Jewfish

Book One

Chapter One

Nathan Pray pulled the Tacoma gingerly onto the street. A too-small truck for a too-small skiff, but he could get away with it. No gradients in south Florida, its humble topography fairly leveled within Nathan’s lifetime, frosted with concrete and asphalt. Hills or no, the trailer groaned and bucked at the insult, the only noise shattering the blissful quiet of his little burg at night. Scarcely a soul about.

He lowered the window and jutted an elbow into the surprising cold. My town, Nathan mused, then checked himself. My town. A quaint notion. Who cared about hometowns anymore?

He rolled the window back up. The entire planet had been set to boil, yet what a winter this season in the subtropics! The snook had disappeared from his immediate fishing grounds. Purged. A few more degrees south, one more cold snap, and the few likely survivors at this northern fringe of their range would perish too. The last cold front pretty much did in Florida’s linesiders. Polar vortex, they were calling these strange episodes. Water temps plunging from 75 degrees to 54 degrees overnight. Too abrupt a shift. The extreme low of snook tolerance, in any case.

A rare fox darted across Nathan’s illumined field of view and flicked its ridiculous bottle-brush tail above the asphalt. The actual fox ushered phantom creatures to his mental screen. Land crabs scuttled across the sandy two-lane road, disappearing beneath the palmetto scrub; armadillos wandered blindly, nose to the air, fragrant with wax myrtle; gopher tortoises lumbered below ground into their burrows; a scrub-jay pair, wearing their gray backpacks, hopped follow-the-leader across the tattered bark branches of a slash pine.

So long to all that.

Some beauty remained, though. And so Nathan stayed too. For what remained.

**

The fisherman pulled up beside his fishing partner’s house, the roadside dust and shell-bits crunching beneath the tires of his truck and trailer. He cut the headlights. It felt like a stealth mission, which it wasn’t. Camilla had always been good about letting Terrance fish with Nathan at night. Nathan couldn’t think of many wives–certainly not his own; that much was clear–who’d abide these twice or thrice-weekly fishing excursions late into the morning. Terrance, just a step slow for a football scholarship at U of F, FSU, or Miami, had met his wife at Alcorn State. That Terrance had known him longer than Camilla worked to Nathan’s advantage. The longstanding tenure of their relations somehow mattered to her, and Nathan wasn’t above exploiting this curious deference.

He gazed toward the front door, the matching light fixtures on either side, burning. He didn’t want to honk, or knock on the door, and risk waking one of the little Stillwaters. Terrance usually sensed his arrival, somehow, heard the groan and rumble of the trailer, maybe, or glimpsed the flash of headlights against the window treatments. And here Terrance was, opening the front door now, throwing the hood of his sweatshirt over his mostly shorn pate, turning back to say goodbye, or maybe something else, to Camilla, whom Nathan couldn’t see.

Terrance swung his oversize canvas duffle (which held too many plastic tackle boxes) over the gunwale onto the skiff’s deck along with three fishing rods, and then joined Nathan in the cab. He smacked his palms once and then rubbed them together, as if it were much colder outside than it actually was. Woo-ee! he said, then with open knuckles tapped Nathan’s thigh. Evening, cap’! Terrance declared, half-facetiously, then rubbed his hands again. Nathan smiled. Only Terrance tapped his thigh with his open knuckles to greet him and called him cap’, half-facetiously. It was a gift. Others had less.

Evening, T.   

**

Before long, they were on the water.

Slow it down a bit, Terrance, will you? Wielding an inshore rod, Nathan hopped up on the bow’s casting deck. He tugged his line taut above the bail, testing the drag, and savored the reassuring zzzzzp in his ear. Next, he popped a Lemonhead into his mouth. Cherry Chans he had liked too, but it seemed they stopped making those a while back, maybe on account of the impolitic name, the slant-eyed portrait on the cardboard package. Well fine. The candy itself, though, he missed. 

Just cut the motor, T. I’ll use the trolling.

Terrance, Nathan was certain, rolled his eyes behind the console as he turned off the ignition. It burned him up that Nathan insisted upon wasting time inshore alongside a few lit docks and here, beside the crusty pilings of the inlet bridge, with his spoons and homemade wooden lures before heading out to the reef lines, where they actually stood a chance of filling the coolers with snapper using frozen pilchards, sardines, and slimmer silversides.

Plan on casting anytime soon up there?

Nathan raised a hand to quiet his companion, which didn’t work.   

