I had nothing to hold me and nothing to show for my life. No job. No wife. No family. One friend. Bimini felt empty. I had moved to an island and become one. I had a four-decade track record of playing my cards close to my chest and running from everything that hurt me.
With smooth water, I climbed up on the tuna tower. Two stories above the boat, I sat for hours just staring at the water. Before me flying fish jumped up out of the water and flew a foot or so above the surface for two or three hundred yards before diving back in. My left wrist wore the watch Shelly had given me. One more reminder of an angry wake.
I took my time. Conserved fuel. Soaked in the horizon. By noon on the fifth day out of Miami, I sat rolling in the waves offshore, staring at Colin’s pool deck through a pair of binoculars. The porch doors were open, curtains swung in the breeze. Music played. Smoke from a bonfire trailed upward. Someone, or someones, had been there. I waited until evening, but in eight hours of surveillance, not a soul moved about in the house or on the deck.
CHAPTER EIGHT
In the days following my exit from Pickering, headhunters called nonstop offering me jobs of a lifetime. More money than I could spend. I sent them to voice mail. Amanda called twice but I never answered. Finally, driving south down I-95, I opened the window at ninety-seven miles per hour and tossed my cell phone into a concrete barrier. I was done. I wasn’t sure who I wanted to be, but I was finished being whoever had worked for Marshall Pickering.
I floated south to Jacksonville and found myself in my childhood home sitting on the crow’s nest with a cup of coffee staring out across heaven’s reflection. Two weeks passed in which I slept most of the time. My body was so tired, when finally given the opportunity to sleep, it did. Days passed in which I slept eighteen to twenty hours a day. No drugs. No alcohol. I simply stopped long enough for my soul to catch up with my body, and when it did, it needed sleep. I didn’t know what I would do or where or how I’d eventually make a living. I had some money saved up, but one day I’d have to get a job. Start over. The only thing I knew for sure was this: I’d never trust my heart to another.
It hurt too much. Despite all my tough talk about not risking what I wasn’t willing to lose, I’d gotten in over my head and risked everything. And lost.
In the end, Marshall had won.
To add insult to injury, Marshall had given us, his “boys,” the option of accepting our bonus in a year-end cash payout or equity shares in the firm. The “catch” was this: The year-end cash payout was at 50 percent on the dollar. It worked like this: If your bonus was $100,000 on paper, the cash payout was $50,000 minus taxes at 30-something percent. In brass tacks, that meant $100,000 turned into about $35,000 in less than a few seconds. Understandably, everyone took the equity.
The second catch was, to protect us from taxes, all bonuses were a gentleman’s agreement written on paper. The only copy of that paper was kept in Marshall’s office. He had us by the short and curlies, and we knew it—but it gets better, or worse. In another twist, if any of us wanted to buy something—say a house, a yacht, take our family on vacation, pay for private school, pay off college loans, or just “cash out” so that we controlled our own money—we had to take a loan against our personal balance. And while Marshall never expected us to pay it back, he did collect interest on the loan—which he deducted from our principal equity or from next year’s bonus. This ensured that Marshall didn’t have to pay tax on our bonus money. He kept all the money, didn’t pay tax on what he “paid” out, and earned interest on money that was rightfully ours. A genius scam. Really. Wish I’d thought of it. If anyone demanded all their money, Marshall never refused it and gave it with a smile and a pat on the back as he showed them the way to the door—“Enjoyed you working with us. Let us know if there’s ever anything we can ever do for you.” As a result, everyone was loyal to Marshall—they had to be. He had all their money. When I drove out his driveway, I left all that. I’d given up everything.
The only consolation I felt was this: Amanda knew that I valued her more than the million or so equity money. That left me with one problem—she chose the money over me. Maybe Amanda was the best poker player among us. As the weeks passed, that became tougher and more difficult to stuff.
