The Sound of Many Waters (14 page)

Dominic opened his eyes and pondered the striking differences between La Florida and his homeland. Here he was, paddling over a body of water teeming with ferocious mo
n
sters, surrounded on all sides by wilderness where even worse creatures probably lurked, and yet to the natives it was all normal. It was simply what they knew. Perhaps similar beasts prowled the wilds of Spain when it was still a land of tribes and huts, but that was eons ago and by now all the dragons had been slain.

The canoe approached a thin lip of shoreline. Dominic’s muscles burned from paddling. He was about to request that one of the natives relieve him when a gar burst out of the water and bit down on his paddle.

“Curse you!” Dominic screamed. He strained to pull it out. The fish thrashed and sent a gush of frothy water onto Dominic. Determined to win, he dug his fingernails into the wood with such force that the fragrance of cypress filled the air. The gar, however, would not relent. It shook its head with such violence that Dominic feared the fish would rip his arms out of their sockets.

Itori leapt off the side of the canoe with the shark-tooth knife in his hand. He landed on the gar’s back and wrapped his legs around its massive girth and brought the knife down under the fish’s throat. At once the gar released the paddle and sounded, taking Itori down into the lightless depths with him.

“Itori!” screamed one of the younger natives. He stood poised to dive in, but Utina pulled him down and said something in the tone of a leader and pounded his fist on the conch shell around his neck.

Dominic, dumbfounded, stared at the deep, pitted teeth marks on the paddle blade. If that had been flesh, there would be nothing left. He gazed into the water but saw no sign of Itori. “He’s gone.”

“Do not forget what his name means,” said Francisco.

A flurry of bubbles stirred the surface and Dominic guessed that the gar had shredded Itori to pieces, but he did not want to suggest anything so gruesome to the others. Suddenly the huge gar broke the surface; Dominic jerked the pa
d
dle away from it. Infernal demon—was it coming back for more? But then the gar rolled over, revealing a pearly underside that glowed white against the black water. The gar floa
t
ed there, undulating in the chop. A cloud of redness spread from a jagged gash beneath its gills.

“Itori?” whispered Utina.

Itori’s head popped out beside the gar. He took a gasping breath, then held the knife high and made a whooping sound. He climbed onto the gar and straddled it like a horse and pounded his fists against its sides. He and the other natives burst into jubilant war cries. Even Dominic could not help joining in, but his war cry sounded more like a yodel and the natives playfully mocked him.

Itori climbed into the canoe. Dominic slapped him on the back and said, “Crazy Alligator.” Itori smiled.

Twenty minutes later they made camp on a high, sandy bluff overlooking the lake. They dragged the dead gar up the bank and hung it by its tail from an oak branch but the twine broke; the fish flumped to the ground like a body cut from a gallows. On the second attempt, they used two strands of twine and hung it successfully. Itori slid his knife down the middle of its belly and made a long incision. He stuck his arm into the cavity, felt around for a while, and yanked out the fish’s heart. He took a bite out of it and his mouth curved into a dreadful blood-smeared grin. Then he held the dripping heart to Dominic.

“Eat,” said Itori.

Dominic’s stomach squirmed. He would try almost any food, but not raw organs. “No,” he said.

Itori pushed the heart closer to Dominic’s face. “Eat.”

“It is an honor to be offered this,” said Francisco. “He is not just asking you to eat the gar’s heart with him—you will ingest its soul as well.”

Dominic looked at Itori’s eager, wild eyes. Damn it. He took the heart and drew a deep, contemplative breath. He had seen and held plenty of hearts before, but they had all belonged to enemies. This heart was about the size of a man’s but it felt heavier, denser. Dominic closed his eyes and bit into it. Lukewarm fluids gushed into his mouth, tasting of iron and bile and fish slime. He severed off a large chunk with his teeth and it slid down his throat like a raw oyster. He gagged once but kept it down.

Itori whooped with joy and grabbed hold of Dominic’s hand. “Brother,” he said.

