Eighty-Sixed: Chapter 40 - Fishing

Many nights and memories past — long before Marie came into his life — Gordon explored and camped alone.  He’d venture out on a tiny fishing boat and watch stars twinkle into existence against a blackening sky. That vessel from his youth was nothing like the one on which he found himself now. 

Charlie stood barebacked at the helm, his wrinkled skin like tanned leather, glowing orange and weathered.  He turned his head and shot Gordon a wide-toothy grin.  They crashed past the breakers and sliced through the water in a way that, to Gordon, was strangely reminiscent of shoveling his driveway after the first snow of the year, wet and dense and heavy with cold.

“You might be good luck, there!” Charlie called out.  “I think this is about the closest I’ve gotten to one of these things.”

Gordon sat heavily on a padded stern-side seat within the close-quartered confines of the open-air helm.  An orange life jacket wrapped embarrassingly around his neck like a giant ungainly donut.  One of those ominous black circles had appeared five hundred yards off the bow.

“What will you do if you get up next to it?” Gordon yelled over the motor’s rumble.

“Hell, if I know!” Charlie answered back, laughing.

After another hundred yards, Charlie idled the motor.  The boat coasted to a stop, bobbing on the waves and churning Gordon’s stomach.  Looking back, he guessed they were nearly a mile off the shore, still faintly visible behind them.  

“Look here,” Charlie said.

Gordon wobbled his way to stand on deck next to the old man.  

“I’m telling you what,” Charlie continued.  “You ain’t never seen nothing like that!”

Bracing himself with one hand against the fishing boat’s dashboard, Gordon raised his other hand over his eyes like a visor.  He peered out over the water before them and the endless green waves that moved once again upon the exact same tidal patterns they’d already followed forty years prior.  

Gordon had a moment of disequilibrium from reality crashing like a swelling tide.  He was standing on a boat no more than ninety miles from Havana.  There, a younger Fidel Castro was alive and in power again.  And here was Gordon, floating upon the Gulf of Mexico for the first time, staring at a throbbing black anomaly floating above the ocean’s surface.  His stomach lurched. 

“It looks like a black hole or something,” Gordon said.  He struggled to remain steady against the bumping waves.  

“Ayup,” Charlie agreed.  “Exactly my thought, too.”

“How is that possible?”

“Possible?”  Charlie laughed a throaty, garbled smoker’s cough.  “Son, you could pretty much say that about everything anymore.  I’d just about believe it would be possible to fly at this point.”

The black circle was rotating counter-clockwise, its edges warped and shimmering like heat off of asphalt on a hundred-degree summer day.    

“Can we get up closer?” Gordon asked.  

“Son, I’m betting we could steer our boat right up into if we wanted, but I’m not thinking that would be prudent at this juncture,” Charlie said, sputtering out another laughing cough.  “And look here.”

Charlie tapped the boat’s steering console.  Gordon watched as the red line of the speedometer jittered back and forth, left and right, as if the boat was soaring at top speed, slamming to a sudden stop, and then racing off again over and over.  Yet, besides the bouncing up and down of the waves, the boat wasn’t moving in any direction.

“That ain’t right,” Charlie said, still smiling.  He scrunched his nose up with a look of cautious concern.

Gordon looked at the digital watch on his wrist, the readout now a blank slate gray.

“Look,” he said.  “And my watch is dead.”

Behind them, the large outboard motor let out a loud shudder.  The entire stern and floorboards shook with a vibration that shot right up into Gordon’s knees.

“I’m thinking we might actually want to back away a bit,” Charlie said.

“Yeah, I think I’d feel better if we did.”

Charlie pulled back on the throttle, spinning the boat’s motor blades.  They lurched slowly backward.  The motor let out a sudden noise that made Gordon think of old screws rattling around in a coffee can.  They backed up a few hundred feet, and the motor quieted.

“That didn’t sound good,” Gordon said.

Charlie turned the boat around and pointed it back toward the shore.

“That it did not,” Charlie agreed.  He gave a quick look behind him as he popped the throttle forward again and brought the motor alive with a roar.  “And looky there.  It’s shrinking.”

Gordon turned, cupping his hands over his eyes again.  The black circle widened, enlarged its circumference, then seemingly swallowed upon itself and blinked out of view.

Charlie laughed and looked at Gordon.

“Just like the others!”

“I just don’t understand how this is possible,” Gordon called over the engine.

“You can see how those things would put a damper on a guy’s charter boat business!”

Gordon tried to answer with a smile, but a deep, sinking feeling had set in.  He thought of his mother-in-law, Delores, over thirteen hundred miles away.  Had it been a mistake to leave her?  Should he have stayed with his tiny house and the abandoned Hewing Grocery store?  Maybe he could have got that running again now that he was back before Walmart had tainted Burkett, Pennsylvania.  He could have sunk back into familiar routines and easy patterns and allowed himself to accept the reality of his lousy misfortune once again.

He ambled to the back of the boat and took his seat once more.  Gordon silently watched Charlie as he stood with broad, bony shoulders and the sun blazing down upon him while he navigated the boat back to the Key West Bight marina on the island’s northern part. 

“What a day, eh?” Charlie called out to him.

By the time they churned past the sandbar on the port side, Gordon had all but decided that when they finally reached the dock, he’d politely shake Charlie’s hand, walk back to the deserted parking lot, get in his car, drive through the abandoned streets of Key West, and head straight back to Pennsylvania. 

Then, as they neared the same platform deck from where they’d departed, Charlie laughed.

“Well, look at that!” he called out.

Gordon looked up and was surprised to see a young woman.  She was perhaps in her mid-twenties, wearing shorts over a black single-piece swimsuit top with a straw hat and oversized sunglasses protecting her from the sun.  She carried a leather satchel in her crossed arms, much larger than a standard purse.

Charlie waved enthusiastically as he slowed the craft down to a churn.  The woman waved back with a worn and nervous smile.

“Well, hey there!” Charlie called out to her.  

“Hello!” she called back, a tremble in her voice.  “How close did you get to the anomaly?”

“The what?” Charlie asked.

The boat bumped up against the dock.  Charlie moved quickly from the helm and tossed a rope ashore.  He popped out of the boat, grabbed the rope, and expertly tied it to a cleat on the dock. 

“The black hole,” the woman said. “It obviously shouldn’t be there.  And I saw two more further off to the north, but they looked much smaller.”

“You know what those are all about, do you?” Charlie asked.

“As a matter of fact, I do,” the woman said.  She extended her hand to Charlie as he approached her.  “I’m an astrophysicist.  Becca Watts.  And I was hoping perhaps I could pay you to take me out there.”