The Lonely Silver Rain Read online

  Bringing Hubie’s sloop back from Marigot Bay had been a good interlude for me. When we were pounding along on a good reach in hot sunshine, I spent a lot of hours working with the set of exercises Lois had taught me. She said that when you drive along the streets of Beijing in the morning, you see a lot of Chinese standing all alone, doing the same stretching exercises. It is called Tai Chi Chuan, and looks like a kind of imitation combat in slow motion, with no opponent. At first I felt like an idiot. “At your age,” Lois said, “it is very important to stay flexible and limber. Each time you make the same move, you force yourself to bend a little further, reach further.”

  “At my age?” I had said.

  “When there is a tendency to accept constricted movements of the joints.”

  “And how many push-ups can you do?”

  “The question is irrelevant.”

  And so the post-Lois, post-sailing McGee was down very close to two hundred pounds, with a new layer of deep-water tan, and a match in slow-motion combat for any hundred-and-twelve-pound Chinese person.

  On Thursday morning I found the Mick in his office in the back corner of a leased hangar, at the public-use airport at Southdale. He waved me into a ratty old wicker chair while he continued to poke two fingers at the keyboard of an Apple 11e computer, copying data from a yellow pad, grunting with annoyance whenever he made a mistake and had to correct it on the screen. He put the data on disk and then printed it and checked the printout against his yellow sheet. He then activated his modem and sent the data out over the phone. He leaned back in his squeaky chair, waiting. He punched a couple of the keys. Suddenly the printer chattered into life, ran off what looked like a full page of information and stopped.

  He sighed, tore it off and studied it and flipped it aside. “Dad bang business is getting more frigging complicated all the time.”

  “What was that all about?”

  “It’s a couple of programs called DataPlan and OpsPlan. I got three birds I can get into the air and I have to file plans and routes for the next three days, charter work and package delivery. Key West to Marco to Fernandina Beach to Venice to Georgetown to Abaco to Great Exuma to Clearwater to Staniel Cay … to hell and gone, Trav. And you miss filing or change a flight plan without enough notice or run an hour early or late and they are all over you like bug worms, laying on the damn fines and penalties, and taking every removable panel off the aircraft, poking around for Lady Caine. Anyway, this gadget makes it easier than it was last year to run my little operation, but I had to pay a little old gal to set in here with me for a couple of weeks teaching me how to run it. I’d like to sell out. There’s two different sets of people after me to do just that. But what the hell would I do with my time? Set on a porch? I hate golf and I hate TV and sunshine gives me the brown spots. What do you want from me this time?”

  “You still do the aerial photography?”

  “Indeed I do. And I still use that little old Aeronca Champ to do it.”

  “That old rag-wing still able to get it up?”

  “And it’ll keep on long after both of us are gone, if somebody loves her enough to get the parts made when they fail.”

  “Here’s what I’m looking for. Confidentially.” I slid the photograph across the desk, positioned so he would make out the face Meyer had found.

  He stared at me, jaw sagging. “McGee, am I hearing you?

  You are looking for a damn boat? In Florida?”

  “And wherever else you can fly that thing.”

  “You want to pay for a special mission?”

  “Not if I can help it. There’s no client picking up the tab. It’s all me. I’d like you to work it in with your other business. Just take pictures whenever you come to a big bunch of boats at a club or marina on city docks or wherever. And when you see the lone cruiser running a water-way or outside, see if it has a face.”

  “Face? Oh hell yes! I see it. But do you have any idea at all how many boats I fly over, me and my pilots, every day?”

  “Just mail me the film. Here’s mailers all stamped and addressed. I’ll get prints made. Black and white. Fine grain.”

  “I’ll work with wide angle, covers a bigger area. So get enlargements like maybe eight by ten. I got a Nikon C3 with a motor drive rigged to shoot straight down through a hole in the floor, with a long cord on the trigger. But I don’t take the Champ to the islands. You said confidential, and I don’t make that one by myself often. If I can get away, I like to use the Champ, low and slow. Now I’m ready to ask the big question.”

