Going Dark(4)

Sugar took a moment to scan the blue reaches of the ocean. Processing something while he moved his lips as if doing a tricky computation in his head.

Thorn felt the rumble of storm clouds gathering in his chest. His trusty weather vane beginning to twitch.

Sugar looked at Thorn blankly, then patted him on the back. “We need to talk.”

“Ah, yes. My favorite four words.”

“I assume you haven’t heard about Leslie Levine?”

“News about Leslie?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve been out of the loop lately.”

“Lately? You been out of the damn loop since the day you were born.” Sugarman smiled wearily. Accustomed to Thorn’s stubborn disinterest in the details of the modern world. “Day before yesterday, there was a crocodile attack up at Turkey Point, at the nuke plant. Happened late at night, back in those cooling canals where she’s trying to rebuild the croc population. Twelve-footer versus Leslie.”

“Leslie was injured by a croc?”

“She was killed, Thorn.”

“Leslie?”

Sugar reached out and laid a consoling hand on Thorn’s shoulder. Thorn turned his head, looked at Sugar’s hand, then looked out at the lagoon. A mist burned his eyes, blurring his vision.

Around twenty years earlier Leslie Levine lived in a trailer park a half mile down the road from Thorn, and one autumn afternoon the skinny, auburn-haired teenager showed up with a fishing rod and bucket of dead shrimp she’d bummed off a clerk at the Yellow Bait House. Awkward and shy, not more than fourteen at the time, she introduced herself and asked Thorn for permission to fish off his dock. Thorn said it was okay, and the kid spent a couple of hours trying and failing to snag gray snappers from the school that lived around the pilings.

Finally Thorn drifted over and offered her a few tips on her casting technique and showed her how to grip the rod when jigging her bait, and gradually the girl got the hang of it. Later, he made sandwiches, and when Leslie wolfed hers down in three bites, he made another. The next afternoon she returned. A week, another week, a month and another month.

For most of that school year Leslie Levine apprenticed herself to Thorn, eventually applying herself to the craft of fly-tying and learning to fish the flats in Thorn’s skiff. Raised by a single mom who traded sex for cocaine, Leslie was more of a lone wolf than even Thorn. But the bond between them grew until Leslie began to confide in Thorn a few details about her grim childhood.

After four or five months, she’d mastered every lesson Thorn had to teach, and her visits became sporadic. Then one day, without a formal good-bye, the visits ceased altogether, and Thorn later heard the young woman had attached herself to Mary Jo Prentiss, her high school biology teacher, a specialist in Florida reptiles and a strident environmentalist. A couple of years later, Thorn read in the local paper that Leslie had won a scholarship to the public university in Miami, where she planned to major in biology.

He’d heard nothing more about her until last year, when Leslie paid a surprise visit, appearing at Thorn’s dock at sunrise one morning in a sleek flats boat. She’d matured into a striking young lady, lithe and vibrant, her chestnut hair worn boyishly short. She said she was working temporarily for some Florida state agency that had hired her to do a crocodile census in the Upper Keys. Leslie invited Thorn along for a tour of local croc habitats.

Sitting in the bow of her boat was another woman, gaunt, with flame-red hair loose down her back. Her tall frame was hidden beneath a bulky jacket and loose jeans. Her hiking shoes were battered and her skin sunburned and roughened by weather as if she’d been hiking for months through some unforgiving terrain. Leslie never introduced the young woman, just made a quick don’t ask shrug.

The three of them spent the morning cruising the familiar back bays of the Upper Keys, Thorn marveling at Leslie’s ability to spot bashful crocs from long distances, sneak up, lasso them, haul them to the boat, tag and release those toothy creatures as effortlessly as if they were backyard lizards. At sunset, before she left, Leslie stood out at the end of Thorn’s dock and thanked him for sharing those hours with her as a teenage kid. The red-haired woman sat silently in the bow of the boat, staring forward as she had all day.

“You got me started on all this.” Leslie gestured at the open water, the mangrove islands, the reddening sky laced with threads of purple and green.

Thorn said he was glad to have played a part in Leslie’s education.

“It was more than that,” she said. “You gave me a reason to go on.”

Thorn smiled, opened his arms, and Leslie stepped into an embrace.