Dominic squinted. “Who are you?”
The man raised a short, thick oak branch and swung it down against the side of Dominic’s head. Everything blurred and withered to black.
…………………………
Dominic now felt certain the ants would kill him. They attacked his head, biting the insides of his nostrils and crawling into his ears. The lower part of his body had gone numb, his joints had swollen into horrid knobs, and a growing tension in his chest made it difficult to breathe. Once again he heard a voice but he could not discern any of the words. He could only tell that it was a male voice, one with the fragility of an elder.
“Help me,” Dominic wheezed. “Help me or for God’s sake kill me.”
Two hands shoved him and he had the sensation of rolling down a hill. His body slapped into warm, glutinous liquid. Fully submerged, he twisted around, unsure of up from down, trying to find air with his face like an infant emerging from its mother. Dominic’s body yearned to breathe but he knew that even one inhalation meant death. Perhaps drowning like his son was a fitting end, but he had no desire to meet a God he despised. He could hardly fight the urge to inhale but his anger drove him on for a few more seconds, and he felt the hands again. This time they fumbled across his body until they gripped his torso and dragged him up a muddy incline.
He inhaled deeply; the air tasted of charred oak, and when the hands released him, he heard the crackling of a fire and felt its warmth. As he lay there savoring every smoky breath, he realized that the ants were gone. Their scorching bites remained, though, like tiny embers that refused to expire. Then he heard bones creaking and a sigh, as if an old body had just sat beside him.
“Identify yourself,” Dominic implored. “Why do you torture me?”
A long pause ensued, and then came a coarse voice. “Purificación.”
The response startled Dominic—it was in his own language. “Purification? God damn you, I am a commander in the king’s—”
“The ants opened you,” interrupted the voice. “The waters cleansed you, and now the smoke is sealing you anew.”
“You will be arrested for treason. Who are you? I demand that you—”
“I am a protector. Rest now. Rest in the smoke.”
Who was this man who talked so strangely? Was he one of his crew members, exacting revenge for something that Dominic had done in the past? Impossible. They were all dead and he had even counted the bodies on the beach. None were missing. The man spoke in a dialect similar to his own but his accent and the words he used sounded foreign, like a person from another time. No one on the ship had spoken so, and the only Spanish settlement in La Florida—San Agustín—was several hundred miles to the north. Aside from natives, only a deserter or a madman would reside in such fetid wilderness.
“Why am I tied?” Dominic asked, but no answer came and the heat of the fire coaxed him into a light sleep. He dreamt of Juan, five years old and feeding monkeys at the jungle edge, and then of gold flecks glinting in a mine.
“Awake,” said the voice, and Dominic did. His sinuses saturated with smoke and ash, he tried to determine how long he had been sleeping. His eyes were no longer swollen; he opened them. Everything was blurry but he could see the orange glow of the fire set against a brooding darkness.
“Please know that I was once as you are,” said the voice, “covered in the filth of my past iniquities.”
Dominic gazed into the darkness beyond the fire and his vision adjusted enough to see an old man with a long white beard sitting on a stump, his eyes sparkling in firelight. The old man laid a piece of oak on the fire; the flame leapt into the night and danced about like the tail of a riled rattlesnake, giving Dominic plenty of light with which to see. What he saw, however, shocked and confused him.
The old man wore nothing but a strip of deerskin around his thighs. Ornate tattoos covered his neck and face—black spirals that could have been patterns of snail shells, fern shoots, coiled snakes or whirlpools—and small shards of bone pierced his nose and ears. His frayed, tatty beard ended at a tendril just above his distended gut, and the explosion of white hair atop his head was as disheveled as a bird’s nest. He looked absolutely feral.
“Just like you,” the old man said, “I was a demon skulking beneath a man’s skin.”
Dominic scowled. “You know nothing of me.”
“I can see that you are filled with rage. Your eyes tell me that much. And I know that you have killed many people. Wickedness exudes from you like a stench.”
“Every execution was lawful.”
“Whose law?”
“It was God’s will.”