  “Thought you might be. What if you find it?” I asked.

  “Like finding the head of a pin in seven haystacks. But what if I do?”

  “Your piece of the action could be twenty to thirty thousand.”

  “What if I don’t find it?”

  “You’re out a little film and a little air time, and we’ll sit around and cry a little.”

  “Remind me never to ask you what you do for a living, McGee.”

  “It strikes me that all marinas look a lot alike from the air, so if …”

  “I am a professional, friend. I list every shot in order and the list will be in with the exposed film every time.”

  A thin woman in a red and white jogging suit came into the office, clipboard in hand. “Everything is ready, Mick, except no passengers yet.”

  He cursed and then looked at the wall clock. “Give them another ten minutes, Carleen, then go ahead and take off. The other stuff had to be in Key West by eleven-thirty. Carleen, this is a friend of mine named Travis McGee. Trav, this is Carleen Hooper, my best pilot, aside from me of course.”

  “Of course,” she said, smiling as we shook hands. She went on out to wait for the passengers. Mick said she was a fool for work, and had three little kids to support. “She used to do aerobatics in a Mooney 231 with her husband in a twin version. He bought the farm and she doesn’t want to do high-risk flying while her kids are little.”

  I hung around a little while to give him the usual chance to grouse about how too many regulations are ruining flying for the little guys, and too little regulation is ruining the cash flow for the big guys.

  Three

  On Tuesday, the ninth of October, I got three rolls of film from the Mick. I took them to a big commercial lab and had over ninety eight-by-ten glossy prints in hand by five o’clock when they closed.

  As soon as I was back aboard the Flush, by referring to the exposure notes Mick had enclosed, I was able to write the location where each picture had been taken on the back of the picture. The dimensions of the task became evident. The big marinas looked like so much uncooked rice scattered across a black maze. Under the magnifying glass the rice became the shiny toys of the yachtsmen, chrome and brass, varnish and plastic, cleats and davits, and aerials, canvas and teak.

  It was going to take too much of the rest of my life to peer at each craft looking for the smiling face. Florida was too full of boats. I locked up and took the glass and the sheaf of prints down to Meyer’s boat, the Thorstein Veblen. It is bigger and roomier, brighter and more open than the stuffy little cruiser he had before, the John Maynard Keynes. But already the hairy economist was beginning to wall himself in with books, pamphlets, charts, research papers and water glasses filled with sharp pencils.

  He organized the search. It involved a screen, a plane projector and a drink while we waited for darkness. Each print required four projections, as the device could handle only a four-by-five area of the print comfortably. For each print he devised a template. Once we had identified a production boat we knew was fifty-four feet long, Meyer would then cut a U-shaped piece of cardboard to size. It was quick and easy work matching the template to the few fifty-four-footers in each segment of each print. Because the pictures had been taken at varying altitudes, from three hundred to five hundred feet, the template had to be recut for each print. As Meyer remarked, had we been searching for anything in the twenty-two-to-forty-two-foot range, we would have been wedged far
up the creek. There were just too many of them. As we got used to looking, the templates became less necessary. Our eyes had adjusted to the relative sizes of the usual mix of pleasure boats, and we could immediately spot the marina areas where the larger ones were docked.

  We came across several which could have been the Sundowner, but each close comparison with the color shot showed some basic structural differences unlikely to have been altered. We became instant experts at looking down on boats from aloft. We looked at them in marinas, in flotillas, in single-file parade on the waterways, tied up to backyard docks and out trolling the deeps.

  It was a little after midnight when we finished the last print. Meyer turned off the projector. My eyes felt sandy and tired. Earlier on, Meyer had set out a package of his notorious chili to thaw. We divided it and I went sleepily back to the Flush to take a precautionary pair of antacid tablets before climbing into my lonely acre of bed in the master stateroom.

