Home Coming (The Survivalist Book 10) A. American (read after .txt) 📖

everywhere. Not to mention the gators. I was surprised at the number of them we saw. I figured they would have been hunted out by now. But maybe people found it wasn’t quite as easy as the TV show portrayed it.

The St Johns river can be confusing to navigate. There are numerous drainages that empty into it and many of them are wide and can be very easily confused for the actual river channel. But I’d fished this river for years and while I wasn’t intimately familiar with it, I knew where the major traps were. When we came to Hontoon Landing, I took the cut to Lake Beresford, leaving the main channel as I headed towards the lake.

Seeing a channel marker pass him, Sarge asked, “What are you doing?”

“We’re going to go into the lake and take a channel out of the south end,” I shouted. “It runs straighter than the river proper and will save miles. There are a lot of blind curves on the main channel.”

Sarge nodded, “Good idea. I don’t like blind corners.”

As we passed Hontoon Island, I remembered a lazy day of fishing with my dad. We were anchored across the river from the landing, using fishing as the excuse to get out of the house. Mostly what we were doing was talking shit and generally having a good time hanging out. There was quite a bit of boat traffic that day and the landing was crowded with boats launching and coming back in. As well as people just dropping into the store.

So, there was nothing special about the Gheenoe coming down the river towards us. We were anchored parallel to the river and as the small boat came abreast of us, it suddenly started to buck, rock and convulse in the water. Now, this all happened in seconds, but it was like it took place in slow motion.

When the boat started its acrobatics, the woman sitting in the front of the boat with her feet up, relaxing in the sun, gripped the gunnels and started to scream at the man in the back of the boat, “knock that shit off!”

Well, the poor bastard sitting in the stern of the boat had his hands full, literally, with the small Mercury outboard, that had until that very moment been attached to the stern. It was now free of the boat and the only thing keeping it from sinking to the bottom of the river was the fact that he had ahold of it, by the throttle. And it was twisted wide-ass open. It was like he had a giant weed-eater stuck in the water as it splashed and threw up geysers of water.

As the boat started to buck and rock, his lady friend began to scream at him as she held on for dear life. The struggle with the motor only lasted a few seconds though. After it made a couple of revolutions, coming completely out of the water in doing so, and assaulting our ears with the exhaust that was no longer muffled, everything went silent.

Now, up to this point I’d sat in complete shock at what I was witnessing. But when everything fell silent, the poor bastard stood there looking at the rising bubbles where his outboard had disappeared. His brand new outboard. Because, while the sound of the motor and the thrashing were gone, his lady friend’s complaints were not.

Finally, he shouted, “Bitch! Shut the fuck up!” Which, upon reflection was a little harsh. But at the moment, caused me to erupt into laughter, which he surely heard as we were only yards apart. Then he looked back at the bubbles and said, “It’s gone! It’s fucking gone! It’s brand fucking new!”

Of course, this only added to the laughter I was already experiencing, and I felt bad about it. Not bad enough to stop laughing, but bad enough to try and hide in the bottom of the boat. With his boat out of power, he made his lady friend move to the rear and he went to the bow where he dropped the trolling motor in. The current was sufficient enough that all it did was hold him in place, neither allowing him to go forward or to drift back against the current.

Now, I was still laughing. I mean, uncontrollable hysterical laughing as I lay rolling in the bottom of the boat. My dad called out to the man, “You need a hand?”

The man looked around for a second before replying, “Well dammit, I guess I need something!”

So, I had to get up and try and get my laughter under control, so I could look the man in the eye and offer some help. We pulled our anchors and moved out to where his stricken craft sat lazily in the current. Dad tossed him a line that he tied off and we pulled him across the river to Hontoon Landing. After wishing him luck, we went back across the channel and assumed our previous position. Where we could still watch the show of course.

I can remember that day like it was yesterday. And as I steered us into the cut past Hontoon that led to Lake Beresford, I realized I was smiling. I hadn’t thought much about Mom and Dad. There was just so much that always needed tending to. It seemed everyday there was a new crisis that demanded all available focus. But that was all gone now, I hoped. And it was time for me to do what I should have done long ago. Go find them and bring them home with me.

We saw a few people fishing or tending nets from the seawall that lined the little community along the river here. They waved, in the way everyone on the water does in acknowledgement of an unspoken kinship. Like bikers always do. It’s always struck me as interesting that this only occurs in a few places. Naturally, bikers always do it. But, so do people driving on country roads. I’ve