Rising Water

by Wayne Stinnett

  Finn barked as the other boat came alongside, and Naomi stepped back slightly.

  “He won’t hurt you none,” Jimmy said. “Unless he steps on your toes.” He snickered as Finn continued jumping around me. “That usually happens if you try to move them. He knows where they are and will dance around ’em.”

  I patted Finn on the flank a few times, then put the boat into gear. He rolled over onto my feet, tail thumping against the deck, for the short ride to the skiff dock at the end of Rusty’s canal.

  There wasn’t much room, but we lashed the two boats together and tied off to the last ten feet of Rusty’s barge, our bows only a couple of feet from the concrete seawall on the side away from the bar. My Grady-White was tied off to the other end of the barge, and another boat was lashed to it.

  After tying up, we walked up the dock and across the yard. The parking lot was nearly full, too. Mostly pickups, many with boat trailers attached. I wasn’t the only one pulling a boat out today.

  The door opened as we approached, and Dink stumbled out. There wasn’t anything to trip over and Dink rarely drank before Happy Hour, so unless you knew him, you couldn’t guess what had caused him to stumble. Dink was a local flats fishing guide who people said had perpetual sea legs. He was clumsy on land, but fine on a boat out on the water.

  “Well, hey, Jesse,” Dink said, extending a big, calloused hand. “Where ya been, man?”

  “Off island for a couple of weeks. Where you headed?”

  “Pulling the skiff out. Did ya hear there’s a storm coming?”

  “Yeah, that’s why I’m here, to start getting my boats out.”

  “Take a number,” Dink said, heading toward his pickup and trailer. “They’s a good half-dozen ahead of you.”

  We walked inside and found about a dozen people sitting and standing around the long wooden bar, eyes glued to the TV mounted high in the corner.

  “When’d you get back in?” Rusty asked.

  “About an hour ago,” I replied. “Had to cancel the second day of diving.”

  “Was Peter pissed?” Rusty asked.

  That’s just how things were, living on an island. You could be gone for two weeks, with little more than a wave goodbye, but while you were gone, everyone knew what was going on in your life and would pick up a conversation like you’d just returned from the head.

  “No,” Naomi replied, sitting at one of two remaining stools at the end of the bar. “He was thrilled with the shots. Especially the night shots.”

  “You saw ’em?” Rusty asked. “He don’t ever let anyone see his pictures till they’re in the magazines.”

  “We all did,” Jimmy said. “Well, except Jesse. He was messing around in the engine room. Naomi’s right—the night shots were eerily beautiful, man.”

  Naomi nudged Jimmy with an elbow and nodded toward the empty stool next to her. After a moment’s hesitation, he sat down.

  “What’s the latest on the storm?” I asked.

  “Winds are really kicking up on Antigua and Barbuda,” Rusty replied, as he reached into the cooler and pulled out a Red Stripe. I shook my head and he slid the beer down the bar to Al Fader, a shrimper out of Key West.

  Rusty gave Jimmy a bottle of locally-bottled mango juice and looked at Naomi questioningly.

  “I’ll have what Jimmy’s having.”

  Rusty pulled another bottle from the freezer, set it on the bar in front of her, and turned toward the coffee pot, and continued his summation of what I’m sure took two hours to report on the local news. “The outer bands came ashore a few hours ago, and they’re getting tropical storm gusts already. Just under a hundred miles due east of Antigua.”

  The TV wasn’t on a news channel. Rusty had it connected to the computer in his office behind the bar. Every minute or so, the picture changed to a different chart or report from NOAA. The current offering was a color-enhanced satellite loop lasting ten seconds. The date and time were displayed on a bar across the top. It was a twelve-hour loop.

  The middle part of the storm was colored dark purple, representing hurricane-force winds, with a red ring around that for tropical storm winds. Hurricane winds extended more than fifty miles from the eye wall, and tropical storm winds another hundred. The storm was massive.

  “You pulling your boats?” Rusty asked, spreading his beefy hands on the bar. His posture was unmistakable. It was time to get to work.

