The Water Keeper(36)
She saw me staring behind us. “Can I ask you something?”
She was pressing closer against the walls I’d erected around myself. The walls I lived behind. The ones that protected me from people who tried to find my heart. I turned and pulled my Costas down over my eyes. “Yes.”
She lifted them up again, setting them at an odd angle on top of my head. “Is Murphy Shepherd your real name?”
The no-wake zone ended. To the west, a deserted plantation house sat back off the water. Four chimneys, missing sections of roof, boarded-up windows, spray-painted graffiti, pigeons flying in and out—a shadow of her former beauty. The remains of a dock, outlined only by the barnacled posts that pierced the water, led from the marsh to the boathouse, a single sheet of rusted tin rubbing against its single remaining post. The hull of a fishing boat bobbed in the water feet away. In the water farther south, two dozen half-submerged sailboats lay at twisted angles. Beached. Run aground. Abandoned. No difference between the sea outside and the sea in. Single masts rose like sentinels at forty-five-degree angles, driven like stakes in the oyster shells. A rusted-out shrimper, rotten nets hung like Spanish moss, sat high in the marsh where the last storm surge had buried her and where she will remain. Forever.
We rode silently through the cemetery. So many muted memories, laughter that would never be heard again. What happens to old boats and those who rode them?
I pushed the throttle forward, bringing Gone Fiction up on plane and easing off when she reached four thousand rpm’s—or thirty-two miles per hour. While Clay napped up front, caressed by the wind, Summer and I stayed in the bubble behind the windscreen. The eye of the hurricane. That safe place where you can hide from the noise and the wind and the stuff that tears at you. As I turned, a tear rolled down my face. I shook my head a single time. “No.”
Chapter 14
We left Daytona in our wake and wound into and through the S-turn at New Smyrna Beach, eventually turning due west around Chicken Island and then due south through the northern tip of Turner Flats and Mosquito Lagoon. It’s here in these frothy waters that mangrove trees grow en masse. Mangroves grow farther north, on up through Palm Coast and into St. Augustine, but it’s down here where the water stays a bit warmer that they really thrive and spread out into islands. It’s this island-spreading tendency that gives the Ten Thousand Islands their name on the southwest coast of Florida.
While Mosquito Lagoon may be great fishing, local knowledge of the waterways is a must. Fraught with hull-shredding debris just inches below the water, it’s a no-man’s-land outside the channel. The waters both east and west of the channel are littered with boats that strayed too far from the safety of the ditch. With nighttime an hour away, and with a thirty-knot northeast wind pounding the coastline east of us just beyond the mangroves, I needed to make a decision. We would not make West Palm tonight no matter how far I pushed the throttle, and the relatively wide-open water of the lagoon meant we’d be riding in two-to four-foot chops. Doable but not enjoyable. Especially for an old man.
And once we passed through the Haulover Canal and popped out into the open and wide water of the north end of the Indian River, which borders the eastern side of the Cape Canaveral security area, we’d be exposed for the better part of an hour—maybe three, depending on conditions—which would be miserable but necessary if we hoped to make West Palm tomorrow. And we needed to. The clock in my mind was ticking.
With the afternoon sun beginning to fall and only a few hours of daylight left, I knew Clay needed to stop. Despite the beanbag, he needed a break. We stopped on the side of the IC at the Sand Hill Grocery and Bait, and Summer and I loaded up with enough food for both an afternoon snack and dinner if things got bad. Twenty minutes farther south, I turned hard to starboard and entered the no-wake zone of the Haulover Canal.
The canal is an arrow-straight, three-quarter-mile, man-made cut through the finger of land that connects the Canaveral land mass to the mainland of Florida. Inside the protection of the canal, tall juniper trees form a windbreak, calming the water to a sheet of glass. The break from the constant pounding was a welcome relief.
I beached the boat on a sandy stretch on the northwest side of the canal. We helped Clay out of the boat while Gunner surveyed the landscape, marked his territory, and chased a rabbit. I gathered driftwood and built a fire. Then I asked Clay, “Thirty minutes okay with you?”
He knew what I was asking him. He nodded and gave me a thumbs-up.
I stretched a tarp to protect him from the sun and then hung a hammock beneath it. Clay tested the strength of the ropes, then lay sideways using the hammock as a chair. His smile spread across his face in much the same way as the hammock between both trees. Summer brought him a hastily made ham sandwich along with a bag of Doritos—each of which he savored.
I liked to watch Clay. His movements were purposeful. Singular. And he lived in the moment. Never outside of it. He ate each Dorito as if it were the last Dorito on earth. Thankfully, his cough had abated. For now.
I didn’t like stopping but we all three needed a bathroom break, and that boat isn’t the easiest place for a woman. It can be done, but there’s nothing graceful about it. Clay swayed back and forth, singing in his hammock, while Summer fed Gunner half her sandwich. I cranked the Jetboil and started water for coffee, giving my fingers something to do while my mind turned.
Beach before us, a gentle breeze washing over us, and the sound of Clay humming. I wondered if this was the calm before the storm. I questioned if Summer would be able to weather what was coming.