American Tropic Read Free Page A

parlor? Adrift in puke after a night of prowling sleazy bars? At the bottom of the sea, entangled in a net with dead turtles? What’s up with Randy? What’sup with the turtle slaughter? Sea turtles are being killed by gill nets and long hook-lines by the millions. Show me the rage!”
    In front of Noah, on the console’s instrument panel, three cell phones are wired into battered wood speakers. A light flashes red on one of the phones, signaling an incoming call.
    Noah presses the answer button. “I’ve reeled in my first caller. I hope you’re a whopper.”
    A male voice booms from the speakers. “Hey, Truth Dog, I’ve been listening since you started your pirate-radio gig a year ago. You’re so righteous to call out those macho joystick powerboat racers like Candy Bambi.”
    “Dandy Randy.”
    “Whatever. Were you around back in the eighties, when Key West was Dodge City on the Gulf Stream? Totally lawless time, cocaine smuggling and high jinks par
excellente
!”
    “I was getting my degree in environmental law up in Miami then, but Key West has always been a pirate island, stolen treasures off of wrecked ships lured by false lights onto the reef offshore, rumrunners, gunrunners, drug runners, any kind of contraband. What ruined your little paradise?”
    “Not the smuggling. It’s that Key West isn’t a fishing port anymore. The shrimpers and their boats were kicked out to put in seaside condos. Hordes of tourists driving down here on the Overseas Highway. Giant cruise ships spitting out thousands of passengers. It’s the tourists who are killing the coral reef offshore of Key West.”
    “Now you’re showing some rage. But tourists, you think they’re killing America’s only continental reef? Youthink they’re killing a two-hundred-forty-million-year-old reef?”
    “Hell, yeah!”
    “No! Coral die-off is caused by the thermal stress of ocean warming. Added to this is the ocean dumping of toxic pesticides and chemicals. I want to expose the real culprits. I want to peel the lies off of their greedy hides, the same way the shark hunters used to knife-skin a shark with a one-bladed stroke. The reefs are the rain forests of the sea. Fifty percent of the Caribbean reefs are already dead because of warming, pollution, and net-fishing ships. Soon every coral reef on earth will be dead!”
    Noah punches off the caller and clicks on another phone. “I can’t hear you, talk louder, there’s static on the line.”
    A belligerent voice echoes through the static. “I want you to know, I’m a vet. I was in Vietnam.”
    “Is that supposed to be a cause for celebration or condemnation?”
    “Fuck you!”
    “Now that we’ve got that out of the way, I’m all ears.”
    “Perm … ian Ex … tinc … tion E … vent.”
    “Permian Extinction Event? What’s that got to do with anything? Happened millions of years ago. A volcanic methane-gas explosion that wiped out nearly every living thing on our planet.”
    “It’s also called the Great Dying. It’s what you’ve been quackin’ about and you don’t even see the connection. It’s comin’ again.”
    “Okay, Nam vet, I’m on the edge of my seat. Shoot me facts.”
    “This time the explosion of obliteration will be man-made.”
    “What’s the trigger? Nuclear war?”
    “It’s comin’ from beneath the boat you’re floatin’ on, from the seafloor of the Gulf of Mexico.”
    “And you say it’s man-made. So I figure you must mean that—”
    A thundering boom comes from outside Noah’s trawler. He looks through the window of the pilothouse. The radio-transmitter antenna bolted to the deck sways. The trawler rocks hard from side to side. Noah tries to keep the shaking electronic equipment on the broadcast console from falling. He catches his rum bottle as it tumbles from the table. He glances around, trying to figure out what happened. He looks down through the window and sees that a drifting raft has collided with his trawler.
    The raft