The Sound of Many Waters (11 page)

He stood and checked his phone—still no service. But then he saw a metal ladder extending up one of the legs of the launch pad. If he could climb high enough, he theorized, he might be able to get a connection. He scrutinized the ladder for a long time. It was severely corroded—a tetanus breeding ground if ever there was one—but all the rungs were intact and did not a
p
pear rusted through. With his battery so close to depletion, he knew this might be his only chance, so he put his phone in his pocket and started climbing.

The buzzards departed all at once and he could feel the wind off their wings as they lifted themselves into the sky. A terrible odor remained, though—their waste was splattered all over the beams and it smelled like the rotting dead things that buzzards typically consumed. The stench intensified as he climbed higher into their realm.

When he reached what he thought might be the halfway point, he looked out and was overcome with astonishment and terror. The vast expanse of wilderness that lay before him looked impassable. A dirt road ran parallel to the launch pad but, beyond that, the seemingly endless tracts of swampland and forest were only periodically pierced by space center buildings. The largest structure was the mountainous Vehicle Assembly Building, or VAB, tall enough for rockets and shuttles to stand inside vertically before their transfers to the launch pads. The VAB had an enormous American flag painted on its face. A halo of buzzards orbited above it on an invi
s
ible updraft.

He looked in the other direction and was transfixed by the enormity of the ocean and the indescribable beauty of the sun rising out of it. He realized why the most coveted units in oceanfront condominiums were on the highest floors; he had never been in one, but he guessed that the view would look similar. If he pulled this off, maybe he would have to buy one.

He suddenly thought about the wreckage of his boat floating somewhere out there, and about the two men in the other boat. Was it possible they might have survived? It pained him to ponder their fate. If only he could explain to them that he had not intended to crash his boat into theirs. He hated the thought of anyone thinking badly of him.

After climbing a little higher, he wrapped his elbow around the ladder and pulled his phone from his pocket. He looked at the screen, averting his eyes ahead of time to the top-left corner in an attempt to avoid seeing Lucia again. He sighed when he saw the letters
NS
. But then the letters flashed and became another image—an illuminated bar beside four vacant ones.
Service!
He smiled, but then his face hardened with pensiveness. Who should he call? He doubted that he had enough juice for more than one try.

He narrowed it down to two:
911
, or his father. Then he remembered how Skip had repeatedly tried to reach him the previous afternoon, and he could see that his voicemail folder had messages in it. He dialed Skip.

It rang once before Skip answered. “Zane!” he shouted.

Zane had never heard such panic in his voice. “Dad!” he shouted back.

“God, Zane, I’m so happy to hear from you. You’re ok?”

“For now.”

“I’m so sorry, kiddo. I never thought he’d go this far. I had no idea.”

Zane’s phone beeped. He wanted to know more about his father’s involvement but his battery had little vitality left. “Dad, listen to me, my boat is sunk.”

“I know. It’s all over the news. You’re away from that bastard, right? You’re not still in the water, are you?”

“I’m on land. Cape Canaveral. My phone’s gonna shut off. Call the police and tell them I’m on an old launch pad, somewhere near—”

“The police? Hold on, kiddo, don’t you know?”

“Know what?”

“The police are looking for you. They traced what they found of your boat and pulled up your record. They’re saying you killed a federal agent.”

Zane’s body went cold. “Killed?”

“One of the agents is fine. They found him in a lifejacket. But the other one—Zane, he was dead, floating with the wreckage.”

Zane choked on his tears. “It was an accident, Dad, I swear it. When my boat came down—”

“He didn’t die in the crash.” Skip breathed into the phone. “Somebody cut his throat.”

Zane felt dizzy. He hugged the rusty ladder to keep from falling off. He looked down and for the first time saw how incredibly high he had climbed. His legs felt weak and he swooned to one side. His phone beeped again. “Dad, I’m scared.”

“I know. Me too. But listen, we’ll get you out of this. They’ll be looking for you all over the coast, so you have to go inland. Keep a low pro.”

“And go where?”

“I’ll meet you somewhere and we’ll get outta dodge. You’re pretty far north. How about Gainesville?”

Zane knew Gainesville well; hearing the name brought such sadness that its name may as well have been Sorrow or Regret. When Lucia did not wake up that night in his truck, her parents thought she would have wanted to be brought back there. Zane tried to go a few times a year. He sometimes came across her relatives or former university clas
s
mates—they all knew who he was and never spoke to him—but it was even worse when her parents were there. Whenever they saw Zane, Lucia’s mother would sob hyster
i
cally and her father would clench his fists. They swore they would never forgive Zane for what he had done, but Zane did not think he deserved their forgiveness anyway.

“Ok,” said Zane. “Where in G-ville?”

“How about a bar. Know any good ones?”

It did not surprise him that Skip would want to reunite at a bar. In terms of meeting places, to Skip no other option was ever worth considering. Zane remembered how Lucia always talked about going with her friends to a seedy little lounge famous among college kids because it rotated on its foundation. People got so dizzy inside, she said, that they often spilled their drinks. “Look for the
Spinner
,” said Zane. “I have no idea how long it’ll take me to get there, though.”

“That’s ok,” said Skip. “I have no problem sitting there every day until you do.”