* * *
I grew my hair, didn’t shave, burned anything that resembled business attire, seldom wore a shirt or shoes, and reduced my life to a single suitcase. My motto became “traveling light.” And while that was a good description of my physical appearance, it was a better description of my heart. No tethers. Nothing to encumber me. Nothing to hold me back.
I was getting a bite to eat one night on Third Street in Jacksonville Beach, a few blocks from my house, and overheard a guy talking about the Bahamian island of Bimini. Even though I’d grown up on the northeast corner of Florida, I’d never really realized that Bimini sits about forty-four miles off the Florida coast. People in Miami do it in a day-trip. Sometimes, several times a day. When he finished, I said, “Any chance you’d give me a lift over there?”
He sized me up. “Long as you don’t mind working a few hours on deck before you get there.”
“I don’t.”
He handed me a business card. “Boat leaves tonight at ten p.m. If you’re not there at a quarter to ten, I’ll figure you’re not coming.”
I didn’t know how long I’d be gone or where I’d stay or what I’d do, but I had a feeling it would be longer than a few weeks, so I locked up the house, paid the property taxes a year in advance, and climbed aboard his boat.
It’d be years before I returned.
Once a British colony, Bimini is now a fishing island with a drinking problem. Given its resurgence in numbers and its appetite for fighting anglers, the bonefish rules the flats, but the top three blue marlin world records were caught in the deep waters within spitting distance of the beach. Sport fishermen catch everything in between. By boat, it’s an hour and twenty-minute trip from Miami. Less if your boat is well equipped. Its culture is everything Miami is not and wishes it was—an island. The Bahamians are beautiful, laid-back, and the British influence exists in more than just accent. The north-south island is little more than three miles long, and at its widest point, it might be a quarter mile wide. There are essentially two parallel roads, there are about as many bars as homes, and if there happens to be a funeral, the streets will shut down along with much of the town. In its heyday, it was one of the sport fish capitals of the world. Hemingway frequented here. As did Zane Grey. Multiple movie stars. The water is turquoise, the beach is white, the women are bronzed, and the breeze always blows. Early in its history, the island of Bimini was populated by a colony of freed slaves. Many of the modern-day residents are direct descendants.
I fit right in.
I landed on the island, took a deep breath, and knew that I’d found the antidote to Pickering and Sons. I slung my backpack across my back, slid on my flip-flops, and pulled my Costas down over my eyes. After finding a hotel room “by the month,” I began strolling the streets. A few blocks later, I stumbled upon Legal Grounds, the local coffee shop.
Jake Riggins graduated Miami Law two decades earlier. After an unsatisfactory decade practicing law, Jake, late forties, thumbed his nose at South Florida and took up residence on the eastern coast of Bimini, where he put his law degree to use making coffee and defending the occasional drug runner with enough money to bring him out of retirement.
Legal Grounds was a home run and exactly what I needed. Jake did coffee and he did it right. He started with good coffee—he had a thing for Tanzanian and South African but mixed in some Central American as well—ground it with a burr grinder, boiled water, let the boil run off, bloomed the coffee, and then slowly poured the water over the grounds to release the flavor. Perfection every time. Jake’s nickname was “Picasso,” and when it came to coffee, he was.
After a few weeks of sun, Jake’s coffee, and a cool island breeze aided by not a single care in the world, I found my rhythm in Bimini. A mo
nth in and I bought a hurricane shack on the northwest corner of the island for a few thousand dollars. It sat up on a small bluff beneath some huge trees, and the sunsets from my porch were, hands down, the best on the island. I had to renovate pretty much the entire thing, including the walls and roof, but I was in no hurry. Six months in and I was actually sleeping in a bed with a roof over my head and four strong walls surrounding me. In my bedroom, I had an AC unit, although I seldom turned it on. The breeze across my bedroom was plenty. I would not say that I had a plan or a goal. Not in the traditional sense of “knowing where I wanted to go in life.” I didn’t. I just knew what I didn’t want to be.
I wasn’t running to, I was running from.
