Water from My Heart (8 page)

Big difference.

Somewhere in my second year with Hack, he double-booked clients for a day. Two guys show up, fly rods in hand, expecting the storied James J. Hackenworth to “put them on the fish.” Hack turned to me and said, “You mind helping out an old man?”

Thus began my career as a bonefish guide.

When the guy protested, Hack backed me up. “He's better than me.”

Setting out, it struck me how that was the first time anyone had backed me up in a long time. And as much as I guarded my heart from anyone, I felt a twinge toward Hack.

My client was the CFO of a Fortune 500 company with a Stanford MBA. Because I didn't want to answer a bunch of questions about how I ended up here, I decided not to give him my academic résumé. Figured it was just less complicated if he thought of me as an island bum who happened to know the location of the elusive bonefish. By the end of the afternoon, I'd put the guy on so many fish that he was rubbing his forearm to get the cramp out. Finally, he just sat down in the front of the boat, swallowed four ibuprofen, took off his hat, and shook his head. I asked, “You okay?”

“Best day of fishing ever. Period.” He paid me $500 for the day, plus a $500 tip. I tried to split it with Hack but he just laughed. “What am I going to do with it? Can't spend what I got.”

We sat, staring out across the water. Hack with his cigarette and I with my water. Seldom was I without a bottle of water in my hand. Hack noticed it. “You drink that a lot.”

“Figure it's better than Scotch.” I laughed. “Or the latest fad light beer.”

“Why the bubbles?”

I glanced at the plastic bottle. “I guess I like the way it feels.”

He took a long draw on his cigarette. He gazed out in front of us toward the coast of Florida some forty-four miles away. “I know you're here running from something that hurt you—from someone—but you need to know that to the folks you meet—” He pointed his cigarette at my water. “You're like that bottle of water.” He squinted at me, and I thought I saw the residue of a tear. “Don't let the pain of whatever or whoever hurt you bottle itself up inside.” A breeze rippled across the water and settled on us. “Everywhere on the face of this planet, water is life, and I don't know why, but you have that effect on people. They are drawn to it.” He reached for my bottle and swigged from it. “They like the way it feels going down.”

How I loved that old man.

Word spread and pretty soon Hack and I were both spending our days on the water. We built skiffs mornings and evenings and guided during the day. One morning I looked in the mirror, tanned, my hair turned blond in the sun, a few pounds lighter, and realized that the lifestyle agreed with me. I was reminded of the kid I once saw in the mirror. I don't know what my blood pressure was, but I knew it was a good bit less than when I worked for Marshall.

And Hack was right. Working that wood, drawing out the oil, pulled the anger out. I could see Marshall's face in my mind and not want to kill him or drive a fork through one eye and a spoon through the other. Between my folks, high school, being alone, Harvard, Amanda, her dad, I don't know how much anger I'd buried in my life, but working with Hack brought me up against the rock of it. I'm not saying that I had found a way to blast through it, but I am saying that for the first time in my life, I had pulled away the facade that masked it. If Hack had given me a gift, it was honesty with myself. Through his patience without expectations, Hack had dug down inside me and brought me face-to-face with the stone that separated me from my heart. And what he showed me was not a pebble, but rather the Great Wall of China. While I was more comfortable being honest with myself, I would not say that I grew to be honest with others.

This would come back to bite me.

One morning, a guy a few years older than me walked into the shop and started talking with Hack. He'd heard about the skiffs through some friends in Miami and wanted to know if he could order one. Hack informed him that his waiting list was now seven years long, and given the sight of Hack, the fellow could read the writing on the wall. That's when he spotted my skiff. “That yours?”

He wasn't unkind. Just curious. Opportunistic. He was also used to getting his way—or at least being able to buy it. “Yes.”

“Any chance you'd sell it?”

“You like to chase bonefish?”

He shook his head. “Don't fish.”

“You want to buy this skiff, but you don't fish?”

He nodded with a grin.

Hack smiled at me and raised both eyebrows. I wiped my hands on a rag and turned to admire my boat. “I just spent the better part of a year building it. Have had it out a half-dozen times. I don't mean to be ugly, but it would take a lot of money.”

The going rate for a custom-built skiff from Hack was $40,000 to $60,000 depending on the finishings. He smiled. “How about two hundred fifty thousand? Cash.”

