Hell's Bay

by James W. Hall

  “There was more going on back there than being splashed.”

  He was probably right. Up close she looked more cultivated and well-maintained than some roadside fishmonger. The whole encounter had the feel of a reconnaissance. Testing our reactions, getting a closer look.

  I dug through the duffel and pulled out the cell phone Rusty had given me. I flipped it open, but no bars showed on the screen, zero reception. Lance, the same hurricane that last August had ravaged the shoreline mangroves, also wrecked the cell towers on the mainland that once served this region. Five months later, only a couple were back in service, but we were just beyond their range. The satellite phone Rusty carried for emergencies was locked up back on the Mothership.

  Though I knew it was useless, I switched on the handheld VHF radio, tuned it to our agreed-upon channel 67, and tried to hail Rusty. By now she was probably on the far side of Whitewater Bay, beyond the reach of my meager wattage and stubby aerial. The Mothership had two twenty-foot antennae with boosters, so there was a chance that Teeter might hear my voice, but after three tries and no response, I set the radio back in its holster.

  There was something quaint and pleasing about passing beyond the range of modern electronics. Even the map on my global positioning screen was wildly inaccurate, show-ing the Wood River to have dwindled away to nothing a half mile back. According to the GPS indicator map, the spot where we were floating was a half mile inland on the solid ground of Florida’s southern tip.

  That seemed a pretty fair definition for a wilderness zone—a place where none of the gadgets worked, and if you were going to save your ass you better have a command of the basics.

  I couldn’t remember the last time I felt so relaxed.

  I slipped behind the wheel. Milligan was still staring at me and shaking his head.

  “Let’s go fishing, why don’t we?”

  I eased the skiff forward a few feet so the bow brushed the outer branches of the creek mouth. I bent forward to peer down the corridor to see if there was any hope we could penetrate the snarl.

  The good news was that there was a line of sight for about two hundred yards. The bad news was the line was cross-hatched by branches at intervals of about every yard or so. If we were to penetrate that overgrown stream, we’d have to claw and cram and scrape the skiff ahead for a good part of the morning.

  I tilted the engine up so high the propeller was barely below the waterline. That way we could muscle ahead through as little as five or six inches. If it got any shallower back there we’d have to kill the engine, tilt the prop all the way up, and drag the boat ahead by hand.

  “You sure about this?” Mona said.

  “I’ll need you up front, John.” I drew the loppers from be-neath the console. “You keep us in the center of the channel, clip as few branches as possible. Be on the lookout for any submerged logs. And don’t fall overboard. This is gator country. And a few crocs show up back here, too.”

  “We’re going in there?” Milligan said.

  “That’s the idea.”

  I flipped open the rear hatch and drew out the two net bags that held the foul-weather gear.

  “Put the jackets on, hoods up.”

  “It’s not going to rain,” Mona said. “Skies are perfectly clear.”

  “Spiders,” I said. “It’s going to be raining spiders.”

  They put on their slickers, and I inched forward into the thicket.

  “Spiders?” Mona said. “The biting kind?”

  “I don’t know. Let’s not find out.”

  * * *

  Sasha killed the engine and let the boat drift a mile beyond the perimeter of Ponce de Leon Bay, out in five feet of water in the quiet gulf. They had a straight-on view of the mouth of the Broad River, with empty miles of silver-blue in every direction squirming like a pan of mercury.

  On the deck beside her, Griffin lay still on the bedroll with his eyes closed. Sasha knelt down, looked for the rise and fall of his chest, and when she couldn’t detect it, touched a fingertip to his throat.

  Griffin opened his eyes. Smiled at her.

  “Not yet,” he said.

  He struggled to sit up, then extended an arm and Sasha hauled him to his feet. He coughed, spit a gob over the side.

  “What was the fuss back there, all that roaring around?”

  “Milligan and his daughter and another man. I made a pass at them to make sure.”

  “Was it Thorn?”

  “I don’t know. Didn’t seem as big and bad as advertised.”

