by Sam Hawken
“Take a picture,” Camaro said, and that was all. Camaro’s trips were strictly catch-and-release. Everyone knew this going in.
They got lucky here and there over a few hours, but the men were as interested in drinking as they were in the fish. Camaro did not let them get sloppy and put a curb on them when they went to their cooler one time too many. There was more grumbling and talk about refunds, but she reminded them it was money up front and no refunds. They were more subdued after that.
She got back to the marina a little after two and let the men off. She thought to warn them about driving off buzzed, but they had probably heard enough from her already. If they wanted to end up wrapped around a pole or in the back of a police car that was their business and not hers. Camaro’s responsibility stopped the moment they stepped off the boat.
When they were all gone, she broke out the hose and cleaned off the deck. She got an old towel and wiped down plastic and wood and metal alike. She checked the bait locker and made a mental note of what she had to stock. Afterward, she got a sandwich out of her personal cooler and ate it in the shade with a little bag of chips. Watching the men put away beers had put her in the mind for one, but there would be no drinking while she worked.
She lay down for a short nap. It was four when she heard Parker calling from the pier, and she got up to meet him. He stood beside the boat in a different shirt and nearly identical shorts, his feet tanned in his sandals, the barest hint of white flesh peeking out from underneath one strap. Camaro saw herself reflected in his sunglasses. “Hey, there,” Parker said. “Sorry I’m late.”
“You’re not late,” Camaro said. “I told you three o’clock or so.”
“Well, I’m here now.”
“You want to come aboard?” Camaro asked.
“Sure,” Parker said, and he stepped over onto the deck. He looked over the fighting chair and made an admiring sound. “I can’t wait to sit on this baby. Is that teak? Is this thing an old classic?”
“No,” Camaro said. “It’s just a nice chair.”
“I’m gonna land the big one,” Parker said.
“That’s what everybody says. Come on in. Let’s get you out of the sun.”
They went inside and stood in the little galley. Parker dug in his pocket and came up with four fifty-dollar bills. He laid them in front of her on the counter. “That should cover our deposit,” he said. “But I don’t know what night it’ll be yet. I’m sorry about that.”
“I said you get a week, so you get a week,” Camaro said. She took the money and put it away. “It’s your charter.”
Parker fiddled with his thumbs and looked around the small cabin. He took off his sunglasses, and Camaro was glad to see he didn’t have the strange, pale shadow around his eyes that some men got down here. To her they looked like raccoons of the wrong color. “This really is a nice boat,” he said.
“It cost enough,” Camaro said.
“Expensive?”
“Yeah.”
He put his hands flat on the counter. “Listen, I might be able to swing some extra money your way if you’re interested. It’s not strictly charter stuff, but it could be worth something to you.”
Camaro looked at him. “I just do fishing charters,” she said.
“Right. Of course. I’m only saying that we might be able to arrange some extras to give you a bigger payday.”
“My paydays are plenty big,” Camaro said. “This is my business, remember? If you want extras, there are plenty of places that do extras. This isn’t a party boat.”
“Sure, sure,” Parker said. “I’m sorry I said anything. Don’t be insulted.”
“I’m not insulted,” Camaro said. “I like to keep it simple, that’s all. Boat. Water. Fish. That kind of thing. Maybe that means I lose some clients once in a while, but I don’t mind too much. There’s always someone out there who wants service without frills.”
Now Parker smiled, and Camaro read both relief and tension in it. He was fiddling with his thumbs again. She could not tell what was driving him on. “This is my first time chartering a fishing boat,” he confessed to her. “I don’t know all the rules.”
“They’re not really rules,” Camaro said. “I think they’re like habits. Sometimes you break them, but most of the time you do what feels right. I like doing what I do.”
Parker stood up. “I guess I should go, then,” he said.
Camaro looked at him again and saw the nerves prickling out through his skin. “Are you busy?” she asked him.
“Me?”
“Yeah, you. Are you doing anything right now?”
“I didn’t have any plans.”
Camaro got up. “I already ate, but I could use some dessert. There’s a diner up the road. Want to have a coffee or something?”
Parker blinked. “You want to have a coffee with me?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Okay.”
Chapter Five
AT THE DINER, they sat across from each other. Instead of coffee, Parker had iced tea, but Camaro had a hot cup with cream, along with a slice of key lime pie. The tartness and sweetness combined with the mild bitter flavor of the coffee played games on her tongue, and she enjoyed it. Parker added far too much sugar to his tea.
“What do you do?” Camaro asked him.
“Me? Oh, I’m a business consultant. I go around to businesses and tell them how to improve their operation. Efficiency. Stuff like that.”
Camaro grinned a little. “That so?” she asked.
“Yeah, sure.”
“Do business consultants work outdoors a lot?” Camaro asked.
“What? You’re talking about the tan, right? I like to do yard work and gardening on the weekends with my daughter.”
She shook her head. “You are an absolutely awful liar,” she said.
“I’m not lying,” Parker said. “I’m a business consultant, and I’m going to take a few clients out fishing to butter them up a little before we make a deal. Try to jack my fee up, you know? That’s how you make a living.”