  “Yeah,” I replied. “Got the two Mavericks here now. I don’t have a trailer for Knot L-8.”

  “I got a spare out back,” a familiar, Aussie-accented voice said. Looking down the bar, I saw Sherman Crawford lean forward and tip his beer my way. “It’s a might bigger than your little wooden boat, but just to get ’er outa the water so you can lash ’er down, I think it’ll do.”

  “Thanks, Sherm,” I said. “Beer’s on me for the duration.”

  “Oy,” he grunted as he stood. “No worries, cobber. I reckon Dink’s had long enough, and I’m up next. See you fellas.”

  The other fishermen around the bar offered their best wishes to the old black man and Sherm went out the back door.

  “What are you gonna do about Island Hopper?” Jimmy asked. “And where’s your sailboat?”

  “Salty Dog’s on the hard in Bimini,” I replied accepting a coffee mug from Rusty.

  “She’ll be safe there,” Rusty said. “They’ll get some weather, but no chance of a direct hit. From what you told me about that yard, they’ll be prepared.”

  “I called Billy while we were bringing the boats down,” I said to Jimmy. “He and a friend of his will fly down tomorrow and fly the Beaver up to LaBelle.”

  “You takin’ the Revenge up to Tarpon Bay?” Rusty asked, again placing his hands wide apart on the bar.

  “And Cazador, too.”

  Rusty frowned. “Use Sherm’s trailer to get the little boat out and we can pull her off onto a coupla 8x8s I got out there and strap her down. Then you can put that big-ass Winter on Sherm’s trailer to haul it out. His trailer’s big enough for Cazador and The Beast won’t have no trouble pulling her up the ramp. It’s not like you’re gonna drive in traffic.”

  “Good idea,” I said.

  “Tarpon Bay,” Rusty muttered, shaking his head. “Might not be safe there, bro. If it’s still a Cat-5, there ain’t no place in Florida safe. They’re saying it’s gonna rip right up through the whole state.”

  “There,” I said, pointing at the TV as it changed back to a newer version of the ten-second satellite loop. “Watch the Bermuda High.”

  “Well, I’ll be,” Rusty said, watching the swirling mass of clouds far to the north of the rotating Hurricane Irma. “It ain’t moving much, and you can just barely see it, but it looks like the high just ticked a little to the west.”

  Hurricane Alley gets its name because most of the late summer storms originate as low-pressure areas off the coast of Africa. Steering currents move them westward across the Atlantic and the Bermuda High, a semi-stationary high-pressure system in the North Atlantic, rotates clockwise, further moving the counterclockwise rotating storms westward and preventing them from turning north. Where the high was located would determine where in the Americas a hurricane would hit, if at all. If the high was off to the east, a storm would loop around it and might not affect the U.S. coast in the slightest—what we called a fish storm. If it moved a little west of there, storms would loop into the Carolinas. Farther west, Florida. An even greater westerly shift, like I thought I was seeing, would push a storm across Cuba, or through the Florida Straits and out into the Gulf of Mexico.

  Rusty had the intuition of several generations of Conch blood, while I liked raw data.

  “I don’t know,” Rusty finally said, turning back around. “It don’t look like it’s far enough west to push Irma into the Gulf. She might turn right up the west coast, instead of running the length
of the state all the way from Key Largo, like they’re predicting. But turn north, it’s gonna do.”

  “I’m less concerned about where than I am about how strong. Think that shift will be enough to shove her down closer to Cuba before turning north?”

  “I see what you’re thinking, Skip,” Jimmy said. “Eastern Cuba is pretty mountainous, man. Hurricanes are bad-asses against trees and anything man-made, but mountains are a different story. They could weaken it.”

  “We’ll just have to keep an eye on it,” I said. “Right now, let’s get the light work done.”

  When it came my turn, I went out back and started The Beast, while Jimmy went to the dock to bring the first skiff around. The Beast is my 1973 International Travelall, which I keep at the Anchor, along with the trailers for the two Mavericks and the Grady.

