Racing the Rain

by John L Parker

  He wasn’t concentrating particularly well and thus whacked a knee every now and then. The warmth of the early sun was nicely balanced by the salty breeze from the intracoastal waterway, inducing a kind of numb-brained kid euphoria. It was Saturday and midwinter was finally beginning to leaven the tropical misery. The sandy halls of Glenridge Junior High seemed a million miles away.

  Air Force beach was deserted. He left his bike and trudged laboriously through the powdered sugar of the dunes to the top, setting his bucket down and looking out across the glittering panorama of the Atlantic Ocean. The bottoms of his feet were tough, but the soft sand was already hot around the edges as he stood there, feeling a little thrill of greed as he peered through the cattails and saw water dappling with life in the shallow tide pools. Today he would be a successful capitalist.

  He removed the little cast net from the bucket and waded into the shallow tide pool, biting down daintily on one salty fold as he untangled the lead weights and separated the folds of netting.

  He blew the first cast as usual. The net flattened in the air, forming a nice oval momentarily, but the timing was off and it bounced back into an inefficient hourglass shape before it landed. Only a few of the unluckiest fish were under it. He frowned in distaste as he tugged in his meager haul.

  Sitting by the edge of the pool, he scooped some water into the bucket and began picking the jittery fry out of the netting, making his hands form oval pincers to avoid the dorsal fins. It was perfect kid work, requiring a modicum of skill and a lot of patience. The downtown businessmen, lawyers, and doctors who would later purchase these little fish for bait were probably capable of getting them themselves but mostly couldn’t be bothered. Cassidy considered himself lucky to have found one of those happy interstices in the economy where an alert underage entrepreneur could actually make a buck.

  Though it was still cool, he could already feel the sun cranking up across a thousand miles of Atlantic. Its place in the sky told him he had time for only a few more casts before he had to meet Trapper.

  The next cast was much better, forming a fairly symmetrical oval before dropping onto several dozen glittering creatures. A few escapees nevertheless managed to strand themselves on dry land, where they lay panting and flopping next to the very bucket they were trying to avoid. Their narrow bodies flashed like quicksilver in the sun. Cassidy licked the salt off his lower lip, pulling the net in, satisfied this time with his cast.

  * * *

  The Jupiter Marina was not much more than a shack on stilts. It sat on a rickety dock where the Loxahatchee River emptied into the intracoastal waterway. Everyone called it “the Jupiter Hilton,” which the locals deemed the height of sardonic wit.

  The irony was lost on Cassidy. To him it was one of the epicenters of his life, the place where all the fishermen and divers sooner or later ended up on any given weekend. It was where you got fuel if you were rich enough to be gas-powered, where you got lunch if you were not too far out in the Gulf Stream, and where you went to deal in baitfish if you had some to buy or sell.

  Cassidy, a seller this morning, rode up with the heavy bucket swinging on his handlebars, noticing as he dismounted two rough-looking men at the dock—one white, one black—pumping fuel into the battered red can on their grungy skiff. He had seen them around before, but they had never paid him any attention. This time the white one nudged the other and gestured toward Cassidy. He ignored them and leaned his bike next to the ice cooler. There was another man, nicely dressed in clean khaki shorts and a spotless white bass fishing shirt, sitting in the back of the skiff rather imperiously, reading the Palm Beach Post.

  Cassidy went around to the back of the building to use the hose, shivering from the cool water as he washed the salt away. By the time he got back to the front, the bucket was gone. He looked around and saw it sitting on the green bench between the two men at the front of the store. The black one was sitting next to it, the other standing with his knee cocked up on the bench, looking at Cassidy and smiling a not particularly friendly smile.

  Taking a deep breath, Cassidy walked over to them and reached for the bucket. The white one pushed his baseball cap back on his sunburned forehead and placed the bucket on the ground, pushing it with his toe under the bench.

  “Hey!” Cassidy said.

  “Hey yourself,” said the white one.

  “That’s my—”

  “Your bucket?” said the white one. “Dogged if it didn’t look exactly like our bucket, didn’t it, Bobby?”

