Sunbaked (Pineapple Cay Stories Book 1)

by Junie Coffey

  She had never even bothered to try fishing in Maine. Things were off to a rocky start. She wondered what the point was if you just let them go, but she didn’t want to offend Ted, who obviously liked it enough to devote his life’s work to it and had gone to the trouble to plan a day out.

  “Great,” she said.

  They headed south of town past the airport turnoff. It was another perfect day in paradise. They passed the oceanfront villas she and Pansy had driven by on their way into town a couple of days ago—Bougainvillea Villa, The Flip-Flop, Mermaid House, and a dozen others—and a convenience store and the medical clinic. They passed a whitewashed church gleaming in the sunlight, its doors and windows flung open. The sound of a joyful hymn poured out into the quiet of Sunday morning. Gradually, signs of human habitation petered out, and they were driving through low scrubland with a huge bowl of blue sky above them and the ocean on their right.

  The road followed a winding, thin strand of beach along the coast for a couple of miles, then cut inland. A few miles farther on, Ted turned off onto a gravel road. They bumped along for a few minutes, the bush pressing close on both sides of the road. They rolled to a stop in a grassy clearing with the water in front of them again. There were three or four pickup trucks and a couple of trailers parked on a patch of gravel. There was no beach, just an aged concrete boat ramp sloping into the water next to a narrow wooden pier that extended into what looked to Nina like a swamp. Dense clumps of mangrove trees with high, tangled roots grew out of the water. A meandering channel wound its way through the mangroves away from the dock.

  Nina got out of the Jeep and stood to the side with her canvas tote over her shoulder while Ted backed the trailer down the boat ramp and slid the boat in the water with the ease of someone who had done it at least a thousand times. He tied the boat to a cleat on the dock, waded back to shore, and parked the truck and trailer out of the way in the shade. His boots and the bottoms of his khaki shorts were soaked, but he didn’t seem to mind. He came and stood by Nina with a second pair of boots in his hand.

  “Once in a while I see parrots here. They like those red berries.” They stood silently, scanning the treetops. There was plenty of raucous birdsong but no parrots in sight.

  “Maybe we’ll see them next time,” he said. He handed her the boots. They were sand-colored with a pair of sand-colored socks inside. “Here. It’s probably easiest if you wade out to the boat. These will protect your feet and help keep you upright while you fish.”

  She leaned against the bumper of the Jeep, slipped off her flip-flops, and put on the boots. They waded out to the boat. Luckily she had worn her bathing suit under her shorts. He jumped into the boat and reached out his hand to help her in over the bow. She sat down, he started the engine, and they began to move slowly away from the dock through the mangrove creek. The vegetation was high on either side of the boat, and they were in shade. It was a different world from the turquoise water, white sand, and brilliant sunlight she’d seen on her side of the island.

  “Keep your eyes on the water,” he said. “There are green turtles around here. Huge. Some of them eighty years old.” She slid to the edge of the bench and peered over the side. There were little brown fish darting all around.

  “There!” he said, pointing ahead of him. He motioned to her to look. She looked where he was pointing and saw a large oval shape glide through the water just below the surface. He grinned at her, and she grinned back. The mangroves began to thin out, and the channel opened up. They emerged into a wide sunlit bay. The color of the water changed from olive green to jade, turquoise, and sapphire blue. He cut the engine.

  “Are we going to fish here?” she asked.

  “The fish around here are fished so hard that if they see a fly, they can tell you who tied it. We’ve got to go farther down,” he said. “I just thought we’d soak up the silence for a few minutes.”

  They sat there quietly, looking out to the horizon. The only sound was the soft lapping of the water against the hull of the boat. The shallow water was transparent, the grains of sand visible on the bottom. Ted handed her a bottle of orange juice from the cooler, and they drank in silence. He looked over at her, then started the engine again.

  “Hang on,” he said. The boat gathered speed, and the bow lifted. They skimmed over the surface of the water. Nina felt the ocean spray on her face. They flew along, cutting wide arcs around sandbars until they rounded a point of land and drifted into a shallow, sheltered bay. Swirls of white sand rose above shallow pools and channels of sapphire and green. Ted cut the engine and threw out the anchor.

