Chapter 13 One Fish Two Fish, Red Fish Blue Fish

By Gary O'Brien


Dawn, Tuesday, Cape Point Park at Hatteras Island National Seashore.
When I woke I was covered in sweat. The inside of the tent was wet, and I was hung over. I had gotten into a bottle of Mount Gay Rum after setting up the tent in the rain. Can you blame me?
I had taken the last ferry from Ocracoke to Hatteras, the M/V Governor Hyde to be precise, immediately after getting off the Silver Lake at Ocracoke Harbor and racing out to the other end of Ocracoke Island. After crossing Hatteras Inlet, fearing I was about to be arrested any minute, and finally relaxing a bit when the Dare County deputies did not meet me at the docks, I drove to the park after a brief stop in Buxton.
I didn’t even bother trying to disguise my vehicle or any of that nonsense when I checked in at camp. The only thing I did was slightly-disguise my name to the woman taking money at the gate to the campground. I paid for a week up front, about $100 cash. Gary O’Brien became G. Lawrence O’Brien, as I called myself in college during my coffeehouse poet days, AKA Larry O’Brien. The woman didn’t know one O’Brien from another to two pounds of bait mullet. It was damned near 11 p.m. when I arrived. Quitting time. She didn’t bat an eye.
She told me where the showers were, pointed out on a map which pathways that were off limits to four-wheel traffic and the rules of the park. She took a look at the fishing poles on my vehicle and handed me a North Carolina guide to fishing regulations, warning me about the perils of catching sound-side flounder and hauling them over to the beach to escape the watchful eyes of game and fish wardens since the length limits were different on the beach.
I had forgotten most of these rules since last year, and when they were repeated to me they went in one ear and out the other. I was just glad to be here and not in jail
“….been a lot of that lately,” she said about recent arrests on poachers trying to cut corners, adding. “Hey, the blues are running and you’re permitted a catch of fifteen of those per day if they’re under twenty inches.”
I thanked her, handed over the money and drove to my campsite. This is a parking slip adjacent to a patch of grass just this side of the dunes. It had its own charcoal cooker set into the ground on a metal pipe. I had my own little charcoal cooker too in the van. But you need to have two of these babies going on the site. The great thing about the National Park Service’s cooker is it’s adjustable, it rotates so you can orient it to block and use the wind as needed, depending on the temperature and humidity and wind speed and whatnot. See, cooking at a campsite is a science and we’ll get to that, but first; the tent.
This is a six-man jobber with all those collapsible poles and it usually takes Leslie and the girls and I about ten minutes to set it up from dumping it out of the bag to final touches. With just me in the dark, however, it took half an hour, especially with the wind knocking it over every five seconds, then the rain coming down before I could get the tarp over the skylight mosquito netting. The drama ended with me waking up at dawn soaked through, covered in sweat and hung over.
But hey, I was damned if I was about to spend one more night in that van. After two nights my Vivarin-saturated B.O. was actually leaching into the seat covers, into the rugs and walls. The inside of the van was beginning to smell like the ass end of me.
That little conversation with Leslie yesterday had not been very satisfying at all, I thought as I lay there again, in filth and sweat. The patter of light conversations, the tinkling sounds of people at the campground adjusting breakfast cookers, pots and pans, accompanied the occasional trill from a seagull as I picked out the crusty contents of my nose and eyes.
Leslie had every right to be mad, but that didn’t take the sting out of it.
“Do …you … HEAR ME! DO …YOU…UNDERSTAND WHAT I AM…SAYING TO YOU!?”
Jesus. I think the whole neighborhood heard you, honey.
But, silver lining, two good things resulted from that conversation. One, I complied with Leslie’s request to call her, to at least make the attempt, so at the very least the guilt would hopefully go away. Two: It was discovered, upon driving in the dark and ruminating the sour contents of our spousal discussion, that the lone full-service liquor store on Hatteras Island, that being the ABC Liquors of Buxton Woods, was indeed open just prior to 11 p.m., and said liquor store had Mount Gay Rum on the shelf for just (wait for it) $11 a bottle.
