Logan hadn't cried since he was a teenager. He remembered vividly the helplessness that accompanies the loss felt when God chooses to take. He remembered his grandmother, in her hospital bed. Deep, gravel in a can, breaths barely seemed to escape her lungs and he knew that the woman who had helped raise him was on the way out. He didn't feel anything at first, she'd had a brain aneurism, what was there to feel. It was a bitch of a thing an aneurism. If it hits you in the right spot, you're as good as dead. It came later, on the way home from the hospital that he felt the deepening void of dread and shock. His mother had called and said that shortly after he left, his grandmother was no more. He remembered sobbing like a toddler who scraped his knees. Deep long bawl's of regret and the realization of mortality had assaulted him like a mugger in the night. It was different now. He thought of Jason and replayed everything they had ever done together. The memories, marching to the beat of emotion. Happy, sad, happy, sad, took him on an emotional roller coaster ride from hell. He remembered fishing, baseball games, family affairs, stolen girlfriends, fights, and drunken expeditions. The last one made Logan laugh out loud. He remembered being a shade under the legal drinking age of this country, a shade being about 4 years too young. 17, at 17 he and Jason had gotten into the liquor cabinet in his fathers workshop, hidden behind old fishing rods and boat parts, it lay. The cabinet that contained the forbidden drink of men, the cabinet that held the wildest of turkeys, his excellency James Beam, and the great daniels of house Jack. Logan chuckled even louder as he thought of how he and Jason had begun this one particular drinking mission. They had infiltrated the garage and had pretended that those bottles that lay in the cabinet were royalty. They were missing artifacts of an age not yet discovered. They were relics of prohibition. They were in fact, by law, forbidden. It added a layer of excitement as they cracked open the cabinet. Logan was the first to conquer this particular historic site, catching a wild turkey bare handed and drinking its guts, he was a man now. He felt the burn of adolescence leaving his body with every swallow the warm throw of manhood encased his body and after he and Jason had fed the fire of manhood to the brim, they decided why stop there. It was Jason's idea, trudging through the swamp and it was an incredibly stupid one. Logan remembered thinking it but never saying it because the way he felt, no poisonous animal, gator, insect, or swamp person would dare to trifle with the first slayer of turkey wild. However, the gusto they both felt immediately left them as they waded across hip deep mud. Jason attempted to bring humor to the situation by encouraging Logan to pretend that they were in the army, Vietnam, and given assignment to sack a camp that contained Vietcong spies. It did no good, they were both shivering scared, completely sober and getting sucked into mud deeper with each step. They must have spent 3 hours trying to get out of that sloshy hell. Logan remembered getting home that night, his father who was supposed to be gone until the next day, sat patiently as Jason and Logan scraped up the drive way. Logan thought fondly of his father for the first time. He had expected to be hit with a tire iron and locked in his room for the rest of time. Jason was close enough with the family that Logan's father might have whooped his ass too. But it didn't go down like that. Logan remembered looking at Jason as he looked right back at him, ready for the punishment designated for law breakers like them. Instead, Howard Albright took a deep breath, looked them up and down and laughed harder than Logan had ever heard him laugh before. Mr. Albright, to Jason, had looked on the verge of hysterics as he gazed upon these two idiots caked in mud so thick that they couldn't bend their legs. Logan thought of the way they probably looked coming up the drive, stiff legged, like a pair of penguins or guys who had just shit themselves, either one would have sufficed to sum them up. Howard Albright shook his head and stated calmly. "I can't bring myself to do it boys, its priceless, in addition to you two idiots looking like you've been tarred and feathered, it's just too good. You see those bottles over there? Those my good men are so watered down that you'd have a better shot of getting hammered on O'Doul's than you would by chugging that shit. You see boys; I've been keeping an eye on you. I've seen you both pining after that liquor cabinet like a couple of hound dogs. So I figure what the hell, I'll have some fun. Your mother and I took the liberty of draining most of those bottles at the last cookout we had, added about a gallon of water to it and put them back to see if we could trust you. I'll be honest it hurts a little that we couldn't but it feels a hell of a lot better now looking at you two dumbasses." Logan remembered his father at this moment in time with crystal clarity. He bellowed once more, called for his wife to come look, snapped a polaroid, and left Jason and Logan stiff legged, mute, and shivering there in the threshold of the garage.
