The Boat by Jim Markson

Author:Jim Markson [Markson, Jim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-05-18T04:00:00+00:00

XII

The weather was fair and the wind was firm when Mike woke up the next morning. He had rounded Marco Island by 10:00 am and started sailing southeasterly, trying to stay in the margin that separated Ten Thousand Islands from the Gulf. But the area was a navigational nightmare under the best of circumstances, and Mike was not in the best of circumstances. The expensive GPS system he had bought before the trip had been lost to the bottom of Tampa Bay on the first evening. It wasn’t a big deal when all you had to do was keep the mainland on your left and the barrier islands on your right, but, as the name implied, there was no mainland down here, just islands that were really patches of mangroves, and they all looked the same. There were occasional channel markers, but the event sponsors had gone to great lengths to warn that they could not be trusted. Every channel and so-called “island” changed with each passing storm, and there was no passing traffic that was going to come to your rescue if you were in trouble.

The next checkpoint was at Everglades City, a forsaken village buried at the bottom of the everglades whose primary source of income was derived from locals escorting illegal shipments of marijuana and cocaine. The methods were constrained only by imagination; some used airboats to pick up packages dropped by low-flying airplanes, others met mother ships out in the Gulf and then brought the goods in after the end of a genuine fishing trip. It was rumored that there were even small submarines delivering merchandise to the local runners.

Mike would have skipped the checkpoint altogether, but he knew he would be lucky if he still had any water left by the time he got to that point. It would be the only time he planned on penetrating the maze of islands, and the four-mile route through the mangrove islands was as challenging as anything he would do during the trip. First, however, he had to put twenty more miles under his belt to get to the point where he hoped to find the channel that led into the checkpoint.

As soon as he turned to the southeast, the wind died. He took the opportunity to drink as much water as he could and once again unzipped his dry suit as low as it would go. He ate a granola bar, and the crunching sound echoed across the flat milky-brown water. He stopped chewing and listened. So this is what silence sounds like, he thought. In all his years, he had never heard such a complete absence of sound. He looked behind him and then slowly in all directions. There was not a single thing moving. No rigging from his boat jangling with the waves or wind, no birds flying, no fish jumping, no waves rolling … not even a ripple. He thought he could actually hear his heart thumping blood through his body just below the sound of his own breathing.

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