  The black man didn’t answer. In fact, he didn’t seem to even be listening. When he finally looked over, Cassidy saw something so completely dead behind his bloodshot eyes that a shiver ran down his spine. Cassidy looked over to the boat where the nicely dressed man continued to read his paper, paying them no attention.

  The white man was talking again in his false-friendly way. “You’re that little diver people talks about,” he said.

  His smile wasn’t reassuring. The man was fair-skinned but clearly spent so much time in the sun he seemed to be in a permanent state of sunburn. Anywhere on him that wasn’t already peeling was red and getting ready to. He wore cutoff jeans, incredibly worn Docksiders, and a sleeveless Walker’s Cay Marina staff T-shirt with LUCKY embroidered over the pocket.

  “Got the little skiff with a old Evinrude Handitwin three on it?” the white man said.

  Cassidy shrugged.

  “Sometimes a little aluminum canoe? Have to use that trick where you use a little rope ladder to come in over the bow?”

  Cassidy was surprised. He’d never noticed anyone watching him out there.

  “You like to dive off the lighthouse on Frazier’s Reef, ’bout a half mile out.”

  He was no longer asking questions; he was making statements.

  “Bobby,” said the white man, “this is that little Cassidy kid. You remember, the one old man Branch said got his anchor up from sixty feet? Said he was straight up and down over it and damn if the kid didn’t go down and work it out of the rocks. Sixty feet down. Went home and measured the wet rope.”

  Bobby was looking out at the intracoastal, bored. He spit into the broken shells of the parking lot.

  The white man’s smile disappeared like a light going off. His eyes weren’t dead like Bobby’s, but overly active, jumping around like he was barely in control of himself. Cassidy didn’t know which one of them was scarier.

  “This right here’s the reason, Bobby, the reason we ain’t been able to find a eating-size lobster around Frasier’s Reef in more’n a year! What do you think about that?”

  Bobby sat up straight, and for the first time seemed to look at Cassidy with interest.

  But then the white man’s attitude seemed to change abruptly. His smile came back and he casually nudged the zinc bucket out from under the bench toward Cassidy.

  “Anyway, the name’s Floyd, people call me Lucky, and this here’s Bobby Lincoln from over to Riviera Beach. We just wanted to say howdy in case we ever happen to run into you out there on the salt salt sea,” he said.

  Cassidy sensed a trick and didn’t reach for the bucket yet. When he glanced at the ground, he saw the big shadow coming from behind him.

  Trapper Nelson stood there, arms akimbo, looking huge and not happy.

  “Go on and take your fish inside, Quenton,” he said. “I’ll help Floyd and Bobby get on their way.”

  Cassidy grabbed the bucket and pushed through the screen door. Glancing back, he could see Trapper Nelson stepping closer to the two men, who stared up at him.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be in school, young man?” said old man Tolbert, almost hidden behind the counter, sitting back in his ancient metal office chair, reading a tattered issue of Harper’s Magazine.

  “No, sir. It’s Saturday,” said Cassidy, hoisting the bucket onto the table beside the bubbling bait tank. Dave Tolbert knew what day it was, and Cassidy knew that he knew.

  “So it is, so it is. What do you have for us today?”
<
br />   “Ballyhoo mostly. A few greenies and menhaden that got mixed in with them.”

  The old man rose from his seat and peered into the bucket, pushing his reading glasses up to peer through them.

  “Where’d you get ’em?”

  “Tide pools off Air Force beach.”

  “Hmmm. Very nice. I count about thirteen ballyhoo, plus about a half dozen of the other. That what you figure?”

  “I thought it was only eleven, sir.”

  “Well, they are moving around pretty good in there. We’ll call it thirteen. Okay, they’re going for a dime, threads and pogies get a nickel each, making it a buck eighty, right?” he said, punching up No Sale on the ancient cash register.

  “Uh, I believe that’s a dollar sixty, sir,” said Cassidy meekly.

