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June 14, 2002
Melbourne Beach, Florida

I’m knee deep in a blue run when Mama drowns in Arkansas. Gull, heron, stork dive the bait-slick water. Bluefish leap beyond the second breaker. For the quarter-mile school, I fish one rod. Each hit is violent, tight line whistling through the lips of waves. High tide rolls in. It’s overcast. The wind is southwest. Even six ounces of pyramid lead swerves hard north. A surfer girl runs past, neon board looped to one ankle. She ducks under my line, hits the board hard on her tanned belly, paddles for the good waves. I’m very much alive. Be careful, I want to say, these murderous blues, they’ll rip your head off, take a finger or a toe, it’s happened. Fishing a good run brings on trance, the honest Zen of surfcasting the tide, horsing the lead and graphite with the eyelets swishing your ears. Dance into the water and let fly. The repetition – hours pass.

A Mexican family – I guess Mexican and I guess a family – works the surf a couple hundred yards up beach. They’re having a time. These big-chested dark men, brilliant casters, catching Jesus out of the blues, giving them hell. The baitfish are in thick – menhaden, finger mullet, spot and croaker, they zing past. And these Latinos’ wives or girlfriends or sisters stretch on colorful towels behind the coolers where sand sluices toward the dunes and signs say Beware of Sea Turtles – they’re laying now. A mile-long stretch of public beach, you don’t have to have a license and the man never checks your coolers. Two boys, fourteen, fifteen, romp beside the men’s lines. They ride boogie boards and inflatables, brown skin against the green water.

The overcast sky starts to pinken. Pink sky at night, sailor’s delight, that’s what Renee always says. It’s the sort of afternoon you can get your teeth into.

What I’m saying is that these people seem decent and hard working, like Stepwells and Harvells back home, and they have this Friday afternoon off like me to fish the rising tide within eyeshot of the millionaire beach palaces that line the coast toward Cocoa. We’ve hit the blue run square on the nose, and there’s nothing save this labor, this motion, this way of being.

The Mexicans catch two-at-a-time on double rigs: tailor blues, three-pounders. We mirror each other this way for who knows how long. And I start thinking how right the world can be, how we’re all knee-deep in this shit together. That’s how blind I’m thinking, like the kid who grins into the jack-in-the-box that’s about to knock his teeth out. It’s an old story. The Mexicans see me too, cranking the blues, how I hang with them. Maybe they think I’m decent, or hardworking, and not one of the candy-ass tourists or snowbirds whose concrete driveways they pour, whose houses they roof and whose yards they mow and whose bugs they poison in the ungodly heat. Whatever, workers move my heart. My people are workers. I choose to see them as workers this afternoon. This is how I’ll remember them. These workers and me, we watch each other land fish as the boys surf riptides.

How much time passes this way? Baiting and casting, reeling the torpedo blues onto shore, the bright gills and darting eyes. His teeth will lay you open. The smell of fish, oily and sweet. When he hits, let drag go, let him run and jump and feel the hook buried in his jaw. Keep the rod tip high, throw your head back and scream come home to Daddy like my writer-friend Ray Ray out on the outer banks drunk under the Orionid meteor shower. Use the wave, break the run, goddamnit, bring him home. Up onto the sand. Grab his pale blue shoulders and lean into his face. Let the hemostats sway from your neck down to his mouth. Get a grip on the hook’s snell, twist it from his mouth. Cut his throat. Lay him bleed with his kith and kin, under bloody ice and beer and heads-on shrimp. Smear blood on your ball cap so you’ll remember this day, even when it morphs into the day it will become. Rebait, cast a hunk skyward – let fly. Be.

Maybe it’s after five when the blitz slows. The length of my white rod, the eleven-footer glistens with scales and blood and my arms are spattered to the elbows. I’ve promised Cap, Renee’s father, I’ll cook tonight, make fish tacos and frijoles negras, salsa and corn tortillas. My word’s good.

I’m forty goddamn years old: why not piss in the ocean, swim out and get my hair wet, wash the blood and guts off my body? A shadow slides through the trough when I enter. The Atlantic is cold water, best to dive through the incoming wave, split the lip, that’s what I do, with the blues and screaming birds thinning now, the run played out. Over the second bar, in the wake of the blue run, I give to the current and don’t know about Mama, how it goes for her now. We breathe goodbye, her mind flashing the way the sun does when it goes down on open sea. The feast is set, food for the table, good meat from the open water between worlds. What is there to know for certain about anything?