  On Saturday I got four more rolls, too late to get them developed and printed before Monday, the fifteenth. The Monday-night session went a lot faster. Recognition of the right size and shape was more instantaneous. But it was dull work. I began to have the impression we were looking at the same half dozen prints over and over. We yawned a lot. The thought of jackpot can keep the adrenaline flowing, but when it seems indefinitely delayed, the brain sags.

  And so, one week later, on the twenty-second, when the jackpot showed up in the second print of some seventy we were prepared to examine, it jolted us. “Hey!” we said. “How about that!” we said. “What do you know!” we said. It had all begun to seem so highly improbable, our elation was inappropriately large and lasting. I had scribbled the information from Mick’s record on the back of the print. It said “west end Big Pine Key Sunday Oct 14.” Meyer adjusted the focus to the sharpest image we could get. There were twenty-two boats in what seemed to be a shaggy little commercial marina on the Florida Bay side, not far from the south bridge. Several with outriggers looked like charter fishermen. The Sundowner was the biggest moored there. It smiled up at us.

  I couldn’t take my information to Billy because all we knew was that it had been there eight days ago.

  On Tuesday morning at first light I was heading down toward the Keys, driving a battered old white Chevy pickup with big noisy beach-buggy tires and a Florida tag so old you could just about make out the green number on white from three feet away. But the sticker was up to date. I wore old khakis bleached by sun and salt, a faded red baseball cap which says, above the visor, Bay City Bandits. I wore an old pair of ratty gray New Balance running shoes, without socks. I wore aviator-style sunglasses. I wore a fishing knife in a sheath on my right hip. I wore a yellow wind-breaker against the morning chill, and peeled it off as the sun came up.

  I had borrowed the pickup from Sam Dandie. He lives aboard the Merla S. at Bahia Mar with one or another of his nieces. They like to come visit, he says solemnly, nodding. He invented the Dandie Flotation Gauge when he was thirty-eight, and hasn’t worked since. He gives generously to his nieces. Borrowing his pickup is a trade-off. He enjoys driving Miss Agnes. He keeps trying to buy her. No way. I loan it to him and he takes a niece off to Disney World for a couple of days of fun and frolic. He takes one of those bungalows where you have everything sent in, if you wish. He has yet to see Epcot.

  I reviewed my preparations as I drove. I had a grungy old cooler with ice and two six-packs of Bud. I had my old plug-casting bass rod, and my good spinner, heavy-duty graphite loaded with ten-pound test. I had the big black tackle box full of plugs, spinning lures, leader material, swivels, hooks and miscellany. And down in the bottom of it, under the last tray, lay the flat and deadly 9mm automatic pistol with the staggered box magazine holding fourteen rounds, wrapped in a piece of oily flannel. No extra rounds. If fourteen won’t do it, then it can’t be done.

  Except for the weapon, I could see no reason in the world why if I said I worked in construction I wouldn’t get instant belief.

  It took a little while at Big Pine to orient myself. Things look different from on high. It turned out to be called the Starfish Marina. Beer, bait, boats, slips for rent, charter service, guides. The parking area was beside the marina building, a cement-block structure. I could see the slip where the Sundowner had been. It was gone, as I had expected. Luck comes floating by a morsel at a time.

  The interior was cleaner and brighter than I expected. There were floor racks of fish-oriented merchandise, a display case of reels, a wall rack of rods, a couple of coolers and along one wall a line of bait bins with a constant flow of running water through them. A heavy man in a stained canvas apron was skimming off some dead bait fish which floated on top of the water in one of the middle bins, using a small dip net, and dropping them in a bucket.

  “Make good chum,” I said.

  He turned and eyed me. “That’s what they generally get used for.”

  “I meant that there kind, with the big eyes. They seem to cut up greasier than the others.”

  He finished and dropped the dip net into the bucket and stood up. “What can I do for you?”

  “Has a fella name of Al been here looking for me?”

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is McGee.”

  “Far as I know nobody has been looking for you.”