It was memories like this that gave Logan the most trouble. He hated thinking of Jason as though he were dead but the past week and a half had turned up no clues, no new information and for someone as capable as Jason, there was simply no logical reason that he would still be out in the bush, he knew his way around and he knew how to get home. That was where the dread came from. Logan had made up his mind, he was going back to the harbor tomorrow. He was going to look for himself. He wanted no one with him, this was something he wanted to do alone. There was an urge in him to put forth the effort as though Jason were watching. He wanted him to know that he was still looking, still concerned, he still cared.
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Logan brought his contender slowly through the narrowing channel that led to the harbor. There was a storm still surging up from the south and the outer bands would be there within the week. The funny thing about tropical storms is that they affect the waters of the areas in their path long before they arrive. This particular storm "Ginger" was flirting with a category 1 hurricane and seemed to dance back and forth each day between a tropical storm and a hurricane. Logan hoped it would skip off out into the gulf but the models predicted that it would hook north in a matter of days, slamming directly into the suncoast. The waters in the gulf were turbulent even though the weather was mild. Mildly fucking hot. Bluebird skies indicated that fishing wouldn't be good for a few days yet. The evening storms in Florida could range from a sprinkle to an all out flash flooding bitch. The flooding bitch coupled with the bluebird skies often turned a fishes tummy sour and they wouldn't chew for a few days. Not like that mattered to Logan now, that was the last thing on his mind. He wanted answers. Mainly for himself but he also felt a need to provide answers to others who were impacted by Jason's disappearance. He didn't know why he was here. He had made such a good argument the night before but as he stepped on the the scaly back of the island, he second guessed his intentions. What did he expect to find? The harbor was a small spit of land, someone could map the area in an hour. If you looked under every rock and in every crevice that flowed from her, you might need two hours max. But there he stood looking out in every direction try to materialize the events of that night in his mind. He found his way around the back of the harbor where the giant grill lay dormant. The Ma L, never looked more ghostly, and for the first time, Logan felt as though he should have had someone come out with him. He felt alone, running a fools errand. He searched the area for almost 2 hours with nothing more than a headache to show for his efforts. The sun had done its damage on his pupils, he had taken his sunglasses off when he thought he saw something and then put them back on, he continued this throughout his search and it had done nightmares to his eyes. That headache that starts behind your eyeballs. What a bitch. He smelled the remnants of charred fish on the grill, which didn't help his headache either. In fact he began to feel queasy. There was something about charred meats that smells wonderful when it's cooking but once it's cooled and then rained on, it's more of a musty, waterlogged earth smell. He came to the conclusion in that moment that this would be his last search of the harbor, Jason wasn't here. There was no evidence of anyone being here in days. No footprints, no new fish carcasses or clam shells that eluded to the presence of drunken shenanigans, nothing. He decided then that he would begin looking inland, they had mapped a small area around the harbor but nothing had come from that either. It was Logan's idea to focus on a small radius. If Jason had decided to try and walk out, he could have only made it so far inland before needing some sort of water vessel. The way the little creeks and channels cut through dry land was enough to make you sick. You could be walking on dry land one moment and then your foot would find a sogging matt of seaweed only to introduce you to a water hole 8 feet deep. It was a nightmare to search. You couldn't use dogs for this very reason. It was closing in on panic time and he'd considered getting a helicopter to expand the search. However, Jason wasn't a little kid wandering out here and he wasn't running from the police. A request for a chopper at this point would prove fruitless. At that Logan decided that the only logical step to take would be to bring his kayak over and navigate through the mangroves. Even this posed a problem due to the carving rivers that ran through the mangroves, you were at their mercy. Jason could be laid up on a stretch of land but if one of those rivers ran away from it, you'd never know otherwise. You were at the mercy of the sea, the scrawny, narrow midget sea that hid things just as well as revealing them. It was almost as though the mangroves had a secret, a secret they wouldn't give up without relentless pursuit and ruthless persuasion.