I am convinced that ole fashioned, southern-fried homophobia had everything to do with the price of that bottle. I thanked God for gays and rednecks.
Mount Gay is among the finest rums, from perhaps the oldest rum distillery in the western hemisphere, founded in Barbados in the Year of Our Lord 1703. Mount Gay Rum, I am sure, espouses all forms of legal, consensual sex, as this often leads to more rum drinking. If you can’t seal the deal over a bottle of Mount Gay, you’re just not trying hard enough.
But I can’t imagine the average North Carolina fisherman is socially prepped yet, to accept the brand. Not due to the taste but….well, shit, you know.
“Hey Kyle! What-chew bring that HOMO rum to our party for, boy?”
I could be wrong but $11 a bottle is a sacrilege. The same bottle goes for $22.50 in the Florida Keys. Oh well, there it sits on the shelf left for the weekly visitors to the islands - the wordly wise, did I mention good-looking, socially graceful and secure in their sexuality of whatever brand - renters from Kinnakeet Shores and Hatteras Village, and of course the vagrant fugitives staying at the National Park.
Now half an $11 bottle of rum had given me a $30 hangover. That’s bang for the buck to be sure. But it was a good hangover, a good, solid reboot and restart. I needed it.
I rubbed my eyes and laughed. The Hendley family had done everything but have the U.S. Coast Guard stop and board the Silver Lake in the middle of the Pamlico Sound searching for the cell phone and the man who had swiped it from their daughter, Lisa. They threw and absolute shit-fit; wanted the crew to search every car, every passenger for the phone. Wanted a lineup; wanted Sheriff’s Deputies to meet the ferry at the Ocracoke docks.
When the captain said; “Hey, sir, we’re out of it. You’re telling us about a lost cell phone and we have a thousand ton ferry to keep in the channel,” the family went on its own hunt-and-peck for it, sniffing in car windows like dogs. I played possum in the van and they overlooked me, thankfully.
I only hope the crewmen of the Silver Lake don’t get any grief when it dawns on everyone that Gary O’Brien, the collaboration killer of Pulitzer nominee Christopher Naughten, had been on that phone. This deranged, hunted man had been not three steps from sweet, little Lisa, while the entire nation was searching for him.
Ooooooooooooo! John Walsh of America’s Most Wanted will have himself a field day.
I guess I can’t blame Dad for getting so worked up about it. More than anything he wanted to know who had been following his little girl so closely that the man now had her name, the name of her boyfriend and probably all the phone numbers of everyone she knew. I’d lose it too, I supposed.
It was ironic that Lisa’s little ego pill was now at the bottom of Pamlico Sound, mixing with the sediments from a thousand estuaries deposited over a thousand years. I thought about some paleontologist from the far-distant future finding the mineralized remains of that phone; a big question mark written on his reptilian brown.
“These humans were certainly some curious creatures indeed.”
My little gift to him across geologic time, my little joke in a time-capsule and puzzle. Now, how did this get here?
But what about the here and now? What about my situation? Leslie’s rage was to be expected. But it still hurt, the thought that when you added all this up, none of this should have happened. No matter what she said, I did not deserve all of this. They should have published my first book, or failing that, released me to sell it elsewhere. When you got right down to it, I should have pulled the plug on that project right at the beginning but you know how it goes, when are you ever going to get the chance to hold a publishing contract in your hands again? What are you going to do, not sign it? What are the odds of that happening?
So I got my gear together, took a shower, brushed my teeth, and lit out. I bought ice for both coolers at the Red Drum Bait and Tackle, and some cut menhaden, then drove north to Avon Pier.
I had made a promise to myself a few days ago when I was being chased by the police, and I meant to honor that. It was something I really never thought I would be able to do again, fish as a free man off Avon Pier.
I had my large surfcaster rod with 30 lb test on it, the fish-finder rig trailing out to the circle hook, and a ¾ ounce weight on the bottom. This was for catching what we Floridian’s call Redfish; North Carolinians refer to them as Puppy Drum, Red Drum, Channel Bass, and …Redfish.