  As I sat there letting the diesel engine warm up, I couldn’t help but remember back to the preparations for another storm. Hurricane Wilma had passed just north of here in ’05, making landfall not far from Shark River. I’d ridden that one out right here in Rusty’s little marina aboard the first Gaspar’s Revenge, with Alex in my cabin.

  Alexis Dubois McDermitt. She’d been the one to name this old truck. A couple of years later she was murdered on our wedding night. In two months, it would have been a dozen years ago.

  I pulled the truck around to the back and hitched up one of the Maverick’s aluminum trailers. Several other guides had already dropped their boats and trailers in Rusty’s five-acre backyard. There was a concrete pad that ran the length of the eastern edge of the property, with big eye bolts that were anchored deep in the concrete when it was poured. The boats were strapped down and would likely be fine for the wind, with everything stripped. The pad’s elevation was only twelve feet above sea level, so there was still a danger of a high surge. But that’d only be if there was a direct landfall, and if that happened, Marathon could look just like Jimmy had described it; wiped clean by the hand of God. Like Islamorada was in 1935. Living in paradise had its costs.

  It took two hours, but we finally had the skiffs and the Grady secure. Rusty offered to run us back out to my island after dinner and help us secure everything there and bring the other two boats back. Buttoning up his house, the bar, and Rufus’s little shack out back never took him more than a couple of hours, and he didn’t plan to do that until Friday at the earliest.

  Later that night, well past midnight, the three of us sat around the fire pit, having worked straight through the evening and into the night before stopping to eat our fill of lobster tails cooked over the open fire. Finn snored beside my chair.

  “You don’t ever get tired of living out here?” Rusty asked.

  Jimmy shrugged. “Nope.”

  “Angie still up in Louisiana?”

  “Been a year since I talked to her,” Jimmy said. “Probably.”

  Jimmy and Angie had lived together on their houseboat for a long time before moving to my island. But she’d gone home to take care of an ailing mother, and then chosen to stay.

  “We have plenty to keep us busy,” I said. “Had our best crayfish haul ever just last month.”

  “What’d that bring in?”

  “Almost five grand, dude,” Jimmy replied.

  Rusty glanced over at him. “You know he earns that much in interest in a week, right?”

  “That money’s not mine,” I said. “I just found it. What Mam and Pap left me is right here; this island, my house, and the boats. I don’t need much, nor does Jimmy. With the solar array we put up last year on the little island, we hardly ever have to run the generator. We’re basically living free here. So, I use the money I found to help other people.”

  “I know that,” Rusty said, letting me off the hook for snapping at him. We were all tired. “But don’t it get lonely way out here?”

  “It’s not like we’re on Gilligan’s Island,” I said, aware it would rekindle an old argument. “Town’s only a half hour away. Though I wonder why old Gilligan never hooked up with Mary Ann.”

  “Ginger,” Jimmy said.

  “Mary Ann,” I shot back with a half grin. We’d had this debate quite a few times over the years. Sometimes we even switched allegiances, depending on the subject of the debate. “Ginger’d be too high-maintenance on an island, and Mary Ann would take over the farming. Speaking of lonely,” I said, turning back to Rusty. “Where’s Sid?”

  Our little group’s dynamic had changed. Rusty and I had known each other for all of our adult lives, and I’d known Jimmy for nearly two decades now. He’d been with Angie for a long time. I’d found and lost love several times over. During all that time, Rusty had remained a steadfast bachelor. Until he met Sid, he hadn’t dated anyone since his wife died giving birth to Julie. But his daughter was married now, with a son of her own.

  “Oh, she had to run up to the mainland,” Rusty replied, poking at the fire. “She’ll be back in the morning.”

  The phone in my pocket vibrated and I pulled it out. It was Chyrel.

  “Hey, Chyrel.”

  “Hey, Jesse. I got the latest update on the storm.”

  “Hang on, I’ll put you on speaker.” I touched the screen and set the phone on my knee. “Go ahead. I’m on the island with Jimmy and Rusty.”