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The wind was howling, the water was treacherous, and neither Frank nor Don had experience navigating anything bigger than a military grade zodiac. However, they managed to get this 20 foot "rental" skiff from the boat club at about 0200, around the last bend and into the back bay where the harbor sat. Frank had heard many a local talking around the marina about the goings on of the harbor. He heard tales of local boys exaggerate about their alcohol consumption and their ability to bang just about any tourist girl they chose to take out there. It sounded like the harbor may have had an STD of some sort based on the disgusting stories he'd heard. Hell it probably had some sort of hepatitis that was yet to be discovered by science. Hepatitis C 2.0, the platinum package. Regardless, Frank and Don had agreed to come take a look at this scab in the bay. Frank brought the skiff along the edge and slammed it straight into an oyster bar. "Fucks sake, Frank!." Don screeched as he almost went head over heels onto the jagged points of shell that were ready to welcome him with open arms. "Sorry, I can't drive this hunk of shit very well, it handles like a elephant on roller skates." Frank and Don dismounted onto the harbor at 0257. By 0315, it was determined that there was nothing here worth looking at. Don had confirmed what Frank had anticipated. "Too much rain, everything is a wash." "I found a track on the west side of the island but it looks like a police grade boot. Pretty fresh, less than 12 hours old." "Sheriff probably came out earlier doing the same thing we're doing. He's a persistent bastard." "By my guess, and by the look of it, they probably have 50 meter spread into the mangroves, anything more than that, we're gonna need a better way in. I'd be willing to bet we'll find some answers, but we're only at the surface, we need to dig in about a mile or two to get a good read." "That doesn't really help us does it?" Frank replied in agitation." "That's the problem." Don volleyed. "We haven't had a chance to map out this area much since we got here. We're gonna have to reevaluate before we go in any deeper. At that, Frank and Don trudged back to the skiff they "borrowed", their treadles shoes leaving no proof of their existence. Don was the first to spot it, as he typically was. "2 o'clock." Frank squinted and adjusted his eyes. He was glad he picked this week to examine the harbor. The moon was almost full and high in the sky. The dark and light shades of grey were enough to make out different shades of grey and develop a mental map of the foliage. Then he saw it. Just off the east side of the harbor, across the channel in the hedge of mangroves was an abnormality. To the untrained eye, hell even to a trained eye it was easily missed. There was the slightest bend of branches around the base of the mangroves. It could have been anything. A heron could have been perched there, a muskrat could have had a tussle with a copperhead, one thing was certain, it didn't look right. "Yeah, I got it." Frank replied. "Don't look right does it?" Don was still deep in concentration, "Whatever made that had to be at least 36 to 40 inches wide at the base. The weather hasn't helped though its almost back to form. Wind and high water almost shut it right back up." Frank dreaded this part. He knew that to get a better read, they would have to venture into the mangroves. That was for another night though. They didn't have the tools or time to get to it just yet. The only thing working in their favor was the isolation of the island. There wouldn't be anyone here or around here to takes notice of their activities. However, he also knew that they needed to trek inward. How far? He didn't know. How long would it take? He didn't know that either. The only thing he did know was that something, maybe the boat man himself, beckoned them east.
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In Greek mythology, Charon or Kharon, is the ferryman of Hades who carries souls of the newly deceased across the rivers Styx and Acheron that divided the world of the living from the world of the dead.
