point, without warning or notice, Donna Kay did a graceful swan dive from the altar steps into the blue hole. I instinctively followed. We broke the surface about ten feet apart and kicked our way to each other. All I could think about was making love to Donna Kay in the sacred pool under the navigator’s altar. I pulled her to me. She didn’t resist as I pushed the hair out of her eyes and kissed her firmly on her salty lips. I slid my hands up under her shirt and cupped them around her breasts and lifted her slightly out of the water. I felt her body tense as if someone had flipped a switch.
“Donna Kay! Donna Kay!” a shrill voice screamed. We sprang away from each other immediately. Above us on the steps, two gray-haired women with cameras strung around their necks stood beside a guide. How they got there I had no idea, but all we could do was wave.
“Can you believe it?” one of the women said. “We come a thousand miles away from Alabama on a ship, and we run into the owner of our favorite restaurant. Y’all have fun.”
Donna Kay swam to the steps, and I just floated for a moment, wondering what other surprises lay in store for me.
The aperture for a passionate moment without discussion, questions, or explanations had closed. All those things were now on the back burner. We rode home in silence with our wet clothes drying in the wind. I steered the boat, and Donna Kay sat in one of the chairs, twisting her ponytail in her fingers. The furrow above her brow told me she was thinking hard about something. I tried not to dwell on the inevitable moment when I would be held accountable by this woman for the wrong I had done her, but I knew it was coming. There were things we needed to talk about, things I had to explain, and issues that had to be addressed. But as Venus drew the curtain of the night sky up over the eastern edge of the horizon, we were simply jockeys straddling the back of that giant, unpredictable crocodile called life.
9
Fish Tales
There was just enough twilight left in the day to illuminate the channel markers back to Lost Boys, and when I got there, Donna Kay jumped up on the dock before I even got the bowline tied. She thanked me in a nervous voice, suddenly as distant as a paying guest, and hurried down the path to her cottage. It was then, as I washed off my fishing tackle and cleaned up my boat, that I asked myself the big question of whether or not I really wanted something as complicated as a woman back in my life.
I know it sounds odd, but from the time I arrived at Punta Margarita up until the moment that seaplane hatch opened, I had been so involved in covering my tracks, changing my life, and learning to be a fishing guide that women had somehow gone out of the picture.
I guess one of those fancy radio psychologists would have said that since I’d come to Lost Boys, I had been running away from some deep-seated fear of relationships, but I just saw it as being really busy. Now I felt guilty that I hadn’t even been thinking about Donna Kay, at least not since I blew her off by not showing up in Belize City. Besides, I reasoned, she’d kept the rest of the $10,000 from the lottery ticket I’d sent her. Wasn’t that enough payment for my sins?
I’d kind of become a monk in the sexual department, and the scary thing is that it really hadn’t bothered me up until the moment I saw Donna Kay again. It didn’t help matters much when Donna Kay appeared on the porch for dinner that evening looking like a forties movie star. She wore an almost see-through print sarong and no shoes. Her hair was now brushed out of the ponytail and fell across her shoulders, and she wore a choker with a single pearl that matched her earrings.
Bucky was up in a flash, attending her chair at the table. Donna Kay folded into her seat, trailed by a scent of citrus perfume. Bucky slid in next to her, thank God. I took a seat at the far end next to Sammy Raye and reached for the wine, asking myself this: What the fuck is she doing here?
When I first