Racing the Rain Read online

  Cassidy sat on the cushioned built-in seat in front of the center console while Trapper steered from behind. Cassidy looked down at his legs and was dismayed at how blindingly white they were in the morning sunshine. He tried to remember the last time he had done much of anything outside. Last summer? Basketball had rendered him a subterranean creature, peering painfully into the unfamiliar sunlight with pale vestigial eyeballs.

  Beach houses and low-slung motels dotted the beaches of Singer Island before the larger structure of the Colonnades resort hove into sight.

  “Wonder if Old Man MacArthur is at his favorite table in there counting napkins and salvaging catsup,” Cassidy yelled back over his shoulder.

  “Don’t knock it until you’ve made a few million yourself,” Trapper called back with a laugh. “I can tell you from personal knowledge he is a tough guy to do business with.”

  Strange, thought Cassidy. What kind of business a famously tight animal trapper would have had with the famously tight tycoon? He knew better than to ask.

  They traversed the rough water at the opening of the Palm Beach inlet, where the sheltered waters of Lake Worth flowed into the wild Atlantic. They took a couple of chilly spray showers over the bow, enough to raise gooseflesh on Cassidy’s fish belly legs, but in a few rough minutes they were past it.

  “Sorry ’bout that,” yelled Trapper.

  Cassidy waved it off. “No importa.”

  More elaborate houses went by now, seaside “cottages” with eight or ten bedrooms and barrel-tiled roofs, the winter digs of America’s generationally wealthy. They passed former ambassador to Cuba Earl E. T. Smith’s place, then old Joe Kennedy’s compound, perhaps close enough together, Cassidy thought, for the lovely Mrs. Smith to traipse across in a housecoat to trouble Rose for a cup of sugar.

  When they got to the Breakers, Trapper took them close to shore, then turned and headed straight out into the Gulf Stream, looking over his shoulders for his landmarks. Cassidy stood up to help.

  “What is it, the leftmost cupola of the Breakers and that church steeple?”

  “Right, we’ve almost got it now. Then we veer off and pick up the TV antenna on that white house and the middle of the water tower.”

  It was a mysterious business, locating a precise section of sea bottom by triangulating points on land, but Trapper was good at it, and he never forgot his triangulation landmarks once he knew them. The water went from light aquamarine to dark aquamarine to, finally, the purple of the Gulf Stream.

  “Okay,” said Trapper, squinting landward under a shading hand, “that’s it. Drop the anchor.”

  Cassidy tossed it overboard from the bow and watched the coiled line play out. They were in more than a hundred feet of water and the line buzzed out over the rub rail for a while. Finally it went slack. Cassidy fed thirty more feet into the water and cleated it off. The boat, which had seemed to be bobbing along in place, fetched up hard against the anchor rope and began riding into the current, which was fast enough to throw up a little wake under the bow.

  “Enough scope?” asked Cassidy.

  “Better give it another twenty feet or so. The tide is ripping pretty good. Last thing we need is to be dragging anchor out here. Jim Branch will make us swim to Jacksonville to fetch his boat.”

  Cassidy reset the anchor and joined Trapper in the back to suit up. The current flowing under them made it seem for all the world as if they were coursing along under power. Cassidy looked wearily at the pile of equipment at his feet: tanks, regulator, pressure gauge, weight belt, inflatable safety vest, dive knife, and wet suit top, not to mention the nets, prods, and jars they would need to catch tropicals.

  “Now I remember why I like skin diving better,” he said.

  “Not to mention I hate the idea of paying someone for God’s air. But you’ll never catch any tropicals without tanks, unless you’re in five feet of water with no current.”

  “Mmmm,” said Cassidy, wiggling into the tight wet suit top. He wouldn’t bother with the bottoms today. It wouldn’t be that cold in the stream, even at 110 feet.

  Trapper attached his regulator to the valve at the top of the tank, tightened it, opened the flow knob until he heard a hiss that instantly diminished to silence as the regulator hoses filled. He bit on the mouthpiece and inhaled, immediately getting a mechanical click and a rush of the cold, compressed air. He picked up the pressure gauge, saw that it read eighteen hundred pounds, then put the tank aside and started on the rest of the rigmarole.