Earl Van Stal had heard of this. He had heard of the ferryman and the job he had. Earl found it ironic that he'd been adorned the nickname of "the boat man" while working for Mr. Jimmy at the Freemont boatyard. He didn't make the connection then, he was too early in his quest to understand the connection. and quite frankly it wasn't a suitable enough title to define what he'd become. We was not just a taker of life, he was an inflictor, a tormenter, a monster among men. It was bad enough to take a man's life but the reprehensible joy he got out of it cloaked him in a robe of disdain. It was an unquenchable thirst that could never be slaked. He lived for those last moments of life where the intimacy of death, typically reserved for loved ones or solitude, seemed to blossom just for him. He took great pleasure in spoiling the end for his victims. He swelled with joy as the last phase of life entered and exited the eyes of those he'd locked away. That phase of acceptance where those who faced it knew the end was near. They make their peace with God and pass through to the other side. There was no such phase, or time for such a phase according to Earl's schedule. He expected perfection as he induced death. He knew that the last sparkle of life that shown in the eye was reserved for him. It excited him. If a person chose to try to deny him that last right, Earl would make sure that they couldn't. He would make quick work of an eye lid. Slicing it back and disconnecting the membrane that attached it to the brow. Even as blood pooled in an open eye, he knew that the last thing a person would see, albeit through a film of red, would be his beautiful face. He was more than the boat man. He was the giver of death. Pride wrapped its arms tight like a lover around his body when he thought of it. It was almost a godly feeling that few would ever know.
His schedule was meticulous and he knew that he would need to expedite his efforts with Jason Stark. The boy had become too comfortable. He had shown Earl reckless trust and understanding where others had simply "known" what his intentions were. He couldn't quite place it and it had confused him for a moment. For gods sake, the boy thanked him! Earl was sure that his transformation into a master of deception was nearing its completion. Deceiving people had become an art form in itself. He thought of people he'd taken. He'd made mistakes along the way but for the most part he was efficient. There were two in particular that stood out to Earl. The boy in Mississippi and another in North Carolina. What a mess he thought. He remembered the North Carolina boy well but he couldn't place his name. It was an eerie reminder that things COULD go wrong. Even as methodical as he thought he'd been, a storm slammed into the coast the same week he had taken the young man. He'd barely had time to latch the lid of the piney tomb he encased the boy in. He improvised and fastened the largest rocks he could to the outer edges of the box. He figured that it wouldn't take long for the storm surge to dislodge them and send that boys corpse rocketing across the waters like a misguided missile. Sure enough, he found out later that the storm in deed had sent that wooden box across the sound like a rogue fed ex package. The cops picked it up and starting spouting gibberish on the news about the indecency of burying someone alive, blah blah blah. There was no decency in Earl, he didn't need it. There wasn't enough room. Earl committed that day memory.
