Read Online Everglades Assault by Randy Wayne White - Free Book Online Page B

moment I agreed that the bar seemed quiet and benign my luck would change and something—or someone—would prove me wrong.
    And something did.
    Our waitress was a pretty blonde who looked as if she might have been a cheerleader and president of her class fifteen years and a husband or two ago. She had the look of worn beauty: still striking at first glance, but then you noticed the lines forming at the eyes and forehead, and her ample breasts seemed to owe a great debt to Playtex.
    She wore a clean white uniform, bra and panties visible beneath. She looked tired, and her smile suggested a certain vulnerability and the knowledge that life is sometimes not all it’s cracked up to be. The plastic tag on her uniform said her name was Stella.
    She wiped our table with a bar cloth, added napkins and a basket of chips. Hervey ordered gin with tonic, and a twist of lime. I ordered the draft beer.
    So we sat in the comfortable coolness of the bar, made small talk, and watched Stella as she went to get our drinks. As my eyes adjusted, the blank faces at the tables near us became people. It’s an old habit of mine—and maybe a bad habit. I see strangers, study their dress, their mannerisms, then try to pigeonhole them.
    I don’t like to be categorized, and I shouldn’t do it to others. But I do.
    At the nearest table were a man and woman—both somewhere in their fifties. There was a bookish air about the two of them, and their clothes looked as if they had been ordered from the L.L. Bean field catalogue. They drank white wine and didn’t say much to each other. Yet there was an obvious affection there, like old friends content with their silence. I decided they were a modern rarity—a happily married couple who had probably come to Flamingo for the bird-watching. The happy older couples fill me with a certain reassurance. Their contentment bespeaks order and reason. I decided they were the type I’d like to have charter my boat. When the man felt me studying them, he looked up briefly, nodded and smiled.
    I smiled back.
    At another table were three beefy business types who were working their way toward a deliberate drunk. Theirs seemed to be a harmless vacation: leave the wife and kids at home for a few days while they fished and drank and acted silly in the Everglades.
    I watched and listened to them for a few minutes, and decided that they were all pretty good guys taking a well-deserved break.
    The other table did not fare so well in the MacMorgan Rating Game.
    There were four men at the long table. They all wore safari suits of various shades and design. The obvious patriarch of the group was a man in his late thirties who bragged long and loud about his big-game-fishing exploits in South America and the Bahamas. The other three men at the table listened anxiously, laughing at the right places, nodding enviously when the patriarch’s story demanded it.
    The man at the head of the table had black curly hair and a swarthy face. His massive hand clutched a whiskey tumbler, and his big shoulders and belly strained at the leisure suit. I decided he was probably the head of some corporation—real estate, probably—and these were his important drones, following him around on this fishing vacation to brownnose and make points, and generally bask in the light of their browbeating boss.
    The drunker the guy got, the louder he talked.
    â€œI’m telling you boys, fishing isn’t a sport. It’s a war,” he was saying. “Just like business—it’s you against the fish. Get it? You against the fish !”
    The three men laughed loudly.
    Hervey and I exchanged looks and listened to him go on.
    He said, “Course, you boys wouldn’t know anything about fighting a really big fish. Those piddly little tarpon the guide got us into today weren’t nothing compared to a big blue marlin or tuna. Nobody in this whole shithole knows what real fishing is really