Ten Thousand Islands Read Free Page B

fast-twitch muscle fiber as they exploded to speed.
    Unexpectedly, my face pressed into thick netting. It took me a moment to realize that it was the deep-water pen where I keep big fish. Already, my navigation was off.
    I used the netting to pull myself along. Took my time, moving slowly to conserve oxygen. I’d been down for less than a minute. I wanted to surface far from the house.
    The darkness of the innermost core of the brain would be a similar darkness. It was a darkness given occasional dimension by sparkling green light: bioluminescent plankton.
    How many times had I used that darkness to travel unseen? The unexpected is defined by the fears of our enemies. Always choose the unexpected route.
    THUNK
    I nearly panicked when I felt a creature of great mass punch me in the side. I floundered momentarily for control, then it hit me again,
thunk
. Not hard, but in a measuring, experimental way.
    It took a moment for my brain to compute what had happened.
    On the other side of the thick mesh I kept two big bull sharks. There was a torpedo-sized female over two hundred pounds, plus a male close to a hundred. I do ongoingresearch on these unpredictable animals; animals that can be found three hundred miles up a freshwater river, or a mile below in the purest blue sea.
    Now they were doing their own investigation. I could picture them circling inside the mesh, pectoral fins drooping into attack position as they touched deticles to flesh. It was an ancient interrogative: Was the thing alive? Was the thing edible?
    True predators prefer darkness.
    I pushed away from the netting, toward shore.
    I was no different …
    When I surfaced, someone was whistling …
    It wasn’t a normal, cheery kind of whistle. It was a thin, absent-minded sound, made through clenched teeth, no louder than a series of harsh breaths.
    We all do it. A tune gets into our brain. We don’t know it’s there. During moments of deepest concentration, it slips out, a subliminal backdrop to the work at hand.
    This man must have been a romantic. It was one of those old country-western torch tunes. I could hear little bits and snatches of it, as I drifted toward him through the fog. Couldn’t identify it. Kept listening.
    He was standing on the bank, near the steps of the boardwalk. He was a black, vertical shape in the drifting plateaus of mist. I knew he was trying to decipher the obvious: Was the house occupied? Would someone awaken if he crept out, cut the lines to one of my boats and paddled it away?
    Was he wearing something over his face?
    The cloud parted momentarily. Yes. A tall man. Perhaps wide. A ball cap backwards on his head, a dark scarf tied over his nose.
    The curtain closed and he vanished.
    But I could still hear his absent-minded whistling …
    The reason we remember song lyrics more easily than poetry is that music is stored in the cleaner, mathematical side of our brains. Poetry is shoveled into the cluttered, creative side.
    Some of the lyrics came to me as he whistled:
In the dah-dah glow I see her, dah-dah cryin’ in the rain
….
    It took me a moment.
Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain
. That was the song. Willie Nelson sang it; maybe a woman country singer, too.
    My hands were on the bottom now, pulling me along toward my visitor. Fingers touched muck and broad-bladed turtle grass. Only my back and the top of my head were on the surface of the water. I knew the silence of a saltwater croc; knew expectations no croc would ever comprehend.
    Love is like a dyin’ ember, only dah-dah remains
….
    Now I was nearly under the base of the boardwalk. Only a couple meters from the man. Staring up at him in darkness, he was still a charcoal shape. I floated there, belly touching the warm bottom, the toes of my shoes dug into the mud for quick traction.
    I waited. I waited.
    On the banks of billabongs in Australia’s Northern Territory, I’d watched massive crocs wait for feral water buffalo to take just one step closer. Move too soon, the