That's what happened early on with Earl, sloppiness. He'd learned to prepare after that point. He taught himself the importance of learning to read the land, read tides almost flawlessly, and take factors of the environment, mold them into useful information, and commit them to memory. He had made great efforts to know each of his victim's names since then, he needed it to be personal, intimate, a relationship. Hell, if he was in a good mood, like now, he could take his time and get to know them. He peeked over at Jason to make sure he still slept as soundly as a little fawn, nestled up in the thicket, no movement, everything was good. Earl couldn't figure out whether Jason was sleeping or unconscious, the same deep, rhythmic breathes escaped a man's lungs the same in either scenario. He'd taken time to get to know Jason more so than the others, he had a feeling that it had a lot to do with the remoteness of the area or maybe he was just comfortable. There had been nervousness early on but now there was just the comfort of the job to be done. Earl had been methodical as he planned his expedition. Another trick he learned after that mistake in Mississippi. He needed isolation and privacy to take his time and in Mississippi, some bitch of a woman had gotten a gander at him, throwing a wrench into his work. He remembered the Shwarber boy vividly now. He had taken him down by the mighty Mississippi in the wee hours of the morning. The boy, drunk, had mistaken Earl for a hobo. He couldn't blame him. Earl took little interest in his appearance or cleanliness. He felt at one with what he needed to be. Not a man but part of the earth. He could tell when he approached the Schwarber boy that the sight of him and the smell of him had probably thrown up a red flag. The boy had almost immediately taken the offensive as Earl had tried the nice guy routine. Schwarber had shouted indecencies and shooed him away like a stray dog. At this, nice guy Earl left and he picked the boy up, almost over his head and slammed him down with such force that his skull seemed to compress into the pavement. It started sloppy, but he didn't care, at that point. He was not in a good mood that morning. In fact he had been in a funk for a few days prior and needed to go to work out of frustration and boredom. Schwarber was given extra attention over the next couple of days. Earl remembered having to stifle the boy's cries as he splayed open the webbing between his toes. He sat back and admired that act in silent, self-reverence. He bet it hurt like a sonofabitch. The way he made his incision and gently pulled the little piggies apart, seeing the flesh tear ever so slightly with every centimeter of pressure that was applied as he pulled. That Schwarber boy had a mouth on him too. Good lord. Called Earl every name in the book. He kicked and spat at Earl in attempts to dissuade him. He took care of that in a hurry though. He remembered the muffled sqoosh as he brought his mallet down knocking the boy unconscious. Earl then took the wooden mallet, gathered a small rock down by the river and began to chisel away the boy's teeth like a young Indian boy, fashioning his first spearhead.
Earl was startled by a rustling in the bushes. He began exhaling his festering breath a little easier as he saw a rabbit bounding slowly toward the edge of mangroves. It took him immediately back to the Mississippi fiasco. He had just finished his work on the Shwarber boy. The mallet had done the trick that evening. It found its home on the boy's ribcage, sternum and skull enough times to do the job twice. Earl was so invigorated by the sound the mallet made in its last heaves downward, it sounded like a medicine ball, filled with clam chowder being bounced on a gym floor. It had entranced him and he found himself quite literally beating a dead horse. Then it had happened, he had picked up the faintest change in the wind and caught the scent of something that was not kosher about the evening. It smelled like men. His time wandering the south had honed his ability to smell danger. He felt danger as he picked up the men's scent. He was quite sure they had tracked him and it wasn't by chance, no small feat. He heard lowly, almost inaudibly, swaying branches that shook slightly as they trekked his way. There was no reason anyone would stumble upon his current location by accident. Earl, in a panic, left immediately. He bounded south for almost two days only stopping to rest, shit, and eat. Earl felt as though he was leaving behind a child as he remembered Cole Schwarber's body, alone and in need of a proper send off, just lying under some branch. A job unfinished he thought. A mistake that he would not be making again.
