“Are you the captain?”

UD leaned over the marina railing and greeted a leathery guy in a fishing boat.  She had ten minutes to kill before her boat, thrillingly named The Danger, set sail.

“I like to be the mate.”  He had that Hemingway thing going — bristly beard, red face, squishy sweaty white hat.

“It says you take novices out.  That right?”

“We love first-timers.  Haven’t developed bad habits.”

“You’d show me how to fish?”

“Yup.  Last week a little kid caught a shark.”

“How big.”

“Eight feet.”

“You wouldn’t be telling me a… a…”

“Fish story?”

He leaned back in the cabin and came out with a photo album.

“You’d help me reel it in, right?  Looks a bit on the heavy side.”

“Sure.”

“How much is it to go out?”

“If you charter the boat for yourself, eight hundred dollars.  But you’d want to do a split charter.  That’s much less.

“Thanks.  Enjoy your trip.  Beautiful day to go fishing.”

“It’s freezing.”

“What?”

“Cold day for Key West.”

UD laughed and went to join her fellow kayakers.

UD made friends with the fifteen or so people on her outing, all of them desperate escapees from places like Thunder Bay, Ontario and Duluth, Minnesota.

She liked Bess, the only woman on the crew, immediately. She’d already seen Bess – twentyish, looking like Jean Seberg in Joan of Arc – in a little harbor shop where UD had gone to get something to drink before the trip. In front of UD in line, Bess had insisted that the cashier put a twenty dollar bill from the register into the tip jar.

“Do it! Do it! I promise people will give you higher tips. When they see the twenty… It’s psychological… They’ll give more.”

“Or they’ll steal the twenty,” said UD.

Bess was one of those pushy oblivious women — much like UD — whom UD privately saw as the future of the female race. Odd, out there, genial under a vast array of unsettling conditions, Bess was perfect for the job of standing up in a kayak under mangrove trees and barking away at people about birds who make nests out of their own shit.

Or something. I wasn’t really listening. I was gazing at Bess, standing up in a boat like George Washington on the Delaware.

At one point in her talk Bess got carried away about the blight of human beings upon earth’s delicate ecosystems.

“I hate to get all morbid with you, but it’d be better if we were all dead.”

end of part two