—
"So Joey," said Zack Davidson, "you ever run a boat before?"
Joey looked down at the water, wiggled the earpieces of his shades, and tried to choke back his long-standing impulse to bullshit, to make it sound like he'd done more than he had and knew more than he knew. "Well, uh," he began, "this one time, up at Montauk, well, uh. No."
It was after work, around five-thirty, and they were at City Marina, a decidedly no-frills establishment for people with yacht club tastes and a rubber ducky budget. A very democratic place, City Marina was. Very Key West. Clunky houseboats with vinyl siding and TV antennas lay in berths next to dainty sloops whose polished hulls reflected every glint in the water, and also next to the staunch craft of working fishermen, where razor-beaked gulls scraped slime off moldy planking. The marina was nestled in a well-protected cove known as Garrison Bight, whose location underscored Key West's status as an intersection at the end of the world. On its south end, the Bight lapped quietly against the embankment of Highway 1. To the west, narrow channels wound through mangrove flats toward the open Gulf of Mexico; to the north and east, the long arced chain of the Keys stretched away under its freight of bridges and pylons.
"No." Zack repeated the single syllable, briefly puffed his cheeks out like a trumpeter, and ran a hand through his unvarying hair. He looked down at his little boat, which had never before appeared so frail. It was an eighteen-foot fiberglass skiff with a dark blue Bimini top. A perfect flats boat, it did less well in the ocean swells, where it bounced from wave to wave like a skipping stone and skidded down following seas like a riderless surfboard. The skiff had a sixty-horsepower outboard and an eight-horse auxiliary that was propped next to it on the transom, seeming to nestle up like a duckling to its mother.
"What's the little motor for?" Joey asked.
"Emergencies," said Zack. His mouth twisted up as if the word tasted bad. "But hey, first things first. You know how to tie up?"
Joey gave a nonchalant shrug. He told himself that, in his pink shirt and khaki shorts, he at least looked like he belonged at a marina. "Sure," he said. "I mean, I guess so. Well, not really."
Zack showed Joey how to make a clove hitch around a post, whtle pelicans banked by and cormorants dried their spread wings on top of pilings. On board, he showed him how to tilt the engine down, hook up the extra gas tank, and close the choke. "You know what the buoys mean, right, the green and the red?"
"Yeah, sure," said Joey. "It's, like, the red ones are stop and the green ones are go."
Zack leaned back against the gunwale and played with an ear. His boat was insured, but only for liability, not for being totally trashed by a guy who had no idea what he was doing.
"Joey, you sure there's no way I can go with you?"
The novice looked down at the fiberglass floor of the cockpit, toyed with his sunglasses, and shook his head. "Zack, listen, if you're having second thoughts, I understand. I really do. But like I said, this is something I hafta do alone. Believe me, it's not fair to involve anybody else."
Zack hesitated, though there was really nothing to hesitate about. He'd offered Joey the use of the boat, no strings attached, no explanations demanded, and it would be too undignified to back out now. "Well, let's take 'er out for a test drive, at least. Ya know, once you're away from the dock, it's mostly just like driving a car."
"Yeah," said Joey, "that's what I figured, like driving a car. That I can do."
"And swim," said Zack. "You can swim, right?"
Joey choked back his impulse to bullshit, but not quite soon enough. "Sure," he said. "I can swim. Sort of. Like, a little. Not really. Nuh-uh."
— 29 —
Zack told Joey many things, but he failed to get across how different water looks at night. Mainly, it disappears.
Joey realized this while edging the skiff out of Garrison Bight, just after ten P.M. on an evening without a moon. The shadings and dapplings had vanished from the surface, and all that remained was a featureless blackness shot through here and there with green flashes of phosphorescence. Was Joey even seeing those green flashes? He couldn't be sure, because they looked so much like what happened inside your head when you pressed on your eyeballs. Another thing Joey couldn't be sure of was where the coastline was. In daylight it had been so clear; now the boundary where land met water seemed unhealthily approximate. That flasher over there—was it a buoy or a traffic light? That dark bulk getting closer to him— was it another boat or a stray shred of North America?
Joey Goldman squinted, leaned so far forward that his head was almost caught between the top of the windshield and the front edge of the Bimini, and squeezed the steering wheel in his sweaty palms. Go under the bridge and hang a left, Zack had told him. It sounded so easy, as easy as driving the Caddy to the grocery store for a carton of milk. But Joey hadn't figured on the eddies that formed near the bridge, the swirling rushes that rendered the wheel almost as useless as if it had come off in his hands, and that spat him broadside, as though in distaste, between the stanchions.