Hell's Bay by James W. Hall Read Free Book Online

are?”
    â€œAre you? I remember a different Thorn. A funny guy, lots of friends. Some hilarious nights.”
    â€œI can’t believe it. You and Sugar, double-teaming me.”
    â€œSomebody’s got to kick your butt, get you out in the sun-light.”
    I took another look at the photo. All those hours she’d spent flying over the Glades in a small plane, all that labor. But it had been worth it. Now she could introduce her clients to waters that had never been fished. Sixty, seventy miles as the crow flies from downtown Miami was an unexplored wilderness, a place about as inaccessible as any on earth.
    â€œGive me one trip,” Rusty said. “A week out of your life. It doesn’t pan out, big deal. You come back to your monastery, I find somebody else. Right now the boat is half done. They’ve got the hull complete, they’re framing the interior and exterior walls, then the trusses for the second level. Exterior skin gets riveted on, windows cut and installed, then the electric and plumbing goes in. Five baths, nine cabins. Completion date: early December. By January, assuming we can rustle up four paying customers, we take our first trip. Hack our way into a couple of those lakes. See how spooky the fish are.”
    I shook my head. “Thanks, Rusty. But this isn’t for me.”
    She stood up, looked at me for several seconds, then rolled up the laminated photograph and slid it back into the cardboard tube. She walked out of the kitchen without a word and made it halfway across the living room before turning and coming back.
    â€œLet me ask you something, Thorn.”
    I was silent. I looked out toward the lagoon, my fly-tying bench, the glow of the lightbulb, the whirl of insects.
    â€œGo ahead. Ask your question.”
    She waited a moment more, staring at me hard.
    â€œCan you remember the last time you blazed a new trail? Did something fresh, something totally new?”
    I looked at her but said nothing.
    â€œThink about it,” she said, then turned and left.
    I did. I thought about it. For weeks I thought about nothing else.

 
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CHAPTER FIVE
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    Six months later, on a January afternoon, I was kneeling on the rear deck of Rusty’s brand-new houseboat, gashing my knuckles against the razory flanges of the water purifier, trying to get the cranky machine into working order. The air was still chilly from the cold front that had passed through earlier that week. The sky was peeled open, exposing its most perfect blue.
    Three days earlier from the rooftop of the houseboat, I’d watched thunderheads gather in the northwest as a trough of brisk Canadian air muscled up against the sultry Florida atmosphere. All that morning it grew like a vicious bruise, until at noon the heavens hemorrhaged and a downpour like none we’d seen for months drenched the Upper Keys for most of the day.
    Next day, with lows in the forties, my fingers were stiff and toes icy, and the sunlight was so astringent my face grew chapped and took on a ruddy glow. I hauled out a musty sweatshirt and traded my shorts for jeans and brewed pot after pot of coffee just to warm my hands on the mug.
    For two days the chill lasted, but now the old marine smells were returning, those lush sulfurous gases rising from the tidal flats and the shadowy waters within the mangroves, the sweet rot of barnacles and spawning shrimp. Hour by hour the air was softening, and the strip of shoreline that had hardened in the cold was turning back to sandy slush. All of it was another reminder of what rude changes regularly race in off the sea. How vulnerable we are on our outcropping of rock, how fully exposed.
    It was three in the afternoon and our first two anglers, John Milligan and his daughter, Mona, were due at any moment. Instead of mixing them a welcoming cocktail like a proper host, I was on my knees with my arm poked into the bowels of that water purifier. Before we could set off on our