The office was a T-shaped building that doubled as a general store. The front area was normally devoted to food and sundries while the back area was devoted to tackle and live bait. On one side of the crossbar was the cash register and an empty cooler. The other side had a door with a sign over it that said “Keep Out.” It was from beyond this door that the voice had issued.
Both areas were barren. The live bait tanks were uniformly empty and the tackle shelves were bare while the food and sundries area was nearly empty. There were a few jars of peanut butter and some quart Mason jars for sale. Other than that the store had been picked clean. For all it was nearly abandoned, it had been well cared for. The empty shelves had been covered with plastic sheets, to keep flies and their specks off, and the floor was freshly scrubbed.
The proprietor, propped beside his antique cash register, rolled his eyes and looked out the window as the source of the voice walked into the main area. The woman was fortyish and reminded O’Neal of Sergeant Bogdanovich. She had long, blonde hair tied in a ponytail which hung down her back and wore faded jeans and a peasant blouse. She had one of the darkest tans Mike had ever seen in his life and a nice smile.
“Forgive my husband, sir,” she said, sliding behind the counter and knocking that worthy aside with a casual bump of her hip. “He’s best suited as a hermit.”
“I’m sorry to impose on you…” said Mike.
“It is not an imposition,” the proprietress said, with another smile. “Harry has a lot on his mind is all. But one of them is the condition of the cabins and about that I’ve got to be frank—”
“They’re a wreck,” said Harry with a slight snarl. “We haven’t had a visitor for nearly a year. There’s only one that the roof doesn’t have a leak!” He thought about the admission. “Well, two.”
“And those we offer,” stated the proprietress with a tight smile.
“We’ve used up most of our linens for other things!” said Harry.
“We’ll improvise,” said the proprietress.
“There’s no electricity!” the proprietor thundered.
“There’s the generator.” The blonde smiled.
“It’s for the ice!”
“These are guests,” said the proprietress, reasonably, but with a hint of teeth.
“No! We don’t get a gas ration for guests!”
“We’ll improvise.”
“There’s no food!”
“Oh, pish. There’s fish, lobster, crab…” She turned to Mike, who was watching the familial argument with amusement. “No one in your family is allergic to shellfish, are they?”
“No,” said Mike with a smile at the play. “Look, let me get a word in edgewise.” He started ticking things off on his fingers. “One, we don’t need electricity. We came prepared to camp out, so we have our own lanterns.” He thought about the argument. “Two, we have our own sleeping bags, so we don’t need linens. Having a bed, any bed, is better than the floor and a roof is better than a tent. We just want to spend a few days in the Keys and maybe get a little snorkeling and fishing in.”
Mike turned to the proprietor as he opened his mouth to argue. “Look, I understand where you’re coming from. But let me say a few things. We’re prepared to pay and pay handsomely. But if you don’t take FedCreds, we brought stuff that people said was in short supply down here. I’m sorry to point it out, but I notice your cupboards are bare. I’ve got fifty- and twenty-five-pound monofilament, sling-spear rubber, five diving masks and two cases of large hooks.”
Mike raised an eyebrow as Harry’s mouth closed with an audible clop. When he did not say anything Mike went on. “We’ve also got some other ‘comfort rations.’ So we’ll be okay without all the usual amenities.” He looked from proprietor to proprietress. The two exchanged a look and then Harry shrugged his shoulders.
“Sir,” said the proprietress with a smile, “welcome to No-Name-Key Fish Camp.”
O’Neal smiled back. “Call me Mike.”
The cabin was small, old and smelled heavily of the mildew as common in the Keys as mosquitoes. A chameleon had broken off its pursuit of a large antlike insect as Mike opened the door. The cabin had two beds for the adults and another had been prepared for Cally. It was divided into two rooms, the side towards the parking lot being a combination living room/kitchen/dining room, while the rear side towards the bay was the bedroom and bath.
The furniture must have dated from the 1960s. The chairs, gleaming yellow in the fading light from a window, were all tube steel and cracked plastic padding. The countertops and floor were cracked linoleum, the patterns so worn as to be indecipherable. Mike glanced at the nonfunctional stove, television and refrigerator. The bedroom window showed signs of once sporting an air conditioner, but here under the spreading palms and salt-tolerant oaks the wind was relatively cool. There was running water but the proprietress, whose name was Karen, pointed out that it was strictly rationed and not to be trusted for drinking. There was a certain amount of imported bottled water, but the main source for drinking water was the distiller attached to the icehouse.
The icehouse turned out to be the center of the little community, as Mike found out when he left the cabin at dusk. The rising clouds of Keys mosquitoes drove him quickly across the parking lot to the knot of men gathered in the screened porch of the large building. It turned out that they were preparing the day’s catch.
With the exception of the baseball caps, sputtering incandescent lantern and modern clothing, the scene could have been from any time in the last thousand years. The men and women were arranged along tables, talking and laughing quietly as they expertly processed the harvest of the seas.
How they kept up with whose was whose was a mystery to Mike as rubber tubs of fish were dumped on the communal table. The piscines would slither outward, some of them still faintly thumping, until they reached an available preparer. There they would be filleted or simply gutted.
Mike was amazed at the speed and technique of the workers. The gutting was different from what he was used to. When he gutted fish he generally inserted the knife into the anus and cut towards the gills. Then the head could be cut off and the guts dragged out with it or the guts could be pulled out by hand and the head left on.
The fish that were being gutted here, mainly yellowtail grunt and mangrove snappers, were being done in the opposite direction. The knife was drawn across the fish’s throat just forward of the gills then the belly was slit back to the anus. A twist of the hand brought out gills and guts in a smooth motion and the fish was flipped away and the next one expertly snatched up.
The filleting was, if anything, faster. A cut would be made across the meat of the fish, just behind the pectoral fins down to the backbone. Then a cut would be made along the backbone itself. A third sweeping motion lifted the meat off, leaving a flap of skin attached to the tail. A swift slice along this flap lifted away a clean fillet. Then the fish was flipped over and the same motions cleared its other side. The remains of the fish were going into a bucket; they were useful in traps and for trolling lures. The filleters would stop after every couple of jobs and run the knives over a sharpener, then get back to work.