bit. She was working it like a pro. The line was tight as a guitar string, sizzling with water spray, but suddenly went slack. Sherry nearly fell back off her seat, her face shocked. Furrows started in her forehead, and bordering on disappointment, she started to look back at me. All I could do was point out where the fish was doubling back and yell out a warning.
“Reel!” I shouted and she turned back and started cranking just as the silver-sided tarpon broke surface, flashed in the sun as it violently twisted its body in an attempt to throw the pain of the hook, and then crashed back into the river.
“Holy, holy!” Sherry yelped with delight. She got a dozen spins on the reel to take up slack when again the line zipped taut and the fight was on.
Three times over the next ten minutes I had to reach out and grab a handful of her waistband to keep Sherry from standing and going overboard as she battled the fish, her determination sometimes overtaking pragmatism.
Twice I said: “Don’t let her get to the mangrove roots in the bank. She’ll try to swim into them and cut the line.”
The second time I said it Sherry took her focus off the fish, shot me a “shut up” look, and slapped my hand away after an offer to take over.
She finally reeled the exhausted fish to the side of the canoe and I reached over with a net and scooped it aboard. She let me hook my fingers into the gill slits and hold it up like a trophy. The tarpon seemed to be smiling and she mocked it with her own.
“Tough little bastard,” she said.
“She’s not so little,” I said, removing the hook from the tarpon’s mouth and then easing it back into the water. “And she’s gorgeous.”
When I looked back up Sherry was watching me.
“She, huh?”
Those first days while the iced beer was still cold, we sipped and ate onion and tomato sandwiches and napped in the quiet roll of the boat or stretched out on the small dock landing at the foot of my stilted shack. Sherry listened to the sounds of the animals that always surrounded us. I was surprised when she started asking me to name them that I could only guess a few. Splash of a red-bellied turtle. Kee uk of an osprey. Grunt of a mating gator. During the day we sat in the speckled light that passed through the tree canopy as though it were green cheesecloth. At night I read to her aloud from Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses and we made love on the mattress I’d pulled from the bunk bed down onto the floor.
But by the third morning, I detected a twitch in Sherry’s ankle or a couple of extra sighs while we were lounging on the dock.
“How you doin’?” I asked.
“I’m fine,” she said. But I knew the difference in tone between “I’m fine” with half a glass of beer and “I’m fine” and getting bored by the minute.
“Hey, I’ve got a friend, Jeff Snow, who has a place out farther west in the Glades and down south a bit,” I said early in the day. “It’ll take a three- or four-hour paddle in the canoe, but it’s out in the wide-open marsh field and very different than here.”
She cut her eyes at me, a look of interest, maybe in a change of scenery, maybe the challenge of a good physical workout.
“I mean, it’s October, a perfect time out there because the temperature, even in the full sun, is pretty tolerable. In the summer I won’t even go out there.”
“Oh, not even you, eh? Mr. tough-guy Gladesman.” She was smiling when she said it, but I had been right about the challenge. Sherry did not thrive long without a challenge.
“And the stars are amazing,” I added, just for incentive. “Horizon to horizon without any of the city lights to muck it up.”
She took another sip of late morning coffee and acted like she was pondering the possibilities.
“Sold,” she finally said, stretching out her long legs, flexing and showing the hard cut in the muscles of her thighs. “Let’s go.”
We packed up a cooler of food and plenty of water. The plan was to stay a couple of nights, maybe three, at the Snows’ fishing camp and then make it back for a final day at the shack before returning to civilization. I was digging around in my duffle bag for