My last trip here I had hooked only stingray from the pier trying to catch my Redfish. The last time prior hooking a Redfish had been at Sebastian Inlet, Florida. That time I had been unprepared, hadn’t necessarily been looking, and therefore my tackle had been too light. Using 20 pound test, a simple light hook and a rounded sinker for working around rocks and stumps, I plopped a nice pink shrimp at the edge of a rock riddled grass bed and let the line play out back into the channel towards the Indian River Lagoon.
Within minutes something solid had swallowed the shrimp the hook and part of the leader. I cautiously fought him for ten minutes, letting line play out when he ran with fury, dragging him back in and keeping him off the bottom when he lapsed for strength.
He surfaced dead tired, more than the legal twenty-one inches of him. As I dragged him closer I could see the hook that held him was nearly straight. It had been unequal to the task. With a last ditch effort, the fish thrashed his head and jerked clean of the hook. All I had time to get was a good solid look at him, with those big bright pink scales of his, those black spots bordered in yellow white near the tail; that glowing whitish, pink underbelly hinting to that luxurious, slightly-chewy and carotene-rich flesh of his. I would have broiled him on my gas stove. I would have seasoned him lightly in garlic, butter, lemon and lime. I would have, I would have…
It was a year ago in June, just before last year’s trip to The Banks, when I recalled the stories of the mammoth Puppy Drums caught in Oregon Inlet, Hatteras Inlet, Ocracoke Inlet, and in the deep channels of sand running parallel to the shore from Duck to Portsmouth Island where they huddled for love against the cold, in sullen little groups of two and three. These were the same fish, only by some trick of nature, or perhaps the result of nuclear fallout, they were gargantuan in Outer Banks waters, capable of consuming housecats in a single gulp, heads the size of Bull Mastiffs, scales the size of silver dollars.
As a result of my one and only fight with this particular species of fish, I have a heavy-duty surfcaster rod prepared for him always.
But the woman at the campground said the blues were running too, so I had my light, spinning rod with a simple leader attached to 20 pound test, and a red-headed lure on the end. The lure has a rattle inside and three treble hooks on it. When this thing is trailed near a school of Bluefish they come after it like kittens chasing yarn. They simply can’t resist it.
The problem with the Blues is, there’s a switch that seems to turn off in their little brains after 10:30 a.m. when they stop biting near shore so you have to get out and after them early. They start up again in the late afternoon, around 4:30 p.m., when the sun’s forgiving angle on the water cools things down for them and the come back in closer to shore, but if you’re camping in The Banks, and the wind is down, you have to be cooking and cleaning whatever you’ve caught by then.
By sundown you need to be finishing up and policing the campsite for the morning, cooking the camp coffee (which is one of the reasons you need a second stove.) By ten minutes after sundown, if there is no wind, you need to be inside your tent, or you’ll find yourself blood meal to every accursed insect on The Banks. That is the way of it, and you must plan accordingly whether or not there is a breeze. Because, even if there is wind, and it appears as though it will blow all day, sometimes it doesn’t.
This particular morning I was out in plenty of time. The old boards of Avon Pier were still covered with dew and cool to the touch. Last night’s rain had left everything fresh and brisk. I was surprised to see only a couple of old timers on the pier. They showed no signs of wanting to fish for Red Drum.
The end of Avon Pier forms a crucifix of sorts, with two mini piers sticking about fifty feet out to the north and south, and a final stretch of just ten yards to the very end.
This area used to be the crossroads in the middle of the pier, to hear the veterans tell it. The pier used to jut an additional four-hundred feet or so into the sea but a nasty hurricane in the late 1990s took off that section and now this is the end of the line.
This area is a desperate little battleground for space that sometimes can leave manners back in the parking lot. The words “FOR RED DRUM ONLY” painted on the rail at the very end seem extreme at first glance but there’s a reason for that. This is where long casts are made with hideous contraptions lugging and tossing heavy hunks of metal, as if trying to make up that extra four hundred feet all over again, as if that distance is so dearly missed by fisherman, who remain convinced that’s where those six-foot monster Reds lurk, it simply must be recovered by any means necessary.
