Three shaggy headed boys were near my dock, antagonizing a horseshoe crab on its back. The oldest and tallest of them poked the soft belly with the end of a broken fishing pole, while the crab’s ten little legs clawed in an oscillating motion into the thin air in vain. The shirtless boy was having a mock sword fight with the sea creature’s spiny tale.
The dark tanned kids came by most summer days, and I didn’t mind them none. But today, my mood was sour. No patience for child’s play.
“Leave that sea spider alone and scram,” I told them.
“We’re just playing, Mr. Cato,” the tallest antagonizer protested.
I leveled a hard gaze, squinted my eyes, and then flung a rubber shrimp boot at the boy who had spoken. They drifted away, wisely sensing my mood.
The tide was receding as the morning drew late and the sun boiled down from the Florida sky. Three hours of throwing a 12-foot gillnet for a few dozen pounds of sellable fish would sour any man’s mood. Twenty-five cents a pound, when demand was high, and it wasn’t. The mullet had been harassed and were skittish this morning. They didn’t like the noise and wakes from the smugglers running about last night in Deadman’s Bay. Even the Friskies canned cat food I used as chum didn’t bring them together in a school. Nervous fish make a poor fisherman poorer.
I walked from the deck down to near the water where the boys had been playing. Pity was in store for the dull copper-colored creature. Cut up, it would have made decent bait for my traps, but there was not much demand at the marina for pinfish this late in the summer. The horseshoe crab looked helpless and desperate in its precarious position. A spot of blue blood oozed from the underside of the shell where the boy had poked a little too hard. Its sharp tail plunged relentlessly at the soft sand, seeking leverage to topple over. The injured creature was racing against time, the scorching heat of the midday sun would have no mercy. I flipped it back over, with the toe of my boot, into the brackish salt water. The crab thankfully burrowed in the mud, and soon scurried off quickly and glided away into the ocean. Happy to be back in the safe familiarity of the sea where it belonged.
I looked up from the vanishing crab to see Ignacio pull his rusted old truck into my driveway. The fat tires rumbled under the lime rock surface as the battered truck braked and slid to a stop. Ignacio came by often, but not normally this early.
Ignacio was the hardest working sea dog a captain could want. I had hired him on for crabbin’ season two years before. He was the best deck hand I had in nearly thirty years of running my own boat. Like those I had hired before him, I didn’t ask where he came from or what trouble he might be running from. I didn’t ask him where the fresh six-inch scar across his left cheek had come from either; it was none of my business. This was still a place where a man came to disappear, and could. I paid in cash, and didn’t ask for no social security card. As long as he stayed sober, and pulled his weight at the labor, not a concern was given to his past. Trust and worth had to be earned on the water, and Ignacio’s steadfastness had earned both from me.
“How’s Lucy?” the Mexican always asked first.
Lucy was staying with her sister in Lake Butler now, closer to where she got her treatments. Ignacio knew that. He knew considering he had driven Lucy the 150-mile round trip many times before she decided to stay with her sister. But he didn’t know the latest round of chemo had been ineffective. He didn’t know that the doctor had suggested experimental drugs at a clinic in Houston, Texas. He didn’t know that no matter how many fish I caught it wouldn’t be enough for the medicine. If those mullets counted as some kind of currency, then I’d been fishing for dimes.
We went inside my twenty-foot high raised Fleetwood and had the first beer of the day. A bit early for it, but circumstances and company made Budweiser appropriately timed. We talked over cold suds and last year’s boiled peanuts from the freezer.
“You heard about the sea huggers calling a meeting over at the Capital? They got the government talking about no nets for the commercial business,” Ignacio
“I read about it. It is all bull crap. You know, my pappy told me about a Coast Guard outpost over at Keaton Beach back in war number two. True, the old barracks are still there. Folks were worried the Germans were going to sneak around in the Gulf and shoot torpedoes at us. Now the government is worried about fish populations going down. More likely to find a German submarine today than that ocean running out of mullet. Them granola-crunching environmentalist don’t know what they are talking about. That is the way I see it. How is a fisherman to make a living?”
