Swede lost. Beth wasn’t waiting – but Zo was. I walked over to the yellow jeepster she was driving and her voice reached out and caressed me.
“Hello, honey. Am I glad to see you.” Zo lifted her lips to be kissed. “I’ve been waiting out here since daybreak.”
Her lips were clinging. Her fingers dug into my back. After three years in a cell, it was like kissing a jet plane. I said:
“You shouldn’t kiss strange men like that. You won’t go to heaven.”
She wrinkled her nose at me. “Who wants to go to heaven? And since when are you a stranger?” She slid over on the seat. “Get in, honey. You drive.”
I said, “What? Without a driver’s license? You want me to break the law?”
She thought that was very funny. “Okay. I’ll drive.” When I still didn’t get into the jeepster, she fished in her purse for the Havana bank pass book that had been in her possession when the law had swooped down on me. “And don’t jump to false conclusions. No one let you down. The big shot couldn’t show up at your trial. It would have jeopardized the whole setup.” She handed me the pass book.
I had lied to Swede. I wasn’t broke. I was filthy. And I was still important to the gang. Every month I had spent in a cell, someone, Señor Peso presumably, had deposited one thousand dollars to my account. The last figure showed $36,124.00.
Zo asked, “Feel better?”
The Devil came up behind me and pushed. To hell with Beth. To hell with everything, I thought. To hell with trying to kill Señor Peso. In his way the guy had played square with me. Why should I try to goose into his grave an egg who laid so many golden pesos?
I got into the jeepster and Zo pulled out of the parking lot and headed south on Florida 16 into Starke. I asked her where we were headed. She said:
“Over to the West Coast. I’ve engaged a double cabin on a little cove just above Dead Man’s Bay. But we won’t be there long. One of the boys will put in with a converted Tarpon Springs sponge boat in the next few days and take us on to Havana and Shrimp Cay. That all right with you?”
Her head was bare. She was wearing a strapless sun dress that made her shoulders look like they were made of rich cream. Heat and palm trees, the slap of blue waves, and Zo. It sounded good to me.
“Yeah. Sure. That’s fine,” I told her.
She pulled to the side of the road and handed me an opened bottle of rum. Then, the same devil who was pushing me lighting twin candles in her eyes, she kissed me, hard. “Okay. Until then. You drink and dream, I’ll drive . . .”
It was afternoon when we reached the cabin. We’d stopped twice to eat. Once in Gainesville and once in Cross City. I’d also picked up another bottle of rum. After being away from it so long, it hit me almost as hard as Zo’s kisses.
The cabin, when we reached it, was a pleasant blur in a stand of slash pine on an isolated section of the shore. A rutted sand road led back to it. As nearly as I could tell, the nearest house was a mile away. The gulf looked the same as it always had, blue and endless and inviting.
It gave me an idea. If I wanted to stay with the party, I had to get some coffee in and some water on me. I told Zo, “I’m going to dunk the body. Put some coffee on, will you, babe?”
She laughed. “You’re out of training, honey. But go ahead. You do just that. I figured you might want to swim and you’ll find some trunks in the bedroom closet.”
She got busy at the stove and I staggered on into the bedroom. Zo had told me we’d be alone, but as I closed the bedroom door I could have sworn I heard someone say:
“You got him, eh?”
I opened the door and asked her, “Who was that?”
At the time it didn’t seem important. I closed the door again and tried to hang up my coat but I was so high I hung it upside down and an envelope fell out and skittered across the floor. I recognized it as the envelope the warden had given me along with my discharge papers and what money I had coming. Sitting on the bed I tore it open, and two tens and a five dollar bill fell out. Forcing my eyes to focus, I read:
Sweetheart,
I’d be there when you get out if I could possibly manage it but I have to hang on to my job. So, as a substitute, in case you are broke, I am enclosing my last week’s salary for train fare. I love you and I’m waiting.
We’ll start all over.
It was the type of letter Beth would write. Beth loved me and she was waiting. And here I was all mixed up with Zo again. I was still so long that Zo called:
“What’s the matter? You aren’t sick, are you, honey?”
I told her the truth. “Yeah. Plenty.” I got a grip on the rum and tried to do some straight thinking. With Beth out of my life forever, nothing would ever be right again. The money and excitement and Zo were poor substitutes for what I really wanted. Beth was my wife. She was my life. I loved her.
I fished my coat from the door and staggered back into the living room. “So I’m a heel,” I told Zo. “I’m sorry. But you and I are washed up as of now. I’m going back to Palmetto City and my wife.”
She wanted to know if I was kidding.
I said I was never more serious.
She wasn’t so pretty now. Her black eyes narrowing to slits, she spat, “You’re either drunk or crazy. How much can you make commercial fishing or running a charter boat?”
I said, “Even so. I’m going back to Palmetto City and Beth and get a job and open the old house and raise five or six redheaded kids and be disgustingly honest.”
Her eyes opening wide, she screamed, “No. Don’t!”
I thought she was screaming at me. She wasn’t. The blow came from one side and behind me. I turned in time to see a blur of white face through the fog of pain that was reaching up to engulf me. Then the leaded butt of a gaff hook used as a club landed a second time, and I floated out into space on a red tide.
Just as I passed the last buoy marking the channel of consciousness I thought I heard the flat slap of a pistol. Then a black roller swept me under.
2. Sprouting Wings
The tarpon was huge, two hundred pounds or more, the largest I’d ever hooked. He broke water a dozen times while I was playing him. I was bathed in sweat. My arms and shoulders felt like they had been pounded with a mallet by the time I got him within ten feet of the boat. Then he really went crazy.
With a series of high-powered jolts like the current they were going to shoot into Swede, he lashed into a flurry of frenzy that almost tore the rod out of my hands. I eased the star drag too late. He didn’t want any part of where he was and streaked off into the blue, snapping the wire leader as if it had been string.
I looked over the edge of the cruiser to see what had frightened him. A twenty-foot shark looked back. I was still trying to figure out who had tied the shark under my boat, when he tried to climb into the cockpit with me and I beat at him frantically with my fists.
It was the sharpness of the pain that knifed the fog away. With the first of returning consciousness I lay, gasping, looking up into the dark, thinking what a screwy dream it had been.
The tied shark was an old gag. All of the guides on the waterfront had used it at one time or another to give their charter passengers a thrill. A six-foot shark tied under a cruiser could make a two-pound trout fight like a fifty-pound blue marlin.
Then, one by one the shattered pieces of reality began to fall into place like the curlicues of a gigantic jigsaw puzzle.
I was lying on the floor of the cabin on the shore of Dead Man’s Bay. I’d just read the letter from Beth and told Zo I was going back to my wife when an unidentified party, presumably male, had popped out of nowhere and beaten me half to death with the loaded butt of a gaff hook.