Rednecks, armed with filet knives and pliers, sporting barrel chests, bull and intimidate each other for rights to the end of the pier and the choicest casting spot.
Last year a toe-headed fellow from South Carolina came up to me and demanded quarter at the end. He had more gear with him than an astronaut, and I was curious to see what he would do with it. He was also drunk and it being 9:30 in the morning I decided he was not the sort of person who could be reasoned with. I didn’t relish getting into a fight with him as his filet knife was covered in rust as were his pliers, so I made way.
He assembled a gigantic surf rod on the spot from the trolley of gear he had wheeled out into position. This was fifteen feet if it was a foot. The massive reel had 40-pound test on it attached to a six-foot long section of leader wire. At the end of that there was murderous chunk of metal, about six inches long that looked like the marriage of an exploding grenade and toy lighthouse. When all was set, he hauled back on the rod, turned around and said; “That yore buddey ovah theyuh?”
He was looking directly at a drunk guy from New Jersey. He asked me again.
“Yew know ‘at boy, raht theyuh?”
Now I got it. I tuned my ear to Sow’ Cay line-uh speak which is a variant of the mother tongue, Southernese.
“Never met him…” I said.
“Hey buddy! Buddy!” Toe headed, Redneck boy said. The New Jerseyite looked at the metal grenade swinging on the end of this pole and stepped back, genuine fear written in his eyes.
“Cayful I don’t hook yew in de ass, now…”
With that Redneck Boy hauled back on his heel, and this time for real, let fly the grenade. It arched skyward then toward the horizon, landing a good one-hundred yards downrange from us.
Once that line was taught, he dragged a section of the line down and twirled it around an eye-hook on the pier. He strapped the pole to the corner post of the pier with two, diver’s weight belts. He then fastened a separate rod and reel to the pier beside his first contraption. This had, what looked like, 40-pound cloth fiber line spooled on a massive deep-sea reel, like the one Robert Shaw’s character, Quint, used in the movie Jaws, complete with the old-style, click and buzz, drag on it. Thereafter someone had caught a hapless grunt or mini-black bass using bloodworms from around the pilings. This fish, about six inches long was handed to Redneck Boy who immediately attached a four-foot leader with three treble hooks into his back.
A clothespin connected the leader to the guideline formed by the first pole. After being dropped into the water, the fish then did the work of dragging his bleeding self out over the crests and troughs of sand into that deep, dark place, out to that little metal grenade, paying his own death-line out as he went. Within fifteen minutes a sharp click and buzz, signaled that the little fish was no more and that the clothespin had snapped off the guideline, a bigger fish was on the second rod.
But Redneck Boy hooked a four-foot shark, not a Redfish. It took him five minutes to haul him pier-side. All of us ducked our heads and moved our rods so he could fight all over the deck until it was done.
We three at end of the pier, then, had joy of dropping a heavy-duty hoop net on the end of the rope into the water and then hauled the shark from the surface of the sea, twenty feet up. Try as he might there was no way for Redneck Boy to get his treble hooks back. The leader was cut and a new gashing contraption was attached in its place into the back of another baitfish.
Redneck Boy then threw the suffocating Dogfish back into the water. The little shark landed with a satisfying belly-flop that seemed to reawaken him and started his tail moving again.
“Ah’d rate ‘at dive at about an 8.5,” said Redneck Boy, slurping on a Budweiser and laughing.
It was about retrieving as much gear as possible, then, and sharpening Redneck Boy’s skills for the moment when he squared off against the monster Red or Cobia that surely would find himself hooked before the dumb ole’ shark could beat it to the bait.
I don’t know why I participated. It was against everything I believed in, environmentally speaking, and from a sporting perspective. But it was also the unwritten culture at the end of Avon Pier. You either helped or you collected up your shit, and got off the end of the pier, moved it on down closer to the gift shop.
