‘A rhino?’
‘I’m tired of manatees and alligators. I’m artistically restless.’
‘Azure,’ Thorn said. ‘Cerulean.’
‘Too hoity-toity.’
‘Sapphire.’
To the west across the flats was a small mangrove island. Gulls dove into the shallow water rimming it. A great blue heron stood in the flats just a few yards from the snarl of mangrove roots. On the charts the island was unnamed, but he and Casey had been calling it Mosquito Junction. A dark haze of bloodsuckers that’d probably never tasted human flesh before hovered over it like an evil bloom of radiation. Last night the little bastards had followed the wisp of light from their kerosene lantern across a mile of motionless air right into the Heart Pounder’s cabin to dine on their exposed flesh. He and Casey had to decide whether to douse the lantern and stop reading, or put up with the itchy nuisance. They read. Swatted and read.
‘Cobalt rhino,’ Thorn said. ‘Or navy.’
‘Okay, you can stop. I’m sticking with blue. It’s not great, but it’ll do.’
‘Turquoise.’
Casey gave him a quick, precise smile.
‘You know too many words, Thorn.’
‘Is that possible?’
‘All those books you read, you’re clogged with words.’
‘I’m just a simple guy with a simple vocabulary.’
‘Yeah, right. Sure you are, Thorn. You’re so simple.’
‘Indigo,’ he said.
Casey aimed her chin at the sky.
‘That,’ she said. ‘That color. Whatever it is.’
Casey stretched her arms, pointing both hands up at the unnameable heavens. Her breasts shimmered, taking the light and playing with it and sending it on its happy way.
‘So what’re we having for supper?’
‘I was thinking fish,’ he said. ‘In fact, that fish. If it ever gives up.’
‘Fish again?’
‘You like fish.’
‘Four days ago I liked fish. At the moment I’d kill for a hamburger.’
‘You’re a vegetarian.’
‘My point, exactly.’
Thorn fished for a while and Casey basked. She was excellent at it. Basking seemed to be one of her gifts. She had such a remarkably even disposition, nothing seemed to rouse her to anger or even mild distress.
For the last couple of months they’d been sharing his small stilthouse and his monotonous days. She went off to her roadside shack every morning to make her plaster animals while he tied bonefish flies. After work, he helped her unload her latest creation from the back of her ancient Chevy pickup and she set up her paints out near Blackwater Sound and spent the next few hours covering that dull gray plaster with the gaudiest colors she could swirl together.
While she painted, Thorn tied flies or crafted the wooden lures he carved for a few longtime clients who believed his handiwork had some kind of supernatural power to catch fish. God bless their superstitious butts. The lures Thorn made were torpedo-shaped pieces of gumbo-limbo or live oak ornamented with a few dabs of paint and glitter and glass bead eyeballs, nothing more or less. But if those fine folks wanted to give him cash money to carve them and sand them and fine-tune them with a little color, then fine. Go with Allah.
Last week after he’d finished replanking the hull, Thorn decided he needed a break from the routine. A shakedown cruise seemed just the thing, putter out into the backcountry, deep into the Florida Bay, and see if the dignified old lady still leaked.
It’d been a long while since Thorn had motored so far into those waters, and though he’d heard the backcountry was in bad shape, seeing it firsthand was something else entirely.
The Florida Bay was a flat, shallow basin that lay at the tip of the Florida peninsula. Bordered on the east by the upper Keys and running west to the other side of the state where its waters merged with the Gulf of Mexico. For centuries the bay had received the freshwater outflow from the Everglades and had converted it gradually to saltwater by the time it reached the Keys and the coral reefs. The eelgrass had once grown in thick beds, covering most of the bay, providing the nutrition-rich nurseries for shrimp and the other lower-pecking-order creatures. When Thorn was a boy, exploring the nooks of the Florida Bay in his wooden skiff, he’d assumed such abundance would last forever. That the water would always be crystal, that the undersea kingdom would ceaselessly flourish.
But since those days Miami and its suburbs had quadrupled in size and were trying to quadruple again and the people up there were stacked butt-to-jowls twenty stories into the air without room to turn or bend over to tie their shoes, and now that the sugar growers had intimidated or paid off all their foes and were once again happily scattering phosphorus and mercury and a long list of other unpronounceable toxins across their vast acreage, the end result, a hundred miles downstream, was that the pristine Florida Bay was now teetering on collapse.
A never-ending flood of solvents and cleaning fluids and petroleum products and every other form of exotic contamination had been oozing out the rectum of the state, a spew of caustic wastewater and runoff and overflow and toilet flush, leaching into the bay, poisoning the shrimp with its acid, overheating the water with its super-mambo genetically indestructible fertilizer spillage, causing great blooms of algae that stole the oxygen right from the water, leaving the fish to writhe and float to the surface. Decades of abuse. An endless tonnage of disregard. All of which would’ve killed the bay long ago if it weren’t for the steady string of hurricanes bringing in their million million gallons of diluting fresh water. Nature’s irony, using one disaster to neutralize another.
Because of several busy hurricane seasons in a row, the bay water was not as salty or as acidic. You could see the bottom again. Patches of eelgrass were growing. Clusters of shrimp snapped by. But there was no cause for celebration. The rebirth was only temporary. The ever-sprawling masses up the road would win eventually. They’d kill the Keys. One day soon, one of those weekend visitors would snap off the last finger of coral, snatch up the final living conch. And no matter what anyone tried to do, you could absolutely count on the fact that those toxins would continue to pump into the Everglades and filter into the bay until it was all as bleached out as the whitened bones of a desert coyote ten years lying in the sun.
This was death-throes time. Time to bring your ear close to the lips of the dying creature and hear its final rasping words. Thorn couldn’t help being gloomy about it. The only way not to be gloomy was not to know it was happening or not to give a rat’s ass. He’d tried the rat’s-ass approach, tried it and tried it.
So he and Casey had come out on a shakedown cruise and the new hull hadn’t leaked. Thorn was pleased with the hull, and a little amazed. But he was deeply disheartened by what he saw beneath the glittery surface. Last night, after two rum drinks and a long dose of starlight, he’d proposed that the two of them take another trip. Cross the Gulf Stream, go over to the islands, poke around. He’d heard about a place near Andros, the blue holes, the wall. Go diving in the deep stuff. Fish on flats where the bonefish had never seen human shadows. Maybe search out some fresh place to set up shop. A new home where the tourist Huns had not yet arrived.
Casey said nothing, and Thorn dropped the subject.
Now in the fading daylight, Thorn started in on Andros again. And those other little islands where wild goats and rats and iguanas were the only residents. He’d been down there as a kid with the folks who’d raised him, Doctor Bill Truman and his wife, Kate. They’d crossed the Gulf Stream on the Heart Pounder. It’d been his first experience with deep-sea fishing, sailfish, marlin, and yellowfin tuna. Thorn was only ten, but he remembered