  “Let’s try it here,” he said. He opened the tackle box to reveal several cascading trays filled with flies and lures. He picked out a cotton-candy-pink-and-silver bundle with shiny metal eyeballs and a hook protruding from it.

  “This is a Crazy Charlie. They seem to like them,” he said.

  “They must be pretty dumb if they think that’s a fly. It looks just like a piece of thread and a feather,” said Nina.

  “Yes, well. It’s supposed to be a shrimp. They are not rocket scientists. But they are savvy. Let’s see how dumb you think they are at the end of the day,” said Ted. He put the fly on her line and handed the long rod to her. They slipped over the side of the boat into knee-deep water and started wading out onto the flats.

  “Wait a second,” said Nina. “Are there sharks around here?”

  “Don’t worry about them,” said Ted. “They’ll be long gone before you even know they were here. They’re more afraid of you than you are of them.”

  “Yeah, right. I’m from Maine. That’s what we used to tell the tourists about the black bears. The summer I worked at the state park office, the staff bulletin board was full of pictures of flattened tents and cars with the doors ripped off by bears looking for peanut-butter sandwiches,” she said.

  “I haven’t lost a customer to a shark yet,” he said. “See all those circles in the sand with the holes in the center?” He pointed down into the shallow water. “That’s where bonefish have been feeding. One way to find them is to look for tailing fish—their tails poking out of the water while they suck small shrimp and crabs out of the sand. Otherwise, they are nearly invisible and very quick. You have to look for their shadows on the sandy bottom rather than for the fish themselves. They sometimes travel alone and sometimes in schools.”

  He spent several long minutes patiently trying to teach her how to cast; then they stood scanning the flats for signs of the fish.

  “There! Cast your line at nine o’clock!” he said. She made a clumsy attempt to throw the line in the direction he was pointing. It landed a few feet in front of her. He deftly took the rod from her and cast the line like a lariat far out in front of them. He handed it back to her.

  “Now strip the line. Pull it in with your hand a foot at a time. Strip it. Strip it. You’re trying to make the fish think you’re a shrimp,” he said. They did that several times. Nina could understand the appeal on a certain level. The setting was spectacular, and the peace was enveloping. A sweeping empty vista of blue and white. But after the tenth time pulling the long line in foot by foot, she was feeling ready to move on.

  Suddenly she felt the line pull tight.

  “OK! You’ve got one on the hook,” he said. She felt a tug through the rod and the movement of the fish in the water. A few seconds passed, and nothing much else happened.

  “So, is this what it’s all about?” she asked. “Is this what people travel thousands of miles and spend thousands of dollars to do?”

  “That fish doesn’t know it’s hooked yet. Just wait,” he said. As the words left his mouth, the line started ripping off her reel, and the handle spun wildly.

  “Ahhhh!” screamed Nina. For a millisecond, she thought of dropping the rod, but instead, she hung on for dear life.

  “OK. Keep the rod up. Let him run. Don’t touch the line or the reel while the fish is running. That’s it. There’s drag on the reel, and that’ll tir
e the fish out.” He put his hand over hers on the rod for a second and then removed it. The fish was racing like a missile straight out to sea.

  “Wait until it stops running, then start reeling in the line. Keep the rod tip up. Keep the rod tip up so it can’t snap the line. Good,” he said. The fish finished his run. “OK, start reeling it in. You don’t want any slack on the line.”

  Nina reeled the line in.

  “OK. Now watch out. It’s going to run again when it sees us.” All of a sudden there was a violent pull on the line. The line tore off the reel, and the fish was off running again.

  The fish ran three times before Nina was able to reel it in to where they were standing. Ted reached down and gently cradled the fish in two hands just below the surface of the water. He looked up at Nina and smiled.