This morning I checked in at the last outpost of the pier, this crossroads where east coast rednecks from Jersey to Florida mixed and tried to get along. The words, FOR RED DRUM ONLY were a year more faded into the dusky gray surface of the railing. Redneck Boy was nowhere to be found.
I missed his wit and determination.
If I wanted to, I could set my own Redfish rig without fear of being bulled out of position. But looking down into that water I was struck with its absolute clarity, so clear I could make out the triangular backs of every brown or spotted stingray around the pier. The place was crawling with stingrays. I didn’t relish the improbable quest of getting my bait into the mouth of a Red before one of these rays got to it first. Something told me fishing for Red Drum channel bass would not be a rewarding experience today.
Gazing into the bright blue waters, swelling and falling in neat shoreward rolls, I was struck by something else: shimmering patterns lapping the surface. The diving terns and gulls followed these dark divots and splotches. It was that kind of morning then, no doubt about it; a morning filled with schools of Bluefish and Spanish Mackerel.
The swell was coming in at about a twenty-five degree slant from south to north, and surely, so too the long-shore drift flowed from south to north.
I positioned myself just landward of the T in the pier, with my bucket and my rods, and got out my filet knife.
Where were all the people? Two clusters of old fellows? That’s it? They stood there with hooks baited with bloodworms in an effort to snag a few speckled sea trout, called “specs,” oblivious to what was about to happen. Had not a clue, perhaps weren’t from around here, or hadn’t been here long enough to see how easy it can be to catch a fish. Especially when that fish is so ravenously hungry he can’t think straight anymore.
I tried to reason it out. How had I been so fortunate? Last night and the day before it had likely rained all day leaving dirty water. Hours now, no wind, and tide was set at slack high.
These fish were starving. My God, look at them flashing in the water just beneath those ripples, shooting up from the bottom to lash at anything moving; tiny baitfish running for their lives into the waiting jaws of terns, gulls and pelicans, only too happy to take over where the Bluefish left off; all that bright smooth water alive with protein, life sustaining, brain-healing protein. No one here but me and a couple of old fellows who didn’t know better just yet. But just you wait, because you can teach an old dog new tricks.
I put on my fishing sunglasses and gazed southeast. The ripple-water was moving my way as I expected. The current would carry it to me. Fattened gulls and pelicans rested like obese men watching Thanksgiving football games, floating vanguards to these dark waters.
I cast my red head to see if everything was working properly. The line paid out nicely. About thirty-feet worth of it twirled away in pleasing little spirals before the lure fell to the sea surface. It skipped and jerked its way back to me unnoticed.
I cast it out again as the school neared. The first blade of flesh came arching up and redirected like a curve ball, but missed the lure, then another and another, like exploding fire-rockets in the summer sky.
A second later and a large Blue hit the lure hard and countered my reeling with helpless jiggles. Another hit the lure immediately and for a second both were hooked until the first shook itself free, leaving only the second. The action against my hands felt like the hum from a guitar. I pulled him free of the sea then up over the railing in one smooth motion where he beat himself on the deck before settling. I covered his head with a gloved hand, retrieved the hook from his mouth with a bloody, crunching twist and he was in my bucket, thrashing himself unconscious.
I reeled and cast for just over an hour when I had my limit of fifteen bluefish. I was absolutely spent, covered in sweat and joyful as a small boy. I looked around and there were no less than one hundred people on the pier, now, casting and reeling into that school traveling beneath us, the school without end.
I sat for a time and watched, sipping a soda. Around 11:30 a.m. the breeze trickled up from the southeast, the tide ran out and the waves grew. The bright royal blue of the waters turned a cloudy green, then a brownish green as the sediment kicked up off the bottom at low-tide. Soon, no one was catching anything. It was done.
But the sun held sway in the sky, not a cloud all day long.
By 8 p.m. I was utterly useless but exceedingly happy. I gorged myself on Bluefish filets, eight whole fish and two ears of corn smothered in butter and salt. The remaining filets were wrapped in tin-foil and immersed in a slurry of ice inside one of the coolers. Tomorrow’s dinner.
