for it. Enough people already had.
T wo weeks later, Charlie Riggs said I’d been an invalid too long. He wanted to get me out on the water. I said no thanks.
He tried to entice me with an invitation to chase bonefish in the flats off Key Largo. I declined because of the lobster mobsters. For two days each summer, just before the commercial season begins for the spiny lobster, every jerk with an outboard motor gets to trample the coral and shoot spears at all living creatures in our shallow waters. Not that it’s legal to spear, hook, or trap the little crustaceans. You’re supposed to catch them by hand or hand-held net. You’re not supposed to take egg-bearing females and undersized lobsters of either sex. But these bozos don’t care, and I wasn’t about to get speared, shot, or just plain annoyed while fishing.
So why did I let Charlie talk me into a ride on his old Boston Whaler?
To talk.
We said to heck with the flats and headed into the ocean in fourteen hundred feet of water, seeking a measure of solitude. Charlie had the binoculars out looking for osprey and frigate birds feeding on small fish at the surface. In the food chain hereabouts, the dolphin-the bluish gold fish, not Flipper the marine mammal-chase tiny fish to the surface where the birds eat them.
We follow the birds and find the dolphin, which, with any luck, will be in Granny Lassiter’s frying pan by sundown.
I used a light spinning rod baited with a yellow feather and came up with some seaweed. Charlie used mullet and got a strike from a five-pound dolphin. It jumped, fought, ran, fought some more, skipped along the surface, then gave up. Charlie hauled it in, wriggling, and tossed it into the cooler. “ Coryphaena hippurus, a magnificent animal. Fast and full of fight.”
I was still casting when Charlie pulled in his second one, a blunt-headed iridescent blue female. I leaned back and rested awhile, watching Charlie enjoy himself. After a moment, I said, “I still can’t figure it out.”
“A little more wrist,” Charlie advised.
“Not that. What was I doing, trying to help Francisco Crespo or find out something about myself?”
“Either way, you tried to make a difference.”
“And either way, I still couldn’t tell the good guys from the bad. Every time I thought I knew, they changed the players or the rules.”
Charlie chuckled. “Things are seldom what they seem. Skim milk masquerades as cream. The new world order makes it even more confusing, Jake. It’s hard to realize, but old enemies are on the same side now. Still, there will always be loners like Foley and Yagamata, who are just in it for themselves, and an occasional throwback like Soto who thinks he can change the world by force. Most everybody else seems willing to let individuals control their own destiny.”
“But I didn’t do anyone any good. I didn’t save Crespo or Eva-Lisa. I didn’t save anyone.”
“Sure you did, Jake. You saved yourself.”
W e stayed the night at a rundown motel on the Gulf side, then got up at four A.M. for a second try. Except for the slap of water against the hull, it was quiet as a tomb as we headed out the channel. A velvet black sky was filled with diamonds, and a feathery breeze blew from the southeast. Charlie and I sat looking at the heavens in the silent comfort that two good friends can savor without self-consciousness.
When we reached what Charlie promised would be a hot spot, I baited my hook. Charlie tamped tobacco into his pipe and scratched at his beard. “You see my matches?”
“Too dark,” I said.
After a few moments, on the horizon to the east, an orange glow cut through the darkness.
“False dawn,” I said.
“No. That’s the real thing. Sun’s coming up.”
“Too early, Charlie. That’s the phony one. I remember.”
“Twenty bucks,” Charlie said, goading me.
“You’re on. In the meantime, tell me one of your stories I haven’t heard in a while.”
Charlie harrumphed. “Ever tell you about the Doomsday Rock?”
“What’s that, an engagement ring?”
“An asteroid big enough to cause an explosion a billion times bigger than Hiroshima.”
“Where is it?”
“Nobody knows. But theoretically, it has to be out there, hurtling toward us right now. The Earth gets hit by one every five hundred thousand years or so. The blast causes a dust cloud that changes the climate, kills off the plant life. It’s probably what did in the dinosaurs. To demonstrate the effect, imagine my bait box is an asteroid.” He leaned over and picked up the box. “You see this, Jake?”
“Of course.”
“Thought so,” he said, laughing.
I reached for my wallet, handed the old buzzard two tens, and told him to finish his story.