It ever occur to you, my brotha’, that you done chose the one path you least cut out for?

Terrance usually didn’t talk like this. He had started out as an English teacher before scaling the administrative ladder. Yet his street diction, syntax, and timbre rose proportionately with his vehemence.

Take a look at yourself, man. You’ve got options. With your B.S. from U of M I can get you a provisional teaching certificate, lickety-split. English teachers, dime a dozen. But science, math—a rhetorical burst of air fluttered between Terrance’s lips—can write your own ticket, homeslice. When are you going to give this up and teach science for me?

Soon, Nathan replied, smiling at homeslice, tasting the sweet lemon ball dissolve, turning tart. Real soon, T.

You can blow it off all you want, but face facts, Nate. You can’t handle the sun, you don’t like getting wet, you’re not into social media or any self-promotion at all far as I can tell–heaven forbid you answer or even carry your cell phone–you don’t really like people very much. . .

Terrance was right about most of this, especially the sun bit. Nathan could scarcely bear the subtropical afternoon rays, lacking the olive Pray hue. Pink craters of various circumference and depth dotted his forearms, his nape, his sloping forehead, remnants of Dr. Krauss’s scalpeled defense against squamous cell incursions.  But Terrance wasn’t finished. . .You’re out catching colorful fish all day but you’re colorblind—

It’s an advantage, I keep telling you. Being colorblind. I see my grays better down under the surface. Come on, now, T. You’ve seen me spot tarpon down there.

A bird bleated from the bridge scaffolding somewhere low. Green heron, probably. 

Just you have to see things as they are, Nate? Not how you want them to be. How many times we been through this? You want to fish, fine. But we ain’t fishing for croakers out the El Rio no more. You gotta ditch this skiff. Nathan glanced back to see Terrance gesture downward with an open hand, dismissively, as if the twenty-two foot skiff were an inner tube. Get yourself a center console, something with a decent-sized V, take folks out to the Gulf Stream for dolphin, wahoo, marlin, sailfish. That’s where the Benjamins are. That’s what all those dumb clucks at the dock are doing. They ain’t got half your smarts, a Jew like you, so why you letting them make off with all the charters?

A Jew like you. Terrance used the expression from time to time to leaven his chastisements with humor. All the same, it seemed to Nathan that his friend ascribed too much validity to certain notions. What did smart mean, anyway? Sure, Nathan had earned solid grades and scored well on the SAT (a performance he might have curbed had he known his mother would hassle him these many years for his squandered intellect), he still preferred the quietude of books to the dizzying array of visual media enticements. But a smart person, it seemed to Nathan, would have figured out how to hold on to his family. A smart person would have figured out how to make a respectable living. Perhaps he was only a high-IQ moron, which was much worse, somehow, than being a plain-old moron.

I’m not nearly as smart as you like to believe, T.

There! There! Don’t you see? Just saying something like that proves the point. You feel me?

Nathan didn’t feel him—Terrance’s street voice again!—and confessed as much. Besides, he added, you know I’m not into that sort of thing, Terrance. The blue water stuff. Next you’ll be telling me to fish with kites or balloons.

Well, what’s so wrong with that?

It’s not angling, Terrance! That’s what’s wrong with it! It was Nathan’s turn to grow exercised. Playing with your food is what that is. . . . Want a Lemonhead? he abruptly proposed, in a spirit somewhere between peace offering and taunt, rattling the cardboard box.

Terrance, frustrated by the inscrutable terms, elided the offer. The heron bleated again. Vehicles groaned overhead as they crossed the bridge. 

You and your rules, Nate. Terrance plopped heavily down on the cooler seat. Not sure if you’ve noticed, but you’re pretty much the only one anymore who cares about these rules of yours.

His fishing partner was right. The waters had shifted over the years, the fish stocks had depleted—climate change disrupting eons-old patterns of migration and provoking ever more erratic spikes and dips in the air and water temps, the sugar and cattle industries releasing their tonnage of nutrients into the estuaries, exacerbating the toxic red tides that were once more local and short-lived, plus the plastics and sewage from too many Floridians ravaging the reefs. The commercial and charter community had recalibrated, harnessing every conceivable advantage to locate and land these ever-dwindling creatures. 3-D sonar, 32-megabyte GPS, newfangled baitcasting reels boasting unprecedented torque in complex ratios and variable-speed retrieves, 12-volt electric reels for deep-dropping on the swords miles offshore, a plethora of glimmering, mass-produced stick-baits and plugs, and now these scented plastics, dangerously blurring the live-versus-artificial boundary. And live bait had always been anathema to Nathan. Any moron could catch a snook throwing live pilchards, pinfish, or mullet. The only thing that mattered anymore, it seemed, was the bottom-line. The fish landed.