Camp coffee was brewing on the charcoal fire. I sipped my rum and grapefruit juice and let the numbness overcome me. There was enough of a breeze to keep the bugs off and the air was dry enough to almost make it chilly. I would see how long this situation held before retreating into the tent. This was heaven.
The twirling blink of Hatteras light cut the twilight but it being dry, the signal cast no halo. The ice crystals clanked pleasingly inside my pewter camp cup. The rum screwdriver was so cold the bottom of the cup was wet with dew and chilly to the touch.
What to do about this situation? I had decided somewhere between Avon Pier and the campgrounds that I would continue writing The Dead Agent. I would do so until I was apprehended or ran out of money and turned myself in, or it otherwise ended badly, perhaps with my demise, which also was a consideration. I didn’t plan on doing anything to myself, oh no; but there was always the chance that after what happened to Naughten, someone would think I was armed and dangerous and take a pot shot at me.
It seriously pissed me off that Lyzanne was using an attorney to go after my wife and children. That was reason enough to finish the book, if not complete the act described in it. After all, that woman had created this entire situation.
Chris Naughten was DEAD! I was on the run, and this woman had the gall to go after my family?
The book at least explained how I had gone from point A to B. At least everyone would see I didn’t mean to kill Naughten, if indeed that’s what happened to him. I had the next three chapters of The Dead Agent done, allowing for some trimming and minor rewording.
I could print them out and mail them from Kitty Hawk, or email them from one of those twenty-four hour office shops. I would send them to newspapers in Orlando, and to that jackass PIO for the Orlando PD, for starters. If it pissed off Lyzanne so much that I had written this book, well then; I meant to go right on doing it. I’d make sure she got a copy of my next installment, too.
I eased back in my folding beach chair, thinking about the sunset, about that huge red ball that would return again on the opposite side of the sky, and all those silhouettes of sea gulls and pelicans framing it just before it slipped over the horizon. I closed my eyes and could see them like still photographs.
Why hadn’t I done this more often? Being out here certainly improved your state of mind. I thought of all those afternoons spent in my little household office, gazing out my window to the clapboard fence and the top of my orange tree. Every now and again a squirrel would run along the top of the fence with nut in his mouth. I would hear him scream at my dog, panting beneath him, before scratching away and leaping to a tree in the neighbor’s yard. Other than that, or the sound of Leroy’s industrial mower or the sound of one of his guys on the leaf blower or weed whacker, these were the only audibles assuring me an outside world existed.
This was much nicer. Being cut off from email was a benefit too. You weren’t constantly interrupted by those little chimes letting your machine know a message had arrived. You couldn’t Jones, checking and rechecking for news about manuscripts or proposals outstanding.
Did they buy it? Was there a new contract? Did she decide to resell it? Did she change her mind?
Only to be disappointed at finding another advertisement for penis enlargement or black-market herbal Viagra, or any number of things they hawk today on the net.
I drifted off pleasantly with the rustle of sea oats and dune grasses in my ears, the taste of Bluefish tinged with rum in my mouth, the smell of sea and smoke in my nostrils. I was experiencing a node of joy in my life. I knew it would end soon. That’s why they call it a node. And bliss cannot be fully appreciated unless it’s book-ended with struggle.
When I woke, the camp coffee had brewed and was simmering. It was time to retain the heat for the morning cups. I got out my halogen to make sure I had the drop correct, and transferred it from the pewter stove-pot to the thermos, leaned back and watched the glowing coals again.
It was then I realized I was not alone. He was sitting in Leslie’s chair. I’m not sure why I had unfolded it, other than force of habit. Now he occupied it. There was no telling how long he had been there. I didn’t look over, but I could sense him there, like a darker patch of air.
“Why don’t you ever hang around long enough to be specific about anything?” I said at last. He waited a beat.
“Oh please, Gary, won’t you leave a tender moment alone?”
“Who knew Graham Greene had been a Billy Joel fan,” I said.
“These are your thoughts, boyo. Your dreams. We have to start somewhere, with some frame of reference in the real world, and as I am dead just now…”
“So you’ve pointed out. Listen, tell me what it’s like?”
