Cuban Death-Lift Read Free Page B

shrug. “Captain MacMorgan hasn’t been in today, sir. Sorry, I don’t know where he’s living.”
    Outside, I nudged my thirty-four-foot sportfisherman out of her berth, feeling the sweet sync of her twin 453 GM diesels bubbling me over the clear green water of the harbor. I had an icy Hatuey beer in a Styrofoam hand-cooler, a pinch of Copenhagen snuff wry in my lower lip, and as I piloted from the flybridge, I tried to recapture the delight I usually felt in going out to sea alone.
    But it didn’t work. I couldn’t get the muscles in my shoulders to relax, and it seemed as if I looked out onto the world, through glazed eyes. I dropped Sniper into dead idle as I came up behind four ratty fiberglass fishing boats loaded with gas cans, boxes of food, and determined Cuban-Americans, all heading out Garrison Bight Channel, bound for the wicked Florida Strait. The guy running the point boat couldn’t have been more than eighteen. He had a tired outboard, belching smoke as it struggled to push the little skiff onward. The kid was shirtless, there was a smile on his face. But in the depths of my despair, it seemed as though a raven-shaped shadow haloed his head, diving and soaring, and the shadow was death. . . .

2
    The storm came funneling out of the west-northwest across open sea. I watched it from the porch of the stilthouse, morning coffee in hand, noting the way the strange light which accompanied it changed from copper to bile green as it approached landfall.
    And I knew that it was to be no ordinary squall.
    I had spent the previous day, Saturday, trying to work some of the rough edges off the stilthouse—and myself. It’s really a fairly large place for a house built on pilings out on the water. I went to work on the bedroom first. It only has one. I got rid of the old cot, and laboriously carried the wide double bed I had just bought and transported out on Sniper. The stilthouse faces south and north—with long porches on either side—and I set the bed up by the eastward window of my new quarters. The bedroom has a big brown oval of rag rug on the plank floor; it smelled musky and doggy, and I decided to keep it right where it was because I like dogs. I swept and cleaned and tacked black shades up so I could dark-out the bedroom if need be, and I built rough bookcases and transferred my small—but good—ship’s library to the stilthouse. It felt good to be doing mindless work; work that required just enough thought to match the light sweat that the labor required. There wasn’t much I could—or wanted to—do with the little galley and living area. There is an ancient stove and a small refrigerator, both of which run on bottled gas, and there is a sink with a faucet hooked up to the big five-hundred-gallon rooftop rain cistern that serves the little shower on the narrow dock built under the stilthouse. The man I had bought the place from—he had helped his father build it back in the 1930s as a place to store ice and supplies for the fishing boats—had left the giant shell of a loggerhead turtle on the wall, two sets of big mako jaws, a gas-station calendar from 1956 showing a blonde with improbable breasts, and four kerosene lamps hung in strategic spots. I filled them, changed wicks, then set about stringing fifty feet of copper wire outside the stilthouse to serve as an antenna for my portable Transoceanic shortwave receiver.
    By dusk I had worked enough and sweated enough and relaxed enough to be pleased with my new home. After the death of my wife and sons I had taken up residence aboard Sniper. But Sniper was built and outfitted to stalk the Gulf Stream for the big ones, not to serve as an apartment for a guy who is six-two and a shade and weighs 220 pounds.
    So this new place would be just fine. With its high ceiling and location on the water it would be cool in the summer, and with the little oil stove, it would be fairly warm in