I looked at him like he'd lost his ever-loving mind. “Are you on the level?”

“I'll have the money delivered this afternoon.”

“A quarter of a million dollars? For some wood and glue and paint?”

He smiled. “And elbow grease.”

Hack nodded several times and spoke out of the corner of his mouth. “Take the man's money before he changes his mind.”

I looked at the boat. Then at Hack. Finally at the man. I offered my hand. “Would you like that gift wrapped?”

That afternoon, I found myself in a predicament. Just what exactly does one do with $250,000 cash?

C
olin's house sat inside a gated community, the centerpiece of which was a resort hotel—a five-star-rated vacation. The resort also sold time-share condos with access to the hotel amenities, but the prizes of the community were the thirty or so ocean estates of which Colin's house was the pièce de résistance. A long driveway, nearly a half mile in length, wound out onto the rock point on which Colin's house sat, allowing for two points of entry from the water. The house faced the ocean and offered beach access down a winding path of rock and dune that led to a cabana. The back of the house led down to a deep-water port on a small, private cove—custom designed for large seafaring fishing yachts.

I docked the Bertram, tied her off, and inventoried the three other boats hanging on racks in the boathouse. I chuckled. Colin was a poor boat pilot, constantly running aground and knocking over pilings in the dock, but that did not hinder his ability to buy first-class boats. He had a great eye when it came to boats. Tiny lights had been mounted beneath every fifth step, lighting the way up the more than one hundred teak steps to the house. Whoever built this house had spared little expense. The smooth stairs wound up through the rock ledges, turning and twisting with several overlooks as I climbed higher. Off to my left, leading out of the boathouse, wound a cart path that serpentined its way around and then up the bluff. It allowed somebody with a golf cart or small car to shuttle necessities to and from the dock house without having to carry them up and down those steps.

The steps exited on the backyard, off to the side of the outdoor kitchen. Unnatural heat from the kitchen met me as I stepped around the stone wall serving as part of a chimney. One of the enormous gas grills—that could have doubled as a rotisserie—sat burning on high, and the commercial fan above it sucked up much of the heat. The residue and grease on and around the grill suggested that something had been burning at one time. I clicked off the grill and the fan, and then studied a margarita mixer, which sat mostly full and completely melted. The air smelled of rum and coconut oil. I circled the backyard and walked up onto the pool deck where the pool was lit. A couple of bathing suits and the halves of several bikinis floated in the water. Two lawn chairs sat at the bottom of the deep end. More than a hundred beer and whiskey bottles littered the backyard along with a couple dozen cigarette butts and almost as many marijuana joints, a couple of which were still stuck between paper clips. A hookah with several pipes lay on its side next to the pool.

The back of the house was mostly glass and the large doors had been slid open. One had come off its tracks and now rested on its side, crushing some bushes beneath it. Its partner had been broken and scattered in several large pieces off to the side. I stepped through a torn and flapping curtain and into the house to two smells: The first was of something having been burned in the oven. The second was something rotting in the main kitchen. Either oysters or shrimp. A glance in the sink and trash can confirmed both. If I thought the backyard was in disarray, I had another thing coming. The inside of the house was trashed. The stereo was pounding out something incomprehensible with a beat I couldn't follow, so I found the power button and killed it. Much of the furniture had been turned on end. The kitchen table sat at an angle as one leg had been broken off. Someone had punched multiple holes in the Sheetrock with something the size of an anvil. A green stuffed animal that looked like Kermit the Frog had been tied to one of the blades of the ceiling fan and was currently doing about 280 revolutions a minute. The TV had been a large flat screen before someone threw what looked like a lamp through it. The lamp was still protruding from the screen, which was now black.