“Being dead?” he answered. I could sense he was scratching his chin. He wanted to do the question justice with a considered answer.
“One thing I learned in life, Gary, was that your sins become your fears, just as easily as the reverse holds true, and with alarming rapidity.
“The principle holds for thoughts and dreams, actions and beliefs. They are mirrored manifestations of each other. One based in reality, the other, in the stratosphere of ideals, out there, in the stars of our imagination.”
“Dude, what in hell are you talking about?” was all I could say to this because, after all, I’m from Florida and this guy was educated at Oxford.
“Ponder it. You’ll get it, lad. I’ve renewed confidence in you.”
And with that, he was gone. Another enigmatic message, another Greene –o-Graham, so to speak. The only bit that sunk in for the moment was “Your sins become your fears…” I could wrap my mind around that, yes.
Look at it. Happens all the time. A guy screws around on his wife, and in so doing the guilt forces him to rationalize that everyone’s doing it, therefore his wife must be at it as well with some guy who may be a better stick man, and it rankles. And so he sees shadows in every corner. Everywhere are the shades resembling the mailman, his best friend, her officemate, some kid bagging groceries at the supermarket.
Now begins the slow death-spiral of a jealous mind. Oh, Dante had all this shit straight. Knew it cold like he lived it.
Now the man can’t stop jerking off mentally or otherwise, drinking and looking for strange “poon” just to retaliate against the shadows, and his wife.
On and on it goes until he’s caught. Just like the fish with the treble hooks in his back, dragging his own line out into position, so too with the chronic sinner, wriggling out toward his own punishment and damnation guided there by the nature of his choices; a little grenade of fate waiting for him there at the end. And he knows this, but he keeps swimming.
How elegant: free will and that. God washes his hands and says; “Hey, not me. YOU, boyo. You! Did that to yourself there, didn’t you, smart guy…”
Was Graham hinting that I was wandering toward my own fate grenade? Or was he saying that I was “getting it,” that I was opting for a better course of action, and in so doing, I was regaining something of my soul?
Oh Hell, I didn’t want to start obsessing again so I looked at the sky.
I’ll never get over being out here. The first impression one gets staring at a clear sky from along the Banks is “look…at….all…those STARS!”
You think you see a wispy cloud obscuring some of them, running roughly from southwest to the northeast, over both horizons. It looks bluish. You think, maybe it will even be clearer tomorrow and you’ll see more.
Next night, and that same strange cloud is back. Maybe it takes you the third night to really look at it, before you realize it doesn’t behave like other clouds you’ve seen. Not at all. For instance, the prevailing wind direction has no bearing on its movement, which seems more timed with the rotation of the earth. Yes, you realize with a slap to your forehead, you’ve been staring at a neighboring arm in the spiral galaxy known as the Milky Way, expecting a breeze to come along and move it out of the way.
You realize that long ago, before backscatter and myopia turned the descendants of Phoenician and Viking navigators into blind, clueless moles who work at Wal-Mart, that the texture and color of that cloud, like cream poured into indigo coffee, is precisely why the galaxy we ride in is called the Milky-Way, well, at least by humans anyway.
You sip your rum and think about it. You can get the full view out here, not even that pin-prick of incandescence from the Hatteras signal erases that panorama of stars and that splash of cream dividing it like a sash. Another sip of rum and you decide that this little cloud cover present seems so temporal, trivial and small. They scud by so quickly, these clouds, so low, immediate and abrupt, like our lives.
I worked out how the rest of the story was going to go. Now all I had to do was live it out in the writing, live out the plot; the worse-case scenario of life imitating art, for the sake of a book that would document the story.
Confused, I downed another swallow then turned in.
I worried about my daughters, Mariah and Katie, and my son Nate. Katie would be especially affected by this sojourn, or jihad, depending on how you looked at it. She would cry in her sleep wondering about whether Daddy was getting his.
At 3 a.m. I woke beneath a canopy of stars that all but made sound. I opened my notebook computer and started writing.