This time it’s Jessie who shouts, “Look!” She’s pointing at a fish hawk that’s appeared to our left, circling, on the hunt. It’s a beautiful thing, its breast and shoulders bright white against the gray-and-white checkering of its underwings and tail.
“Osprey!” Frank tells the girls. “Name comes from the Latin ossifraga. Means ‘bone-breaker’!”
“Bone-breaker!” Rayo says. “That’s so perfect!”
I wouldn’t say Frank’s a showoff, but he does like to impress women every now and again with his erudition, and I have to admit most of them get a kick out of it. Just a few nights ago, Rayo and I were at a bar with him and a girlfriend of his, a nursing instructor at UTB, who got riled at the bartender for some reason and said to Frank, “Hit him with an English major put-down, baby.” So Frank said to the guy, “You, sir, are the terminus of an alimentary canal.” We all laughed, even the bartender, who admitted he didn’t know what Frank called him but thought it sounded funny.
Now the osprey spies a fish and wings around to the east before turning back again.
“He’s coming into the sun so the fish won’t see his shadow,” I tell the girls. Frank’s not the only one on the boat who knows stuff.
The osprey’s gliding now as it starts angling into a descending trajectory and picking up speed, tucking its wings back as it swoops down. It’s just a few feet above the water when it slings its legs forward with the talons spread and wham, it hits the surface with a terrific splash and flies up with a sea trout in its grip.
We all cheer and watch the hawk rise and start angling off to wherever its nest is. Then it jerks sideways a split second before we hear the gunshot, and it drops into the water about twenty yards from us, still holding the fish. It’s trying to fly but is just splashing around in a small circle.
“Son of a bitch!” Frank shouts, slowing the boat and turning it toward the hawk.
“It was them,” Rayo says, pointing at the small boat we’d noted earlier.
I pick up the big field glasses and home in on it, a little over a hundred yards off and bobbing at anchor. A bowrider, twenty-two, twenty-three feet, stern drive, its Bimini top furled. Two guys standing in it, long-billed fishing caps, dark glasses, looking this way. One holding a scoped rifle with one hand, muzzle up, the butt resting on his hip.
We draw up beside the hawk, and Frank tells me to take the wheel and hold us in place, then gets his SIG nine from the bridge locker and goes down and around to the fishing cockpit, where the girls are discussing how to get the hawk out of the water. It’s beating one wing in a spread of blood, and even from the bridge I can see the other wing’s crippled and the chest torn. No way it can be saved. Frank picks up a long gaff and Jessie says, “Not with that, you’ll hurt it worse.” Then she sees the pistol in his other hand and says, “Ah, hell.”
Frank steps around them and starts to take aim at the hawk, but it abruptly goes still. Before it can sink, he gaffs it out of the water, the fish still in its clutch, and lays it on the deck. He looks up at me and points at the other boat, and I start us toward it, then reach down and take my Beretta nine out of the locker and slip it into my waistband.
Frank detaches the trout from the osprey and lobs it overboard, then places the hawk at the foot of the cockpit’s starboard gunwale. He goes up close to Jessie and says something to her, glancing over at the bowrider as he talks. She looks out at it, too, then nods and goes up to the bow and stands by the rail. He beckons Rayo to him and furtively hands her the SIG as he speaks to her. She listens, then moves back to the stern, holding the pistol out of sight behind her leg. Frank looks up at me, his back to the bowrider, and shows me with his hands how he wants me to position our boat in respect to theirs. It’s pretty much what I had anticipated, and I show him a fist to let him know I got it.
The two guys watch us close in on them, and I draw up alongside, our deck several feet higher than theirs. I align our cockpit right next to their open bow, where the one with the rifle, the bigger and older of the two men—midforties, I’d guess—is standing with the rifle barrel now propped against his shoulder, his finger on the trigger guard. It’s an M1 Garand out of the Second World War and a fine weapon to this day. The other guy’s in the cockpit, a kid of eighteen or nineteen, his thumbs hooked into the front of his cargo shorts to either side of the .38 revolver tucked there. Four fishing rods, their lines out, are in rod holders affixed to the stern. Both guys take off their shades for a better look at the girls and keep smiling from one of them to the other at either end of the boat.
“Y’all come over here to tell me what a helluva shot that was?” the big man says.
“It was something, all right,” Frank says. “Damn bold, too, seeing as it’s against both state and federal law to shoot a hawk.”
The big man shrugs. “I don’t reckon you for no game warden.”
“Oh, hell no. Thought you might want your prize, though.” Frank picks up the osprey and lobs it down near the big man’s feet.
“Hey, fellas!” Jessie shouts. The two men both look over at her, and she yanks her top up to show her tits.
In the moment they’re gawking, Frank vaults over the gunwale and drops into their boat, grabs the M1 with both hands, and wrenches it away as he shoulders the big man backward—and Rayo whips up the SIG and fires a round through the bowrider windshield and yells, “Hands high, boy!” and the kid’s hands fly up. Frank drives the rifle’s steel butt plate into the big man’s mouth with a crack of teeth I hear in the wheelhouse, knocking him on his ass, blood gushing over his chin. He tosses the rifle into the water and kicks the guy onto his back and straddles his chest, pinning his arms with his knees, then picks up the hawk by one of its feet and rakes the talons down one side of the guy’s face and then the other side, the guy just screaming and screaming. Frank gets off him, hauls him to his feet, and pushes him over the side, then turns to the kid, who can’t raise his hands any higher. “Hey, man, hey, I didn’t do nothin! I didn’t do nothin’!” the kid screeches. Frank takes the revolver from the kid’s pants and backhands him with the barrel, cracking his cheek and dropping him to his knees, then flings the gun away and yanks the kid up and shoves him overboard, too. The two guys tread water clumsily, gasping and moaning, blood running off their faces.
“I don’t know where you shitheels are from and don’t care!” Frank shouts. “But I ever see either of you around here again, I’ll cut your face off!”
He picks up the hawk and hands it up to Jessie, who’s got her top back in place, then pulls himself aboard and signals me to move out. Rayo’s draped a beach towel over the transom to hide the boat’s name from the two guys—playing it safe despite the unlikelihood they would ever try tracking us down.
About a half mile farther on, Frank has me stop again. By then the two shitheels have managed to get back into the bowrider and are just a speck heading off in the other direction. Frank hooks the transom ladder to the stern and lowers himself into the water until it’s up to his chest, then Rayo hands him the hawk. He holds it below the surface for about half a minute before letting go of it, and we watch it slowly sink. Then he climbs back up on deck and gives me a hand sign and I head us for home.
I’m not saying Frank’s a softy or anything, but in truth he’s always been prone to get a little upset when he witnesses mistreatment of an animal.
It’s after dark when we come off the Gulf and into the seventeen-mile ship channel leading to the Port of Brownsville. Near