  “Congratulations. You’ve caught your first bonefish. I wish you many more to come.” It was long and slender, with gorgeous silver scales. It was so closely camouflaged to the water and sand that it appeared almost translucent. With one hand, Ted reached into the pocket of his shorts and pulled out a pair of forceps. He clamped them on the hook protruding from the fish’s mouth and, with an expert motion, gave them a twist. The hook came out, and the fish shot away. Nina was unexpectedly exhilarated.

  They fished awhile longer. Nina did not hook another one, but she did get caught up in scanning the surface for signs of fish and practicing her casting. Eventually, she went back to the boat and sat in the shade of the Bimini top, drinking a bottle of ice-cold water from the cooler, watching Ted cast and cast again. He caught two more fish and gently released them. After he let the second one go, he waded back to the boat, grabbed a water bottle from the cooler, and sat beside her. He lifted his hat and wiped the sweat from his brow. A gentle breeze rippled the surface of the water, and then it was smooth again, like polished glass.

  “It’s about time for lunch, what do you think?” he asked.

  “That was fun. But now that you mention it, sure, I’m ready for lunch,” she answered.

  He pulled up the anchor and started the motor. They flew back the way they had come, skimming over the water. The breeze and mist from the wake of the boat cooled Nina’s sun-heated skin. They cruised slowly through the mangroves back to the wharf. Then Ted loaded the boat on the trailer, and they headed back down the potholed gravel road to the main highway.

  “There is a little place at the south end of the island called Rosie’s. I thought we might stop there for a bite,” said Ted.

  “Sounds great,” said Nina.

  They drove for a couple of miles on a straight road through scrubland devoid of any development, the ocean coming close to the edge of the highway, then moving away again. Gradually, the island narrowed until they could see the water glittering in the distance on both sides of the road through a fringe of palms and casuarina pines. As they crested a low hill, suddenly spread out before them was a sweeping vista of turquoise water, white sand, and patches of green-and-gold grass. At the end of the island, an arm of land curved around in the water, enclosing a bowlful of the Caribbean Sea. Off its very tip, a scattered line of low-lying sandy cays trailed off over the horizon. Immediately in front of Nina and Ted at the bottom of the hill, two ponds rimmed in brilliant white flanked the road. The white was even brighter than the sand.

  “Those are salt ponds,” said Ted. “There’s a small company here that produces and exports Pineapple Cay sea salt.”

  Beyond the salt ponds, the terrain climbed gently again until it reached the sea. A small village clustered on either side of the road. There was a gas station and a tiny telephone company office dwarfed by a telephone tower and a forest of antennas penned up in a yard surrounded by a chain-link fence. Three goats stood in the shade on the front step of the telephone office, their heads swiveling to watch Ted and Nina as they slowly drove by. There were a dozen or so small cement-block houses, the fishing boats in some driveways taller than the houses. Nina heard a rooster crow and saw a hen and some chicks pecking in the yard of a yellow house with a big red-hibiscus blossom painted on its side. There was no other sign of life in the heat of midday. As they drove slowly past the lone gas pump, Nina read the hand-lettered sign taped to it: BLOW HORN FOR SERVICE.

  Ted followed the narrow road through the village and out onto the arm of land to the very southern tip of Pineapple Cay. There, just below the narrow, rocky point, sat a wooden building painted all the colors of the rainbow. A covered veranda faced the cays, and a beer sign and a giant ice cream cone were nailed to the wall next to the door. ROSIE’S was painted in giant white letters on the rainbow-striped wall next to the beer sign.

  Ted parked the Jeep, and he and Nina climbed the three steps up to the veranda. The view was amazing: the blue sky, the turquoise water, and the white sails of a sailboat drifting back and forth. A couple of sailboats were moored in the sheltered cove below the restaurant, and an aluminum motorboat and an inflatable Zodiac were pulled up on the sand. Nina surmised that they belonged to the laughing, tanned vacationers sitting at two picnic tables littered with sweating beer bottles and half-eaten plates of food.

  Nina and Ted gravitated to a table on the edge of the covered deck, facing the cays. Ted took off his hat and ran his fingers through his damp hair.

  A matronly woman in an apron greeted Ted warmly and brought them coleslaw, toasted sandwiches, and cool drinks.