  “Middle of nowhere. Why didn’t you go ahead and take them down? You’re not losing your nerve?”

  “I was only scouting. Making sure. We want to get this right.”

  Sasha sat on the flip-up seat on the bow and looked back at her son. Her mind was flashing with ravenous blackbirds, dark bursts of beak and feather, a whirlwind flock feeding on a cloud of fat lazy insects. A vision she could neither eradicate nor decode.

  “What kind of fish you and Granddad catch out here anyway?”

  Sensitive Grif saw her strain and was fetching for a pleasant memory.

  “Reds, cobia, some snook. Lot of trash, ladyfish and cats.”

  Griffin nodded and closed his eyes on a smile as if he was picturing that kind of paradise. Lost to him now, lost to both of them. All they had was this yellow boat, stolen, and the rifle and the pistol in the duffel beside the console. A day of killing ahead.

  “Damn,” Griffin said. “We forgot the rods and reels.”

  “Not to mention the bait,” Sasha said.

  “Next time we come out here, it’ll be for pleasure.”

  The only answer she could muster was a nod.

  “What’s in the cooler?” He settled into the swivel seat behind the wheel.

  “Sodas, turkey wraps, some pork rinds. You hungry, need a sip?”

  Griffin didn’t answer, his gaze drifting off toward the waanswer that. From the first moment vering horizon, the gray listless bay, staring at the mudflats and the sandy banks where herons stood a mile offshore, the air quaking with heat as the sun gained its place.

  “Wonder what Dad would say about this mayhem we’re into?”

  “He wouldn’t like it a damn bit.”

  “Hell, if he was alive, he’d still be out knocking on doors, getting names on one petition or another, making posters, lobbying his congressman, playing by the rules. Thinking everyone else was, too.”

  “He was a good man.”

  “Turns out being good doesn’t get you far.”

  “He did what he thought was right.”

  “That why you married him, ’cause he was good?”

  They’d been having these conversations. A kind of fast-forward courtship. Her boy trying to plumb his mother’s depths in his final moments.

  “I married him because he was smart and handsome and had a good heart. He was the best man I ever met.”

  “Until I came along, you mean.”

  “Until you came along.”

  “Give me the truth on something, Mama.”

  “I don’t lie to you, Grif.”

  “Is this a kamikaze mission? Coming out here, this killing? You plan on getting out of this alive?”

  She couldn’t answer that. From the first moment she’d returned fire in Iraq, the old definitions of survival no longer ruled. Trying to stay alive wasn’t part of it anymore. Good death, noble death, useful death, taking as many of the enemy with you. That’s another thing she brought back from that wretched place, a different way of seeing death.

  “You’re a beautiful woman. You shouldn’t let this be the end. Just because of me and Dad. You should get out of this alive, go somewhere. Live. Your looks, you could get a rich husband, enjoy some luxury.”

  “You hitting on me, Griffin?”

  “I would if it were allowed. I would indeed. You’re beau-tiful. Anybody can see it.”

  “You’re a sweet boy.”

  “There’s things you could do, places to see.
You could do it for my sake, be my eyes. Go see Spain, Switzerland, the Alps. Florence, Berlin, Tokyo, California. Travel and take me along. You know. China, that’d be cool. Hell, I never even seen Atlanta.”

  She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t let herself breathe. The blackbirds, ravens, vultures were whirling inside her eyes.

  Her boy, her bright shining star. Somewhere in the last month Griffin finished being her son. Now he was something else, some other designation. Sasha had witnessed the same thing happen in the war. Kids transforming overnight. One day they’ve got a sappy grin, next day it’s gone. Everything hardened up inside. Eyes still and distant.

  The boy retrieved his blue backpack from a storage locker, hauled it out and dug through it.

  “What’re you doing, Grif?”

  He came out with a couple of old white T-shirts, then a red metal can.

  “Grif, what’s going on?”

  He held up the red can. Lighter fluid for a charcoal barbecue.

  “You know what a Viking funeral is, Mama?”

