To whoever finds this notebook…
This is what really happened to Jim Hobbins, the boy lost out of Cedar Key. I don't write a lot of stories so I might get my order mixed up.
Still, don’t let nobody tell it different.
First of all, I promised myself I wasn’t going to write it down at all until I knew I probably wouldn’t make it home. It’s been so long now since I seen ship or shore. So I guess I’m pretty sure.
Second of all, I don't much enjoy writing when I don't have to. Ask anybody who knows me. Mrs. Harrison says my handwriting looks like chicken scratches, but I think chicken scratches are nicer.
Third of all, I don't want Mom to worry no more or think it's her fault somehow. It was me who snuck out to go fishing. I made my own choices. And this was about the worst I ever done.
I hope that whoever finds this notebook also finds the Montauk and figures out how to get it back to my family.
It's a good boat.
So how did I get here? Wherever here is.
Grandpa would’ve said it was easy as pie and dumb as donuts.
I set out from Cedar Key on a Thursday night, as soon as I got done serving detention for laying my head down in homeroom. You can tell Mrs. Harrison I wasn’t being disrespectful. It’s just that I hadn’t had much sleep.
But that’s not the right place to start the story. Not the whole thing anyhow.
It all started with the dadgum snapper.
Red snapper is as fine a table fare as you can get, and fancy restaurants pay top dollar to us fishing families for hauling them back to the docks.
So when the government cut quotas across the state, prices shot up like a rocket. To make things even more interesting, the snapper have been hard to find.
For fishing towns like Cedar Key, it turned into a gold rush.
Captain Caruso was the first one to find a hot spot. So while the rest of us was making nickels and dimes on mullet and mackerel, he was hauling in load after load of top-dollar fish. Earlier in the week a pair of restaurant owners from Gainesville got into a fistfight trying to buy them up.
And of course Caruso was keeping his lips locked tight.
That’s just the way some captains are–born in a storm and salty as a shaker. Don’t need nothing from nobody. Dad’s that way too.
Or at least he was.
I wish Dad would have let me go with him when he set out to find his own honey hole. Maybe I could have helped find the fish or drove the Montauk when he got tired. I’m nowhere near as strong as him, but I could have hauled that anchor when the storm came up. Maybe he wouldn’t have–
Dadgum snapper.
Still, I never expected Captain Caruso to do what he did.
The sun was getting low by the time I got down to the docks, what with the detention. Everyone was watching Caruso unload a monster haul of top dollar fish–almost 600 pounds of extra large red snapper. And since the prices were high and he was on the spot, he was fueling up his trawler to go right back out and catch more. The snapper bite is even better at night, so there was no point in going to sleep.
I didn’t want to be jealous but it was hard not to, seeing all that green money getting counted into his hand when I could barely afford fuel and a few pounds of frozen bait.
I guess he caught me staring.
“Jim,” he called. I pretended not to hear and shrunk away. But when I got to the slip where we keep our Boston Whaler, he was right behind me. At that point there wasn’t any place else to go except maybe the ocean. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think about jumping into the drink.
“Jim,” he said again. I spun to face him.
“Yessir?”
“Sorry about your dad,” he said.
I knew it’d be something like that. I’d heard it plenty from other captains. But I needed thoughts and prayers as much as I needed another past due notice on the dock fees.
“S’all right,” I said.
“He’s gonna heal up fine. In a few months.”
I nodded.
He stared at me hard, as if he was worried I might crack or cry or wet my pants like some little kid.
I just stared back.
“Can you read map numbers?” he asked finally.
“Course.”
“Alright. Turn around, then.” Like my dad, Caruso didn’t have the kind of voice you disobeyed. I spun around and felt a piece of paper pressed against my back. Then there was a pokey feeling like he was writing. It didn’t hurt but it didn’t tickle neither.
“Stop squirming!” he ordered. I did my best.
A half a minute later he spun me back around, pencil in one hand and something else tucked in the other. I glanced out of the corner of my eye.
It looked like money.
“Here,” Caruso said, pressing the wadded up paper into my palm. He closed his fist over mine and I couldn’t help but notice the scars. They were an old man’s hands.
I shook my head. “Mom don’t want no charity.”
“Good,” he said. “Cause it ain’t charity. It’s a loan you never have to pay back.”
“I… I don’t know,” I said. “I might better ask if it’s okay.”
He took a deep breath and frowned like he was thinking. “All right then. Call it a commission.”
“A commission?”
“I see those pencil drawings you make. I’m hiring you to do a drawing of my boat. I’ll hang it in the kitchen.”
Heat crept up my neck and I was glad it was dark because I was sure I’d turned red as tomato soup. I never showed my drawings to anybody.
I wanted to tell him that my sketches wasn’t worth money. That I was just wasting time waiting for dad to get back to the docks. Waiting for the bait to show up. Waiting for the fish to bite.
But for some reason, I just said, “Yessir. I’ll make it a real good one.”
“I know you will. And don’t spend anything before you have a look at those numbers.” Then he stuck the pencil behind his ear and climbed the stairs back toward the end of the dock where he kept his 26-foot trawler.
I uncrumpled the paper to find a hundred dollar bill. Wow! I knew I’d have to make him a really nice drawing for that.
That’s when I noticed what he’d written along the edges. A set of numbers. What in the world?
I jumped from the dock onto the Montauk, scrambled around under the console for the dry box and flipped open the lid. I pulled out a flashlight and the plastic-coated navigation chart. With the flashlight in my teeth, I unrolled the map across the steering wheel and traced with my finger to the numbers he gave me.
That can’t be right, I thought. I double checked. It was.
I could only stare.
The coordinates Captain Caruso gave me were for a spot nearly five miles southeast of the Whistle Buoy. I’d heard of guys going out that far to fish, but not regularly. And there was only one reason Captain Caruso would go out that far.
Dadgum snapper.