The Salt-Gatherers

Leon adjusted his green visor against the harsh noon sun, which made the concrete pool deck of the Blue Heron Motel gleam like shattered glass. He had retirement in his joints, a low hum of salt and ibuprofen, but he still kept his skimmer pole in the bed of his old Ford. Since the storm three years ago, the Englewood canals had taken on a murky, suspicious green, a shade that didn't respond to chlorine or copper sulfate. He watched a blue-winged teal settle onto the brackish water near the rusted dock. Inside the motel’s main office, Mrs. Gable was arguing with a dry-wall deliveryman about the cost of damp-proofing.

The teal didn't stay long, disturbed by the low, subterranean rumble of a diesel-powered barge carrying limestone chunks from the north side of the bay. Leon dipped his finger into the canal’s edge, tasting it; it was sweeter than it should have been, diluted by the heavy summer rains that had turned every lawn in Charlotte County into a shallow, sponge-like swamp. A girl in a yellow swimsuit, possibly one of the long-term tenants from room fourteen, sat on a plastic chaise longue with her heels dug into the wet turf. She was peeling a tangerine with her fingernails, throwing the rinds into the dead hibiscus bushes in a silent, methodical rhythm.

There was a weight to the air, the kind that preceded those sudden four o'clock deluges that left the asphalt steaming. Leon walked over to his truck, where a bag of lime had begun to harden into stone from the ambient humidity. He had spent forty years maintaining other people’s water, purifying the square, blue rectangles that rich men dug into the sandy earth so they could pretend the Gulf wasn't ten yards away. If he let his hand drop into the canal now, he knew he would feel the low pull of the tide, dragging everything—tangerine peels, limestone rubble, the motel's foundation—slowly back into the warm, indifferent belly of the bay.