Tortuga Madre - Chapter 1

Boat Nichols was headed into fourth grade the summer he caught his first musky. It was jet black. His mother was speechless. Tish thought the guides from Three Loon Lodge were playing a prank, but they were just as incredulous as the mother and son from south Florida. When Tish realized it was no farce, she felt a pang in her chest. Her first thought was, “God, wait til Sam sees this.” But her husband was fishing at a different lodge, one with air conditioning and no mosquitos, where the guests could stay as long as they wanted, and the lake was always placid on account of the absence of jetskiers. The jetskiers were in the other place, Tish was sure. Although the divorce was brutal, her heart had softened for Sam while he suffered. Cancer took him when Boat was just two years old. Boat wondered if the musky had cancer, too.

• • •

“Yuck!” cried the fourth graders in unison on the first day of school. “Why is it like that?” Boat tried to explain that the fish in his photo was a rare catch, that it had a genetic mutation called melanism. 

“My mom takes melanism to sleep at night,” volunteered one of the other boys.

Boat shrugged off their lack of enthusiasm and put the photo back in his pocket. The teacher reached out a hand, gesturing to give it over. He placed it in her hand and she looked closely, wondering how a boy everyone in the school thought to be incapable of happiness could be stricken with such a big smile. The fish looked disgusting. Nevertheless, she pinned the photo to the corkboard with the other summer snapshots, each with a little orange date printed at the bottom. When the children left for lunch hour, Boat lingered behind and moved his picture to another spot on the board, so the edges wouldn’t touch the ones with jetskis in them.

• • •

On graduation day, Tish yanked the boy’s head down from its perch on manly shoulders and kissed it roughly. Tousling Boat’s hair, she said, “I’m so proud of you. I know Sam would be, too.”

“And so am I”, chirped Bill, Boat’s step dad of seven years. 

Boat liked Bill. He had a Hewes redfisher that the family spent a lot of weekends in, and some weekdays when the kid’s grades were good. Boat made the friendly Texan promise not to sell it when he went off to Eckerd College in August. Bill had no intention of selling it, so the promise was made easy. The skiff’s hull was still painted banana yellow, the color of the flesh, not the peel.

“What you got going on later?” Bill asked the kid.

“Mary’s family is in town from Pennsylvania. They’re gonna smoke a brisket.”

“Pennsylvania, huh? Might as well eat a cushion off the davenport.” 

“Nice one.” Boat smiled. “What are you thinking?”

“Boca Chita?”

“Bet.”

They hitched the banana redfisher to Boat’s trailblazer and made it to Black Point before Mary could even wonder if her boyfriend was coming to lunch. Tish insisted on poling the first few hours.

As she strained against the warm easterly breeze, feeling the carbon fiber flex against her prominent hip, she poked her quiet son with a question.

“You sure you don’t want to go to the U? You can study sea turtles anywhere, you know. Lots of ocean here, too.”

“Gopher tortoises, mom. The professor I want to work with studies gopher tortoises.”

“Right.”

“Besides, I hate it here.”

“No, you don’t.”

He really didn’t. Tish smiled.

“You know your dad loved it here.”

“I know.”

Tish changed the subject. “Bill, how come whenever you’re in the boat all we see is pelicans and ‘cudas?”

Without turning his head Bill licked his leader knot and replied, “How come whenever you’re in the boat, my hair falls out in clumps?”

Boat turned around on the casting platform and smiled at his step dad, who had been bald since they met. Bill winked.

“What’s that?” Tish pointed to some nervous water.

“Mullet. It’s always mullet.” Bill was rummaging through a fly box looking for something shrimpy.

Boat said, “That ain’t no mullet.” 

Tish heaved again on the pole and pointed the bow for a good shot. The school of bonefish jumped a little but didn’t spook. One group was feeding while another tried to squeeze by between the hungry and the shore.

“Shit, they’re going in the mangroves.” Boat snarled. The bigger fish, the cruisers, were moving away, obviously spooked.

“Nevermind them. Focus on the tailers. Make a good one.” Tish said quickly and quietly.

Bill stopped rummaging to watch.

Boat let the mantis pattern fall from his hauling hand and swung the line behind him. With two long bends in the inherited Meridian, he had enough line out to launch a dart at the center of the group.

“What are you doing? Don’t put it in the middle of ‘em, pick one!” Tish chided.

“I know!” Boat whispered harshly. His mother was always trying to remind him of what he already knew. He would hear the same exact words at Mary’s family dove hunt in September, if he was even invited. His mother would be there regardless. Mary loved his mother.