No boundaries. No shame.

Nathan, for whatever reason, couldn’t adjust in kind. More and more, it seemed to him, he had become a person who didn’t do, who wouldn’t do, any number of things that most people would do, and did do, as a matter of course. There were innumerable overpriced lures that Nathan refused to tie to his leader, or to the leader of any of his charters, no matter their earnest protestations. The skitterwalk, the skitterpop, the top dog, the popa dog, the popa pup, the shad rap, the jitterbug, the chug bug, the bomber long-A, the hula popper, the zara spook, the thin fin, the spot, the Rat-L-Trap. Anything made by Parabola. Those fuckers.

Nathan outright refused to rig any number of set-ups too. The chicken-rig, the fixed float, the sliding float, the stinger rig, the knocker rig. Anything with wire, balloons, kites, pyramid sinkers, bank sinkers, or pencil sinkers.

Nathan’s preferred angling methods comprised a much shorter list, methods faithfully adherent, he felt, to the venerable principles of angling. Ten-pound test. Maybe twelve in a pinch. A medium-weight spinning rod and reel. Artificial bait to match the hatch. He handcrafted his own plugs from dogwood or cedar using a lathe and gouger. He also used bucktail jigs and gleaming spoons, secured all these go-to baits with a trilene, palomar, or loop knot, depending on conditions. He used a few soft-plastics, too, mostly at night, and partly to appease Chad at Swallow Artificials, his sponsor. None of those funky hues and patterns–electric chicken, mango tango surprise, green eggs and ham, drunken monkey, watermelon blaze, psychedelic Chernobyl. . . Natural presentations only. He rigged them weedless or on a jig–eighth ounce, quarter ounce, half ounce–sometimes below a popping cork that splashed and gurgled and clicked. More often, not. Braided line and 1-aught or 2-aught circle hooks (kinder to the piscine creatures) represented Nathan’s only bows to modernity.

Nathan fished the way he fished because it was the right way. The way he believed one should fish. Because fishing this way silenced the deafening roar dockside rather than contributed more noise to this strange new world—a world in which everyone seemed angry at everyone else. Because it was called fishing, not catching. This was what he endeavored to impress upon his charters. That landing fish was only a small part of the larger picture. The water. The air. The heady odors of marine organisms, living and dead. Your perfect breath. The wetted line against your finger. Contact!

Nathan believed all this. At least he thought that he did. But perhaps, he considered, still reading the current from his perch on the bow, it was mostly his belief in the belief that held fast after all these years. He breathed the briny air, spiced here so close to shore by restaurant foodsmells and vehicular exhaust. Perhaps, as Terrance suggested, he was just unwilling to face facts. Ah, it had been his wife’s favorite chastisement too. Perhaps he was merely stubborn. 

Look around you, Nate. Look, Terrance urged. Nathan complied with a weary exhale, lifting his gaze toward the wide expanse of ICW. The natural inlet, he knew, had been at the north end of the lake, just yonder. A rat’s mouth. No more. The Army Corps of Engineers, for whatever reason, had dredged this alternative inlet long before the war, this inlet that looked only like the manufactured inlet it was, and then stoppered the natural channel. The war was pretty much the only reason they completed the intracoastal waterway, a protected passage up and down the eastern seaboard safely beyond the German U-boats’ field of view. 

Where do you think you are, Nate? The Mosquito Lagoon? The Ten Thousand Islands? Flamingo? Biscayne Bay? You want to be an inshore snook guide throwing plugs, plastic, and spoons with ten-pound mono, you’re in the wrong place. Face it, Nate. They’re gone. 

There’s still snook here, Nathan declared, softly, not altogether convincingly, reading the water still from his perch on the bow’s deck. He spotted the bird now. A green heron, yes, stalking minnows, crouched on the lowest plank of the channel wall beneath the bridge. A sizzling bulb under the bridge, a few feet above the high-tide line, washed the heron with its urine light. 

Jimminy-Crickets man, Terrance squealed in falsetto. Are you going to cast or not, Nathan Herschel Pray?

Now now, Terrance.

Might as well give me some of those Lemonheads! 