“I believe you’re chartering a boat,” Camaro said. “And I believe you have a daughter, but I think the rest of it is bullshit.”
Parker opened his mouth and then closed it again. Then he said, “I do have a daughter.”
“How old?” Camaro asked.
“She’s fourteen. Going on forty. She’s trying to turn me gray, but I think I can keep a handle on her for a couple more years. When she hits sixteen, I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
“What about her mother?”
Parker made a gesture with his thumb, whisking the thought away. “She’s long gone. Out the door when Lauren was seven. The old, ‘I’m going to get some cigarettes,’ thing. Never called again, never wrote. She was just out of there. So it’s the two of us, me and Lauren.”
“Any other family?” Camaro asked.
“I have a brother, but he’s not local. I think he’s seen Lauren once. No, twice. You?”
“A sister.”
“Huh,” Parker said.
“What do you really do?” Camaro asked.
Parker rolled the moist glass of tea between his palms for a minute. The condensation made a smeary puddle on the tabletop. “Can we hold off on that question for a little bit? I’m kind of happy with the whole ‘business consultant’ thing right now.”
“Okay,” Camaro said.
“How about you? Maybe I can ask you some questions.”
Camaro shrugged. “Ask me anything you want.”
“You from around here?”
“No.”
“Where’d you come from?”
“California originally.”
“How’d you end up in Florida?”
Camaro smiled to herself. She took a forkful of pie and held it between them a moment. “I rode my bike,” she said.
“Now who’s telling lies?” Parker asked.
“No lies. Go ahead and ask me another.”
“If you�
�re from California, what are you doing running a fishing boat out of Miami? Why aren’t you off surfing somewhere or something?”
Camaro ate the piece of pie and followed it with coffee. She considered the question. “When I was growing up, my dad liked two things more than anything else in the world,” she said. “He liked fixing cars, and he liked fishing. Fast cars were his favorite. Muscle cars? Forget about it. He’d fall in love with anything that had a big engine. And when he wasn’t under a car getting oily, he was saving up his money to get on a fishing charter and go after barracuda, calico bass, yellowtail…whatever.”
“So you have fishing in your blood.”
“Something like that. I know how to put together an engine, and I can tell you where the fish are. That’s what my dad gave me.”
“Can’t be a cheap business to get into. You said the boat cost a lot.”
“I had some money to spend.”
“You make a good living?”
“Good enough. Keeps me in my house, and I don’t starve. I make what I need and a little extra to put away. I keep up the boat myself and that saves a bundle. Whatever it takes to go on.”
“And you still don’t want more than you’re charging me,” Parker said.
“Nope. The price is one seventy-five a person and that’s it. More if you need gear. I told you: I like to keep things simple.”
“I can respect that,” Parker said.
“I’m glad. Some guys don’t.”
“I get the feeling those guys don’t last too long around you,” Parker said.
“They don’t,” Camaro told him.
Parker was quiet awhile, and Camaro thought he’d finished talking, but he spoke up again. “So you have a sister, huh?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“I’m surprised she doesn’t help you run the business.”
“She doesn’t live around here. Besides, I don’t think she liked fishing as much as our dad did. She was the one who always got seasick.”
“That’s funny,” Parker said.
Camaro finished off the last of her pie and drained the coffee cup. The waitress came by with the pot to top it off, but Camaro put her hand over it and asked for the check instead. “I have a night charter tonight,” she told Parker. “We’re headed out around eight.”
“What time is it now?” Parker asked.
“About five. That gives us a couple of hours.”
“A couple of hours for what?”
The waitress put the check down between them. Camaro took it up and counted off the cost from the bills in her wallet, plus a twenty percent tip. She weighted it all down with her coffee cup. “I don’t want to go back to your place, and I don’t want you back at my place,” Camaro said. “But there’s the boat.”
“I’m still not following,” Parker said.
“Hey, listen: I know you’re a bad liar, but don’t tell me you’re slow on the uptake, too,” Camaro said.
She got up, and Parker followed her out.
Chapter Six
THEY LAY NAKED together in the forward compartment, the sheets twined around them messily. Parker slept, his breathing slow and even. Camaro slipped free of the bed and went to where his shorts lay on the floor. She came up with his wallet and leafed through it. There were fifty-seven dollars in cash, his driver’s license, a trio of business cards from other fishing outfits, and a photograph.
She looked at the picture. It showed a young girl of eight or nine on a beach, corn-silk hair blowing in a sudden gust off the water, and a more youthful Parker half-caught in the frame. The girl was laughing, and he was laughing, and the entire moment was washed in sun and pleasure. Camaro touched the girl’s face once and then put the picture away. She returned Parker’s wallet to his shorts and then climbed back into bed.
Parker murmured slightly and took a shuddery breath through his nose. Camaro looked down at Parker’s feet, at the colorless bands of skin that marked where his sandal straps lay, and she nudged one foot with her own. She felt him wake. He chuckled. “Watch it,” he said. “I’m ticklish.”
“Where?” Camaro asked.
“All over. Don’t get me started.”
“I won’t.”
She could feel him watching her, but she didn’t look back at him, choosing instead to look out past their feet to the galley beyond and the wooden door that closed off the back deck from below. The door had a circular window, and through that she could see the fighting chair waiting.