With one more false cast than Tish approved of, Boat let the line down and dropped the fly on the periphery of the nibbling school. The biggest little bonefish turned on it and pounced, like a dog on a hushpuppy crumb just dusted off the picnic table.

Boat played the runt and let it run, pretending it was bigger, giving it more line than it asked for, just to have something to do. He dragged it boatside, and remained on the casting platform while Bill silently reached over the gunwale and jerked the fly out of its puny, puckered mouth. Bill flicked the water off his fingers in a careless salute as the little doggie skittered back to its school a hundred yards farther down the bank.

Tish broke the silence. “I’m gonna get you closer to the bank. Hang on.”

Boat watched the turtle grass undulate in the shade of the skiff as it eased closer to shore under his mother’s power. He thought about Mary’s long brown hair, how she’d had it cropped short right before the graduation ceremony and surprised him. He regretted it, but he had reacted badly. He laughed when she took off the vintage Marlins cap. They would have fought about it, but were interrupted by the beginning of the procession. He felt bad about skipping the barbecue.

His attention shifted to the edge of the mangroves where a tiny bull shark appeared and promptly disappeared among the arched roots. Then, he saw the unmistakable shape of a bonefish in motion. It looked enormous, the size that made him think twice about casting at it. If he lost this fish to a shark, it could be catastrophic for the local population. He remembered a lecture at the marine institute where a young scientist who looked way cuter than he imagined a scientist could presented some data which showed that the biggest female bonefish contribute a disproportionate amount of eggs to the population. Maybe fighting this fish and losing it wouldn’t make a difference, but he wrestled with such things. Tish loved that about him.

“I dunno, mom. I don’t see ‘em.” He lied.

“Well, I’m having a good time. I’ll just keep pushing. Be patient.”

Boat rolled his eyes. I am being patient.

Then, Bill dropped the aluminum cooler lid with a loud thud, and made a horrible monkey smile that let everyone know he knew what he did. The clear water in front of the skiff was gone. Everybody under the sea had heard the sound and thrashed themselves away to deeper water, milking up the entire flat. Time for a break.

Boat climbed down off the platform and patted Bill on the back. “You owe me one.”

“Sorry, Booter.” Bill said. He offered his step son the clear glass bottle in his hand. Boat looked up at his mother, who nodded with her eyes closed. 

“Just a sip,” she said.

Bill reached into the cooler and cheekily grabbed another two beers as Tish climbed down to sit on the pleated leather bench seat, with banana yellow piping. Tish shook her head as he opened the other two bottles. She resigned and let her son enjoy the whole beer. It was his graduation day after all.

The straw hat on Boat’s head was from a gas station on the Tamiami trail. It had a unique shape, not Asian, or cowboy, and only sort of Indian, without any colored beads or patterned fabric added on. He tipped it forward and leaned back against the casting platform. He nursed his beer to quell his mother’s worry. Then, his cellphone buzzed in his pocket. An automated text from Eckerd College reminding him to put in for the roommate lottery. And another older text he had missed, from much earlier. From Mary. We need to talk.We need to talk.

We need to talk.

He chugged the rest of his beer and whipped the bottle into the mangroves. The satisfaction of smashing glass would have offset the guilt of littering, but it landed softly, and bobbed in the water. 

“Really, Dundee?” Tish scoffed. She reserved the nickname for when her reptile loving son had done something stupid.

“Can we go now?” Boat whined.

“Not before you pick that shit up.”

Bill shrugged. He never chimed in when Boat was getting scolded. Even after seven years, he felt uncomfortable with discipline.

The graduate jumped in the knee deep water and felt the jolt of it in his groin. He bit his tongue as he waded through the settling mud towards the mangrove snag where the bottle was still floating on its side. Is it still a buzz kill if it hasn’t kicked in yet? Buzz abortion, maybe. He thought.

As he reached for the bottle, something deeper in the mangrove caught his attention. A blue plastic shopping bag hanging by the handles from a knob with something heavy inside, stretching the material thin. He stepped closer, over and around the arching roots, ducking under the leafed branches. He weighed the bag in his palm by raising it slowly from the bottom. It was full of water. Probably rainwater. Funny how litter can find such clever ways to clutter the landscape. Boat felt sorry for throwing the bottle. He unhitched the bag and opened it up to reach inside and taste the water and judge its salinity. Before he could reach, he gasped. Inside the bag, swimming in circles was the tiniest sea turtle he had ever seen, and it was blacker than a badly burnt brisket