers they had consumed all afternoon gave Phil the evil eye.

Barry pulled the anchor onboard. The Whaler’s bow was aground and the passengers moved to the stern to help it release. A wading Phil pushed the bow. Cale trimmed the engines down, reversed the props, and the sand released. Phil wallowed aboard, head and belly first, his legs kicking in the air. He scraped his way across the bow.

Six boats were rafted to the Ferretti. Several liquor bottles now rolled empty on the deck. Bronzed and burned skin was everywhere. Girls in bikinis or Daisy Dukes pulsed to synthesized rhythms. Shirtless dudes grooved off beat. Three massive bodybuilders with deep tans and permafrowns, guffawed like morning DJs and played cards in the shade of the flybridge.

Blake, Barry, and Van were on the flybridge with two Tommy Bahama types and three girls in sundresses. Despite the dress, Cale
recognized his goddess from the beach and involuntarily waved. Her head tilted to the side, but she smiled and waved back. Cale found himself involuntarily smiling. He also found himself wondering about this mix of old Italian men sitting with beautiful women above a ladder where three young mastiffs guarded the approach. He tried to remember whether this size Ferretti cost three or four million.

Cale cut the props and knotted onto a Sea Ray’s stern cleats. Barry crossed the tie-ups to the Ferretti. Phil, Mom, and Mom’s young coworker improvised a dance floor while they waited. Cale, feeling awkward over the wave-and-smile combo, looked for things to fix on the Whaler. Twenty minutes later, Blake and the guys crossed the gunwale with plastic tumblers and the flybridge girls. The goddess smiled at Cale as she boarded. Angst crept over him as he started the engines, cast off, and pointed north.

8

A DESIRE TO
avoid the massive expense of hurricane season insurance on the yacht had pushed Joe to take this trip up the eastern seaboard. Now he was docked in Harbor Island, North Carolina, where hurricane-induced ocean swells were too big for cruising. The stop-and-go of the inland waterway drove him nuts, so their trip would make it no further today. Joe was positive Fort Lauderdale was whitecap free.

As Ashley came out of the aft stateroom just after sunrise, his cynical mood lifted and he grinned.

“Happy Saturday, Joe,” she sang out to him.

“To you as well. Did we wake you?”

“No, I had plenty of sleep.”

The poor trainers, Joe thought, were apparently so close but still so far. Since Joe didn’t want to fight Arlene’s waves, he asked the captain to find an anchorage where they could feel the breeze. They cast off, the captain eased from the slip, fast idled less than a mile, and anchored off the north end of a state park. Joe unbuttoned his shirt, knotted the waist tie of his swim trunks, and dove off the bowsprit. He swam the hundred yards to the shallows with his head above water, doing frog strokes. He waded ashore, squishing the clay-like sand between his toes, his seventy-three-year-old lungs only slightly out of breath. The
predawn fishermen were returning from the ocean side and loading their boats to head home for breakfast.

Joe walked east, then left the trail and climbed a dune. The ocean advanced in long swells. It looked like a Hawaiian postcard filled with mid-Atlantic green water. He looked west and saw Tony standing on the dive platform, tossing bread to seagulls, and chatting up the nurses. No sign of the trainers. He looked to the south. The island was a long, narrow strip of sand, kind of like Fire Island but without the parking lots and volleyball courts. He looked north past the jetty and saw marinas, condos, and boatyards across the channel. Beyond that, he glimpsed the backs of three-story houses on the beach that were built over carports tall enough to protect them from flooding. The breeze felt great.

Two old-timers sat on coolers. They drank coffee from thermos lids and savored tinfoil-wrapped bacon, egg, and cheese sandwiches. They’d had decent luck, mostly blues. A drum over thirty inches had to be thrown back. A couple of ladyfish. One tarpon that broke the lightweight tackle.

The sand was rougher on the Atlantic side, the tide low but incoming. The big seas washed up new sea wood. Thousands of barnacles clinging to a former pylon gasped for water. Joe picked up a few shells that caught his eye and tossed them into the water.

He walked north, toward the jetty, and watched a fisherman drag a three-foot shark out of the water. Surfers bobbed in the waves a hundred yards out. A pelican dive-bombed a bait ball in between the surfers and the fisherman. For not the first time, he wondered why people surfed jetties. Were the waves that different? A pair of paddle-boarders stroked into the swells as they came out the inlet. Everyone and everything was crowding the jetty.

It was midmorning when Joe started for the boat. He passed the nurses cutting through the island, wet from their swim. Ashley gave him a hug and a lingering squeeze on his upper arm. He could feel the
wetness on his chest where her bikini fabric had pushed against him. They said the boat was quiet; the trainers weren’t up yet when they left.

Reaching the muddy sand, Joe aimed his swim for the anchor line. The tide was stronger than he’d expected. He barely grabbed the dive platform. Standing on the platform, the breeze and sun took the water off him and his skin tingled with the slight itch of drying saltwater.

Tony and the captain were playing Scrabble, and Joe joined them for a second cup of coffee. For someone with a ninth-grade education, Tony was excellent at Scrabble.

Tony said, “Did you see my girls in their bikinis?”

“Yeah. It was about enough for me to fake a heart attack to get some reviving.”

“You think they brought any little blue pills with them?”

Joe laughed, “I thought you’d graduated to a pump,” as he went below. He changed into Bermuda shorts, fastened his floral shirt with the wooden buttons, and slipped on his Docksiders. The trainers assembled egg white omelets and protein smoothies in the galley. When he was their age, he and the other foremen would knock back two shots, two beers, and a roast beef hoagie during lunch and then go work another five hours. These princesses had three gin and tonics over an afternoon and started slurring. Maybe they needed the yolks.

On the boat’s leeward side, the captain used a remote control to lower the dinghy via a motorized pulley. The dinghy hit the water, and Tony grabbed the cable and walked it to the dive platform. He released the carabiner attaching the dinghy to the pulley and secured the bowline to a cleat.