I stroked my graying beard then told Ignacio about Lucy and the new treatments the doctors recommended. I told him everything – the whole damned impossible trial of life. Ten thousand dollars was needed and needed quick. They wouldn’t take her without the money up front. The one bank in the county had turned me down already. Banker said President Regan’s recession changed their lending practices. Wouldn’t even take the boat as collateral to secure the money. It is a strong boat, but she shows her decades of hard service in the baking Florida sun. I guessed the bank didn’t want the risk of owning an old mullet boat named Lucille.
Ignacio listened while he sipped the tall boy, and then said, “The Taylor boys had trouble with that big Chrysler outboard motor again last night. Their boat is down for a while.”
“Tell them to remove all the insulation from inside the cowling, those Chryslers need a lot of air to breathe. That is likely the problem.”
“Naw. That’s not it, Cato. They tore up the lower unit on the river last night. Going to be two weeks before the parts come in from the marina,” Ignacio said flatly.
I paused, took a swig, and gave Ignacio a hard look. “You seem to know a good bit about them Taylor boy’s business.”
“That I do, Cato. I was with them last night when they hit the oyster bar. Had the boat overloaded, and we were drafting nearly an extra foot. I am telling you this because they need someone to make the run tonight. I can work it out with the Taylors, and I will go with you. The drop is near Fishbone Creek at about three tonight. Cato, we can have at least half the money for Lucy by this time tomorrow.”
I thought hard about what my Mexican friend had to say. Everybody local knew what was going on and looked the other way, including me. Quite a few poor fishermen were enticed into the game for the easy money, especially once all the risks of detection where taken out of the equation. I didn’t know, or care to know, but figured anybody of authority around these parts were getting their cut to stay out of the cartel’s way. The past four years I’d never allowed myself to be lured into the smuggling business. It was illegal as hell – dangerous waters. But now, circumstances were different. I was as desperate as that horseshoe crab on its back in the merciless sun.
I unloaded all my pinfish traps from the boat to make extra room. The two of us left at one o’clock in the dark of the morning, catching the ebb tide. A waxing crescent moon was in the sky and not by chance. The humid summer night was calm. The Gulf was like a millpond – a flat sheet without even a ripple. A deep draught of salty sea air opened my sinuses as we taxied out the channel. I hooked a left to the south at the last channel marker – bound for Fishbone Creek. My running lights were off, our destination would be navigated by the faint light of the moon and the sparkling stars in the clear night sky.
We waited in uncertain apprehension at the mouth of Fishbone, and drank black coffee from a thermos. The little plane appeared at ten minutes after three, and dipped low toward the water several times. Ignacio told me the plane was aiming for an old bird rookery. He said a wide reflector had been placed on the structure that pointed up for the plane to see as a target for the drop. He seemed to know more about this business than I previously believed he did.
I knew exactly where the old bird platform was located. The ten- foot square wooden platform had been constructed back in the 1920’s for the guano. There had been dozens of these old platforms along the coast, but most of them had been blown away by storms the past sixty years. I could remember as a young man that some of them still had roof tops, and on occasion a barge would come along and men would scrape the nitrogen rich fertilizer from the floor of the platforms.
The objects were pushed out of the plane near the old rookery about a mile out in the dark flats of the Gulf of Mexico. I had a nervous feeling while thinking another boat with blue lights rotating would appear at any moment. But we were alone on the water with just the stars everywhere above. It only took a few minutes to approach the drop area which was in a fathom of water. The floating objects were barely lit from the moon light. As quickly as we could we scooped up fifty-nine bales of square mullet. When we were done, nearly two thousand pounds of “Grade A” marijuana was stacked on the deck of my boat. It was all tightly wrapped in plastic, just waiting to be distributed up the east coast, one ounce at a time.