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Jason woke from a restless sleep. He felt as though he had been in and out most of the night. He felt the dry, heavy, fog of waking overtake his body. His eyes were crusted shut and thick drool had dried on his cheek. He searched the area for Earl to see if he had readied the camp for their departure. Jason righted himself against the old pine tree and began to clarify reality as he exhaled a long, overdue yawn. A yawn that comes from a true sleep. He shimmied himself up the tree and began to take his first steps. The first one, left foot first, hit tried and true against the damp ground. His second, the right, hit down uneasy and painful, and he saw the insole of his foot pointing up at him as the bone from his ankle pressed parallel to the ground. Jason went down to a knee as if to pray. The pain wasn't sharp and fierce as he'd expected. It was tight, sore, and dull, almost as though it had been that way for a while. In a panic, he cried out for Earl. "Earl! You there!, I need help!." Earl was nowhere in sight. He tried a second time to no avail. Jason began to cry out a third time but chose the first rule of survival, stay put and wait for help. Jason conformed to his solitude and slithered back to the safety of the ancient pine he now called home. Sitting there, sweating despite the wind that had kicked up, he began to cry. He was confused, he was in a haze of extended pain and shock. He couldn't take it anymore. His head felt like pieces of paper, held together by cheap elmers glue, pulling apart slowly. He was hungry again, the crabs yesterday had only been a twisted temptation to thrust his hunger into overdrive and he was scared. He didn't know Earl from a hole in the ground. He might have just decided to pick up and leave, deciding that a disabled waterman wasn't worth the trouble. He may have gone for help? Yes! That's what it was Jason thought. I'm probably too heavy to keep heaving in and out of that canoe. He reassured himself until the tears subsided. As he gathered himself, he heard footsteps hurtling toward him at great speed. Earl burst through the underbrush, a crazed berserker of body odor and filth. "What the hell did I tell you boy!" The ferocity of the statement threw Jason into a fit of panic and he felt as though he should try to run away. A lot of good that would do, he withdrew the thought. "Jesus Earl, calm down. I hurt my ankle bad." Earl's grim and murderous face never left its post. "Calm down!? Don't tell me my business you little shit! What did I tell you yesterday? WE would see how you could manage traveling. Did I say YOU could get to it yourself? NO! I surely did not. You're damn lucky you didn't crack your fucking head open again." Earl had knelt by Jason and placed his hands on his shoulders as he scolded him. The strength in his hands surprised Jason. He thought of how a rescue diver felt as survivors of a capsized boat might cling to them. Panicked, adrenaline strength. "You're hurting me Earl!" Jason pleaded. As those words escaped his gritted teeth, Earl withdrew. "I .......I'm sorry son" the compassion of a savior crept back into the eyes and larynx that had emitted such a rueful, insidious octave only moments earlier. "I didn't mean to yell. I just didn't want to see you worse off than you already were." The boat man sat back and offered to examine the ankle in question. "Let me see how bad it is son." Even though he'd performed the procedure himself early in the evening yesterday. He found it amazing that Jason was so exhausted or unconscious, shit he couldn't tell, that he barely batted an eye as Earl wrenched his ankle to such an angle that it could only be described as "exorcist like". Jason snapped his head away from Earl like a child who had just been slapped and wasn't ready to forgive just yet. "I'm fine asshole. You'd think I was your damn kid or something". Earl stood up and threw his shoulders back in an over exaggerated stretch. "Just remember something boy, I'm what you have out here. If I have to be your fuckin daddy then I will be. In fact, you better get used to callin me daddy out here, I'm all you got." Earl couldn't stop himself, the look of surprise, teetering on the verge of hysterics on Jason's face forced him to continue. "You wanna know something boy? Lemme tell you where you stand about now. I told you they call me the boat man didn't I? Well let me tell you why I figure they do. Do you know the story behind the boat man son?" "I don't give a shit." Jason replied, still not ready to forgive the verbal lashing he'd received. Earl continued "It aint somebody who works on boats to get em runnin right or scraping barnacles off a hull, no sir, he was an old boy back in greek times, he and his boat. The boat man was the one, the one who stood between life and death. He was the one that carried you from one place to the next. I figure that's who I am for you right in this moment so you better start listening to every fucking word I have to say because it can get a helluva lot worse. " As the boat man finished his sermon, he began walking away as if to leave for good. He turned on heal, strode back next to Jason and drove his boot heel straight down, with the ferocity of a rifle shot, into Jason's badly sprained ankle. The crack of bone sounded like a cherry bomb being ignited under water. Jason's scream caught in his throat as the shock and very prevalent pain coursed up his leg. The boat man knelt, Jason, catching glimpses of him through the screen of oncoming unconsciousness, sat unable to speak. The boat man got within centimeters of Jason's ear as if shooshing him to sleep. "A lot worse." Jason's eyes fluttered like a monarch's wings in a high wind, his body slumped down to the ground and he was out, into the darkness, into the trenches of war that raged across the alluvial fields of his subconscious.