Chasing Fireflies

by Charles Martin

  I dropped the fish into the live well, opened the hatch, and led her downstairs. “There’s the shower. It gets pretty hot, so test it before you step in. And in that closet you’ll find some sweats and stuff that might fit.” I shook my head. “It’s a good thing your fish is bigger than mine . . . otherwise I’d really feel bad.”

  I filleted the fish and sparked the gas grill. By the time she surfaced ten minutes later, I’d made cheese grits, sliced a tomato, and was nearly finished cooking the fish.

  She climbed out of the hole, followed her nose, and sat opposite me, eyeing my work. “Wow, you really can cook.”

  I looked around at the mess I’d made and handed her a plate. “More of Uncle Willee’s influence.”

  “He seems like one of a kind.”

  “Well, I’d hate to think there was more than one of him walking around. I’m not sure the world could handle it.”

  She eyed the two pieces of fish on the grill and said, “Which one’s mine?”

  I pointed with my fork. “The smaller one.”

  She flicked a forkful of cheese grits at me. “Get out of town.”

  I ducked and laughed.

  I pulled up a folding chair for her, and we propped our bare feet on the rope railing and rested our dinner in our laps. We ate and chewed, watching the seagulls ride the breeze. Toward the ocean, ten or twelve porpoises swam upriver, flashing their fins like dolphins while hunting the mullet farther upstream.

  Mandy eyed my right foot. “Is that a scar?”

  I showed her the scar that ran from the bottom center of my foot and up the side of my arch. “Yeah . . . I stepped on a piece of glass when I was about three.”

  She studied the six-inch scar. “That must have been some glass.”

  “I used to wish it’d go away, but now that I’m older . . .” I trailed off. “If it weren’t for this . . . I might forget.”

  “Forget what?”

  “My dad. I only have one memory of him, and this scar reminds me that it was real.”

  I retold the memory for the ten thousandth time. When I’d finished, we were quiet awhile.

  She pointed out into the water where I’d cast for our bait. “Is it always that easy to catch fish there?”

  “Not always. Below us, it’s pretty level. Maybe six to eight feet now. But out there it drops off like a shelf to maybe fourteen, even at low tide. So the fish hang out right there. It’s safe, and there’s usually an abundance of bait moving through in the rapid water.”

  “How’d you learn all this stuff?”

  I shrugged. “Everything I know about fishing I learned from Uncle Willee.”

  “He’s pretty good?”

  “I swear, sometimes I think that man has gills.”

  “You know, most of the guys I work with don’t ever talk about the men in their lives—and when they do, it’s not to speak well of them. Seems like they’re always fighting, trying to outdo one another or get away from each another.”

  “We’ve had our fights.”

  “Yeah, but I can hear it in the way you talk about him. You respect him. You spend time with him. And you seem to enjoy it.”

  I nodded. “When I was a kid, Unc had a boat. More of a big canoe really. Little 5-horse hanging off the back. If you leaned too far one way, it’d take on water. I remember one of the first times he brought me out here. He woke me long before the sun rose, handed me a biscuit, lathered me in sunscreen, baited my hook, and taught me patience. Since then, we’ve caught a lot of fish together.”

  “That seems to be the missing ingredient . . . together.” She shook her head. “In my line of work, I’m surrounded with men who don’t care . . . and it’s the boys they spawn who pay the price for it.”

  I looked at her out of the corner of my eye, trying to figure out how we just went from jumping overboard like Jonah to dissecting the world’s problems like Dr. Phil. I motioned with my fork. “Bad day at the office?”

  She looked down and stirred the grits around her plate. “Sorry. There ought to be a decompression chamber for DAs at the bottom of the totem pole.”

  “How’d you get assigned to the kid’s case?”

  “Oh . . . I asked my boss if he’d let me in on it.”

  “Florence Nightingale?”

  She smiled. “No . . . it was just that picture of the kid. Sitting alone, in the back of that ambulance. No clothes, his body cut up, shaking, shivering, whatever. I just wanted to know who would do that to a kid. And why. And then I wanted to make sure they spent forever looking out through an iron grid.”