“God wills only life.”
“No, I have seen his other side. He delights in the death of the innocent.”
“The boy?”
“My son.”
“Your son is not dead. His journey continues, just not in this world.”
“You are wrong. God in his wretchedness took him from me.”
“You do not know God. God is good.”
“Then untie me, and let me send you to him.”
“It would not be so horrible, but my time is not yet. Soon, but not yet.”
Dominic squinted, analyzing the old man’s face. “What are you?” he asked.
“Pardon?”
“Native? Or Spaniard?”
“I am neither.” The old man smiled, revealing black gums that mourned teeth. “And I am both.”
His name was Francisco de la Mar, he said, and as a young Franciscan friar many years before, he was asked to serve as priest and confessor aboard Juan Ponce de Leon’s exploratory voyage to La Florida. One night during their passage, Francisco drank too much wine, tried to urinate overboard, and fell into the sea. His absence was not discovered until daybreak. He was certain everyone presumed him dead and probably prayed mightily for the repose of his soul, but his tunic kept him afloat and he washed up alive somewhere on the coast of La Florida.
“The Book promises that whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved,” said Francisco, leaning toward Dominic. “But I should have never called on him. It would have been far better for everyone had I gone to the Kingdom that day.”
Francisco wandered the desolate beaches for several days until a hunting party of Calusa natives captured him. They beat him and spat on him and cut off one of his fingers for a taste, roasting it over a fire in front of him. To his dismay, they seemed to enjoy the flavor, and as he sat tied to a cabbage palm at the edge of their camp, he felt certain that they would consume the rest of him before dawn.
“That’s when God sent an army of his angels to save me,” he said to Dominic.
Francisco had seen them hiding in the trees before his captors did, fanning out noiselessly as they approached. They looked like men made of shadow save for the whites of their eyes which moved like fireflies in the darkness. Closer, closer, closer they came, and Francisco was soon more terrified of the apparent phantoms than he was of the hungry Calusa. Swiftly and with the grace of panthers they pounced. The five Calusa had little time to react and after a burst of spears and flesh they all lay dead on the ground.
Francisco tried to stay still, he said, but the three attackers turned toward him in unison, as if guided by some hidden sense. Covered in dried mud, they loomed tall and terrible. The largest of the three approached Francisco holding a blade fashioned from the lip of a conch shell. Francisco trembled and watched the blade move toward him, resigned to the fact that he was about to be sliced apart. To his surprise, however, the muddy native used the blade to slash the twine that bound him.
“He was my Saint Michael,” said Francisco. “My archangel.”
Despite his discomfort, Dominic lay there engrossed by Francisco’s story. “Why?” he asked. “Why did they save you?”
Francisco peered into the dark forest. “To entrust in me a grave secret.”
Chapter Four
“I’ve decided,” said Zane. “I’m gonna ask her to marry me.
”
Skip chortled, but Zane remained resolute. The amusement drained from his father’s face. “What, you’re serious?”
“Serious.”
“Dude. You’re only—” Skip looked at his fingers as if to count them.
“Nineteen. And that’s how old you were.”
“Yeah, but she made me.”
“What?”
“Nothing. I’m rambling.”
Skip sat sucking rum and pineapple juice through a red cocktail straw that looked far too dainty for a man’s mouth, but Zane had never known his father as someone who fretted about appearance. A faded T-shirt, flip-flops and baggy shorts comprised his daily uniform. When not shacking up with one of his many girlfriends, he enjoyed a carefree life aboard his houseboat. He spent most days idling at waterfront bars—sometimes playing Jimmy Buffett songs on his guitar to cover his bar tab—but if the waves were big, Zane could always find Skip longboarding, somehow keeping pace with the younger surfers and never declining an invitation to party with them afterward. In fact, many of Zane’s own friends spent more time with Skip than he did; such was the burden of having a boyish father who had no misgivings about buying booze for minors and flirting with women as young as his own son.
