JAMES HALL
BLACKWATER SOUND
For Peter Meinke, great poet and teacher and always good for a laugh
Grief fills the room up of my absent child, Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me, Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words, Remembers me of all his gracious parts, Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form.
—King John, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Contents
The marlin was the color of the ocean at twenty fathoms, an iridescent blue, with eerie light smoldering within its silky flesh as if its electrons had become unstable by the cold friction of the sea. A ghostly phosphorescence, a gleaming flash, its large eyes unblinking as it slipped into a seam in the current, then rose toward the luminous surface where a school of tuna was pecking at the tiny larvae and crustaceans snagged on a weed line.
The marlin attacked from the rear of the school. An ambush. It accelerated from thirty knots to double that in only a few yards. A fusion of grace, efficiency, and blinding power. For a creature with the bulk of a bull, the marlin was as sleek as any missile and blazed through the water at a speed not even the most powerful torpedo could attain. When it crashed into the school, it stunned each fish with a blow from its three-foot bill, then swallowed it headfirst.
Morgan Braswell saw its dorsal fin and the curved arc of its tail. She saw its shadow just below the surface. Maybe it was simply the angle of the sun, but the fish looked twice the size of an ordinary marlin. Before she could utter a word, the marlin hit the trolled lure and the outrigger popped.
‘Fish on!’ Johnny yelled.
In the fighting chair Morgan lifted the rod and settled it into the leather holder that was belted around her waist. At the same moment the rod tip jerked and the hundred-pound monofilament began to scream off her reel. Nothing she could do for now except hold on and watch. They were twenty-two miles south of Key West, a marlin highway that ran along a drop-off in the ocean floor, an east-to-west ridge that plummeted from nine hundred feet to two thousand in less than a mile. Wood’s Wall was its name, the beginning of the Straits of Florida.
Andy and Johnny stood beside her. Her two brothers. Andy was the older, curly blond hair and rangy like their dad. At seventeen, a major-league science whiz, chemistry, electronics. He spent long hours in the MicroDyne lab, tinkering with new materials, new fibers, new everything. He was movie-star handsome, funny. A gifted athlete, president of his high school class, perfect scores on his college boards, courted by Stanford, MIT.