This strand is world famous for its riptide. The undertow here drowns the best swimmers, hauling them along the ocean floor, turning them under the waves. I’ve felt the pull, and it’s a bastard today, the gravity of open ocean. Peligro, the signs say, Danger, Beware. Watch your ass. Drawings show these hilarious stick figures drowning, blue zig-zags pulling them under. People are always getting sucked under and spat back up, sometimes breathing sometimes not. On stray dunes, crosses are decorated with plastic flowers to mark drownings. But if you’re strong and have the patience to ride the thing out, just hold your breath until it spits you up, then you can make it, that’s what I believe. With a little luck and patience, you can ride out a rip.

Sharks are another story. They’ll come at you from behind and attack in rounds, and once you’re hit, Katy bar the door. Melbourne Beach surfers have rituals for sharks, like never ever eating their flesh or calling them shitheads, or generally speaking ill of their presence within sight of ocean. Rocky and Bet, Renee’s brother and sister-in-law, have dances and necklaces and shark mantras. They beat drums, light and jump through hoola-hoops soaked with gasoline. Oh hell, sharks, I’m thinking sharks and let saltwater sluice through my mouth. They’ve never bothered me. I body surf a wave into a late afternoon after fishing the blue run, clean now, all the blood washed away.

When I get out, the bull-chested men charge me, full-sprint, throwing sand in little puffs. Son-of- a-whore, one yells. The other’s face is white, his lips moving. He’s making damn good time. The boys haul ass as well, at me – and what’ve I done in this world? To get charged out of the clear blue? That’s how it seems, standing there with water dripping off my balls.

They’re good runners, screaming higo de punta – full of piss and vinegar and conviction. A good sprinter can do a hundred meters in eleven seconds, add a few ticks for the sand. It can be a long time – much time for thinking, hearing your own heart beat in the vacuum of middle ear. Believe me. I’ve run the 100 enough to know. The spring of the big tornado, we’d travel to Stuttgart or Tupelo or Lonoke Jackrabbit Relays, with buckets of chicken and dirty sanitary socks stretched up over our calves, with jaguar running spikes and red batons and pole vault poles and shiny starting blocks. The air smelled of Kramergesic the trainers rubbed into our thighs and calves, while honey-breathed cheerleaders thrust hips over the green infield. Are you satisfied? Are you satisfied? they chanted. Pistol fire announced false starts, twin repeats echoing between the home and visitor-side bleachers, and the asphalt was spongy and burned my knees in the on-your-mark position in lane three, and the man said, get set and the sun shone on our spikes and the gun was finally fired for real. I’d come out low and burn the first forty, then rise and pump the sprint in-between. In Lonoke County, with boatloads of time to think about who I was and where I was going, and what kind I’d come from. And this one time, I swear to god, at the Jackrabbit Relays, in heat two of the hundred, a guy named Bobby Cox – somehow his dick got out of his jock strap about fifty yards into the race he was winning, just flopped out of his jock strap and bounced to beat the band. Everybody got quiet and he just kept on running, through the pink finish ribbon and out of the stadium, out into Honeysuckle Lane, he just kept on running and he’s still out there running. So runners, I’m trying to say, they’re thinkers, and what these Mexicans are thinking, the sand coming up from their feet in white whiffs, is beyond me, a genuine mystery about to happen.

I draw the knife from my belt scabbard, square feet and face them straight on. Which must look pretty funny to them, this white dude with a piddly four-inch blade.

Next proves how Stepwell I am to the core, how the great blind spot unites us. The men, brothers I can tell after they pass, pay me no mind. The boys run right on past as well, not even a nod at my knife or a son of a whore. The sand squeaks beneath my feet. Not twenty yards away, just at the point where I, myself, Joey Stepwell Harvell just crawled on hands-and-knees out of the surf, a sea turtle struggles.

A goddamn sea turtle, big as a buffalo.

