The Sound of Many Waters (20 page)

“Francisco asked me not to tell anyone what I saw,” said Dominic. “Why?”

“Because of Yaba’s vision,” said Mela. “He and Francisco are jealous of each other, I think. They are both shamans—but with different sorcery.”

All at once the rain came heavy and cold. Dominic felt Mela’s hand trembling, so he put his arm around her and pulled her close.

“We should go back,” she said.

“Alright,” said Dominic. In truth, he wanted to stand there and hold her all night.

As they turned back toward the brook, a vein of lightning flashed across the sky and brightened the forest. They both gasped when they saw him—the man standing behind a curtain of rain on the other side of the brook—but just as quickly the lightning faded and darkness pervaded the forest.

“Father?” said Mela. She clenched Dominic’s arm so tightly that he could feel her sharp fingernails digging into his skin. The rain was deafening.

Another streak of lightning lit the night, and in that instant they could see the man clearly. It was Utina, holding a spear and staring at them with a livid pout. A crack of thunder reverberated in Dominic’s chest and Mela pulled out of his grip.

Chapter Twenty

On the day Zane planned to kill himself, a tropical depression had formed off the coast and the seas were far too rough for his boat to make it through the inlet. Besides, no one would have believed that he intended to fish on such a blustery day. According to the marine forecast, though, the following day would be calmer, so, to pass time, he plopped himself on a stool at the
Lager-Head
and ordered a draught beer and a basket of stone crab claws—the perfect last meal.

Zane cracked open a claw, pulled out the meat and dipped it in a blob of creamy mustard. He rolled it on his tongue and savored the sweetness. He figured he could eat a hundred
stonies
in one sitting, but at $25 a pound, he could only afford a few.

He looked around the bar. Like most unfishable days, it was packed with drunken captains and mates. They reserved their best fishing tales for such times. Zane noticed Leather Heather sitting alone in a corner booth, leaning on a table and holding her head in her hands, the smoke from her cigarette swirling around her face like a bridal veil. He almost wanted to check on her.

This, he mused, was the last day of his life, and he could not think of a better way to spend it than with the people he had grown up around. Would they miss him? Maybe.

It had been five years since his arrest. The seven months of prison he served, however, did not feel like nearly enough time to atone for what he had done. His life itself seemed a more fitting compensation, and that was a sentence only he could impose.

His plan, though, was not entirely selfish; in fact, he had designed it to inflict the least amount of suffering on the few people who still cared about him. He would make it look like an accident. First, as if preparing for any other day at sea, he would load his boat with fishing gear, bait, ice and even a turkey sandwich never to be eaten. After clearing the inlet, he would drive due east, past the tepid waters of the Gulf Stream, until his depth finder—with its range of 1,500 feet—went batty because it could no longer detect the seabed. He had a hundred feet of anchor line tied to four cinderblocks stowed in a bow hatch and after placing the blocks on the edge of the gunwale, he would fasten the other end of the line around his ankles. Then, with his boat still motoring forward, he would jump into the water and watch the line come taut and his weight would yank the blocks off the side and their weight, in turn, would drag him down, down past the place where blue fades to purple, down past the realm of swordfish and giant squid, and down to the moonrock floor of the abyss where angry pressures would shrivel his body into a crumpled likeness of itself and blind crabs would prune the meat from his bones and every molecule of his body and soul would be diffused into the ocean like so many lost mariners before him. When someone found his empty boat still putting around at sea, everyone would assume he fell off and drowned while fishing alone. It was something that happened sometimes.

“Are you Captain Zane Fisher?” said a voice from behind. Zane spun around on the barstool and found a dark, well-dressed man standing there. In his three-piece suit and shiny dress shoes, the man looked out of place at a waterfront bar.

“Yes, sir,” said Zane.

“And that’s your boat out there at the dock, is it? The Lucy?”

“Lucia.”

The man sipped a banana daiquiri garnished with a cocktail umbrella. “I’d like to charter it tomorrow.”

Zane hesitated. “I may have other plans. What are you looking to catch?”

“Something exceptional.”

Zane was eager to follow through with his original plan, but would one extra day really matter? If he took the job, then at least he could leave the world with no unpaid debts; the economy was so bad that people had all but stopped paying to go fishing and his bar tab was closing in on absurdity.

“Be at the dock at 7 a.m.,” said Zane, and then he smiled, “but don’t bring any bananas, okay?”

The man shot him a confused look. “Why not?”

“Because they’re bad luck.” Zane was equally confused. Keeping bananas off a boat was an age-old fishing superstition he thought every angler knew.

Now, as he hid inside the cramped leg compartment of Shady’s sidecar, his face pressed against the reeking belly of the pit bull that sat in the seat above him, Zane could hardly believe that his first conversation with Miguel had taken place only two days before. Now in danger of losing his life, he felt grateful he had not ended it himself. Leather Heather, in fact, had saved him.

“Are you sure, bro?” Shady yelled over the roar of the Harley.

Zane poked his face out between dog fat and the sidecar seat. “I have to say goodbye to her. It’ll only take a second.”

“You’re the boss.” Shady reached into the sidesaddle of his bike and pulled out a wad of black leather and a red bandana. “Put this on so no one recognizes you. It’s my chick’s, so it should fit.”

Back at the gas station, Shady had agreed to take him to Gainesville only after Zane assured him that—if the cops caught them—he would say that Shady had no knowledge of him being a so-called
person of interest
. The Law had pulled out of the parking lot without even seeing the frantic old woman chasing after him, giving Shady enough time to lock up the shop and usher Zane into the sidecar.