“You know, when I said you could earn a little extra, this wasn’t what I was talking about,” Parker said.
“I know.”
“I can’t really remember the last time somebody…you know, gave me an invitation.”
Now she did turn to him, and she saw that the nerves were gone from him for the first time. His features were softer, the stress lines shallower. He was more handsome that way. “I don’t do that for everybody,” Camaro told him.
“I wasn’t saying anything.”
“Okay, then. Don’t.”
Her left leg was above the sheets and Parker pointed at a spot on her midthigh. It was a long scar with a head like a comet at the end, and it stood slightly raised from the tan skin, marring her. “What’s that?” he asked.
“A scar,” Camaro said.
“What kind of scar?”
“A bullet scar,” Camaro said.
“A bullet scar? You got shot?”
“Yeah. I have another one right here, on my shoulder. See that there on my side? That’s one, too.”
“Holy shit. When did you get shot?”
“In the war,” Camaro said simply. She glanced at the scar once, then looked away again. She examined the roof of the compartment and the rows of little lights, switched off now, that gave off a soothing yellow glow in the night.
“Which war?” Parker asked.
“Both of them,” Camaro said.
“Both…? You mean like Iraq and Afghanistan both?”
“Yeah. I was there. Two deployments each.”
“What branch were you in?”
“The army.”
“But you weren’t a soldier, right? I mean, women don’t serve in combat.”
“Tell that to the Taliban,” Camaro said.
“So you were shooting it out with them? Like with a real rifle and everything?”
Camaro glared at him. “What do you think women do in the army? We’re not all secretaries. Some of us picked up a weapon once in a while. Some of us picked up a weapon a lot.”
“What did you do?” Parker asked. “In the army, I mean.”
“I was a Sixty-Eight Whiskey,” Camaro said.
“What’s that?”
“It’s a combat medic. I went out with frontline troops and got it done. Sometimes I got shot at. Sometimes I had to shoot back. If the enemy figured out what I was, I’d be the first one to take fire.”
“Why?”
“You shoot a soldier, you put down that soldier. You put down the medic, and suddenly you put down two, three, four other soldiers. It didn’t matter if it was Iraq or Afghanistan. They both had the same idea.”
“Jesus,” Parker said. “That’s crazy. And you did this for how long?”
“I was in twelve years,” Camaro said. “I enlisted right after 9/11. My dad was superpissed. I think he got over it after a while, but…I don’t know.”
Parker was quiet. Finally, he said, “I never served.”
“Lots of people don’t.”
“It’s not because I didn’t want to. I used to play football in high school, you know? Anyway, I didn’t get a bunch of concussions or anything, but I did manage to tear the hell out of my ACL. That was the end of that. No more football, no army, no marines, no nothing. I still can’t run right.”
Camaro sat up and searched for her watch. She found it at the foot of the bed, swathed in sheets. “I’m running out of time. You’re going to have to get out of here,” she said.
“What time is it?”
> “Seven thirty.”
Now Parker sat up and made an angry noise. “Goddamn it, I didn’t tell Lauren I was going to be late tonight. I’m surprised she hasn’t called me already.”
“Then go. My charter’s going to be here any minute.”
Parker tried to kiss her, but she turned her head. She got out of bed and put on her clothes. She noticed him watching as she put on her boots. “Is that a knife you have in there?” he asked.
“Yes,” Camaro said.
“You don’t take any shit from anyone, do you?”
“Hurry up and get dressed.”
She went up on the deck while Parker scrambled for his clothes. The day was bleeding away, the sun already low in the west. They would be on their way to the good swordfishing waters by the time it was full dark, and then it would be ten hours out where there were no lights except those of the boat and the distant blink of ships passing miles away on their way to port.
Parker stumbled out from inside after a few minutes, still buttoning his shirt. His hair was mussed, and it made him seem younger than he was. He dragged his fingers through it and cleared it away from his face. “I hope this isn’t the last time we, uh, run into each other like this,” he said.
“No promises,” Camaro said.
“Okay,” Parker said, and she could hear his disappointment. “I guess that’s it for me, then.”
Camaro climbed to the flybridge. “Let me know when you’re ready to go out with your people,” she said without turning toward him. “You have the number.”
“Right,” Parker said. “I will. Good night.”
He left. Camaro did not watch him go.
Chapter Seven
THE NEXT DAY was a half-day at Lauren’s school, and Parker waited at the bus stop for her return. He knew she was old enough to make it the two blocks from the stop to the house. But he had been meeting her after school as regularly as he was able since she was very young, and he didn’t feel the urge to stop now. Sometimes she told him not to come, that her friends would make fun of her. He came anyway, because that’s what dads did for their daughters.
He saw the yellow bus rise out of the silvery heat coming up from the asphalt, and he put on a smile as the bus came closer. It slowed and stopped, and its shadow fell over him. Parker waved to the bus driver, and the driver gave him a little salute. Parker was aware of the eyes of young teenagers watching him from the windows. Lauren came off, and he saw that she was aware of them, too. She clutched her books to her body and hunched her shoulders without looking at him.
