I frowned down at the boat Maggie was sitting in, the boat in which I was supposed to track down smugglers. A pitiably inadequate craft. Maybe ten feet long, made of the same cheap galvanized aluminum as garbage cans. The seats were metal slabs with neither backs nor cushions. There was no steering wheel, just a stem on the ancient, sun-beaten engine. The tub's forlornness seemed to match my own. Masking desperation with wryness, I said, "On television they use speedboats."
"We're a cheap boatyard, not a yacht club," Maggie said. "Climb aboard."
"I'll wait till you get out."
"I'm not getting out," she said.
"Maggie—" I began, though I understood by now that I would lose this argument, that I'd already lost it hours before. Secretly, I was thrilled, of course. My nerves were shot. I wanted company. Still, I launched into some mumbled protests.
Maggie didn't wait to hear them. She swiveled toward the stern, vented the gas tank, and squeezed the priming ball. After three hard pulls on the starter cord, the motor grudgingly turned over.
Gratefully defeated, my small wounds stretching and throbbing as I bent, I clambered down into the skiff and uncleated the skinny line that held us to the dock. I pushed us back; we lightly clunked against the other dinghies. Maggie pointed us toward the broad entrance of the Bight at Toxic Triangle, and, preposterously, we headed out to spy on the presumptive killers aboard The Lucky Duck.
30
Night on the water with Maggie.
Hard to imagine anything sexier. I could envision whispered confidences and languid kisses beneath a spray of shooting stars that mirrored the mystic flash of ocean phosphorescence. The dampness of the predawn air rendered incubator-warm by the mingled heat of limbs and hollows ...
But in the actual event, circumstances challenged sensuality. I was bleeding and afraid. Maggie seemed solemn. As we scudded across the resting harbor; our motor sent up a hideous whine that jangled the nerves and obliterated conversation. The dinghy vibrated like a beaten gong; my backside soon went numb against the trembling of the metal seat. At the harbor mouth, currents collided, setting up a small but steep and surging chop that rocked the skiff and made the engine labor. I gripped the gunwales and watched Maggie steer. She was wearing roomy drawstring pants, a loose sweater with billowing sleeves. A small muscle was twitching in her neck.
Beyond the harbor the currents diffused and the ocean went improbably flat. With the growing distance, Key West, already small, seemed ever dinkier and more insignificant, its buildings thin and frail as matchbooks, its street lamps faint as dying candles. Back to the east, a red smudge on the horizon marked the place where a waning moon would soon be rising. Huge in the south, Scorpio crawled across the sky, dragging its fearsome tail.
We putted along for what must have been an hour. A pink moon came up, pocked and gauzy, more than a crescent, less than a half. My mind went as numb as my rear end.
Finally Maggie brought the engine down to idle and pointed beyond our bow. I swiveled and saw The Lucky Duck, perhaps a third of a mile farther out. A chartreuse gleam came from its portholes. "I don't think we should go closer," Maggie said. "Go ahead and drop the anchor. Don't throw it— ease it down."
Her tone, its certainty, made me careful to do as I was told. The anchor settled slowly, as though falling through Jell-O. Maggie cut the motor.
The skiff stopped vibrating and the night went magnificently quiet. Quieter than silence. Wavelets licked at the hull. Now and then a faint laugh or a cough or the ring of coins came across the water from The Lucky Duck. But somehow these ghostly sounds did not disturb the quiet; rather, they pointed up the vastness and the texture of it. It was a velvet quiet, an embracing quiet. It muffled everything except the present moment in the present place. Things finally felt sexy after all.
Maggie scuttled forward and sat down next to me. The boat rocked with every lean and gesture; we realized that we couldn't move much. But our bodies touched at the hip and at the outsides of our thighs. I put my arm around her back. She rested her head against my shoulder. Her hair had taken on the salt tang of the ocean.
For a long while we just sat there, sharing warmth along our flanks, not speaking. We vaguely watched the gambling boat. Through our fatigued eyes and with the limitless expanse behind it, it seemed at moments insubstantial, painted on a backdrop. I felt time passing, and was reminded that time isn't just an empty bowl in which events are mixed. It's a thing unto itself, has a flavor and a weight, and as it passes it drags a breeze as soft and melancholy as the memory of everything you've ever lost.
Maggie nestled closer up against me, whispered, "Wonderful out here."