Nathan grinned as he underhanded the cardboard box behind him toward Terrance. Jimminy-Crickets. His God-fearing friend cultivated a whole lexicon of non-curses, which sounded downright babyish to Nathan’s ears. Such practiced restraint. Need Terrance deprive himself a full-throated Jesus Christ once in a while? 

I’ll cast . . . I’ll cast . . . I’ll cast, Nathan assured his partner softly, reading the dark water beside the bridge piling once again, its ripple illumined by the sizzling bulb. Outgoing tide. Yes. Good. The heron was here nabbing outgoing prey from above, the snook (hopefully) snatching whitebait and such from below. Gripping the cork handle lightly, he flipped the bail, felt the textured braid lay across the uncalloused crease along his index finger’s first joint. The first cast. It wasn’t something to attempt, casually. The second, third, fortieth cast, fine. But there was only one first cast, one chance to set his homemade silver mullet down in the drink just beyond the ocher O edge, where bridge light gave way to darkness, where the snook lurked, if any had survived the last freeze. His carefully weighted and contoured wooden plug would inspire an underwater wave hewing to the precise real-mullet signature, offering its eons-old come-hither tickle across the snook’s lateral line. He crunched down with his teeth on the sour-sugary remnants of his candy, whipped the rod back, and threw.

**

Having conceded defeat, tired of Terrance’s hectoring, his weary sighs and exhales, Nathan took the throttle. Clearing the bend, he gazed out at the blank darkness beyond the green and red inlet lights. A moonless night. Not bad for fishing. Easier to lure the snapper up off the bottom. But dangerous. Nathan struggled to discern where ocean gave way to sky beyond the bow, where sky yielded to ocean. He glanced rightward toward the jetty, where fishermen silhouettes usually offered parting salutes. They were invisible tonight (if they were present), as was the jetty itself of bulldozed boulders and dirt, just inside the green light. Not many boats out, apparently. A couple stern lights winked at them from the third reef, probably. Not a good sign, the winking, nor was the sea spray he lapped from his stubbly upper-lip just before the bow dipped below the crest of the first wave. 

WHOA, he uttered, immediately regretting it.

You call this two feet or less!? Terrance widened his stance, gripped the console’s stainless steel frame. Nathan removed the clasp of the safety lanyard from the key-ring and clipped it to his belt-loop.

Not me. NOAA. 

I don’t know, Nate.

Water’s just confused here a bit. Won’t be so bad out on the second reef. Offshore breeze’ll die down. We’ll stay at 60 feet or so. How’s that? This was what Nathan always promised, terms Terrance usually accepted. 

Drown just as easy in 60 feet as a hundred.

It was tough to argue with such logic, so Nathan didn’t try. Not exactly.

We’re here, he countered, taciturn–a remark so nonsensically incontrovertible that it left Terrance dumbstruck.

Nathan motored the vessel to take the chop a bit sideward at the bow. As he couldn’t see the waves, though, it was anyone’s guess how to achieve this position. They took one wave over the bow before Nathan’s eyes adjusted and he figured out what was what. Thankfully, it wasn’t too bumpy once they cleared the sandbar beyond the inlet. Just rollers, it seemed, sufficiently spaced. Annoying, but tolerable.

They went about their business without words. Nathan scanned the coastline, spotted the telltale droopy Australian Pine silhouettes, the red beacon light in the background above Dixie Highway. He labored over 36 honey-holes between Pompano and Boynton along the shallow patch reefs and the inside and outside of the second and third reefs, recorded his spot, conditions (current, wave-height, moon phase, weather, water temp), date, and take in his journal. He adhered to a strict rotation, lest he deplete any one honey-hole. The yellowtail, the mangrove, the mutton, the king, the gag, the red and the black–these piscine morsels he gathered for Dixie Doc’s to keep his charter business afloat–tended to bite with less trepidation under this sheet of darkness.

So here he was.

Nathan rose at nine or so most nights (he actually would have preferred to sleep until midnight, had it left him any chance of recruiting Terrance to their nocturne), then fished as close to sunup as his mate would allow. After dressing his catch, after dropping off his old friend, after sliding a cooler safely inside Doc’s padlocked patio, he courted his insomnia until sunrise over weak tea with lemon served by Kati in coffee-stained ceramic at the ungentrified Caribbean Café. He’d wait there through the morning, along with his more successful cohorts, until summoned to his charge (with any luck) by the dockmaster, Marty. After a four-hour, six-hour, or full-day charter, or after waiting for one, after washing down the Pray Fish, after washing himself down less purposefully in the bleak stall of his rented apartment, Nathan would court a few precious hours of early evening sleep.