  Griffin was gazing out at the diffused grays and blues, the ragged shoreline of mangroves. Breath rasping in his throat.

  “Boat on fire,” Sasha said. “Corpse put out to sea.”

  “Make my reservation.” He smiled her way, his cheeks burnished with sun, a smear of dark spittle on his chin. “Could you do that for me when the time comes?”

  “Why, Griffin?”

  “If the color of the fire matches the color of the sunset, that means I led a good life and I’m going to Valhalla.”

  “You’ve led a good life, Griffin. A damn good life.”

  “Valhalla is where warriors go. Their private heaven. They feast on roasted boar and get drunk every night on grog or beer.”

  “This is something from a book?”

  “Dad read it to me when you were off fighting in Iraq. We talked about it, how it would be a good way to go. He wanted it for himself, but that didn’t happen. The goddamn hospital and all that bullshit.”

  He set the lighter fluid on the deck beside him, bundled the white rags back around it, and tucked it away into his backpack.

  She managed a nod, then looked off at that wilderness of water, off toward where that houseboat was anchored up, only a few minutes away.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  It took more than an hour to reach the final snarl of branches, with the secret lake shimmering just a few feet beyond.

  By then John Milligan had become adept at snipping with the loppers, making only the cuts necessary and trying not to open the lane so wide another passerby might notice it was accessible.

  I’d mastered a technique for maneuvering the skiff through nearly impassable gaps, reversing the prop, then slamming us forward, cutting the wheel in short choppy strokes from side to side to wriggle past obstructions. The bottom paint on my wood hull would be nicked and scored by the half-dozen logs and rocks we’d rammed, and the deck itself was blanketed by hundreds of tiny agitated spiders and the crumbled white crusts of barnacles and a thick coating of mangrove leaves. But otherwise the three of us seemed unscathed.

  As we’d worked down the narrow channel, I was pleased to see no signs of other explorers preceding us. If the woman on the bass boat was trying to scare us away from her private fishing hole, this nameless lake was not it. Either no one had ever passed this way before, or their passage had occurred so long ago that no mark of it remained. I could sense a high, thrilling whistle in my veins that had gradually risen to a pitch I had not known since I was a boy basking in my first ecstasies.

  Once we entered the still waters of the first lake, we spent a while whisking the spiders away and swept the deck as best we could with hand towels and scrub brushes. We worked in silence, part reverence, part exhaustion.

  While John and Mona finished swiping at the remaining cobwebs and shook the spiders off their foul-weather gear, I knotted orange bucktails onto the leaders, then set their spinning rods in the holders. Afterward, I tilted up the motor and examined the prop. Along the route, I’d dinged two or three solid objects, and the stainless-steel blades showed some minor scarring, but nothing that would substantially alter their performance.

  Mona took her seat on the padded ice chest while John finished cleaning the deck. I slipped the fiberglass push pole out of its clips and climbed up on the rear platform to propel us deeper into the lake.

  John shook out his towel, folded it, and set it on the deck, then gave me a quick questioning look and I nodded my assent. He took a rod from one of the holders, set his feet, and after a practice motion he cast his lure toward the mangrove roots. Though his technique was capable enough, he was clearly rusty and his bait plinked into the water well short of the tangle of roots.

  Using short jigs he retrieved his bucktail and after only two or three jerks of his rod and cranks of the reel, his road bent sharply. One cast, one strike. The tarpon was smallish, ten, twelve pounds, but it jumped a half-dozen times. A bright silver projectile launching several feet into the air, twisting and splashing on its side. Back in the water it made sizzling runs toward the roots before John managed to turn it each time and angle it back toward the boat. Finally he brought it up to the side, and I netted it and held it up for them both to admire. Smiles more genuine than I’d seen on their faces before.

  I slid the fish back into the water and it shot back toward the roots.

  On her first cast, Mona hooked a redfish and nailed a sizeable snook on her second. We’d been in the lake for less than ten minutes and we already had a backcountry grand slam. For the next half hour it was another fish at every cast, the closer the bait landed to the mangrove roots, the bigger the catch.