The granite countertop covering the island in the kitchen had been cracked down the middle, but the most interesting “adjustment” made to the house on the first floor was that the kitchen sink faucet had been turned on and pointed away from the sink. A small river of water ran along the countertop, down the wall, along the tile floor, and down into the sunken living room, which now floated in eighteen inches of water—aided by water from a garden hose, which had been rolled in through the back door. The water had risen to the level of the top step, crested, and spilled over, cascading out a side door and onto the pool deck, where it emptied into the pool. The pool—aided by water from a second garden hose—had now filled and spilled over the zero-view waterfall that led into a smaller pool eight feet below on the second pool deck, which had also filled and was now spilling over the edge, creating a miniature waterfall down the craggy rocks leading to the beach some sixty feet below. I turned off the faucet and both hoses and then made my way upstairs. Someone had tied a curtain to the chandelier and had evidently been swinging on it from the stairwell, dislodging it from the ceiling. It now dangled by three electrical wires, threatening a dive into the recently added indoor pool below.

The seven bedrooms upstairs were no better. Each of the beds had been slept in or used by what appeared to be multiple people. One of the beds had been covered in plastic sheeting and soaked in something with the same viscosity as baby oil. Clothes and underwear lay scattered. The bathrooms were soaking wet, and the Jacuzzi in the master bath had been filled with what was now stale and sour beer, as evidenced by the three empty kegs stacked next to it.

The master bedroom must have seen the brunt of the upstairs party because the mattress had been taken out on the balcony and someone had lit a fire in the middle of it with what looked like the remains of the master bed frame and headboard. The balcony was devoid of any other furniture. The sun had disappeared behind the Pacific and dark was falling, but one glance off the north end of the balcony proved that the furniture had been thrown down the cliff toward the boathouse. Most of it lay in splinters on the rocks.

Resting on a ledge above where the master bedroom had been sat a handheld video recorder. A cord tethered it to the master TV, which was the only piece of furniture or area of the house that had not been violated by the party. I was pretty sure I did not want to see what was on that recorder, but I thought it might help me determine if Zaul had been here and what his new best friends looked like.

The video recorder contained more than eight hours of unedited content. Someone had spent a good bit of time recording and narrating the events over what looked like three days of a rather epic party. The voice sounded female, but I couldn't understand a word as it was all spoken very fast and in Spanish. She did an excellent job of documenting the escalation of the party and the total destruction of Colin and Marguerite's house. A few minutes into the video, I heard a clinking of bottles behind me in the master bathroom. I paused the video and found a young man in what was once a tuxedo crawling out from underneath the laundry bin in the closet. He was in the early stages of waking up and experiencing the mind-splitting headache accompanying what was probably the worst hangover he'd ever known. His eyes were slits, one hand was attempting to shade his eyes, and at some point in the last day, he'd thrown up all over himself, which explained the smell. He was rank.

I looked at him and he grunted at me.

“Hi.”

He lay his head back down on the floor, put one hand on the wall and one foot flat on the floor. He cracked a whisper. “Make it stop.” His Spanish accent was thick and fell on the English words in all the wrong places.

I laughed. “Spinning a bit, is she?”

“Dude…” With that, he turned on his side and emptied what little remained in his stomach. It wasn't much. I turned the shower on cold, dragged him into it, and sat him up while the water ran down his head and chest. He might have been sixteen, and judging from his demeanor, I didn't take him for an invited attendee to the party. He looked to me to be someone who, at least initially, had worked the party.

While the water ran, I walked downstairs and scrounged up enough to make a pot of coffee. When ready, I carried a cup to the kid, who had now turned off the water and sat dripping in the shower. He accepted the mug with a thick-tongued
“
Gracias
.”

I handed him some swim shorts and a T-shirt that might have been Colin's and then returned to the video. About fifteen minutes later, he stumbled out. The mug hand was both shaking and shading his eyes while the other felt and steadied his way along the wall. He began speaking in mumbled and nearly incoherent Spanish. Thirty seconds in, I held up a hand and spoke most of the Spanish I knew.
“No hablo español.”
He smiled, nodded, and began speaking slowly again in broken English. I managed to piece together that Miguel was an employee of the seafood caterer—or had been three days prior—and had accepted an invite when his shift ended to join the bartenders and work for tips. Sadly none of which were still in his pocket. But to his great pleasure, the alcohol had flowed, as had the tips, as had the girls dancing on the balcony. Following his tenure at the bar, he'd met a beautiful girl and they'd danced away the night—which he surmised was two nights ago—only to wake up in her arms on a lawn chair by the pool. They spent that day on the beach, partied into the night, and the last thing he remembered was pumping beer into the hot tub. As best he could recall, he'd been passed out in the closet for the better part of a day.

