The Cracker Belle was a small fishing boat, formerly white, now driftwood gray. They idled her downcurrent past the rusty fish houses and the leaning bulkhead stacked with sea-greened crab pots. Emerging from the mangrove wall into Chokoloskee Bay, they headed out the north channel to the Gulf and traveled south along the coast, passing Rabbit Key with its lone mangrove clump on the seaward point; it rose ahead, passed on the port side, and fell astern.
Though Lucius was silent, Hoad knew where his mind was. Hoad was the one friend with whom Lucius would discuss that black autumn evening. “Trouble was, nobody could rest easy with Mister Watson laying out there in the moonlight. That’s why they towed him way out here. I bet every darn kid on the Bay had bad dreams for a month about that cadaver bumping down Rabbit Key Pass on the flood tide.”
Hoad smiled apologetically at Lucius, who could not smile with him. The seeds of legend, he was thinking, sown in his father’s blood. It was not like Hoad to talk this way: had he forgotten he was talking about his friend’s father and his own father’s best friend? Was Papa in the public domain to be pawed over and patronized now that he was the legendary “Bloody Watson”?
Hoad had remembered to put a shovel in the boat. Was he uneasy about what might await them at the Bend? Hoad hated violence just as his father had (“Cap’n Bembo couldn’t kill a chicken; his wife had to do it,” Papa said).
“Course those Chok fellers ran that rope around his neck so the family could locate the body when they came for it,” Hoad was saying.
Lucius said, “Hoad, I saw no noose and I was there, remember? They probably got that tale about the hanging rope out of the magazines.”
Hoad apologized. “I’m sorry, Lucius. My point was-”
“I know what your point was. Let’s forget it.” In the next hour, they did not speak again.
The Cracker Belle was the lone boat on the empty coast. Far offshore to westward, a tiny freighter smudged the Gulf horizon.
Traversing the old clam beds east of Pavilion Key, Hoad mentioned that this shallow shelf was now so plagued with sharks that men disliked going overboard to wade for the few clams left, and nobody knew what drew the sharks from the deep water. Some folks said that that plague of sharks foretold that the old ways of Earth were near an end.