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.Night’s still young,” I said.“But I’d like to sit down with you in the morning.Maybe we can catch an early breakfast.”“Sure, that would be great,” Moody said.“Where you staying?”“Oh, this little place just up the road.I forget the name of it.”There aren’t that many choices in Marsh Harbour.I knew most of them.“Abaco Beach Resort? The Lofty Fig? Dunning’s Cottages?”“That last one,” Moody said.“But why don’t I just meet you here at the restaurant, if that’s alright.”“Fine by me.Say seven o’clock?”“That is early,” Moody said.“How about nine?”“Eight.”He grinned.“OK,” he said.“I’ll try.”I gave the room another quick once-over while Boggy pulled a blanket over Delgado.He wasn’t going anywhere.I’d check in with him first thing in the morning, maybe drag him along with me to breakfast.We could kiss and make up over coffee.Charlie turned off the lights.The four of us stepped outside, and I pulled the door shut behind us.24“He tol’ me five hunritt dollars.And dat’s what I want to see.”The man said his name was Williamson and we’d met him, as instructed, at a place called Lita’s Take-A-Way.It was on the road going south out of Marsh Harbour.Typical Bahamian fish-fry joint.Weathered shack glorified with turquoise paint and white trim.Wooden shutters propped open above a walk-up window.Old woman in a hairnet taking the orders.A couple of not-quite-so-old women working behind her in the kitchen.Fried fish.Cracked conch.Fried chicken.Conch fritters.You could elevate your cholesterol count just by breathing the air.Picnic tables sat on a concrete slab illuminated by yellow bug lights that dangled from bamboo poles.A dozen or so men played dominoes at the tables.Each and every one of them casting an eye our way.Williamson walked out to meet us the moment Charlie swung his rental car into the parking lot.A tall, slender, loose-limbed man with a close-cropped white beard that matched his hair.Might have been forty, might have been seventy.Hard to tell.He had more than half his teeth, but the ones he had were gnarly and stained and there were sizable gaps between them.He wore a long-sleeved white shirt tucked into long brown pants.Black sandals on calloused feet.We had gotten straight to business.“I’ll pay you two hundred now,” I said.“And the rest if it pans out.”“Three hundred now,” Williamson said.“Tell me once more what you saw,” I said.He told the story again, the same way he told it the first time.He was a lobster fisherman and a few days earlier he had been out on his boat along the west side of Great Abaco.Lobster season was over and Williamson had been pulling his traps, taking them ashore a boatload at a time to clean and repair and get ready for when the season reopened in August.“I seen da boat, big and bare-masted, come puttering along in the still of morning,” he said.“Took notice of it, too, because dat kind of boat, it don’t come near da Marls too often.”At mention of The Marls, I looked at Charlie and he looked at me.The Marls is a vast estuarial reserve that gets its name from the gray muck—a combination of clay and dolomite and shell—that is the region’s most notable topographical feature.Where there’s enough muck to form an islet, mangroves take root, flourish, and create dense broad canopies of green.A spiderweb network of tidal channels, miles and miles of it, cuts among the islets, flooding the estuary with baitfish and the larvae of shrimp, lobster, and conch.Imagine a ten-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle where every piece looks like every other piece and that pretty much describes The Marls.And it’s home to some of the best bonefishing on the planet.Charlie said, “Brings back fond memories, doesn’t it, Zack-o?”“Don’t know if fond is the exact word I’d use to describe those memories.”A few years back, Charlie and I had chartered a guide for a day of fishing in The Marls.We must have caught and released two dozen bonefish.A splendid excursion [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]