  “So, you’re bent on vengeance?”

  She shook her head. “No, justice. There’s a difference.”

  “You learn that in law school?”

  “No . . . the grammar school playground.”

  “You want to walk me through that?”

  “Somewhere around fourth grade, we were playing on a jungle gym. You know, the kind that looks like a geodesic dome. Anyway, I was hanging, my feet dangling, and this bully ran up and yanked my underwear down and completely off my feet.” She shrugged. “All I could think of the rest of the day was how to get him back. He sat behind me, and as the weeks went by I realized that his grades were a lot like mine.”

  I smiled. “Good eyes?”

  She nodded. “Near the end of the year we had those standardized tests coming up that determine whether you’re fit to progress to the next grade. I went to my teacher, told her that I’d be out the day of the test, and asked if I could take them a day early. I did, and when his tests came back . . . well, he repeated the fourth grade.”

  I sat back. “Wow . . . remind me never to come up against you in court.”

  “Of course I was mad, but I was fair. He sank his own ship. Should’ve studied more.” She paused to finish her fish. “So . . . when I see pictures like that kid in the back of that ambulance, scared out of his mind, I remember the school yard, and that every bully gets his due.”

  “Let’s hope so. Speaking of bullies, any leads on Bo?”

  “I think so. If it’s the same one, he’s already in prison. I’m going to pay him a visit tomorrow.” She looked at me. “You want to go?”

  I didn’t even have to think about it. “Sure . . . as long as you promise not to tell Uncle Willee about our first fishing adventure. I’ll never hear the end of it.”

  When Mandy gave Sketch the good news about moving to Unc’s, the kid didn’t seem all that impressed. A lot of people worked really hard and fast to make that happen, and based on what little I did know of him, I knew that he knew that. His reaction told me a lot. It said he’d been moved around more than once and he’d stopped getting his hopes up with each new move. I knew because I’d done it too.

  Before Willee and Lorna took me in, I’d bounced around a good bit. The first couple of times, I’d go into a new home and open up my heart, and then they’d beat me, or stick me in a corner and collect state money, or feed me food and nothing else. So I turned cold, too. Why? Because you can’t hurt cold. If you get all warm and fuzzy for each new set of arms, you learn that most, if not all, are just as cold as the last. So you learn that if you turn cold, they can’t hurt you.

  At least that’s the lie you tell yourself.

  As I sat on the bow of my boat, I realized the lie that Sketch was telling. His facade was just as fake as mine had been.

  Something told me this kid had been taken, and somewhere out there was somebody who wanted him. They might not be able to keep him, or even to voice it, but somebody wanted this kid. My nose told me that.

  I remember my first summer with Unc and Aunt Lorna. We celebrated my birthday on July 31, and Unc gave me two things: a Timex waterproof wristwatch that glowed in the dark and the promise to take me fishing.

  He doused us in Muskol bug repellant, and we stepped out the back door at 5:01 AM. I know because I looked. I carried a knapsack filled with lunch, and Unc carried the poles and a flashlight. We walked out the back door, through the back
pasture, and skirted the Zuta. There was no moon that I can remember, and it was as dark as I’d ever seen it in the woods. We stepped in under the cover of the canopy of the swamp, and I remember asking, “Shouldn’t we wait ’til it gets light?”

  Unc shook his head and stepped into the swamp. I remember this, too, because he did the one thing I won’t ever forget. He clicked on the flashlight, but rather than pointing it in front of him so he could see, he held it behind him so that I could. We walked nearly a mile, skirting cypress stumps and bog holes and skipping over ditches. Midway through, I tugged on his pant leg. He stopped and waited.

  I said, “Unc, how can you see?”

  He looked around, shrugged, and said, “Don’t need to.”

  “Why?”

  He smiled and leaned over, whispering a secret. “’Cause I know where I’m going.”

  He turned to walk, and I tugged on his pants again. “But . . . but aren’t you scared?”

  He stood up, looked around, and shrugged again. “Of what?”