I clicked on the video and asked him to help narrate, which he did with animated delight. He told the stories of the girls and what they drank. Who liked rum. Martinis. Shots of tequila. He snapped his finger. “
Flor de Caña de bomb.
E'body ly' fruit of cane.” We watched as the crowd grew and beer foam began to spew across the pool. Early on the first evening, some guy with long, sun-bleached hair dragged a hose into the house and started filling in the living room. Late into the night, bikini-clad girls swung from the chandelier. Soon, they were blindfolded, soaked in oil, and wrestling on the upstairs mattress. Somewhere in the middle of the night, another guy—a walking spark plug, muscled, bald—began breaking the teak patio furniture into splinters, which he promptly threw into a pile and doused with gasoline. The crowd of about a hundred danced around the fire, and most passed out within its glow. The second day followed much like the first, except a couple more sun-bleached and tanned guys showed up. Muscled, powerful shoulders. Not much fat. Four in total.

I pointed them out. “You know them?”

“Sí.”
He nodded as if it was a stupid question. “Surfers mostly, but—” He mimicked smoking a joint. “You need som'sing, I hook you up. Dey ha' good produc.”

Whenever Zaul showed in the video, one of the other four weren't far. I asked, “And him?”

He shrugged. “He new. Quiet. No smile much. But—” He rubbed the fingers together on his right hand. “He loaded.”

With the video, I was able to put together a pretty good idea of Zaul's new circle of friends. Because Miguel also worked at the resort on weekends, he knew of most of the guys. Except Zaul. “No, he jes' roll in. Big wad of cash. Pay for whole party. Tip me…” He dug his hands into his tux pants and shook his head. “Hundred dollars.”

When I asked him what had happened to everyone and their party, Miguel shrugged and pointed at the closet. His disappointment was obvious.

“Any idea where they went?”

He rewound the video and let a section play where the four surfers were talking with Zaul. They were animated, talking with their hands as much as their mouths, trying to persuade Zaul to come—and bring his money—to someplace where the waves were big and the girls were plenty and scantily clothed. Miguel translated. “Here, they talk about the surf being b
roke
n.”

“Did they say ‘broken' or ‘break'?”

He rewound and listened again. Then he nodded. “Break. Dey say ‘break.'” He pressed play again. “Here, they talking about a resort. North o' Corinto. Son'sing about—” He shook his head trying to find the words. “A ‘break' off the beach. At a reef. Thirty-foot wave. But—” He snapped his fingers and shushed me, listening another few minutes. He pointed at the TV. “First, go to León to party and stay at one of the guy's uncle's hotel where there is be a party.”

“Does he give the hotel name?”

Miguel shook his head. At this point in the video, one of the guys points to Zaul, rubs his fingers together like Miguel had just done with me, and says something with a big smile at which point the other three nod. “What are they saying there?”

Miguel listened and tried to make it out. The music was loud and a couple of girls were singing in the pool, just off to the side. “Son'sing now how they meet him to
‘el jefe.'
”

“They want to introduce him to someone?”

“Sí.”

“Who?”

“El jefe.”

“What's a heff-ay?”

He searched for the words. “E'body work for heem. He”—he held up a finger—“number one on flagpole.”

I understood what he was saying, so I didn't bother correcting him. “Does heff-ay have a name?”

“No, but”—he pointed to one of the guys on the screen—“he know him.” He kept pointing at the screen, using his hand to draw the words out of his mouth. “He think”—he pointed to Zaul—“he money be berry good. Make much more money. All around.” He put his hand on the screen, covering Zaul's face. “He bank.”

I was afraid of that.

I asked him if he needed a ride, and he lay down on the floor, closed his eyes, and said something about calling “his mu-herr.”

Twenty minutes later, a girl riding a scooter zoomed into the driveway. The look on her face was not one of kindness. He walked outside, sort of circling her, when she promptly slapped him across the face, ushering another wave of vomit out of him and into the bushes. While he emptied himself, she continued with a verbal onslaught the likes of which I've seldom seen. I don't know if I've ever heard someone speak that fast before. After he cleaned his face with the hose, he eased onto the back of the scooter with his tail between his legs and then disappeared down the street. I don't think Miguel's wife was too happy to see him.