  “He’ll probably turn up. We would want to rent a boat. If he shows up. A green skiff like one of those out there would be fine. And twenty horse with a spare tank. Nothing fancy.”

  “Do you want to rent one or don’t you?”

  “Only if he shows up. Last time we were here we did good.”

  “I don’t remember you being here.”

  “We didn’t start right from this marina last time. It was one down the line. But we worked our way up this direction. Got some nice trouts off the grass out there.”

  “If he shows up, how long do you want the boat for?”

  “We’d come in right at dusk. What would that be worth?”

  “If you start in the next half hour, call it thirty dollars plus the gas.”

  “Little heavy, isn’t it?”

  “Going rate. Leave your car here, you don’t have to make a deposit.”

  “It’s the white pickup next to the power pole out there.”

  He glanced out the window and nodded. He went over to the cash register to get his cigarettes. As he lit one I said, “You own this place?”

  “Me and the bank.”

  “You got the kind of work I’d like to do.”

  “What do you do, McGee?”

  “Construction. But it isn’t like it used to be. Nobody gives a shit anymore. Slap it together and sell it off and hope the sucker don’t fall down before you get paid off.”

  “True, friend. True. I got a shipment of six reels in a couple weeks ago. Priced to sell at thirty-nine ninety-five each. Four of them defective. So I pay UPS to ship them back and I’ll wait maybe two, three months for replacements or money back. I call up, I get to talk to a machine.”

  “Well, there’s still some damn good merchandise being made in this world.”

  “Like what?”

  “When me and Al went fishing last time, let me see, that would be on Sunday, a week ago last Sunday, when we went by here a couple times I noticed you had a big custom cruiser in here. Looked rich and sassy and really put together. I’d guess at least fifty feet, maybe more. Right out there it was, at that last slip.”

  “Good boat, but she wasn’t kept up.”

  “Shame to let something like that go downhill. What was the name of it?”

  “Lazidays. Registered out of Biloxi. Come across from Yucatan. A smart-ass redhead kid running it. Couple of girls aboard.” He opened a blue notebook. “Kid’s name was John Rogers. Came in Saturday night, took off Monday early. It was fifty-four feet. And it was a hog pen. When I saw how they were keeping her, I made them pay cash in advance.”

  “They came across from where?”

  “Mexico, Yucata
n. The redhead didn’t tell me that. One of the girls, the blonde one, told me. She came in to buy beer and wanted to know if I’d take pesos. I said maybe, because my youngest, she likes coins. So I bought four different coins for a dollar. She kept scratching her legs and she said the bugs were terrible in Chetumal and I said where’s that, and she waved west and said over in Yucatan there.”

  “I guess these days they check those boats out pretty good, the ones coming in from the west or the southwest.”

  He shrugged. “Sometimes yes, sometimes no. They’re spread thin. Those from around here got into it, some are in the U.S. prison and some can’t stop smiling. I wouldn’t have the nerve for it. They even use satellites. So these days it’s by airplane or real fast boats running at night. And it’s none of my business if a boat I rent dock space to got checked or not.”

  “Mine either,” I said. “What you get for this here Mirralure?”

  “Four and quarter plus tax.”

  “Guess I’ll take it. Big snook up in Chokoloskee Bay chewed mine raggedy.”

  “Hard to make them hit a plug.”

  “I put a little strip of white fish belly on the back-end gang hook and then work it like a wounded minnow. The ones that take it seem to usually be the big ones. Permit take this?”

  “Permit’ll hit anything at all or nothing at all, depending.”

  “Never have fastened on to one of those.”

  “You do, it’s something to remember. Best to get a guide for them.”

  “Too rich for my blood, friend.” I walked over and looked out the door. “Wish Al would show up.”

  “Want to use the phone, see what time he left?”

  It seemed reasonable, so I telephoned Meyer collect aboard the Veblen and when he answered, I said, “Al! Al, what the hell are you doing home? I’ve been waiting here at the Starfish Marina for you. You forget?”