  I gave only minimal directions. “Keep your rod tip down; cast side-armed.” Other than that all three of us were reduced to yelps and whoops of wonderment. To my surprise, I was starting to warm to these two—not for anything they’d done or said, but for their silence and restraint, their understanding of the rare good fortune of such fishing and such isolation, and for succumbing to what I took to be the same wonder and awe I was feeling.

  Fifty yards to the west, I spotted the narrow channel that connected the first lake with the second and I began poling us quietly in that direction. The wind was light, the water brilliantly clear, and the circling egrets and cormorants seemed to be eyeing us with lazy indifference. We were one of them. We’d earned the right to be there.

  Songbirds reveled in the dense branches, and the breeze was as plush and bracing as a swallow of aged whiskey. The fish we’d caught were not even close to the largest of their kind I’d landed, and I’d fished other remote backwaters where they were more abundant, lagoons where schools of giant tarpons rolled, their big scales flashing in the sun like rows of silver badges. But this nameless lake, in its utter isolation, had a purity I’d never known. So far removed from the squalor and jangle of urban streets, the jackhammer racket of brute machines, the bellow of fourteen-wheelers rolling by on the overseas highway, that for a moment it was possible to believe that all was not lost, that scattered here and there relics of the original Florida lived on, still with the power to absolve and restore.

  “Want to take a shot, Thorn?” Mona held up her rod.

  I nodded my thanks and set about stabbing the push pole into the muddy bottom, then lashing it to the platform to anchor us in place. But as I came down from the platform, John snatched the rod from Mona’s hand and slid it into one of the rod holders on the console.

  “It’s time we talked.”

  I stared at him for a moment, then let it go. I didn’t want to lose my high in some petty squabble. As I took a seat behind the wheel, a great blue heron watched us from a perch atop the clicking branches of a mangrove, taking a break from its ceaseless forage to study these curious creatures.

  “So talk.”

  “And I was so relaxed,” Mona said with a sigh. “This place is magical.”

  “Give it a rest, Mona,” her father said.

  Sh
e opened her mouth, then shut it and took a seat on the bow.

  Milligan drew a breath and held me with his hard gray eyes. He rubbed a finger back and forth against his lips, pushing aside the black bristles of his mustache. I could see the clench in his neck and the swell of bulky muscles in his chest and shoulders. A man priming himself for hand-to-hand combat.

  “I grew up on a cattle ranch,” John said.

  “Oh, here we go,” said Mona.

  “My daughter has no respect for family history, but I’m deeply proud of my heritage. My father and mother worked long, grueling hours, as did their parents. And when I was a boy, I joined them, side by side, mending fences, moving the herds, feeding, branding, watering, slaughtering. Exhausting days, harsh work. From the time I was five, I was riding horseback and was expected to keep up with the adults. We raised cattle. A good portion of the herd was descended from Andalusian stock. Cracker cattle. Forty years I busted my ass working that land. No vacations, no breaks. While you were being a beach bum or playboy or whatever the hell you did, I was a cattleman, shoulder to shoulder with the laborers we hired. A cowboy pure and simple.”

  “Don’t forget the wolves,” Mona said, “and the mosquitoes.”

  Milligan looked away and shook his head. When he turned back to me, his eyes had hardened. Nostalgia time was over.

  “When Mother passed away last summer, she left us quite a surprise.”

  “The lockbox, you mean.”

  Milligan glared at Mona.

  “I told him that much,” she said. “I left the good part for you.”

  Milligan swung back to me.

  “Yes, the lockbox. It seems Mother had taken a keen interest in following your . . .” He searched for the word.

  “My career?”

  “If you want to call it that,” Milligan said. “In any case, she collected a good bit of information about you. For a woman of such hard-bitten temperament, such a tough old bird, she had a sentimental streak she kept hidden. Somehow she kept track of her daughter’s son. Her only grandchild.”

  I looked over at Mona.

  “Only?”