  “Hey, y’all,” she said, in her folksy Southern accent. “Irma just made landfall. The eye crossed over the north side of Barbuda at 0545 UTC.”

  I looked at my watch. It was nearly 0200. We were four hours different than Universal Time. “Just a few minutes ago,” I said, absently. “Any report of damage?”

  “It made landfall at peak intensity, Jesse. Winds of 185 plus.”

  “Hand of God, man,” Jimmy mumbled, shaking his head sadly.

  “Thanks, Chyrel,” I said. “Anything else?”

  “Yeah,” she replied but didn’t elaborate.

  I picked up the phone, turned off the speaker, and held it to my ear. “Go ahead.”

  “A message from Jack Armstrong,” Chyrel said. “Sunna Johannsdottir was picked up by a private plane flown into the Caymans from Mexico.”

  “Any idea where the plane was going?” I asked, rising and walking into the darkness away from the fire.

  “It originally headed back toward Mexico. But when it passed the western tip of Cuba, it descended suddenly and disappeared from radar.”

  The next morning, we got started early, removing anything that wasn’t physically attached to the island and storing it in my house, the highest of the four. Finn thought this was great fun and began dragging driftwood up from the water’s edge. I thanked him and added each piece to our ever-growing pile of color-enhanced firewood. The fire ring was cast iron and half an inch thick. Where it was at now was where I’d found it after buying the island. So, I didn’t think it would be going anywhere.

  In times past, it didn’t take much to prepare my island for a storm. But now there were four structures on it, each with windows that needed to be covered by corrugated steel panels. Then there was the problem of the garden and fish farm.

  The aquaponics system was only five feet above sea level. It wouldn’t take much of a surge to put the pumps underwater. Eight feet of water would breach the tank walls. If that happened, everything would die from saltwater intrusion. We picked all the vegetables and fruit we could, knowing the winds would likely take the rest if Irma came this way. And it was looking more and more like it with every hour. We took all the food aboard the Revenge, to hold us over through the storm, and possibly for some time after.

  I don’t put a lot of stock in material things, but there were a few pictures and mementos of my past life that I moved onto the boat, as well. If Irma came through here as a Cat-5, I was under no illusion about what I’d find when I came back. Nothing.

  Jimmy had a small combination radio and lamp. It had a hand crank to charge its battery. We’d shut down t
he generator and transferred all the fuel into the Revenge, turning off all the breakers at the battery shack. Jimmy turned his radio on every hour to get the NOAA update.

  As hot as it was, we had to work smart, taking breaks often. While we prepared, we listened to the updates and learned the fate of island after island as Irma made her way straight toward us. She’d made landfall on Sint Maarten before we’d awakened. By lunch time, Virgin Gorda and Tortola had received direct hits, as the storm passed through the Virgin Islands. No part of the long Antilles chain escaped the devastation, as Irma continued toward Puerto Rico.

  At 1100, we got the word that a mandatory evacuation had been issued for the Keys. That meant different things for different people. The authorities wanted everyone out. Absolutely, all tourists had to leave; it wasn’t their home and they’d just be in the way. But many locals never evacuated. Rusty was one of them. Some people just couldn’t evacuate.

  A few hours later, we learned that Irma had maintained a Cat-5 status all the way through the islands.

  Having located a trailer faster than I’d figured, we were a day ahead of schedule when we finally closed up my house and installed the storm shutters. We split up and made one more pass around the whole island, making sure nothing was left that might be picked up by the wind and sent crashing through a wall.

  We anchored El Cazador out in the channel, with Rusty’s skiff tied off to the stern. I’d tow her with the Revenge. It took some shuttling of lines to get the two boats lashed together with a fifty-foot tow rope on a bridle. As I held the Revenge into the current, my canoe strapped to the foredeck, Rusty raised the anchor on Cazador. I felt it break free and had to keep both transmissions engaged against the extra drag.

  Once Rusty had the anchor seated in the pulpit, he got into his skiff, tossed off the line, and came alongside me, Finn looking up from the stern of his boat. “You sure you won’t need any help?”