Terrance, seated at the stern now, sliced semi-thawed sardines for chunk. Nathan eased on the throttle as the slow-moving beacon neared the second notch in the tree line, just off the coast from sprawling San Remo, where the old Italians lived. Terrance, ripping off the cardboard top, slipped the first frozen menhaden block inside the mesh bag. Nathan, an eye on the sonar, motored eastward, slowly, the waves lapping the hull. Terrance slipped past to the bow and the anchor locker.

Okay . . . now.

Terrance, a sneakered foot braced on the gunwale, threw the Danforth.

Nathan turned off the ignition and unclipped the safety lanyard from his belt loop.

The two stood there for a moment at the stern while they waited for the anchor to hold. Terrance, for whatever reason, always stood shoreside, while Nathan took the outside. The moon, a rusty smudge on the east horizon, struggled to rise as they waited. Stars salted the dark sky above. He could just make out the Seven Sisters, five or six of them anyway. Invisible whitecaps all about issued sporadic applause. Then, suddenly, the stern shifted to the north as if on a pendulum. The anchor had found its purchase below the brisk current.

Nathan set out the chum bag Terrance had prepared and tied it off to the cleat. Terrance tossed a handful of sardines off the stern, sliced thin as rose petals. They set about lowering their lines. Terrance flipped the bail of his reel, peeled off monofilament with his left hand, then flicked his rod upward with the right, enacting the exercise over and over, a conductor leading a symphony. Nathan offered his weighted line no such encouragement. He allowed the eighth-ounce split-shot to perform its own slow work while he gauged the strength, direction and depth of the currents, the monofilament slipping across the pads of his fingers at alternating tempos.

Cold, Terrance observed, halting his symphony to throw the hood of his sweatshirt over his head.

Little bit.

How’s the little gangster.

Fine. I mean good. Big swim meet coming up. Regionals.

Hair?

Same.

And pop?

Not bad. Nathan exhaled. Seems okay most of the time.

God bless.

This wasn’t Nathan’s favorite kind of fishing. He considered it more like collecting, actually. Collecting a catch for Dixie Doc’s. Paying the bills.  But he relished the uncomplicated industry of fishing the reef late at night. While his drowsy town slept, here Nathan was, awake and alive and burning.

He savored this particular moment, especially, this brief spot of time between the bustle of setting up to fish and the actual fishing, the noisy, fragrant two-stroke shut off, the sound and smell of the sea returned to them, their lines just over the side, the bait slipping down the darkening column, negotiating the curious currents, speaking through his fingers, still a secret to the creatures below, the two of them settling in for the night, clearing their throats, a few quiet words exchanged, taking their essential human inventory before . . . before . . .

Got one! Terrance declared, flipping the bail. Snapper, he predicted with confidence, reeling in the line. His drag ziiipped, then held. Decent size. Nathan nodded, threw some more chunk bait over the transom as if to kosher the imminent catch, breathed in the ocean’s restorative brine. 

Think you might need to step up from that split-shot, Nate. Gotta punch through that strong current about thirty feet down. Then bam!

A good night. The offshore breeze calmed, the ocean lay down, while the current below remained brisk, spiriting the frozen chum along a productive trail. Nathan reached down to jostle the mesh bag every so often, as if to encourage a fresh pouch of tea steaming in a cup. When the bite slowed, he plopped ten meatballs or so into the sauce–fist-sized sand-spheres peppered with his proprietary recipe of oats, corn meal, hogmouth fry, and menhaden oil–the packed meatballs releasing their chum lower in the column than the frozen block, luring the bigger snapper and grouper from their grottoes.

The bull sharks and lemons weren’t so bad. Only one mangrove snapper came up quivering, half-devoured—gotta pay the tax collectors, Terrance noted–which they saved on deck for possible cut-bait later on. They worked efficiently, quietly, through the night, filling both coolers with mixed snappers, mostly mangrove (the water temp a bit cold for the yellowtail), a few blue runners Terrance insisted upon keeping, and one large cobia, shark impersonator, strange catch for dead winter, oddly lethargic during the brief battle before thrashing wild boatside, the still-green creature forcing Nathan to use the gaff, which he didn’t much like. The deck a bloody mess. Every once in a while, they heard the distant celebrations from one of the other vessels out at the third reef, odd whoop and wail frequencies lingering in the mild southeast wind. Probably the Little Carlos, Nathan thought. An odd name for the loud boat, as Charlie was much smaller than his enormous center console. Plus, he wasn’t Latino but an ethnic Indian of indeterminate Caribbean descent. A good night for Charlie too, apparently. He wondered if they were catching kings. Or cobia. Their own snappers weren’t too big, not on this nearshore second reef, but they were all over fourteen inches, anyway, and fat.

