JULY
CHAPTER
ONE
Five years earlier,the high school guidance counselor sat Barney Hall down and said, “Barney, you’re bright enough, but you’re not college material. Not yet.” He was looking over Hall’s standard test scores and other accumulated records from thirteen years in the Lower Cape May Regional School District. “You’re not mature for your age. If you hadn’t been sent to detention once a week, you wouldn’t have done any studying at all.”
Hall was a cheerful, good-looking, middle-sized kid with broad shoulders and bright white teeth, who must have said a hundred times in his life, “Watch this—and hey, hold my beer, willya?”
He had a girlfriend named Sue, whom he’d known since fourth grade, who was happy to hold his beer, most of the time, and then apply the bandages afterward. Hall worked after school and all summers as a mechanic in his dad’s yacht salvage yard, or junkyard, depending on who was doing the talking.
“I’m trying to do better, sir,” he told the counselor.
“Don’t bullshit me, son. Would I be correct in believing that you were drinking beer at Toby Jones’s wedding last weekend and got drunk and fell off the dock and damn near drowned?”
“I’m a good swimmer, sir. There was no danger.”
“That’s not the point, Barney. Anyway, if you want to do anything in life, you need to get serious, and right quick. Knowing you, looking at these records, I’m thinking your best course would be the military. The military would give you responsibility from day one. If you don’t come through, they’ll slap your ass in the brig. You need that discipline. Mind, I’m not saying the Marine Corps. You’re way too smart for that.”
“I wasn’t thinking college, not right away,” Hall said. “I’ve been talking with Sue, and... How about the Coast Guard, sir? There’re some Coasties that hang out at my dad’s place and I like listening to them talk. I’ve been on the water and working on boats all my life.”
The counselor poked a finger at him: “That’s the smartest thing I ever heard you say, Barney. You do a few years in the Coast Guard, get yourself some rank and responsibility and they’ll even send you to college when you’re ready. God help me, you could wind up an officer.”
“Whoa. That’d be awesome, sir.”
“And do me a favor, son. Get rid of that T-shirt.” The T-shirt featured a basketball-sized, full-color image of a bantam rooster, with the legend,everything’s bigger in texas.
Hall looked down at the T-shirt. “It’s just a chicken, sir.”
“It’s a cock,” the counselor said. “You know it and I know it. I don’t want to see it in this school again.”
Hall married Suethe June after high school graduation, joined the Coast Guard at the end of a glorious summer, and after boot camp and advanced training, was stationed in Fort Lauderdale.
Sue Hall went to Broward College and became a registered nurse and started working on a bachelor’s degree in nursing. Hall found the boatyards of Marina Mile to be the most amazing places he’d ever been. When Sue got pregnant with their first one, he got off-duty work rebuilding diesel engines in one of the Marina Mile engine shops. The extra work would get them childcare money so Sue could finish her BS degree.
At night, they’d drink PBR under palm trees in their trailer park, until Sue got pregnant, when they switched to ginger ale, and she’d say, “Barnes, we’re gonna do good in life. I can feel it coming on.”
The owner of the engine shop had a pile of old boats out back, which he couldn’t sell, and Hall kept looking at a 1999 Boston Whaler 260 Outrage that had been stripped of the twin outboards and had a hole in the hull, and now sat derelict atop a tandem trailer with two flat tires on each side, overgrown with weeds. After some talk, the owner agreed to give Hall the boat along with two badly abused, but salvageable, Merc 225s and the trailer—all Hall had to do was work five additional unpaid hours a week, in the evenings and on weekends, on top of his regular weekend shift, for two years, and the boat was his.
Plus, he could use the shop and its tools to rehab the trailer and the Mercs and do whatever fiberglass work the boat needed. The boat was solid, except for the hole, which could be fixed.
That’s the entirebackstory as to why Hall, Sue, and their first boy, Lance, almost a one-year-old, were trolling down the debris line on the outer reef south of Pompano Beach, Florida, lookingfor dorado—mahi-mahi—when Hall spotted something unusual happening with a snazzy-looking Mako center console a half mile ahead of them. He said, “Sue, hand me the glasses.”
The Mako had two white outboards hanging off the back, which Hall recognized as big 350s, giving the boat seven hundred horses with which to get across the ocean.
“What’s out there, Barnes?” Sue asked. She was a rangy young woman, would have been a cowgirl in Texas, sunburnt, fighter-pilot blue eyes, her rose-blond hair frizzy from salt water.
“Something strange going on, babe. I’ve been watching him, ’cause that’s a sharp boat. All of a sudden it slowed down and stopped and it looks like it picked up a diver in the middle of the ocean. I mean, who was already in the middle of the ocean before they got there. Went right to him.”
“You don’t see that every day,” Sue said.
Hall was still on the glasses. “He’s, uh, looks like they’ve got some lift bags coming over the side... in the middle of the ocean.”
“Maybe picking up some bugs?” She was referring to spiny lobsters.
“From a guy they left in the middle of the ocean?”
Sue said, with a sudden urgency, “Barnes, I’ve got a bad feeling about this. Let’s turn around. Bring the boat back north.”
