Carl Hiaasen - Flush

“The dirtbags who hijacked my Amanda Rose, they've repainted the hull and changed her name. But that won't fly,” he said confidently, “because I'll recognize her, no matter what.”

“But what if you can't find her?” I asked.

“Oh, I most definitely will, Noah. You can bet the damn ranch on that.” He didn't take his eyes off the photograph. “I built her myself. Started shortly after your grandmother passed on. It was this boat that carried me through those terrible times. That, and raising your daddy and his brother and sister.”

He folded up the snapshot and went back to fishing.

“All this might be tough for you to understand,” he said quietly.

“Not at all.”

“Ten years is ridiculous, Noah. Ten years without so much as a postcard. I'm lucky your father forgave me.”

“I wish I could've seen his face the night you showed up,” I said.

Grandpa Bobby laughed. “Know what he did? He jumped from the truck and snatched me up and swung me 'round in circles like a doll-same as I did to him when he was a little shrimp! He's got some serious muscle on his bones, your old man does. Hey, what's this? Finally somebody got hungry.”

He jerked up on the rod and reeled in a small blue runner, which he tossed back. He caught another one on the very next cast.

“Hey, aren't you gonna fish?” he asked me.

“Sure.” I threw my bucktail into the deeper water and started bouncing it along the bottom.

“How come you're so quiet?” he said.

The truth was, I felt as bummed out as Abbey-I didn't want Grandpa Bobby to go away again. At the same time I didn't want to make him feel guilty by saying so.

He said, “You don't believe I'll ever be back, do you?”

“I'm worried, that's all.” It was impossible not to worry. The knife scar on his cheek was a pretty strong clue that the men my grandfather was chasing were not model citizens.

“Whatever else they say about me, champ, I do keep my promises.”

“Yeah, but-”

“Hey, are you snagged on a rock?”

“No, I don't think so.”

It was a fish. As soon as I set the hook, it smoked thirty yards of line off the spool. Grandpa Bobby whistled.

“Probably just a big jack,” I said.

“Wanna bet?”

The fish fought hard, dogging back and forth across the flats. It made several more zippy runs-one between my ankles-before I was able to steer it to the beach.

My grandfather was right. It wasn't a jack. It was a fat pink snapper. Triumphantly he pointed at the black telltale spot on its side. “That's a muttonfish, Noah!”

“Sweet,” I said. It was the best snapper I'd ever caught. “How big do you think it is?”

He smiled. “How big do you want it to be?”

“Just the truth,” I told him.

“The truth? Six pounds,” he said, “but that's still one helluva catch on a bucktail jig from a shoreline.”

I held the fish still while Grandpa Bobby unhooked it. You have to be super careful because snappers can bite through a human finger, no problem.

“Noah, you hungry? I'm not.”

“Me neither.”

“Good,” said Grandpa Bobby.

He nudged the fish back into the water. It kicked its tail and tore off.

“Must be some kind of mystic Underwood karma,” he said. “This looks like the very same spot where I caught that nice mutton with your daddy, gotta be twenty-five, thirty years ago.”

“How big was yours again?” I knew it was either fourteen or fifteen pounds, depending on who was telling the story. I was curious to hear which version Grandpa Bobby was in the mood for.

He said, “Your daddy recalls it as fourteen on the button, and his memory's likely better than mine.”

“Still a beast.”

“Yeah, but you got your whole life to catch one bigger. You'll do it, too, there's no doubt in my mind.”

“Because of the karma?”

“Somethin' like that,” he said. “You done fishin'?”

“I think so.”

“Me too.”

We put down our rods and sat on the sand. With the change of tide a breeze had kicked up, blowing in from the direction of the lighthouse. We could see two tankers and a cruise ship, all northbound in the Gulf Stream.

Another loggerhead turtle surfaced in the chop off the beach. It was twice as big and crusty as the one I'd seen with Abbey and Shelly. This time, though, I didn't need to jump in and scare it away.

Today the water looked perfect, the way it was a million years ago, before people started using the ocean as a latrine. Today it was awesomely pure and bright, and totally safe for an old loggerhead to browse the grassy flats. Chow down. Chill out. Take a snooze.

“Don't be surprised,” Grandpa Bobby said, “if one sunny day you're swimmin' here at the beach-or maybe just takin' a stroll with some girl-when a certain magnificent forty-six-footer comes haulin' ass over that pearly blue horizon, yours truly up in the tuna tower.”

The thing was, I could picture the moment perfectly in my mind. All I had to do was close my eyes, and there was Robert Lee Underwood streaking across the waves in the Amanda Rose .

“Now, Noah, I'm not tellin' you to sit around and wait for me. That would be downright pathetic.” He laughed and chucked my arm. “All I'm sayin' is, don't be surprised when the day comes.”

“I won't,” I said. “Not even a little bit.”

The summer ended quietly, and that was fine with me. Rado came back from Colorado with an infected cactus needle in his chin, and Thom came back from North Carolina with spider bites in both armpits. I didn't have any gross wounds to show off, but I had the story of Operation Royal Flush to tell, which made both my friends wish they'd been here to help.

A few days after school started, a check for a thousand dollars arrived in the mail at our house. The check was made out to my father, who thought it was a mistake. It wasn't.

The Florida Keys are a national marine sanctuary, which means that the islands are supposedly protected by special laws against pollution, poaching, and other man-made damage. The sanctuary program offers cash rewards to anybody who calls in tips about serious environmental crimes.

Dad's reward was one thousand dollars.

“But I wasn't the one who phoned in about the gambling boat,” he told a man at the sanctuary office.

“Then it was somebody using your name and phone number,” the man said. “If I were you, Mr. Underwood, I'd keep the money and forget about it.”

I purposely hadn't told my father that it was me who called the Coast Guard on Dusty Muleman the morning after we'd flushed the dye. If Dad had known, he would have insisted that me and Abbey keep the reward.

We figured he could use the money to cover some of the damage caused to the casino boat when he sunk it. Dad still had to repay Dusty, even though Dusty had been busted.

So I felt pretty good seeing that check on the kitchen counter. It was a thousand bucks that didn't have to come out of my father's pocket.

Before long my sister and I were so caught up with school that neither of us thought much about the Coral Queen, or about what might happen to Dusty Muleman. We just assumed that the government would put him out of business-after all, he'd been caught cold, dumping hundreds of gallons of poop into protected state waters. It was one of the worst cases ever documented in Monroe County, according to the Island Examiner .

Meanwhile, something good was in the works. A bunch of the other fishing guides had written to the Coast Guard, saying Dad ought to be given one more chance with his captain's license. And to almost everyone's surprise, the Coast Guard agreed-but only if Dad finished his anger-control therapy and got a letter saying he was all better.