Call it a night, Nate?

Sure.

Nathan kneeled at the bow while Terrance took the wheel and fired the ignition. He always breathed easier upon hearing the engine’s staccato growl. Nathan pointed toward where the anchor lay and Terrance negotiated the vessel, accordingly. Got it, Nathan said, pulling up the rope.

That as fast as you can pull, skinny-boy? Terrance teased, expansive. It had been a good night.

Nathan was about to respond in kind when he heard a plashing portside followed by a lusty human breath. He turned instinctively toward the sound, his headlamp firing red eyes.

Goodness gracious, Terrance uttered, giving voice to Nathan’s thoughts.

What’s a turtle doing out here dead of winter?

Don’t know, Nate. Never seen one so shallow in winter. You?

No. Don’t think so. 

This was something else that Nathan enjoyed about these nights collecting fish out over the reef. He never fished the same ocean. However much his state and city screwed with it (the nearby outfall, for example, spewing their vaguely treated sewage just eighty feet deep), the sea’s inscrutable nonhuman order still obtained. Mostly. You never quite knew what you were in for just off the inlet: curious currents beneath the depths speaking through twelve pound test at his fingertips, a river of glowing photoplasm drifting atop the surface, a shadowy squawking flock of shearwater overhead, a lumbering manatee testing the nearshore waters, silver mullet charging the inlet during their fall run, muscular jack crevalle slicing through the underwater clouds, squadrons of shrimp charging the inlet weeks later on spontaneous winter nights, their eyes breathing fire beneath the incandescence of a lantern, ancient sea hares–gothic, winged creatures–relinquishing the fight, drifting inshore to expire, the heavens aglow in strange hues, a grouper sporting curious geometric patterns. Now, this small hawksbill turtle flopping around their waters in December chasing man-o-war and snappers. There was nothing second-hand or stale about his coastal life. An original relationship here to pursue along this spit of land and sea.

The way things were going, though, how long could he keep at it?

Divers admired these sea turtles for their gracefulness, but it didn’t seem so graceful to Nathan. Rather, the hawksbill seemed out of its element, downright awkward, flopping around on the surface with clumsy flippers jutting from its clunky armor. We still have that mangrove on deck? Nathan inquired as he sealed the anchor into its locker. Terrance wordlessly retrieved the shark-mangled snapper and threw it over the side to the turtle, which seemed to have been expecting the morsel. Probably wasn’t a good idea, Nathan contemplated too late. Making boats mean food to the creature.  It negotiated the snapper down its gullet with its odd hawk’s bill, bobbed its reptilian head.  Shark food, Nathan thought, these turtles.

Terrance, smacking his lips, was thinking something else.

"Mmm-mmm. We’d turn that turtle back in the day, boy."

What the heck you talking about, Terrance?

"Pearl City back in the day, Nate. Turtle steak. Turtle burgers. Turtle soup. Turtle fritters. That’s what I’m talkin’ about."

You never turned turtles at the beach, T. Your father, maybe. When he was twelve. Turtle burgers. For crying out loud, you ate subs from Grace’s and Whoppers from Burger King with me. 

"Didn’t say I did. That’s not what I said. Said we did."

Nathan, sitting on the bow seat now, taking a load off, didn’t know what to say to this. He felt a curious pang of envy and groped to locate its source. The expansiveness of Terrance’s we, one that spanned generations. It pierced Nathan, somehow. His partner was like one of those true-believer Jews taking over the place now, fringes streaming from their waistbands. We were at Sinai together! one of them had accosted Nathan outside Publix, shoving a pamphlet in his face. A nice thought, that, but too theoretical to offer him much ballast. The Florida Prays were ever few and fading fast. 

He looks okay, anyway, Nathan said, coming to and rising from his seat.

Give him another one? Terrance proposed. Cooler’s full.

Probably not a good idea.

Terrance nodded.

Keep fightin’ the good fight big guy, Nathan said as he fired the ignition, causing the turtle to disappear beneath a patch of sargassum, lit now by the risen half-moon. He motored slowly to clear the turtle’s possible sphere. Then, after removing his