  “Well, I want to hear all about the game, of course. If it’s not too painful, that is. In the regionals against Cocoa I thought I’d have a heart attack. I wanted to go up to Kernsville for the finals, but then Marcie and Nell were here with the kids and I just couldn’t leave them alone at the camp.”

  “Sure, of course. You didn’t miss much but the crushing disappointment. But for the first three quarters you would have been just like the rest of us, counting your chickens and looking forward to Tampa Hillsborough the next night.”

  “So who was it you lost to?”

  “Jacksonville Paxon. Bunch of football players, mostly. They didn’t even have a coach until right before the season started. Had to get a teacher to volunteer to take them. We weren’t too worried about them, and it did seem like a cakewalk for a while. At one point we had them by thirteen.”

  “So what happened?”

  Cassidy shrugged. “They put on a full-court press and we just experienced a sudden loss of cabin pressure. They kept chipping away at the lead and we kept forgetting how to play basketball until, with fifty-six seconds left, it was fifty-six to fifty-six. I’ll never forget it, the scoreboard just read fifty-six–fifty-six–fifty-six straight across.”

  “Oooh. Tense.”

  “You said it. They stalled around with it and Stiggs damn near stole the ball when they tried to get it inside to this man-mountain named Clyde Israel. But Stiggs couldn’t hang on to it and it went out-of-bounds on the sidelines. Okay, so now they get the ball out-of-bounds and there’s like two seconds left.”

  “Gulp,” said Trapper.

  “Yeah, I know. So their guard throws it in to one of the football players, this guy Ron Sellers, a six-four wide receiver, who I’m guarding. He’s about forty-five feet out and everyone in the gym knows he’s going to shoot, right? But I’ve got four fouls, and I’m just assuming, like everyone else in the gym, that this game is going to overtime. And I’d be damned—pardon my French—if I was going to sit there and watch the most important period of basketball of my life from the bench. So I make sure there is discernible separation between us—I don’t want to give some antsy ref any excuses—and I go straight up with him and get a hand right in his face.”

  “From forty-five feet still?”

  “If it was an inch. So here I am, high as I can go, hand in his face, and this yahoo football player lets fly. The ball is in midflight as the buzzer goes off . . .”

  “Let me guess.”

  “Oh, of course. Tore the bottom out of the net.”

  Trapper Nelson made a low, sympathetic whistle.

  “Something, isn’t it?” said Cassidy. “The SOBs were never in the lead at any time during the regulation thirty-two minutes of the game. Not from the opening tip-off until the final buzzer. But they darned sure won anyway.”

  “Sounds like one of those high school sports novels,” said Trapper.

  “Yeah, it does,” said Cassidy. “Except it’s the hero who’s supposed to be shooting that last-second shot, not some football player from Jacksonville.”

  Trapper stood up and checked his equipment, then sat on the gunnel, spitting into his mask and leaning back to rinse it in seawater.

  “Well, I’m no expert, of course, but it seems to me that the definition of the word ‘hero’ in the sporting context is just exactly ‘the guy who hits the last-second shot,’ ” said Trapper, but his tone was sympathetic.

  Cassidy, now ready on the opposite gunnel, spat and rinsed his own
mask. The sun was high enough now that he could feel the reassuring warmth on his salty face. He was even starting to sweat inside his wet suit.

  “Yeah, well, about seven thousand people in Florida Gym as well as every sportswriter in the state would agree with you there. Technically, I would too, but . . .”

  He put on his mask and bit down on the mouthpiece of his regulator, then took it out and held it in front of his mouth.

  “. . . well, except gosh darn it, Trap, we were supposed to be the heroes of this story. I was sure of it.” He stuck the regulator into his mouth and grinned around it.

