“You promise?”
“I do.”
She pressed her body to mine. “Then write me.”
How do you bury the two people you love most in this world? The trip south to spread Fingers’ ashes would take several days, a couple weeks even. Then I had to turn around. Get back. The round trip would allow me time to get used to the idea of spreading Marie’s ashes upon my return. Who was I kidding? Get used to? I think not. The only thing the time gave me was more time to wrestle with the idea.
Which was both good and terrible.
Earlier in my apartment, standing there staring at the purple urn and the orange box, I knew I couldn’t deal with both at once. I had to take them one at a time. And while I didn’t know who to bury first, I knew I couldn’t just walk out into that water and spread Marie’s ashes. My heart wasn’t ready for that. Too sudden. Too final. So I’d moved Marie’s urn to the center of the table, kissed the lid, and tucked Fingers’ orange box under my arm.
Now the current lapped against the hull, tugging against the boat, tugging against me. Southward. My Whaler is a center-console bay boat. The steering wheel is connected to a console that rises out of the center of the boat. Which means you can walk around it while still inside the boat. The console holds the electronics and throttle and steering control, as well as space for storage and a tiny toilet. It was meant for kids or women who weren’t comfortable going over the side of the boat or just needed some privacy. I’d never used it.
When Fingers met me, I was just a teenager, no more than thirteen. He’d discovered I had a thing with fish. Meaning I could catch them when others couldn’t. He’d hire me to take him fishing. And there in that boat, I got to know this priest who wore a robe, and he got to know me, this kid with a lot going on in his head and little ability to get those words out of his mouth. Over time, he dug in and helped pull me out of me. He gave me the words.
Years passed. Sometime later he learned I had a bit of a green thumb and that I had an inherent hatred of weeds, so he offered me a permanent position at his parish. “I see what you’re doing,” I joked. “Two birds with one stone: somebody to mow the grass—and pole you through the grass flats.”
He’d smiled. He loved to fly-fish a flood tide, where he could sight the fish.
I didn’t see it then, but he was grooming me. Every interaction was purposeful. Calculated. Intentional. He was not only teaching me to see—he was teaching me what to look for. It was in those moments at early dawn, watching the sun rise as he cast off my bow, that he taught me about the one, and how the needs of the one outweigh those of the ninety-nine. It would be years before I understood what he meant.
I started to stow Fingers’ lunch box in the head, where it would be safe and protected from the elements, but I thought better of it. He wouldn’t like that. He’d want to be where he could see. Where he could feel the wind in his face. So I strapped him to a flat section on the bow and secured him with several ropes. A hurricane couldn’t rip him off there. Once he was secure, I checked the time. Fingers’ Submariner was worn, scratched, and lost a few seconds every day, but that didn’t bother me. He’d bought it thirty years prior while serving on an aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean. Told me it was the best $600 he’d ever spent.
I asked him one time, “What’re you doing with a Rolex?”
He had smiled and scratched his chin. “Telling the time.”
I raised my jack plate, thereby lifting my engine as far up as it could go while still spinning the propeller in the water, cranked the engine, nudged the throttle into drive, and idled out of the backwater.
My boat is a twenty-four-foot Boston Whaler. Called a 240 Dauntless. It’s a bay and backwater boat, though better suited to the bay. It’ll float in fifteen inches of water, but in truth I need twenty-four to thirty inches to get up on plane. She handles well in a one- to three-foot chop where I can lower the trim tabs, push the nose down, and skid across the tops of the whitecaps. But where she earns her reputation as a Cadillac ride is when the wind dies down. I push the throttle to 6000 rpm, trim out the engine to bring the rpm’s up to 6200 or 6250, and she glides across the water like she’s riding a single skid. In rare moments, she’ll reach fifty-five mph. True to the Whaler name, she’s unsinkable, which is a comfort when the storms come. And her range is decent enough. If pressed and conditions allow, I can run an entire day on her ninety-gallon tank, making more than two hundred fifty miles. The T-top is powder-coated stainless steel and built like a tank. It makes a good handhold for purchase in rough waters, you can stand on it if you need a better view, and it’ll keep even the hardest rain or intense sunshine off you—both of which are welcome after long days on the water.
I like my boat. It’s not sexy, but it is a comfort when other things are not.
When I was a kid, I read Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island a dozen times. Maybe more. I loved everything about it. And although it filled many a long night, I never learned to talk about boats or ships or anything having to do with seafaring vessels the way Robert did. He owned the language of ships and boats like he lived it. I, on the other hand, did not grow up a deckhand. I simply grew up with my hand on the tiller. Boats were boats. The left side was the left side, not the port side. Right side was right side; starboard always confused me. Fore, aft, forecastle—this was all Greek to me. Later in life, I’d find comfort in some of these terms but never like Stevenson. To me, he was the captain and I was just a pretender sailing in his wake.
Chapter 4
I idled out the creek toward the Intracoastal—or IC. Most just call it “the ditch.” Above me, gnarled and arthritic live oak limbs formed a canopy shading my exit from land and my entrance to water. Spanish moss dangled overhead, swaying slightly. Waving. I lit the Jetboil, then sat sipping instant coffee with my feet propped on the wheel while I counted the dolphins rolling off my bow. Over the next hour, I covered only four or five miles. I had no interest in pushing the throttle forward. No real desire to get going.
Saying yes was one thing; doing yes was another entirely. Besides, that purple urn awaited my return.
I traveled south into the larger waters of the Mayport basin and the intersection of the St. Johns River with the IC. The Atlantic Ocean was two miles to my left. On a calm day I could exit the jetties, turn south, and arrive in Miami tomorrow. Tonight even. The end of the world the day after that. Two days and I’d be done with all this. But that’s not what Fingers would have wanted. He liked the inside, and he always took the slow way home.
The radar on the Weather Channel on my electronics, along with the digital voice of Weather Radio, told me that a confluence of storms in the Atlantic was pushing a steady barrage of wind and water against the East Coast and would be for the better part of two or three weeks, maybe longer. Today, the average wind was thirteen knots out of the northeast. Tomorrow, it’d top twenty and then stay there a week, maxing at thirty where it would pause briefly, only to pick back up and hammer the coastline again. Those conditions would push all small-boat traffic inside the ditch. For protection. Much of the larger vessels would soon follow suit as seasickness spread. That meant everybody going north or south would be rubbing shoulders in the IC for the next several weeks.