Key West Connection

Underwater, in the angling tawny light of late afternoon, everything was gold. Flaxen sea fans undulated in the current that swept around the reef, and aureated and jewel-crested reef fish watched the naked woman as she reached beneath a pod of brain coral and pulled out a spiny lobster. It was a big one—enough for her half of the supper we would eat back on my thirty-four-foot cruiser, the Sniper. Drifting above, mask in the water, breathing easily through my snorkel, I watched the naked woman with delight. Even she appeared gold in that strange afternoon light; a tenuous light that seems unique to the open sea, and to the reef islands far, far off Key West. It is a light that does more than illuminate—it seems to melt and liquefy, gilding everything it touches: the Australian pines and coconut palms that leaned in windward strands on nearby Fullmoon Cay; the long sweep of white beach on Marquesas Keys; the blue and then orange expanse of open sea as the sun whirled toward dusk, setting behind the Dry Tortugas. And the woman, too. Drifting above the reef, I watched her slow ascent. Her blond hair streamed behind her in a long veil. After a month on my boat, her body was bronzed and trim, and the bikini strips on chest and hips appeared as pale geometrics upon her golden nakedness. She winked at me as she stroked toward the surface, holding the lobster like a prize.

Later, it would return in my memory as a prophecy. An augury of the future. That’s the way our minds work. Something happens, and our brains scan the past for omens. It’s a human compulsion: search for order in a universe that, at times, seems to be anything but orderly. A friend dies and, in our minds, his last words take on portentous significance. We are involved in an accident, and we remember that “something” told us not to take the trip. Now it was golden light on a golden sea and in less than two hours it would take on a whole new meaning.

He was indeed. A beautiful crustacean, the Florida lobster. No claws, but with sharp spines between their eyes that can needle through heavy cotton gloves. And because of that, this woman, Lisa-lee Johnson—Lee, I called her—hadn’t caught one the whole trip. But she wasn’t one to give up. Some afternoons she would come back from diving with her hands perforated, then sneak off to the first-aid kit to doctor herself in private. She never complained and I never let on that I knew. And the next day she would go back down for more. Until now. Finally, she had caught one. And it was a beauty. A two pounder, easy. Her blue eyes gleamed victoriously as she dropped it, squeaking and kicking, into my dive bag, and we swam together over to the little Boston Whaler I had hauled along behind my Sniper.

The smile left her face, and a new look came into her blue eyes; a heavy, sleepy look with which I had become very familiar over the past month. It had been a good month. A month of sun and fish and clear water; a month of aimless cruising, and then, love. In our own ways, we were both healing. Lee had separated from her domineering husband. And for me, only two eternal months before, the pirates, the ruthless ones, the money-hungry drug runners, had blown my life apart. A little ignition bomb in the trunk of our old blue Chevy. How were they to know that I wouldn’t be the one to start it that awful August night? And why should they care that my beautiful wife, Janet, and my twin boys, Ernest and Honor, had been killed instead?

So, when I was done with them, I had returned to my dock in Key West to find this woman, Lisa-lee Johnson. I had come to know and admire her when she and her husband chartered me and my Sniper for a day of fishing, and I had welcomed her tearful request to cruise alone for a few weeks. She wanted to cruise to think. And I wanted to get away so I wouldn’t have to think. When we left Key West and headed across Florida Bay, we were two strangers filled with our own private horrors. The first week had been one of nervous laughter and averted glances. Neither of us was interested in love—just companionship. I had seen too much recent death and had done too much killing to want to be alone. And she—well, she seemed to be looking for a man strong enough not to try to hurry her into the sack; a man she could talk to and depend upon while she made up her mind about the husband she had left behind.

But it seemed inevitable that we would become lovers. I had known from our first meeting that there was a strong sexual awareness between us. You know it instinctively, and it has nothing to do with coy exchanges and suggestive remarks. And when we had finally kissed, it was like a dam breaking. We couldn’t get each other’s clothes off fast enough. We couldn’t touch each other enough. We couldn’t satisfy each other enough.

It was an affirmation of the things we had left behind; an affirmation of the new lives each of us would have to find. And afterward, we would talk: long, rambling, self-indulgent conversations, telling each other everything. We didn’t talk like lovers—nothing about our combined plans and hopes for the future. We talked like best friends. We soothed each other and tried to bolster sagging egos and shattered dreams.

It was harder for me to talk than it was for Lee. I find it difficult to stick more than four words into a sentence, and more than one sentence into a paragraph. I’ve always been quiet. Not shy, just quiet. My wife used to kid me by calling me Captain Stoic. But finally, with Lee’s gentle help, the words started pouring out. When someone you love dies, you first feel outrage, then remorse, then guilt. I had been through the remorse and outrage—nearly a dozen men died in the flare of it. And Lee had helped me reason the guilt away.

So we had worked our way across Florida Bay, up into the Ten Thousand Islands wilderness on the mainland west coast, and then back across open ocean to the Dry Tortugas, and then here, to the Marquesas, working our way along to Key West and the end of the trip. The autumn days were hot and calm; perfect days for slow love and cold beer and talk; golden autumn days.

Lee sat on the gunnel of the Boston Whaler, her long legs draping over into the clear water. And when her eyes softened, I leaned and kissed her, tasting the salt on her lips, feeling the warmth of her mix with the warm sea wind that wafted across Fullmoon Cay to the reef over which our little boat was anchored.

Oh, she made me suffer. With the coconut oil. And her hands. And her lips. And had she made me suffer a minute more, I would have attacked her then and there. But she didn’t. Instead, she grabbed one of the yellow Dacor scuba tanks, and her mask and, with a short laugh, jumped into the clear water. And I soon followed.