Dominic wiped fish blood from his mouth. “Not I.”

Chapter Fourteen

Zane’s lungs ached. He could bend his knees without any resistance, but when he tried to lift his legs, they would not budge. His skin was suctioned to the muck. He pushed against the bottom with his hands but it was no more fruitful than pushing against pudding—the only firmness he felt was a cluster of burrowed clams, too scattered to provide any support.

He opened his eyes and the brackish water stung them but the pain quickly conceded. As his vision adjusted, he could see a tea-colored haze, differentiated by a shadowy hor
i
zon—the mud bottom. He looked up. Rays of light danced over his head. A few bubbles fled from his mouth and wo
b
bled to the surface. He envied them.

His body urged itself to breathe. He refused to let that happen but he knew he had only moments before he would pass out. His situation was as bleak as it could get and he wondered what it would feel like to die. When he heard the click and whistle of a dolphin, however, a moment of hope struck him. He had heard stories of dolphins saving people from sharks and ferrying drowning children to safety. Maybe this one was coming to help him. He stared into the dinge, expecting his streamlined savior to burst forth with its flippers spread wide like angel wings and whisk him to the surface. But nothing came.

Soon everything within Zane’s body was commanding him to take a breath. No part of him but
him
recognized that he was underwater; his functions warred with his reason. He tried again to push himself out of the mud, this time spreading his arms wide to get more surface coverage, and his hand brushed against something rough. He grabbed hold of it and could tell by its shape and texture that it was a rope. He pulled on it and felt only slack, but it soon came taut and he could tell that it was attached to something. He tugged. The thing did not budge. Perfect. He wrapped the rope around his hands and strained to pull himself out of the mud. His legs lifted up.

I might make it, he thought.

But the rope slackened and the mud sucked him back in. He pulled the rope toward him—whatever it was attached to seemed to have gotten dislodged—and soon a black shape came his way. When he tried to touch it, his fingers slid between moss-covered wire mesh. Something pinched his thumb and he realized he had found a
ghost trap
, so called because once its buoy was gone—cut off by a careless boater or an unexpected storm—the crabber could no longer find the trap. When crabs came in and could not get out, they eventually died of starvation and their decomposing carcasses would attract more crabs, and so on through the seasons in a perpe
t
ual cycle of waste. Zane could hear the crabs rattling against each other in the trap.

At least I won’t die alone, he thought, trying to find humor in his hopeless situation. After thinking it, however, he realized how extremely unfunny it was. Still, he was surprised at how calm he felt. The rays of light swooping around him grew brighter. His chest throbbed and in what he assumed to be his life’s last thought he looked at the crab trap and the image of a snowshoe popped into his mind.

Could it work?

At this point, anything was worth a try. He pooled his last morsels of strength, grabbed the trap, and attempted to use it as a brace to lift himself out.

Please, he thought.

The trap sank into the bottom faster than he had hoped but when the mud pushed all the crabs to the top of the mesh, it stopped, providing enough resistance for Zane to put all of his weight on the trap. He strained to push himself up. The mud made a slurping sound when it released him.

As he kicked toward the surface, he felt like he was on the cusp of losing consciousness and was not sure if he would make it. But he swam with vigor, and when his head shot out of the water, he sucked in what he guessed to be the deepest breath he had ever taken, besides, probably, his first. With that one inhalation, he filled his throbbing lungs with all the air they needed and his brain felt suddenly lucid. The ensuing breaths were delicious and the sun felt like warm lotion on his skin.

He looked up and could see the underside of the bridge where, assumedly, the soldiers and cop had looked down and waited for him to surface. When they did not see him after a minute or so, he guessed, they would have considered him drowned. If so, and if he could now reach land unseen, it might work in his favor.

He spun around in the water to analyze his surroundings. The town shoreline was half a mile away and, to his side, monolithic pilings stretched up to the belly of the bridge. He spotted the duffel bag near the closest piling, its contents of Styrofoam buoying it high in the water. Swimming to it, he crossed into the shade of the bridge and the water temperature dropped a few degrees.