  “Apart from the Bassetts, how are you finding life on Pineapple Cay?” Ted asked Nina as they ate.

  “Apart from the Bassetts, I like it very much. If you could dream up the perfect little town on the perfect tropical island, I think it would look a lot like this,” replied Nina.

  “Agreed,” said Ted. “With any luck, thirty or forty years from now, I’ll be one of those old guys fishing off the town wharf every afternoon, with a good supply of stories about the old days to tell on the porch in the evenings.”

  She smiled. They ate in silence for a moment, enjoying the view.

  “Of course, sunshine and blue skies doesn’t work for everyone,” he said. “We get all kinds of people who come here to fish some of the best water anywhere. They include some very successful people who, you can tell, really want to excel at having a good time. They’ve bought all the best gear and are up and ready to go the first morning. Then they get frustrated when they don’t achieve perfection with their first cast. They stand in the water with paradise all around them, cursing. Scaring the fish. I always think of that quotation: ‘The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.’”

  “Mmm,” said Nina, “that’s very true. Danish said something like that the other day.”

  “Danish,” said Ted, looking out at the water again and then back at her. “I never had him down as a philosopher. More as a fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants kind of guy.”

  “Oh, well . . . ,” said Nina. Then she decided to change the topic. “So, how did you come to be living on Pineapple Cay?”

  “It probably would have been surprising if it had gone any other way,” he said. “I grew up in Florida and spent a lot of time fishing with my father. I love it. Always have. I couldn’t believe it when I learned you could make a job out of it. I spent about ten years guiding sports in the Florida Keys before the coast got a bit overdeveloped for my taste. I built the lodge eight years ago, and I’ve been here ever since. The lodge takes up most of my time, but I have no complaints. I’m a lucky guy. I earned a business degree after high school, mostly to please my mother. Most of the guys I went to college with are muscling their way through their office jobs, just looking forward to the couple of weeks a year they get a chance to do what I do every day.”

  Nina had a hard time imagining the rangy, bronzed outdoorsman across from her folded into a desk taking notes on accounting procedures. It was a bit easier if she imagined him as a youth of nineteen with all those big decisions—like what to do with his life—still ahead of him.

  “I grew up at the other end of
Route 1,” she volunteered, skipping over her New York interlude and its messy ending. “Near Brunswick, Maine. In fact, it’s very possible my mother sewed that very belt you’re wearing. She worked at the L.L. Bean factory there until just last year, and I think your belt has at least a few years under it.”

  He smiled. “That’s a nice thought,” he said. “You’re very observant.”

  “Yes, I am,” she replied.

  Ted went inside to pay the bill while Nina fretted about whether or not she should have let him. A short while later, they were passing through the green tunnel of tall trees and dappled sunlight on the route back to Coconut Cove. There was no other traffic. At the foot of the driveway of a small white house with weather-beaten shutters, an older man sat in a lawn chair in the shade of a tall tree and a golf umbrella. A rickety wooden shelf stood next to him, filled with glass bottles. Ted pulled the Jeep over to the side of the road.

  “Let’s go say hi. You’ll like Joe,” he said to Nina. They got out and walked over to the man.

  “Hi, Joe,” said Ted. “How’ve you been keeping?”

  “Well, hello, Ted. I can’t complain. My daughter has come down from the main island to see me and brought the young fella, so I’m happy. She’s up there cooking my favorite chicken foot souse for dinner. The young fella’s watching some noisy shoot-’em-up on the satellite. Who’s this, now?” asked the man, looking at Nina.

  “Hi. I’m Nina,” she said.

  “Well, pleased to meet you, Nina. You fishin’?” asked Joe.

  “First time today,” she said.

  Joe laughed. “Well, I hope you like it. You gonna keep company with Ted here, you gotta like fishing.”

  “I’m running out of hot sauce at the lodge, Joe,” said Ted. “What do you have?” he asked, moving over to look at Joe’s display case. Joe shifted sideways in his chair and lifted a bottle off the shelf.

  “This is my new recipe. More lime. Mmm, mmm. Make your hairdo steam,” said Joe.