“Photography teaches me to be observant,” said Serge. “Discipline. Becoming one with the environment so I don’t miss even the smallest detail.”
A skunk ape crossed the road behind him.
Click. “Got it!” He stood and continued on. Trees gave way to scrub, the sky got big, water up ahead, sagging power lines and crooked palms. A loose parade of cotton-clouds drifting north, and Serge free-associated on their shapes: “Elephant, giraffe, Snoopy, Elvis, the Baltic states, chain of mitochondric enzyme inhibitors, a Faustian choice…” Standing against it all was a solitary old clapboard building at the foot of the Bogie Channel Bridge. White paint and white metal storm awnings. Behind it sat the dock, a neat row of identical rental boats and an aboveground fuel tank with a big red Texaco star on the side. Serge walked past a sign:
OLD WOODEN BRIDGE FISHING CAMP
EFFICIENCY COTTAGES
BEER • TACKLE • BAIT
He reached the building.
Ting-a-ling. The woman behind the counter looked up. She had a tank top, ponytail and a local’s tan. “Hi, Serge…” She raised a hand in front of her face. “Don’t take my picture again!”
“You’re a living thing.” Click.
The woman finished unpacking a UPS box of spoon-lures and reached for a hook on the door under the number five. “Your regular room?”
“Thanks, Julie…. Ooooo, new fishing caps!” He grabbed one off a shelf and studied the front. “Embroidered establishment name and dateline. That means I’m not allowed to leave without it.”
She rang the register. “Anything else?”
“New T-shirts, too!” He held one up to his chest. “And hand-painted postcards. Gimme ten of each.”
“Who do you send all your cards to?”
“Me.” Serge inspected a nearly empty pegboard of Instamatic film and individual packets of Bayer aspirin. The Coca-Cola snack-bar menu board indicated Fruitopia was now in stock and pinfish were going for a buck apiece. Julie punched buttons on an accounting calculator. Serge spun a rack of sunglasses. “They shot the movie
“You told me.”
“When?”
“Last six times you stayed.”
Serge picked up a pot of complimentary coffee, smelled it and made a face. “It’s a B movie, but it beats trench mouth. They chopped up a guy and stuck him in your bait freezer over there.” Serge replaced the coffee beneath a mishmash of sun-faded photos covering the wall. People holding up bull dolphin and tarpon and snook. Bikinis, lobsters, smiles. Somebody’s dog was wearing a bandanna.
The back door opened. A man came in from the dock, sunglasses hanging from a lanyard around his neck. “Hi, Serge.”
“Hi, Mark.” Click.
“Anything going on?” asked Julie.
“One of the rental boats came back trashed again.”
“Which one?”
“Number seven, the businessmen.” He turned to Serge. “Guys from the Pacific rim, don’t know what nationality. Every morning this week they come in and buy twice as much bait as anyone needs and take a boat out all day.”
“Catching anything?”
“Apparently. Each time they come back, the deck is a bloody mess from bow to stern, but they never bring any fish to the dock. We just find all these skeletons in the bilge.”
“They’re eating raw fish out there?”
Mark nodded.
“What about the extra bait?”
“I think they’re eating that, too.” Mark snatched a compact yellow walkie-talkie off his belt. “Jim, hose out number seven…. That’s right, again.” He clipped the Motorola back on his shorts. “Staying in number five?”
“You know it.” Serge adjusted the band of his new cap and left through the rear door. He walked along the dock, where someone was flushing out a boat with a garden hose, pushing squid tentacles and loose suckers along the deck.
“Noble work.”
“What?”
Serge headed across the parking lot. He stopped and raised his camera. A row of tiny, white cottages from the forties. Picnic table in front of each.
The two proprietors were outside, trying to straighten a signpost someone had hit.
“Who’s he talking to?” asked Mark.
“Himself,” said Julie.
“…Ah, the Old Wooden Bridge Fishing Camp!” said Serge. “Last vestige of the early days, when rustic compounds defined the archipelago, vernacular gems with wraparound verandas and plantation fans, Zane Grey lounging in coconut shade, polishing dispatches on pompano for northern intelligentsia. Then the march of progress, coming ashore like Godzilla, smashing the historic fish camps like balsa-wood pagodas…”
“Why is he stomping around the parking lot like that?” asked Mark.
Julie shrugged.
“…Now they’re all memories. Even the old wooden bridge itself is gone, replaced by concrete. But at least the camp is still here….”
“What’s he doing now?” asked Mark.
“Kissing cottage number five.”