Working to get my house in order made me a regular at the hardware and lumber store, where I kept bumping into an old Bahamian man with gnarled hands, sun-weathered skin, white hair, wide straw hat, deep wrinkles, and a smile that just wouldn’t quit. You know that thing that some old men have that makes everybody want to just sit and be quiet with them? He had it. He must have been eighty years old, but most every day we shared a “Mornin’” in the lumberyard or while staring at stainless steel screws in the fasteners aisle. Occasionally, he’d hold up a price tag and squint. “Forgot my reading glasses.” I’d quote him a price, he’d nod, and then about once a week, I’d bump into him at Jake’s, where he enjoyed a coffee while rolling his cigarette.
One morning while he sat with his right leg crossed over his left, trail of cigarette smoke rising up from between his fingers, coffee getting cold, hat sitting on the table, I walked up in front of him and extended my hand. “Sir, I’m Charlie Finn.”
He stood, cleared his throat, and shook my hand. His grip was that of a forty-year-old, and there wasn’t an ounce of fat on him. “James J. Hackenworth.” A wide smile. “Friends call me Hack.”
“Most folks call me Charlie.”
Turns out Hack was the unofficial grandfather of Bimini. He knew everybody and everybody knew him. He was also born on the island, which made him a bit of a novelty in that he’d never left. Spent his entire life on these three miles of dirt and countless hundreds on water. He was a child of the water, not land, and I would learn this soon enough.
Months passed as my friendship with James J. Hackenworth grew. Hack invited me to his shop where he built wooden skiffs. Taped to the walls were yellowed articles from magazines and periodicals. Turns out he had a bit of a reputation around the United States and had been written up in USA Today, Newsweek, People, and National Geographic, to name a few. The wealthy elite from all over North America came to his shop to hire him to build them a wooden bonefish skiff. Over the last forty years, three sitting U.S. presidents had toured his shop and hired him to take them bonefishing. Hack was a living local legend.
A bonefish is one of the best fighting fish in the world. People come to the Bahamas from all over to try to hook one. While many game fish bite and run, peeling off maybe twenty or forty yards of line, a bonefish will strip a hundred before you have time to blink. They are highly sought after. They live on shallow flats, and consequently, getting to them requires a boat that can float in just a few inches of water. That type of boat is called a skiff, and nobody made a better bonefish skiff than Hack.
Hack had no family, no wife, and no children, which meant that the skill and artistry involved with building his skiffs would die with him. The more I got to know him, the more I realized that it was that fact that bothered Hack more than anything.
Months passed. Hack helped me with my house, and I helped him in his shop—learning what I could. One of the things that made Hack such a master craftsman with wood was his ability to seamlessly fit it together. While his boats may have required hundreds of pieces of wood, it was tough to tell that when you were sitting in one. So tight and smooth were his joints, it was as if he’d carved the thing out of a single tree. And if I had to state the one quality that made this possible, it was patience. Customers paid Hack $40,000 to $60,000 for one skiff. He made, at most, two a year. He wasn’t in a hurry and wasn’t motivated by money; he just loved building boats. Sometimes I’d catch him with his eyes closed, running his fingers along the wood he was sanding.
Bonefish braille.
One evening in his shop, Hack stopped sanding, ran his fingers along the lines of the wood, lost in the grain. His eyes a thousand miles beyond that shop. A whisper. “This is where I work out my anger. I rub this wood, and it forces it out, spilling it on the ground, where it drains into that water. The tide pulls it out to sea.” He nodded, speaking not so much to me as the memory of something or someone. “My baptism.”
A second passed before I asked my question. “How much anger is left?”
A smile. “Don’t know.”
“How will you know when you reach the end of it?”
“Never gotten there. But I guess I won’t be angry anymore.”