They nest in dunes between the ocean and highway, and signs warn of heavy fines for anyone who fucks with their doings. It grunts and belches and hisses through its beak, makes six-inch thrusts up toward the dunes that it won’t make by nightfall. And this with the Mexicans giving it all kinds of hell. They dance circles, rapping its briny shell, singing son of a whore, son of a whore, son of a whore which sounds holy out of their mouths, like some miracle is going on this second. The women sashay by and I think to say something in Spanish. And still, this sea turtle puts out such an effort as to astound us for a good thirty minutes as the sun gets low and my mama’s lovely brown eyes see something I’ve never seen. The boys push her from behind, and the men get their whole shoulders into her. The bull-chested brothers lift and push the shell and this helps, though it’s all out illegal, sure as shit. I join in, help, put my shoulder to the task, though I know – don’t fuck with a turtle.

The pretty women, maybe the boys’ mothers, offer soft words to encourage us, to give us strength, or that’s how it sounds, like they urge us and this sister turtle toward a nest where she can lie in peace as the sand cools and the day fades and the stars come out, and the sand crabs walk sideways. Lie awhile before the easy trip down to low tide. Reenter the ancestral waters. Swim home, sister.

That’s how I’ll remember the afternoon. Me and the Mexicans. The olive-skinned women with love on their voices, the blues and the lard-ass turtle, some pink in the sky, sand in white whiffs. Soft voices.

I dig in, hoist my shoulders into her, help the men lift as the boys push and the women chant. No one sees us, the seven of us grunting with this five-hundred-pound turtle. We make a dune just before sunset. The Mexicans hug and kiss each other, make crosses over their chests then turn and walk up the beach. They pack their gear and walk away from my life forever. Something huge has cut the line on my eleven-footer, a blue, shark maybe, whatever – the line’s cut clean. I imagine what’s left of the rig being dragged across the bottom where riptides roll. A heron’s made off with a few blues from my cooler, but there’s cold beer and the night coming, with fish cleaning and tacos, Cap’s sea stories and his wife, Meg, the merry matriarch of the family whose hazel eyes shine down through the generations. Renee and my daughter Lara are poolside. We’ll spend this night between river and ocean; within earshot, the waters will break and break.

The phone call comes after midnight.

The whir of Cap’s lawn sprinklers outside in the dark. Between the ocean and river – that Florida taste in the air when every living thing grows violently. By morning, newly deformed hedges will assault you alongside the oleanders. All that happens while we sleep in bedrooms with their ceiling fans that sometimes creak rhythmically or issue slight cries.

Renee shakes me. O.W., my stepfather, is on the phone.

Lights are on through the doorway and out into the house.

A cold receiver is pressed into my jaw. The digital clock says twelve something. An instant passes when it’s still possible to walk away, to hang up, walk up the street and jump in the ocean, let the tide do what it will.

“Joey?”

“O.W.?”

“I got bad news. Mama’s gone home.”

“Home?”

Renee whispers no.

“She died this afternoon. Drowned. Of a heart attack.”

Renee intuits. Her sob is a moan, one mournful note. Like a dove. I sit on a bed beside a window near the ocean, the cold phone against my face. My wife’s beside me. One mournful note. I hear Cap’s feet swish away over the big tile floor.

“Mama drowned of a heart attack?”

“Yeah.”

“What?”

His voice is wrong. Once when I was a kid, he kicked his way into Mama’s bedroom and she screamed for me to get help, that he was killing her. I picture him big as a barn, sitting at the glass kitchen table piled with her medical bills, maybe a stray love letter from that California flake. The television’s on, I can hear it, taped golf. The players set their mouths, swing sand wedges.

“She drowned in her hot tub. From a heart attack. I tried to call her from Rocky Mount but nobody answered. I’ve always dreaded that.” His voice is high and strange, like a preacher trying to cry. “Traceleen found her.”

“How’d you know I was here?”

“She wrote it down,” he says.

“O.W.?”

“I’m locking the house up till tomorrow.”

“O.W.?”

“I’ll talk to you then.”

The dial tone is hard to talk about – it gets into your teeth, under your fillings, like cicadas in August when all the run over dogs have bloated and people hang water moccasins from tree limbs for the rain that won’t come.

“Mama’s gone home.” I hear myself tell Renee the absurd news.

By the sound of the birds, the new day is going down outside where it’s still Florida. Up the coast, Cape Kennedy, where men defied gravity to take the fat moon. Further north, Saint Augustine, legendary fountain of youth. Ponce de Leon sipped of these waters after the Indian slaughters. Water, always water, the river on one side and the ocean on the other, the entirety of the state surrounded.