No, Zane thought, you wouldn’t have a problem with that, would you?

“Dad? I have to ask you one more thing.”

“What?”

“Did you know what was in that bale?”

“Of course I did. I told you everything in the voicemail. Didn’t you listen to it?”

Zane’s phone beeped again and shut off. He pounded the power button with his finger, but as he did the phone slipped out of his clammy hands.
Bing
.
Bing
.
Bing
. It bounced off the beams of the launch pad as it plummeted, hitting the ground and exploding into a thousand shards of plastic and glass. Some of the pieces slid across the slab and stopped at the feet of a man. Where had he come from? The man looked up and Zane’s heart leaped—it was Miguel. The knife he held in his hand, Zane guessed, was no doubt the same one he had used to slay the agent.

“Well look at you,” said Miguel. “Stuck like a treed coon.”

Chapter Eleven

No one talked around the fire that night. The Timucuans gathered mussels and snails from the slow, gloomy river beside which they had made camp and steamed them on a bed of wet moss placed over the coals. They showed Dominic how to extract the meat from one of the shells and left him to prepare the rest of his supper himself. His stomach could finally tolerate solid foods again, but he doubted he could eat enough of the tiny mollusks to feel full.

All night the natives prayed. When the moon rose they kneeled before it and, with tears in their eyes, delivered up pleas and lamentations in lilting tones that were as beautiful as they were haunting. Somewhere in the distance, a pack of red wolves joined the chorus with their sorrowful howling. While the others prayed, the native to whom Ona had given his shell sloped off to sit alone in the darkness. He looked as despondent as a widower and Dominic watched him remove the necklace, look at it for a long time, and then put it back on.

“Who is he?” Dominic whispered to Francisco.

Francisco, morose, looked at the man. “That is Utina, our new chief.”

“A reluctant one, I’d say.”

Francisco had been holding a piece of half-eaten snail meat in his hand for several minutes. He looked at it, and then tossed it into the fire. “Utina knows he can never be as just and tireless a leader as Ona. No one can. Ona is—Ona was—irreplaceable.”

“Will the Ais kill Ona?” asked Dominic.

“For certain,” said Francisco. “But first, he will be beaten and tortured. They will parade him in front of their village like a prize and call a council to try him for trespassing. A spectacle, nothing more. His sentence will be death. The gods, they will say, demand it. Then the real suffering will ensue.”

“In what way?” Dominic’s appetite had disappeared and he pushed the pile of shellfish away.

“It depends on their mood, I guess. They will most likely cut off his limbs and cauterize the wounds to ensure he lingers for a while. After that they will mount what’s left of his body on a pole outside their village and leave him there, until he…” Francisco seemed unwilling to let the word pass from his lips.

“Until he dies,” said Dominic.

Francisco frowned. “Yes.”

“How do you know all of this?”

Francisco gazed at the river. “Because we used to punish our enemies in the same way. Before Ona became chief.”

The next morning, the sound of chopping jarred Dominic awake. The river basin filled with warm sunlight and the thin fog that had materialized overnight swirled away. Dominic looked around the camp; he was surprised to find himself alone. He considered fleeing but decided against it; at this point, he felt safer with the natives than he did on his own. Between the vicious animals, toxic plants and savage Ais, he knew he could never survive in such wilderness by himself.

He traced the chopping sound to a thicket of trees in the distance and set off down the bank to investigate. The fragrance of freshly-cut wood filled the damp riverside air and as he approached he could see the natives hacking the insides out of a felled cypress tree. Francisco leaned on a nearby stump, using Dominic’s sword to carve the finishing touches of a paddle. Another paddle lay on the ground beside him.

“
Buenas dias
, commander,” said Francisco, his disposition much sunnier than it had been the night before. “It’s about time we got you back on the water, wouldn’t you say?”

Dominic did not respond. It still pained him to see Francisco using his sword. He longed to have it back, if only to give it a good cleaning. The rust accumulating on the blade was a cancer that had to be eliminated; otherwise, he feared, the co
r
rosion would consume the metal entirely. The night before, he had asked Francisco to at least wipe some oil on the blade, but the old man refused. It was only a thing, Francisco had said, and no man should be attached to a thing.

The natives ushered Dominic into the canoe while it still lay on the riverbank. Then they lined up along its sides and heaved it into the water, each one jumping into the canoe when they reached the water’s edge. Soon they were gliding across the black water at enough speed to ruffle Dominic’s hair. He could tell from the miniscule wake left by the canoe that it had a negligible draft, yet somehow it was buoyant enough to accommodate twelve men. He marveled at the stability and swiftness of the vessel, especially considering it had been standing in a forest as a living tree just hours earlier. The shipbuilders who constructed his galleon could have learned plenty from these natives.

Dominic gazed at the bizarre world around him. Massive alligators basked on the muddy shoreline like dragons turned to stone, too large and otherworldly to be real. Further on, three otters swooped through cattails in a playful game of chase and, nearby, an egret speared a perch with its beak. For the first time since the shipwreck, his surroun
d
ings did not seem so hellish. He was beginning to glimpse some sort of covert system at work, a flawless order that disguised itself as chaos to hide from man’s recognition, as evident in the biota as it was in the way the natives paddled in perfect unison. Dominic watched them for a while and marveled at their precision.