She was right. The boat was in poor shape, and though it wasn’t moving fast, if it got sideways against one of the concrete bridge piers in the right position, the weight of the water could break it in half.
I started swimming against the current, which was probably moving at close to two knots. I knew Savannah and I could swim faster than that, but not much, and the boat was moving toward us at the speed of the current. At best, we’d reach it twenty feet from the piling.
“Get to the stern,” I shouted, as we reached the boat. “We can be its engines.”
At the back of the boat, I could see over the half-rotted transom board. The figure lying on the deck hadn’t moved.
“Pull this way,” I yelled, then started tugging the stern to the right, swimming with one hand.
Once we got it turned, we both moved to where the low gunwale met the transom on either side and started swimming hard with one hand. We managed to steer the boat safely around the big concrete pilings just in time.
As we disappeared under the bridge, I yelled up to those looking down at us. “Call 911! We’ll get it to Pigeon Key.”
“Get aboard,” I ordered my wife. “See if there’s a rope or anything.”
Savannah submerged, then pulled and kicked herself up, climbing into the little boat. She moved past the inert body to the bow.
“There’s a bow line,” she said.
“Toss it out and I’ll tow. Then get back in the water and keep the bow angled to starboard so the current helps push.”
The old bridge was only two hundred yards away. Drifting with the current, it wouldn’t take the boat more than three minutes to pass it. Then the next land would be the southwest coast of the mainland—Cape Sable—nearly thirty miles away.
Pigeon Key lay beneath the old bridge, about a hundred yards west of where the little boat was headed. We needed to move it sideways in the current to reach the tiny island.
It doesn’t take much to hold a boat against a current if the bow’s pointing into it. The bow line was about twenty feet long. I quickly tied a bowline knot with a large enough loop to fit over my head and one shoulder, then slipped it on.
Without waiting for Savannah to signal she was ready, I started swimming against the current, angling just to the right a little. The weight of the boat hit my shoulder as the line went tight and I dug in, breathing every third stroke in a power swim.
I could tell by the feel of the boat on the line that Savannah was at the stern, pushing as she worked to keep the current on the boat’s port bow.
Swimming hard, I could feel the burn in my shoulders and legs. I kept at it for five solid minutes, knowing that it would take quite a while to drag the boat sideways as the current pushed us steadily northward toward the massive concrete piers the old bridge’s arches were built on.
Those foundation piers were twenty feet wide and rested on a bottom that was mostly less than fifteen feet deep. They were cracked and crusted with barnacles. We could easily get the boat to one of them and let the water hold it against the pier, which we could then climb out onto while waiting for some help.
But I wasn’t sure of the legalities of a bridge piling versus dry land. If the person in the boat was a Cuban rafter, and still alive, being on dry land used to mean they could stay in the country. I just wasn’t sure if a hundred-year-old concrete bridge pier counted as dry land.
Finally, I heard Savannah calling out to me. I stopped swimming and saw that we were just south of Pigeon Key and the current was taking us straight toward shore, less than a hundred feet away now. It would change before we reached shore, as the water parted to go around the island. I wanted the sweet spot right in the middle.
“Get in and check on them,” I called out as I moved back to the boat.
As she did so, I turned the boat, then started pushing it toward the rocky shoreline, where a solar panel farm provided power for the island. I hoped I’d gotten the sweet spot right and didn’t get caught in a faster current to one side or the other.
Giving up my shoes might have been a bad move on my part. I wasn’t sure how far out the rip-rap of rocks extended.
“It’s a little boy,” Savannah said. “He’s alive, but unconscious.”
A Cuban boy alone on a boat? There’d been a storm two nights before; we’d seen it from my island, lightning flashing across the sky to the south, way out on the Gulf Stream. Had this boy lost his family on the treacherous ninety-mile crossing in a rowboat?
“He’s been beaten, Jesse,” Savannah said. “At least a couple of days ago, by the looks of his injuries.”
I winced a little at the analytical sound of her voice. She shouldn’t know how to tell how long ago a person had been hurt.
There was a crowd of people moving toward shore. Vehicles weren’t permitted on the two-mile section of the old bridge connecting Pigeon Key to Knight’s Key and Marathon, but I could see an ambulance stopped on the span just before the ramp.
“Is anyone alive?” I heard a man shout.
Savannah looked up. “Yes. A boy about six, maybe. But he’s been hurt badly and looks malnourished and dehydrated.”
Once we were in shallower water, I stood and pushed the boat toward the people waiting on shore.
The man who’d spoken was wading toward us. He was a big man. I’d seen him around Marathon quite often. He worked for the foundation that ran the island-turned-museum. The whole island appeared just as it had in Flagler’s day.
“Jesse McDermitt?” he asked, recognizing