  Tolbert pretended to do some figuring on the margin of his newspaper with the stub of a golf pencil.

  “Right as rain,” he said. “Never was good at the higher mathematics.” He ceremoniously placed a dollar bill on the counter with one hand, and two quarters and a dime on top of it with the other.

  He smiled at Cassidy. “It’s been a business doing pleasure with you.”

  Cassidy laughed again. “Thanks, Mr. Tolbert,” he said, folding the bill into a small square with the coins inside and tucking it into the pocket of his bathing trunks. He turned toward the door.

  “Say, Quenton.”

  “Sir?”

  “I saw you talking to Floyd and Bobby out there.” Old man Tolbert lost his smile briefly, then found it again.

  “Yes, sir,” said Cassidy.

  “You didn’t hear it from me, but they are two people it’s a good idea not to get to know too well.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Mr. Tolbert brightened suddenly. “You going fishing with Trapper Nelson this morning? If so, perhaps you’d be interested in some excellent baitfish. I just happened to get a fresh shipment in earlier today. Let you have some awful cheap. Ballyhoo a buck each, greenies and pogies two bits!”

  Cassidy giggled again. “We’re supposed to go for a run on the beach,” he said.

  “You’re going to run with Trapper?”

  “Try to, I guess,” said Cassidy. “We’re going to cross over in the boat and then run down toward Juno.”

  “You know he runs all the way down to the other inlet sometimes, don’t you? Must be over twelve miles. He used to do a lot of road work out there back when he boxed.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, take it easy on him. If I’m not mistaken, I just heard him bid Lucky and Bobby a fond adieu. Here, don’t forget your bucket.”

  Trapper was helping the other two, handing down another full gas can and some other gear from the dock. They seemed to be engaged in a serious discussion for a few minutes and finally Trapper shook hands with the one called Floyd and returned to his boat, where Cassidy was waiting.

  “All set for a nice morning canter?” he said.

  * * *

  Trapper didn’t say much as they crossed the inlet. He just sat in the back tending his ancient Schnacke Mid-Jet outboard as the skiff bounced over the confused chop of the flooding inlet.

  “I thought my Evinrude was old,” said Cassidy, gesturing at the engine.

  “Wouldn’t trade it,” said Trapper. “It’s like an Erector set. You can see how everything works just by looking at it. I actually stopped by to see Old Man Schnacke in Evansville one time.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “Oh, not too much. It was on a weekend and he was in his workshop behind his house, working on a new impeller idea. Said he was tickled to see a satisfied customer. Wanted to know all about the fishing down our way. All he knew was crappies and dogfish.”

  Cassidy was squinting against the sun, enjoying the occasional spray of salty water coming over the gunnel. The money from his morning labors was tucked safely in his buttoned bathing suit pocket. The bouncing of the boat was rhythmic, almost hypnotic, and he caught himself starting to nod off.

  He snapped wide awake as they came up on a kind of whirlpool in the middle of the inlet, where the outflowing river struggled against the encroaching ocean, forming a treacherous bowl of confused water. It looked scary, but Trapper skillfully skirted around the upper lip on the seaward side of the bowl, and they were quickly on the other side of the inlet skimming along in placid water by the white sand of Jupiter Beach Park.

  “Listen, Quenton,” said Trapper, “I want to tell you something, okay?”

  Cassidy looked back, surprised to see Trapper Nelson looking unusually serious.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Those two guys you were talking to back there, their names are Floyd Holzapfel—they call him Lucky—and Bobby Lincoln. I don’t personally know for a fact what kinds of shenanigans they’re up to, but nothing I heard would surprise me.”

  Cassidy nodded, not exactly sure what this was all about.

  Trapper saw his confusion.

  “I do know that they can be lively company, but they’re both bad to go to the bottle, and they’re not too particular how they make a dollar.”

  “Okay,” Cassidy said.

  “Look,” Trapper said, “when I first came down here years ago with my brother Charlie and a friend named John Dykas, we had some trouble at our camp. Serious trouble. The law was involved. Maybe you heard something about it?”