Having never held a real job, Skip was always energized about some new business idea or money-making scheme. After ordering Ricky Rogers’ Roadmap to Radical Real Estate Riches from an infomercial he saw one Tuesday morning at 2 AM, Skip made a small fortune flipping properties during Florida’s housing boom, but he lost it all—and then some—when the market plunged. These days, most of the local bill collectors and loan sharks knew Skip Fisher by name. He stayed perpetually broke despite occasional and mysterious bursts of cash which he’d squander on lavish gifts for girlfriends, meals at gourmet eateries, and rounds of cocktails for everyone at his favorite bars—temporarily satiating himself, it seemed, with fleeting doses of his bygone prosperity and pomp.
Despite Skip’s flaws, Zane cared about him and was secretly happy that his father had gone bust. There were no more luxury cars in which wet bathing suits were forbidden, no more haughty words like dividend and amortization being thrown about, and no more enthusing about foods that were encrusted with other foods or drizzled with reductions of any kind. Skip had returned to his freewheeling, cheeseburger-loving self, and Zane could not have been happier.
Perched on a barstool beside Skip, Zane now ran his fingers over a dripping glass of ice water packed with lemon wedges. He had requested his usual—water with lemons—and then sweetened it with a packet of cane sugar filched from the coffee tray. Despite the doctoring, the acidity of his improvised lemonade was nearly intolerable and he winced at each bitter sip. It was the only free drink available to him that had any flavor, the alternatives being tap water or plain tonic. His father always said that he would never trust a man who didn’t drink, but Zane had not yet reached the legal age—not that Slick Rick, the bartender, would complain.
“Let me get this straight,” Skip blurted after several minutes of awkward silence. “You’re not even twenty years old, not even twenty, and you’re ready to commit to the same vagina for the rest of your life?”
Zane thought for a moment. “Why, do different ones do different things?”
Skip laughed but stopped when he saw from the look on Zane’s face that his son’s question was entirely sarcastic. “You’re too young to think you’ve found the right girl. Trust me, you’ve gotta look around first.”
Zane literally looked around. The only woman within sight was Heather, a fixture at the Lager-Head Lounge & Live Bait. Three times his age, she always held a glass of Vodka-Cranberry and a menthol cigarette in the same hand as if they were one inseparable unit. Hers was the skin of someone who had spent a lifetime broiling in the tropical sun—hence the nickname everyone used behind her back, Leather Heather.
There was probably a time when Leather Heather was considered pretty, but the years had not been kind to her—or, perhaps more appropriately, she had not been kind to her years. Her breasts sagged low and swung like pendulums beneath her dress, most noticeably when she staggered to the bathroom or swayed beside the jukebox. She was the bane of bar conversation and the joke of Karaoke Night, for her voice had lost all semblance of femininity. It was now a gravelly rasp, and her laugh—a rapid-fire wheeze.
Leather Heather’s favorite song, the one that always drew her to the dance floor, was George Thorogood’s One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer, and she mouthed each word with all the theatrics of a stage actor as she tottered. For extra impact, she sometimes raised her glass over her head whenever the song mentioned a drink, which, of course, it did incessantly. She seemed to be locked in a perpetual party of her own imagining, and, whether she knew it or not, she was always the only person dancing.
“It don’t bother me none,” Zane once heard her say. “Just ‘cause no one else likes to have fun, it sure as hell don’t mean I cain’t.”
Only one part of Leather Heather seemed youthful, but frightfully so: her silken blonde hair looked as if it had been pilfered from a 20-year-old. It gleamed bright against her toasted skin, giving the impression that it was a wig, but no one knew for sure, except perhaps for the drunken fishermen she occasionally lured home.
“I don’t want to look around, Dad.”
Skip peered up at the dusty fish mounts that lined the walls around the bar. “I’m just sayin, Zane, it’s a big sea out there, and there’s plenty of fish in it. Enjoy your youth, kiddo. I sure wish I had.”
“If you had, I wouldn’t be here.”