  Trapper nodded, still smiling. He could hardly believe this rangy near-man was the same barefoot waif he’d befriended on the Loxahatchee River so many years ago. Having had heartbreak in his own life, Trapper knew it wasn’t easy coming to grips with those times when life didn’t follow the Hollywood narrative. Trapper took the regulator out of his mouth.

  “Okay, hero. Let’s go catch some tropicals,” he said, replacing it and flipping backward into the purple Gulf Stream.

  * * *

  Their world went silent as soon as they were under, and had to swim precisely like heroes to make it to the bow of the boat and grab the anchor line. From there they could relax and proceed hand over hand down through the surging current. On the bottom the flow would be slower and they could propel themselves along using handholds on the ocean floor, which was a lot more efficient than trying to swim against the current.

  And handholds there were. As the bottom slowly coalesced out of the general bluish gloom, Cassidy at first thought that Trapper had made some kind of mistake. It seemed they were over nothing more than large rolling sand dunes, rippled on the surface but otherwise lacking feature or distinction. But then as they got within fifty feet of the bottom, Cassidy saw two of the largest groupers he had ever seen in his life, one Nassau, one spotted black, cruising lazily over the top of one of the dunes, disappearing down the other side.

  Damn, thought Cassidy, what a day to be after tropicals. Then he thought of what a sixty-pound fish could do with his stainless steel Hawaiian sling shaft, and he decided it was probably better he didn’t have it. Unless he was in good enough spear-fishing shape to get a clean head or spine shot, he would have to have a big gun with a corded spear, and even then a grouper of that size could drag him all over the ocean bottom.

  And that bottom, he could now see, was not sand but mostly coral, pockmarked and riddled with fissures and apertures of all shapes and sizes. When they got within ten feet of the anchor itself, Cassidy was amazed to see that most of the holes and fissures exhibited a live face, some curious denizen peering out at him, wondering what was out there making all those bubbles.

  Trapper clinked the handle of his dive knife against the bottom of his tank to get Cassidy’s attention. He pointed to a clump of outcroppings upstream from where the anchor was lodged in a small crevice. The outcrops were coral, too. Just one kind of coral growing on top of another kind of coral. But as they approached them it was clear to Cassidy why Trapper liked this spot.

  Though the depth of the water filtered out most color from the sun’s spectrum, this bluish-tinted vault was full of creatures of almost every shape and hue, living ornaments that could swim. Some were so exotic they seemed a product not of the natural world but of some schizophrenic jeweler. All up under the coral heads and throughout the myriad passages you could see them by the thousands: squirrelfish, sergeant majors, beau gregories, top hats, Cuban hogfish, baby triggerfish, royal grammas, queen angels, rock beauties, French angels, and countless varieties of tangs, damsels, grunts, and wrasses. They roiled in the surging current like an explosion of neon confetti.

  Trapper particularly wanted to get a rock beauty, a gorgeous species of angelfish with a black body and a golden face and tail. Its face was fatter and more expressive than most of the angels, and that gave them, to Cassidy’s way of thinking, not only more personality but also an air of intelligence and curiosity.

  Trapper motioned to one that was about the size he wanted, and they both took up a position near the fish’s territory to observe him. Holding on to the coral with one hand to avoid being pushed away by the current, Trapper used a small probe to chase the fish from his preferred lingering spot. The fish left his hole and rushed to another three feet away. When he was flushed from there, he left and went to a third hole, and when flushed again, he returned to his original home. Most of the tropicals maintained that kind of three-cornered evasion pattern, and it worked well enough to evade most of their antagonists but was scarcely sufficient to baffle the single curious vertebrate on the planet capable of recognizing a triangle.

  Trapper handed Cassidy the restaurant-size mayonnaise jar that had been carefully cleaned of all traces of paper label and glue and was thus all but invisible to the fish. Cassidy lined up the mouth of the jar directly in the pathway between the rock beauty’s second and third hidey-holes. Trapper prodded the fish from spot one to spot two, then from two to three. The fish bumped into the rim of the jar’s spout, thought it over for a second, then went around. Cassidy scootched the jar over two more inches, then took his hand away so as not to spook the little beauty. This time around he swam directly into the mayonnaise jar and bumped into the bottom of it before he figured out that something was wrong. By that time, Trapper had the top on and was giving Cassidy a thumbs-up.

