into dark buds. Thorn could feel a tingle working its way down from his navel. Things shifting inside his cutoffs.
Thorn’s skiff was pole-anchored in about two feet of water over some grassy beds where schools of silver sea trout had flickered past all morning. In the last few days they’d seen dozens of tarpon and permit and bones skimming the flats, lots of rays and more sharks than they could count. The sky had been clear all week and Thorn’s eyes were dazzled and aching from staring into the shallows. A good ache.
On that April morning, Monday or Tuesday, he wasn’t sure, the breeze had died off and the Florida Bay stretched out as flat and silver as a platter of mercury, running off toward the western horizon where it turned into a blur of blue chrome. The air and water were within a degree or two of his own body temperature. Dipping in and out of the bay, one element to the other, he hardly noticed.
A hundred yards east of their spot, the Heart Pounder, his thirty-foot Chris-Craft, was anchored in four feet of water on the edge of the flats. Their mothership. A couple of narrow bunks, a stove, a cooler full of fruit and cheese and a few bottles of a cut-rate Chardonnay. They’d towed the skiff behind the big boat to have some way to get into the skinny water, chase the fish.
The Heart Pounder was a teak and white oak beauty. Built before Thorn was born, it was low and slow, with the ancient grace of an era when getting from here to there as quickly as possible wasn’t the point. Thorn had spent all of March and half of April replanking the hull. Tearing out a dozen rotting boards and fitting the new ones into place. Harder job than he’d anticipated. Made harder by the fact that he had absolutely no idea what the hell he was doing when he started. He’d torn out too many planks, used the wrong screws, applied the wrong caulk to the seams between the new boards, then wound up having to pull off his planks and begin over. Finally he’d found a boatwright in Islamorada who gave him a few lessons in carvel-planking, and the use of bunged screws and stealers, those triangular-shaped strakes that allowed Thorn to slightly alter the hull profile. For several weeks with the old man standing over him puffing on his pipe, Thorn managed to learn just enough to get the Heart Pounder watertight again. Skills he hoped he never had to use again.
‘What’s another word for blue?’
‘Blue?’ Thorn looked over at her. ‘What’re you, depressed?’
‘No, that.’ Casey lifted her hand and pointed lazily up at the cloudless expanse. She was propped on one elbow now, her breasts doing nicely against the pull of gravity. ‘I’m thinking of doing a rhino in that color. I want the right word for its name. Blue rhino sounds dull.’
‘A rhino?’
‘I’m tired of manatees and alligators. I’m artistically restless.’
‘Azure,’ Thorn said. ‘Cerulean.’
‘Too hoity-toity.’
‘Sapphire.’
To the west across the flats was a small mangrove island. Gulls dove into the shallow water rimming it. A great blue heron stood in the flats just a few yards from the snarl of mangrove roots. On the charts the island was unnamed, but he and Casey had been calling it Mosquito Junction. A dark haze of bloodsuckers that’d probably never tasted human flesh before hovered over it like an evil bloom of radiation. Last night the little bastards had followed the wisp of light from their kerosene lantern across a mile of motionless air right into the Heart Pounder’s cabin to dine on their exposed flesh. He and Casey had to decide whether to douse the lantern and stop reading, or put up with the itchy nuisance. They read. Swatted and read.
‘Cobalt rhino,’ Thorn said. ‘Or navy.’
‘Okay, you can stop. I’m sticking with blue. It’s not great, but it’ll do.’
‘Turquoise.’
Casey gave him a quick, precise smile.
‘You know too many words, Thorn.’
‘Is that possible?’
‘All those books you read, you’re clogged with words.’
‘I’m just a simple guy with a simple vocabulary.’
‘Yeah, right. Sure you are, Thorn. You’re so simple.’
‘Indigo,’ he said.
Casey aimed her chin at the sky.
‘That,’ she said. ‘That color. Whatever it is.’
Casey stretched her arms, pointing both hands up at the unnameable heavens. Her breasts shimmered, taking the light and playing with it and sending it on its happy way.
‘So what’re we having for supper?’
‘I was thinking fish,’ he said. ‘In fact, that fish. If it ever gives up.’
‘Fish again?’
‘You like fish.’
‘Four days ago I liked fish. At the moment I’d kill for a hamburger.’
‘You’re a vegetarian.’
‘My point, exactly.’
Thorn fished for a while and Casey basked. She was excellent at it. Basking seemed to be one of her gifts. She had such a remarkably even disposition, nothing seemed to rouse her to anger or even mild distress.
For the last couple of months they’d been sharing his small stilthouse and his monotonous days. She went off to her roadside shack every morning to make her plaster animals while he tied bonefish flies. After work, he helped her unload her latest creation from the back of her ancient Chevy pickup and she set up her paints out near Blackwater Sound and spent the next few hours covering that dull gray plaster with the gaudiest colors she could swirl together.
While she painted, Thorn tied flies or crafted the wooden lures he carved for a few longtime clients who believed his handiwork had some kind of supernatural power to catch fish. God bless their superstitious butts. The lures Thorn made were torpedo-shaped pieces of gumbo-limbo or live oak ornamented with a few dabs of paint and glitter and glass bead eyeballs, nothing more or less. But if those fine folks wanted to give him cash money to carve them and sand them and fine-tune them with a little color, then fine. Go with Allah.
Last week after he’d finished replanking the hull, Thorn decided he needed a break from the routine. A shakedown cruise seemed just the thing, putter out into the backcountry, deep into the Florida Bay, and see if the dignified old lady still leaked.
It’d been a long while since Thorn had motored so far into those waters, and though he’d heard the backcountry was in bad shape, seeing it firsthand was something else entirely.
The Florida Bay was a flat, shallow basin that lay at the tip of the Florida peninsula. Bordered on the east by the upper Keys and running west to the other side of the state where its waters merged with the Gulf of Mexico. For centuries the bay had received the freshwater outflow from the Everglades and had converted it gradually to saltwater by the time it reached the Keys and the coral reefs. The eelgrass had once grown in thick beds, covering most of the bay, providing the nutrition-rich nurseries for shrimp and the other lower-pecking-order creatures. When Thorn was a boy, exploring the nooks of the Florida Bay in his wooden skiff, he’d assumed