Skip nodded. “That’s right, but if you really want to know the truth, now that you’re old enough, well, I’ll just say it. You can credit your existence to a keg party and some latex that sat in a hot car for too long. But that’s life for ya, I guess.”
Zane had always assumed himself the product of an accident and the catalyst for his parents’ hurried wedding, but hearing it said by his own father helped him see the full tackiness of his creation, the inconvenience of his place in their lives. He turned and looked out the window, at the grove of masts in the marina where his fishing boat was moored, at the pelicans lazing on pilings splattered white by their own droppings, at the cumulonimbus storm clouds billowing on the horizon.
“Zane?” said Skip. But Zane did not want to reveal his tears.
“Zane!? That is your name, right?” Zane turned and saw Miguel glaring at him, his hair slicked back by the wind. It was a risky habit, but sometimes while driving his boat, the drone of the engines would lull Zane into a daydream or recollection. This had been a particularly emotional one, and he lowered his head to dry his eyes with his forearm while still holding the steering wheel.
“Get back to earth, boy,” Miguel shouted. “We’ve got a problem.”
“Problem?” Zane checked his course: still heading north. He checked the fuel gauge: half a tank.
“Can’t this boat go any faster?” Miguel stomped and the fiberglass rumbled like an earthquake.
“We’re at full speed. What’s wrong?”
“That bastard squealed and now the Feds are onto us.”
“What bastard?” Zane scanned the horizon. “There’s no one out here but us.”
“Oh yeah? Look here.” Miguel pulled a handheld monitor out of his pocket. It was rigged with a thick antenna that pointed to the sky like an accusatory finger.
The small screen on the unit showed two green, flashing dots chasing each other at about an inch apart.
“This is us.” Miguel pointed to the dot in the center. “And this is them, ten miles south and closing.” He pointed to the other dot so forcefully that it made a permanent blotch on the LCD screen.
“But how—”
“GPS tracking device. Like they put on sea turtles. I slipped it into their bilge last night, just in case.” Miguel had a subtle haughtiness in his words, obviously proud of his foresight.
“Then what do we do?”
“We get re
ady.” Miguel rushed to the forward hatch and wrenched a duffel bag out of it. Zane had forgotten about the bag since they disembarked. He recalled how surprised he had been about its extreme weight when Miguel first boarded, and how Miguel insisted that Zane not try to help him with it. So, it was hardly a surprise to see Miguel now extract an automatic rifle from the bag and slam an ammunition clip into it. Zane had never seen such a large gun.
“What’s with the cinderblocks in your front hatch?” asked Miguel.
Zane thought up a lie. “I’m making an artificial reef. To attract snapper.”
“Is fishing all you care about?”
Zane did not answer.
“Anyway, here’s the plan,” said Miguel, holding the rifle across his chest. There was a sudden wildness in his eyes, as if the gun had transferred some of its ferocity into him, and his words spilled out with frenetic intensity as he laid out their strategy. Zane would drive while Miguel would hide behind the gunwale in wait. When the Feds came close enough, Zane would slow the boat and pretend to comply, and then Miguel would leap up and try to disable their outboard motors with a quick barrage of gunfire, the prompt for Zane to throttle away at full speed. That was Plan A.
Plan B, on the other hand, would be implemented should the Feds approach with guns already drawn. Plan B terrified Zane. For that contingency, Miguel had placed his revolver barrel-down in a fishing rod holder behind Zane, with instructions for Zane to grab it and use it if a firefight ensued. “Aim for their chests,” Miguel said. “Heads are too difficult out here with the waves.”
Zane did not want the gun anywhere near him. “Aren’t you afraid I might use it on you?”
“Not really. You already passed my test.”
“Test?”
“Earlier, when I was getting the bale, I gave you a chance to push me over the side—but you were too much of a coward, which is good because I was ready to kill you if you tried. So the answer is no, captain, I’m not afraid of getting shot by a scared little boy. You wouldn’t even get lined up before I’d stuff you so full of lead you’d sink straight to the bottom and be worth an extra twenty dollars if they ever found you.”
The Sound of Many Waters Page 3