  Then they got two French angels, a top hat, and another rock beauty before Trapper held up his gauge and showed Cassidy that he had only two hundred pounds of air left. Cassidy checked his and saw that he had nearly twice that. But it was always the hard breathers who dictated the length of the dive, so he nodded to Trapper and pointed up. Trapper nodded. They gathered up their things into the net bags and attached them to the weight belts. Their prizes had all been herded into one of the large mayonnaise jars, with its lid screwed down finger tight, to allow the pressure to escape as they rose.

  They crabbed along the bottom to the anchor, where Trapper indicated to Cassidy to go up the rope first.

  Once on the surface, the boat was still bouncing through the current like it was in a race. The dive platform on the back slammed up and down in the waves until Cassidy thought it would tear the hinges off. Swimming to the height of their ability with the rocket fins, they began dropping equipment over the gunnel, leaving their fins on so they would still have maneuverability in the water. Trapper took his tank off first. This was the tricky part. Even empty, the tank was heavy and awkward to deal with in the water. Together, they both swam upward as hard as they could and finally shoved the tank over the gunnel and into the boat. Trapper then pulled himself up on the dive platform, where he removed his fins and swung his feet around into the boat. He could now take Cassidy’s tank and help him onto the platform and into the boat with little trouble.

  Trapper immediately began searching up under the console until he found a nylon zip-up case of small tools. He removed a needle from a small vial while Cassidy hurriedly unscrewed the mayonnaise jar and started removing the fish, each of which now looked like he had a small balloon attached to his underside. Trapper took them one by one and carefully inserted the needle into their swollen air bladders. The tropicals, now rid of all the compressed air they brought with them from the depths, swam around calmly in their new temporary home.

  Trapper held them up admiringly, their colors now startling and fully saturated in the sunshine. The first rock beauty, the larger of the two, was especially elegant. It swam around serenely, ignoring its fellow captives, staring out through the glass walls at a strange waterless world it had never seen before and could not have imagined.

  * * *

  They had not taken any lunch with them, and by the time they got back to Trapper’s camp on the Loxahatchee they were both ravenous.

  “There’s some smoked amberjack in the icebox,” said Trapper. “See what else you can find in there. I’ve got to get these little gems into the holding tank.”

  “How
do you keep that thing aerated? I thought you didn’t have any electricity.”

  “I don’t. Got an old pump mounted to a concrete block out on the river bottom. It just blows a stream of bubbles through this hose here. Everything else in the place runs on propane, including that refrigerator that you’re standing in front of letting all the cold air out of.”

  Cassidy fetched a jar of homemade tartar sauce and a tub of dill pickles and closed the fridge.

  “Amberjack sandwiches okay?”

  “Sounds good to me. I could eat a horseshoe crab.” Trapper was carefully transferring the tropicals into the big tank at the end of his living room. He watched the fish for a few moments to make sure they were not in shock from all the handling, then washed his hands at the sink and began to help Cassidy.

  “Jeeminy, how tall are you getting to be anyway? I believe you’ve about caught up to me.” Trapper put his flat hand on top of Cassidy’s head and moved it across to his own head, where it came near the top of his forehead.

  “About six one, maybe a little more. I hope I’m over six two by next season. That’ll make me the tallest guard in south Florida.”

  “I don’t doubt it. How about Stiggs and Randleman? They must be about seven feet by now.”

  Cassidy put the thick sandwiches onto paper plates and, after fetching two glasses of sweetened cold tea from the refrigerator, they sat down on the screened-in porch overlooking the river.

  “Well, they’re both about six six, but I think they may be about done. But they’re both getting letters from college coaches. Stiggs got one last week from Lefty Driesell at Davidson.”

  “Oh yeah? What’d it say?”

  “It said, ‘Oh, Mr. Stiggs, we think you are so wonderful and we just won twenty games this year and we’d just love to have you come help us win twenty-one next year.’ ”