  Cassidy shrugged. He remembered what his father said but had finally concluded that the Trapper Nelson he knew just could not have been involved.

  “Well, it was serious. A man named John Dykas ended up dead. For a while some people thought I had something to do with it. All of a sudden I didn’t have many friends around here. Floyd and Bobby, though, they became long-lost cousins. It took me awhile to convince them I didn’t want any part of their tomfoolery.”

  Cassidy still wasn’t sure what this was all about, so he studied the reef line moving slowly beneath them in twenty feet of clear water.

  “What I’m saying is that it would be best to steer clear of them. No need to be rude or anything, just keep your distance. They try to talk to you, just say yes, sir and no, sir and politely make your excuses.”

  “Yes, sir. That’s what Mr. Tolbert said.”

  “Right. And a smarter gentleman you won’t find on this whole coast. Okay, then, here we are. Hop on up and let’s pull the skiff up. Then we’ll get loosened up.”

  “What about the other man, the one in the back of the boat, dressed kinda like a tourist?”

  “That was Joe Peel.”

  “Is he a businessman? He didn’t look like he belonged with the other two.”

  “Business? Yeah, if you count monkey business. Nah, he’s a municipal judge and an attorney in West Palm, and he’s had problems of his own. He’d be another one to steer clear of.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Cassidy rarely got down the coast this far, so Trapper Nelson told him about the history of the area. The coast south of Hobe Sound was a particularly desolate stretch of beach. In 1696, a hurricane-wrecked party led by a pious Quaker named Jonathan Dickinson straggled up that same beach in the dead of a particularly chilly winter. The hardscrabble Native Americans who lived along the coast were so destitute they happily stripped the survivors of everything they had, including their clothes. Even Dickinson’s young nursing wife and child were left with hardly a stitch. But at least the locals grudgingly kept them alive as they painfully made their frozen way north to St. Augustine, where the Spanish took pity on them.

  Most of the people who lived in the area knew about Jonathan Dickinson, and they knew this barren stretch of beach. Even those with poor imaginations could empathize with the half-starved castaways who’d passed this way centuries before.

  But for Cassidy, this barefoot run was a different kind of trial. He had jogged and run with his friends, but he’d never encountered a fit adult who actually knew how to run. Trapper Nelson not only kept up a good pace, he kept up a steady stream of chatter while C
assidy concentrated in silence just to keep up.

  At first Cassidy had tried to chat back, but he soon found himself gasping from the effort. He went back to running and listening. The sand was too soft for comfortable running in most places, so he concentrated on staying parallel to the edge of the water where the waves always pounded a solid strip along the beach. It took a lot less energy to stay on that strip, but he noticed that Trapper didn’t even bother. He slogged along quite happily in the looser sand and kept chattering away. They were both barefoot and shirtless, moving along steadily down the deserted strip of coral sand, and after a mile Cassidy began to feel a little exhilarated, despite the effort.

  There wasn’t much in the way of buildings along here, just a few fishermen’s shanties and an occasional sun-bleached weekend cottage. When they got to a place where they could hear traffic from A1A, Trapper veered off into the water, woo-hooing and high stepping as far out as he could get before diving headfirst into the surfless green water.

  Cassidy followed along, if not quite as enthusiastically.

  Trapper surfaced, huffing and blowing and shaking water off like a dog, then looked at Cassidy with a big grin.

  “Turnaround time. I always have a little cooldown splash before heading back.”

  Cassidy couldn’t believe they had come two miles already. He had never run that far in his life. He and Stiggs and Randleman had once done a mile and a half, but the other two complained so much they had never run farther than a mile since.

  “Okay,” said Trapper, beginning to trudge back toward shore, “back to the real fun. Are your feet holding up?”

  “Yeah,” said Cassidy. “My toes are a little sore, though.”

  “Right. They’re tender under your toes where you try to grip the sand. It’s like sandpaper. You better try to stay in a little bit of water going back. Tide’s about dead high, so there should be some good footing in the shallows.”