In the distance, the dolphin cut across the surface, still busy chasing mullet. “Don’t worry, Flipper,” said Zane. “The crabs saved me.”

He stayed close to the pilings and followed them toward the shore, stopping once to rest against the wooden rafters that marked the channel. The wood smelled of tar; black gunk clung to every part of his body that brushed against it. He continued on. When his ears dipped below the waterline he heard the crackle of the barnacles that covered the submerged bu
t
tresses. His fisherman’s mind imagined the trophy catches prowling below. Redfish. Mangrove snapper. Speckled sea trout. He wondered if he’d ever get to fish Florida’s waters again. The possibility of not being able to made him sad.

He heard the whine of a boat motor. Looking back, he saw a police boat circling the area where he had gone into the water, its flashing lights too bright to look at even in the midday glare. Zane pulled himself around to the backside of the nea
r
est piling and sank into the water until only his eyes and the top of his head were above it. He watched the boat stop. A man on the stern donned scuba gear and flipped backward into the water. This was ideal—they were searching for his body, and with the water so murky, they would probably search for hours. When they did not find him, they would blame it on currents and start counting down the time it would take for enough gases to form.

His friend’s body had soaked for three days before it floated. Bobby Nelson was by far the most popular kid in Zane’s 5
th
grade class. A beautiful boy with almond eyes and skin that never burned—it only tanned—Bobby basked in the sun every afternoon while practicing to be a professional surfer. Despite their friendship, Zane was jealous of Bobby’s looks, athletic skills, and the fact that his parents loved him so much they would sit on the beach all day while he surfed. The girls, naturally, were crazy about Bobby. But so was David Allen West, who first saw him when he peered over a fence during school recess. Posing as a photographer for a surfing mag
a
zine, he befriended Bobby and his parents at the beach.

One day, Bobby was not in class. By midmorning, frantic police officers arrived to interview Zane and his classmates. When had they last seen Bobby? Had he been talking to any strangers? By that afternoon, pieces of the puzzle came together and a manhunt for David Allen West commenced. Two days later, while Zane rode the bus to school, the morning’s breaking news blurted out before the driver could silence the radio. David Allen West was in custody and had already co
n
fessed—boasted, in fact—to kidnapping, raping, and stra
n
gling Bobby, and then dumping his broken little body off the Juno Beach pier, into the surf Bobby had loved so much. And that morning, bloated and corrupt, Bobby had ridden his last wave—right to the feet of a horrified tourist. By the time the busload of distraught students arrived at school, an army of state counselors had already amassed.

“But how did the guy rape Bobby?” Zane asked the counselor assigned to him, a solemn, grandfatherly man with a magnificent mustache that curled up at each end.

The counselor looked at Zane for a long time. “How about let’s not focus on the rape part. Let’s talk about how you felt when you heard that your friend had been found deceased.”

“I don’t know. It sucks, it really sucks. But I just don’t know why…” Zane’s words trailed off.

“Tell me.”

“Nothing.”

“It’s ok, Zane. You can tell me anything.”

Zane looked down. “It’s just that I don’t know why that man chose Bobby. Why not me? I mean, was I too ugly or something?”

The counselor twirled the end of his moustache between his thumb and index finger. His face twisted into a pensive frown. “Are you playing a joke on me?”

“No, sir.”

“Then I’m confused. Are you saying you’re jealous that a sex offender kidnapped your friend and not you?”

Zane stood. “Can I leave whenever I want?”

“Yes. Please do.”

Zane ran out of the room and straight into the bathroom where he locked himself in the farthest stall and cried for over an hour without anyone asking if he needed help. He would certainly miss Bobby, but he was mostly sad for Bobby’s parents. Their son, after all, had been the nucleus of their lives. What more did they have to live for? He thought of the time he had seen them sitting on the beach, clapping and cheering whenever Bobby shredded a wave or shot out of a barrel. They were the kinds of parents that otherwise only existed in old movies and TV shows.