Beside the reef was a pocket of sand. Iridescent blue-and-green parrot fish scurried away at our approach, and the woman lay back in the sand, motioning for me. And there, three fathoms down, we made slow love. Beneath clear water, experimenting with the new weightlessness and the variations it allowed, we coupled in a stream of bubbles, drifting with the sea. Barracuda looked on, stern as maidenly aunts, and yellow-eyed groupers peered at us strangely from their rocky hideaways. I was filled with my passion for Lee and my love of the sea, but I also felt a sweet-sad ache, because I knew that she would be leaving me upon our return to Key West, and that I would probably never see her again.

Afterward, Lee climbed back on the little Whaler to bask in the sun and I took my sling down to the reef alone. I wore no tank. Even after three tours of duty in Nam as a Navy SEAL, I still preferred just mask and fins. No regulator to worry about. No metal fittings to konk you on the back of the head. When I am in the water I love the freedom of unhampered motion. Besides, spearfishing with a tank is one of the most pathetically unfair “sports” imaginable. The poor fish doesn’t have a chance. I dove down to the top of the reef, then worked my way along a shelf of coral in about twenty feet of water. Small snapper and yellowtail moved away from me in perfect, orderly sheets, as if one mind controlled them all. I knew exactly what I wanted for supper, and I moved away from the reef to find it, propelling myself along the bottom with long, smooth leg strokes. A big cuda followed me, drifting alongside effortlessly. He was a five-footer, easy, and mossycolored with age. I didn’t mind. If he wanted the fish I shot, he was welcome to it. I would just get another.

I was after a nice hogfish, and I finally saw one beneath a sea fan in a clearing of coral sand. At first he was a pallid gray in color, but at my approach he flushed a bright nervous crimson, the black spot at the base of the posterior ray vivid. It was a beautiful fish, about a six-pounder, and I took him cleanly with a shot through the head. He fluttered briefly on the free shaft, then fell still—and that’s when I realized something other than the barracuda had been following me.

Sharks and I are not exactly strangers. You won’t meet a SEAL who hasn’t had some kind of encounter with one. SEAL—sea, air and land commandos, the toughest of the tough and the roughest of the rough. And we just spend too much time in the water, day and night, to miss. For me, it was a night swim long, long ago on a training mission in the Pacific, one of those freak occurrences: a big dusky shark that wasn’t supposed to be in those waters, and sure as hell wasn’t supposed to attack. He left me with 148 stitches in my side and a new nickname. It was some scar. But strangely, Lee Johnson had come to be fascinated by it, paying it special, tender attention in our lovemaking. At any rate, I didn’t want or need any more scars. I already had more than my share.

That mako was a beautiful creature: bright blue and then cobalt; a massive ten or eleven feet in length and probably weighing half a ton. The smaller species of shark don’t bother me. They really don’t. You learn to live with them. Besides, their instincts tell them to eat fish, not people. Believe me, if sharks ever got a taste for human flesh, there wouldn’t be a saltwater beach on earth that was safe. But this mako was big enough to break all the rules.

The reef that had been alive with fish was suddenly still. They knew. This was more than just another big shark—this was a big shark feeding. He came toward me, his head slicing back and forth like a radar antenna. From the leg sheath, I drew my Randall attack-survival knife—the good-luck charm that had saved my life and had taken others more than once. But against this fish, it would be no more lethal than a bee sting. I drew it only as a prod. If it decided on me as supper, I could only try to jab its pointed snout and hope to scare it away.

I had been down a long time and was almost out of air. But I couldn’t afford to try to surface. Sharks like dangling arms and legs. I thought about Lee back on the little Whaler, and I prayed that she wouldn’t choose this moment to dive in and cool off. I watched the mako drawing closer and closer. He looked like a two-man mini-sub with fins and dead yellow eyes. I clung to a chunk of staghorn coral, and when he passed me the first time, I felt my legs drawing up behind me, swept along in his powerful wake. He had been close enough to take me in a bite.

But this mako, big as he was, had no interest in breaking the rules this day. He circled me once more, and still I hung motionless. Then, in one lightning swoop, he opened his brutish jumble of teeth, took up the hogfish, shook the spear free, then bolted back toward the reef, his head still jerking, his tiny brain still fixed on feeding. I didn’t give him a moment to reconsider.

As I started the Whaler and powered us back to my cruiser, Lee, wrapped in a blanket, leaned against me. I made jokes; I got her laughing. And I waited for the fear to catch up with me. That’s the way it happens when you’ve had a close call—the fear doesn’t come until later.

But it never arrived. Why? I wondered. And then I thought I knew: compared with the murders of my family and my best friend at the hands of the drug-running pirates who will forever operate in the Florida Keys, death in the grips of a creature so magnificent as that mako seemed pure and compelling.

My sleek charterboat was beautiful in that strange afternoon light. It is painted a deep night blue, with the words

Sniper
Key West, Florida

painted in small white script on the transom. It looked black against the soft blue of calm sea and against the backdrop of the island’s sweeping white beach. We puttered up and I tethered the Whaler off on a long line, tossed out a small stern anchor, and then climbed aboard to receive the second shock of the day. We were not alone on the boat.

A gnomelike man stood on the deck. Gifford Remus. Old as he was, he looked at me with the same submissive uneasiness as always; the face of a little kid in the audience of some idolized big brother. And what he held in his gnarled hands brought all the saffron omens of sunset into sharp focus.