  “Just . . .” I looked over my shoulder and out into the blackness. “. . . of stuff.”

  He knelt down and pointed through the swamp with the tips of the two fishing rods. “Ain’t nothing out there gonna hurt you.”

  “How do you know?”

  “’Cause I grew up out here.”

  “What about snakes?”

  “Well . . . sure, there’re snakes. But, they’re a lot more scared of you than you are of them.”

  “And spiders?”

  “Yup, there’re spiders too. But they’re little and squish easily.”

  “What about . . . monsters?”

  “What, you mean like the boogeyman?”

  I nodded.

  “Listen . . . you might as well learn this now.” He pulled me close to him. His breath smelled like coffee and his skin smelled like Muskol. “The only monster you need to worry about in this life is the one that stares at you from the mirror each morning. You tame him, make friends with him, and the rest of life is nothing you can’t handle.”

  “Yes sir.”

  By the time we made it to the canoe, I was thoroughly convinced that he had X-ray vision. We loaded into his canoe and paddled out into the Buffalo. We were just downstream from Ellsworth’s Sanctuary. Little pink blooms from the crepe myrtle tree were floating on the water. Every time Unc took the paddle out of the water, they stuck to it, only to wash off as soon as he slipped it back in. By 10:30 AM we’d caught nearly fifty bluegills and a dozen warmouth. Our stringer was full and trailing behind us like a ribbon off a lady’s hat.

  We fished until 11:37 AM, when he opened the knapsack and served lunch. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, with Oreo cookies for dessert. We tied the stern rope to a cypress and let the current pull against us. There had been a lot of rain lately, so the Altamaha was running pretty quick. Little swirls would appear in the water where the current bounced off the sandy bottom and created an undertow.

  Unc pointed to them and said with his mouth full, “Be careful of those. Keep your head above them when you’re swimming. They’re not too strong, but if you’re trying to come up and get a breath, it’ll give you enough pause to make you wish it wasn’t there.”

  I watched the swirls zigzag around the hull of the canoe. “Unc? How long can you hold your breath?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe a minute.” He eyed the swirls again. “If you ever get caught in one, don’t worry. They disappear as quickly as they appear. Just let it carry you down. It’ll set you on the bottom, where it’ll dissipate and let you go. It’s just the way they work. My brother Jack and I . . . back when things were different . . . used to ride them just for fun.”

  We finished lunch, and Unc said, “Let me see your line.”

  I held out my pole, and he cut off my bobber and hook and replaced it with a little spinner bait called a Beetle Spin. He smiled, spit on the bait, and said, “The afternoon sun makes the fish kind of lazy so you have to rouse them out of their slumber. This”—he jiggled the spinner—“is too good to pass up. Fish just can’t stand to let it go by. I’m not sure if it makes them hungry or mad, but either way they hit it with a vengeance.”

  He was right. We caught fish on our first three casts.

  He pointed at ten or twelve huge stumps off in the distance. “See those? Back when my daddy first cut this property, he’d cut those huge trees, clear the limbs, then float them down this river to Brunswick and the sawmill. There, they’d cut them into timber and ship them all around the world. He used to tell me that parts of the Brooklyn Bridge came out of this swamp.”

  “What’s the Brooklyn Bridge?”

  “Oh . . . it’s a bridge in New York City.”

  I dipped my hand in the water, testing the pull of a swirl that had surfaced just outside the hull. “Where’s this water go?”

  “Atlantic Ocean.” He swallowed and tilted his gaze toward the invisible horizon. “If you’re man enough, you can canoe all the way from here to anywhere in the world.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure. You might need a bigger boat once you get to the ocean, but barring that, the only limits you face are those you place on yourself.”

  “Have you ever done it?”

  “What?”

  “Paddled from here to the ocean?”

  He looked off into the distance again. “Yep . . . many times.”

  We were floating again, the current carrying us along at a pretty good clip. Unc turned the paddle, using it as a rudder, and steered us toward an arm-sized piece of wood that was lying half out of the water. It was dead and waterlogged. He tied the stern rope to it and tossed it behind us. It sank and dragged in the water about five feet off the stern.