My Evinrude outboard was under strain from the load as we headed back from where we started. The skiff slowly slogged her way north against the sea. I motored into Deadman’s Bay and four miles up the Steinhatchee River. Ignacio directed me to a short dock in the back of a narrow canal. A single yellow light bulb faintly illuminated the rickety old dock. I wanted to rid my boat of the stuff and as soon as possible.
There was a white cargo van waiting. The van was backed up to the dock, lights off, the motor running. A young, skinny kid, with a loaded shoulder holster, exited the van and walked to the end of the dock. He had a tooth pick between his lips and his greasy black hair was slicked back.
“Load it up. I’m in a hurry. They’re little bugs out here – bite’n on me,” he instructed and complained with a noticeable northern accent.
I stacked the bales from the boat onto the dock, and then Ignacio loaded them into the back of the waiting van. I kept one eye on the greasy kid the whole time we were loading. A revolver was secured under the center console of the boat if needed, but I was not looking for trouble, just money. The kid didn’t say a word until we finished the loading.
“U miss’n a bale, supposed to be sixty. Sesenta,” he sneered at Ignacio.
Ignacio grinned big. There was a long pause between the two men.
“We got them all. All that we saw. It is a big, dark ocean out there. Hard to see clear what is what at times, but we got them all. Only fifty-nine came out of the air by our count. Not sesenta,” Ignacio said, still smiling wide.
The kid shifted the tooth-pick from one side of his mouth to the other. “My orders were to pick up sixty. Boss won’t be happy if I come back shorted. We got us a problem here, amigo.”
In the dim light, I slowly felt for my rust pitted revolver, and then placed it on the seat beside me. If the kid made a move to draw his gun, I was drawing my piece first.
“Huh. How I know you two salt lickers didn’t stash a bale somewhere back on the river?”
Ignacio’s smile disappeared during a downward glance at the dock below him. His hand came unconsciously up to the side of his face where the scar traced the old wound. He ran his index finger along the crooked line of the deep scar. This was going to get ugly. I palmed the pistol that sat on the seat next to me. Ignacio turned broad shouldered with his chin up and faced the kid. They were just a few feet apart.
“You don’t know. The captain and me are just transporters. Give us our money, and we are out of here. You leave here with the stuff and we leave here with the money. There won’t be no problem, unless you making it. You got it? Amigo?”
The kid stared back at Ignacio for a moment, smiled, and let out an edgy chuckle.
“Easy man, I’ll get your money from da van. I was just tell’n you what the boss told me.”
The young punk walked to the van as I picked up the gun off the seat, and held it down by my side. If he drove away, we were screwed. One full minute passed, and the drug mule returned with a white envelope and handed it to Ignacio. He didn’t say another word. Just walked back to the van, got in, and quickly drove off.
I exhaled. Ignacio jumped into the bow as I throttled the boat motor and back up the river we raced. The sun was just beginning to light the sky as we tied the boat to my dock. In the house, over black coffee, we counted the money and realized the punk had shorted us five hundred.
The Houston clinic took the $4,500 dollars as a down payment. Ignacio had offered his share of the money for Lucy, and I accepted.
Six months later a grand jury of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Florida in Tallahassee issued an indictment for fifty-nine people. There were names of eight county commissioners, two sheriffs, eight deputies, three game wardens, a tax commissioner, and thirty-seven fishermen. Cato was a name on that indictment. But there was nobody named Ignacio on the long list of fishermen. The government may have missed one bale in the ocean too.
I plead guilty because I was, and to save my former friend Ignacio, a F.B.I. informant all along, the trouble of testifying against me. It is a sad thing that betrayal never comes from your enemies, but from those you trust. It was a long fourteen months I served in the Federal pen in Atlanta thinking about that betrayal. Lucy died of the cancer while I was locked up. When they let me out, I scurried back to the sea to fish for mullet.
# # #
Joseph Gaines is a freelance writer currently residing in the humid swamps of north-central Florida. He has previously published a historical fiction novel, Vain Yearnings, and has written stories for The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature and The Purpled Nail. Mr. Gaines is a graduate of the University of Georgia.
Photo: Alexander Andrews