Tied hand in hand with his love of boats was his love of fishing for the elusive bonefish. Eighty years of casting for them meant that Hack knew where they were. Knew their patterns. What currents brought them where and what fly needed to be thrown when and how. Here, too, Hack gave me an education. And while I truly loved spending time with the old man, my gut told me that Hack was sharing what he knew with me, both about boats and bonefish, about coffee and cigarettes, about shaping wood and life in the Bahamas, because he was alone in this world and had no one to share it with. I think Hack was looking at the end of his life and taking a lifetime’s worth of experience and knowledge with him to a grave on the northwestern side of the island. This explained the resident sadness I experienced while around him. And while he knew some joy being around me, my presence did not redeem whatever he’d lost somewhere in his past. The more time I spent around him and the more I listened to him cough, the more I came to realize that Hack was saying good-bye to the world. I didn’t know how long that process would take, but when Hack came to me and told me that he wanted he and I to build a skiff together—a skiff for me—I knew it was a going away present.
Hack worked most mornings before sunrise in his shop; then about once or twice a week, a client would show up and Hack would putter off in his skiff to some hidden bonefish hole. When he left with his clients, he left me alone in his shop so I met most of the guys with whom he fished. They were all the same. Überwealthy guys living the life I’d chased under Pickering, looking for peace of mind. Peace of heart. A break from the pace of their lives. They didn’t love the bonefish, or Hack for that matter. They came here to conquer a bonefish so they could go home with pictures and a story and brag to all their friends. Hack knew this. He also knew that they needed what he had to offer, so he didn’t judge them for their lack of character or the fact that they let their lives back home dictate the pace at which they lived. Rather than decide what pace they wanted to live and then live at that pace. When I realized this, it hit me. Hack was doing the same thing with me. He was readjusting my internal clock. The pace at which I lived. I realized this one morning sitting on my porch, staring west out across the Atlantic. My coffee had grown cold. I looked down and saw a half cup of cold coffee staring back at me. That meant, in my haste, I had not sucked it down so fast that I hadn’t truly tasted it. Working with Marshall, I learned how to find and brew great coffee, but living with Hack, I learned how to taste it.
Big difference.
Somewhere in my second year with Hack, he double-booked clients for a day. Two guys show up, fly rods in hand, expecting the storied James J. Hackenworth to “put them on the fish.” Hack turned to me and said, “You mind helping out an old man?”
Thus began my career as a bonefish guide.
When the guy protested, Hack backed me up. “He’s better than me.”
Setting out, it struck me how that was the first time anyone had backed me up in a long time. And as much as I guarded my heart from anyone, I felt a twinge toward Hack.
My client was the CFO of a Fortune 500 company with a Stanford MBA. Becau
se I didn’t want to answer a bunch of questions about how I ended up here, I decided not to give him my academic résumé. Figured it was just less complicated if he thought of me as an island bum who happened to know the location of the elusive bonefish. By the end of the afternoon, I’d put the guy on so many fish that he was rubbing his forearm to get the cramp out. Finally, he just sat down in the front of the boat, swallowed four ibuprofen, took off his hat, and shook his head. I asked, “You okay?”
“Best day of fishing ever. Period.” He paid me $500 for the day, plus a $500 tip. I tried to split it with Hack but he just laughed. “What am I going to do with it? Can’t spend what I got.”
We sat, staring out across the water. Hack with his cigarette and I with my water. Seldom was I without a bottle of water in my hand. Hack noticed it. “You drink that a lot.”
“Figure it’s better than Scotch.” I laughed. “Or the latest fad light beer.”
“Why the bubbles?”
I glanced at the plastic bottle. “I guess I like the way it feels.”
He took a long draw on his cigarette. He gazed out in front of us toward the coast of Florida some forty-four miles away. “I know you’re here running from something that hurt you—from someone—but you need to know that to the folks you meet—” He pointed his cigarette at my water. “You’re like that bottle of water.” He squinted at me, and I thought I saw the residue of a tear. “Don’t let the pain of whatever or whoever hurt you bottle itself up inside.” A breeze rippled across the water and settled on us. “Everywhere on the face of this planet, water is life, and I don’t know why, but you have that effect on people. They are drawn to it.” He reached for my bottle and swigged from it. “They like the way it feels going down.”