Zane pulled the pants over his legs and the jacket over his arms, trying not to disturb the dog. The clothes were almost too big for him; Shady’s girlfriend, he surmised, was a fairly hefty woman. He wrapped the bandana around the top of his head. If he were not hiding in the cramped leg area of a sidecar beneath gigantic dog balls that bounced like a jogger’s breasts every time the bike hit a pothole, he might have felt pretty cool at that moment.

The bike jerked to a stop. “Hurry up,” said Shady.

Zane squeezed past the dog and jumped out. Shady had stopped at the edge of the bridge, enabling Zane to descend the narrow trail of concrete to the underside of the embankment without anyone seeing him from the roadway. When Zane reached the bottom, he turned the corner and stopped.

“You okay, Fishy?” yelled Shady.

“Yeah,” said Zane, but he wasn’t. Nothing looked the same under the bridge. Blankets and trash were strewn all over the place.

“Mama?” he called out, but the only sound he heard was a boat wake clapping against the seawall. He stepped into the dimness of the bridge’s shade. Most of the debris scattered about were pieces of the Styrofoam that had been inside the duffel bag. Had Mama Ethel rifled through it to look for more coins? He barely knew her, but it did not seem like something she would do.

“Mama? It’s me, Mister Zany.” Still no response.

He found the empty duffel bag hanging from a finger of rebar protruding from the concrete. He picked it up, thankful he had removed the coins before he went topside. His shorts sagged beneath his new leather pants, so he pulled his last stack of coins out of his pocket and put it in the bag.

“I almost didn’t recognize you,” said a voice that he instantly recognized. He turned and found Miguel standing in the deep shade beneath the embankment. “Going to a costume party?”

“Where’s Mama Ethel?” said Zane.

“You mean the negro? She wouldn’t tell me where my coins are, so I insisted she go for a dip. Who knew she couldn’t swim very well—not with a bullet in her back and all.”

Zane looked toward the river. There, pressed up against the seawall, a multicolored mass swayed in the waves. When he saw the purple pants and
Nike
shoes, his stomach knotted up. “Mama,” he whimpered. She was face down in the water, her arms spread wide like a child pretending to fly.

He had brought this evil to her. He was, once again, at total fault.

“Now,” said Miguel, pointing a handgun at Zane, “unless you’re keen to join her, you need to tell me where my coins are.”

“I hid them.”

“I see. Well, maybe you
are
smarter than your father. Perhaps we can make a deal. How about you tell me where they are and then we split them. Fifty fifty.”

Zane heard Mama Ethel’s sweet voice in his head.
The worm betta not find nothin pretty in the robin’s song.
He took a step backward and said, “I’m the worm.”

“Pardon me?”

“I know all about your deals, Miguel. Go to hell.”

Zane bolted up the embankment. He heard Miguel clambering after him. How had Miguel found his hiding place? What were the odds?

“Go!” said Zane as he jumped into the sidecar, squeezing himself and the duffel bag in beside the dog. Shady gave it full throttle and they skidded onto the highway, narrowly missing a
U-Haul
moving truck, and two shots rang out behind them. One bullet struck the motorcycle’s taillight while the other whizzed past and hit the moving truck’s rear view mirror; glass shattered and the truck skidded to a stop.

Zane looked back. Miguel, standing beside the bridge, slid his gun into the waistband of his pants. Zane had to look again to be sure he saw it correctly—and there it was, a crooked smile on Miguel’s face. Why in the world was he smiling?

“Who
was
that guy?” said Shady.

Zane thought for a moment. “I’m still trying to figure that out.”

“You know, I could have left you. It wasn’t smart to give me that gold in advance.”

Zane was not sure how to answer. “Thanks, I guess.”

They took a right onto
US1
and The Law zoomed by in his cruiser, lights flashing and sirens howling, without even noticing them. Zane hunched deeper into the leg compartment of the sidecar and wiped dog drool off his face. He heard the sound of rain and thunder. Peeking out, he discovered that it was playing on the motorcycle stereo. The squally sound eased into jazz instrumentals and Shady nodded his head while
The Doors
grooved out
Riders on the Storm
.

Shady turned onto a side street and then rocketed onto the
I-95
ramp. They zoomed north on the highway at a constant 79 miles per hour, passing gargantuan SUVs and family sedans and smears of dead animals, the Brazilian pepper trees on the roadside a lime-colored blur in their periphery.

“Are you ok?” Zane asked Leather Heather. He had gone to check on the moping woman after he finished eating his crab claws. He still had not decided whether he would take the well-dressed man fishing the next morning as he had agreed or leave an hour earlier to follow through with his suicide plan. He was leaning toward the latter.

“It’s caincer,” wheezed Leather Heather.

He lowered himself onto the opposite bench of the booth and looked at her for a moment. What do you say to a person who tells you they have cancer? “I’m sorry,” he said. “What kind?”

Heather looked at him with eyes darkened by yesterday’s mascara. “It’s metastasized.”

Zane did not know that word. “Is that a lady part?”

Heather let out a raspy laugh, but then she sulked again. “It means it started somewhere’s else—for me, my left tit—and then it spread. My throat. My lungs.” She pointed to the areas on her body as she spoke of them. “My stomach. My liver. Doctor said it’s all a big mess in there. They’re sending me to
Shands
.”

“For treatment?”

“For hospice.”

Sadness swept over Zane. Few people would miss him, but what would the
Lager-Head
be without Leather Heather? “What will you do?” he asked.

Heather thought for a moment, and then took a drag of her cigarette. “Die, I guess,” she said, blowing smoke in his face.