  “We’re moving a little faster than I’d like,” he said. “The log will give us a little extra drag. Slow us down a bit.” He smiled. “’Cause there’s good fishing in here, and we don’t want to miss it.”

  I watched the swirls, saw the log tugging at our stern, and didn’t feel quite as comfortable in the boat as I had earlier that morning.

  At 3:07 PM we rounded a corner to find that a huge pine tree had fallen across the river. It would have made a good bridge if we were on foot and trying to cross.

  Unc turned the paddle again and said, “I want you to lean forward and keep your hands in the boat. I’ll tell you when you can sit up. Got it?”

  I nodded and leaned forward. The only problem was that I had left my fishing pole sticking up too far into the air. Unc tillered us beneath the tree, but the hook on my Beetle Spin caught on the bark and began pulling against my drag. Without thinking, I stood up and reached for it.

  Unc said, “Nope, Chase, I got it.”

  But it was too late.

  My shifting weight dipped the up-current side of the canoe down into the water where the current, and increased flow of the river, caught it. Within a second we were upside down and swimming. The current grabbed me like a huge hand and shoved me to the bottom, where it spun me like a top. Then all at once, just as suddenly as it grabbed me, it let go. I looked up through the rust-colored water and saw sunlight. I reached out my feet, kicked off the bottom, and started soaring to the surface like Superman. Unc was right. It was fun.

  Problem was, the current carried me downstream and into a chaotic mass of downed trees and limbs. It looked like an underwater beaver dam, but looking back, it was just a logjam. The trees were jammed up against an enormous cypress whose hollowed-out stump reached down into the water and spread out like the tentacles of a giant squid. Some were fat, some slender, but all fanned out and tied themselves into the river bottom. There in its arms, the logs piled up.

  I drifted into the roots of the tree, where the jumbled mass swarmed around me, grabbed my clothes, and pinned my left foot into the V-notch of a root. I pulled at my foot, but only made things worse. I tried to scream, but the water wouldn’t let me. I grabbed a limb above me, pulled as hard as I could, and lifted myself into what must have
been a waterfall inside the stump. Given the rain and the increased water in the river, the level of the water had risen above the normal level on an old stump and created a small waterfall that would last only as long as the water level remained this high.

  I poked my head in behind it where a cavity had formed and sucked in as big a breath as it would let me. I choked and sputtered, and the current began pulling against me. That’s when I felt Unc’s hands on my foot. The wood was cutting into my shin and the pain was growing, but I was more worried about my arms giving out. It was all I could do to hold on. I pressed in hard against the back of the stump and took another breath. I rested my head against my left hand, my eyes pressing against the face of my watch.

  I watched thirty seconds pass as Unc pulled on the logs that had latched their viselike grip on me. At one minute, my arms were shaking. At two minutes, my left foot was numb, yet Unc hadn’t let go. Two and a half minutes passed, and I felt myself slipping further into the water. Finally, at three minutes, when the waterfall covered my face and closed off the air, I let go.

  When I woke up, I was lying on the riverbank, Unc beside me. He was coughing and sputtering like an old outboard motor. His face and lips were blue, and his eyes were bloodshot. He was sucking in huge gasps of air. I looked down at my ankle, which was cut and bleeding, but my foot was still attached. I wiggled my toes inside my shoe and lay back down. That’s when I started crying.

  Unc put his arm around me and pulled me toward his chest. His heart was pounding unlike anything I’d ever heard, and he had yet to catch his breath.

  “Unc . . .” I tugged on him and cried again. “Uncle Willee . . . you . . . you could have died.”

  He tried to laugh, but doing so brought up more water and deeper coughing. “Nah . . . I’ve already been dead once. Can’t die a second time.”

  “But . . . you stayed under for over three minutes.”

  “Really?”

  I held up my watch and nodded.

  “Well—” He wiped the spit off his mouth with his shirtsleeve that was torn and frayed. “That’d definitely be a new record for me.”