Free Lord of the Deep by Graham Salisbury

this?” he said. Stupidly, he thought, immediately after he’d said it.
    “Well, no, actually the pen just flew across the page all by itself. It was a miracle.”
    Mikey flipped back through the pages, looking at other drawings. Some were unfinished, some were crossed out, some had notes around them, and some, Mikey thought, were masterpieces. “This is incredible,” he said, then looked up suddenly. “Uh . . . do you mind?”
    “You really like them?”
    “Are you kidding? This is great stuff.”
    “My dad thinks they’re weird . . . because I don’t put everything in proper perspective. He thinks it’s cartoony. But I like it this way.”
    Mikey’d been right. There were sketches of Cal all over the place—Cal in the fighting chair, Cal standing in the stern cockpit, Cal smoking a cigar, Cal snoring on the bunk.
    There was one Mikey really liked of Bill sitting at the wheel, squinting, a perfect likeness, his arms bigger than life, sharpened by shape and muscle mass. It was as if Alison had looked for some telling detail about him and emphasized that. There was another one of Cal and Ernie playing cards, their hands oversized, the cards like scraps of paper lost in them.
    Mikey flipped to the beginning of the sketchbook. There was a girl with a sleek, long-haired cat in her arms. A massive horse and a rider. Cal in a cowboy hat pulled low. A sleeping dog. A woman scrubbing clothes in a wood bucket. Three cowboys branding a calf, the calf’s eyes bulging with fear. A woman saddling a horse, the look on her face one of complete serenity.
    “Who’s this?” Mikey asked.
    “My mom.”
    “I like it. I like all of them. You’re really good, Alison.”
    “I want to be an illustrator.”
    He handed the sketchbook back. “Can I . . . can I have one? A drawing? If it’s okay?”
    She grinned. “Which one?”
    “The one of Bill?” He reached over and flipped to the page.
    Alison studied it, as if considering if it was good enough to give away. “Sure,” she said. “It’s yours. But I’ll give it to you later. I want to cut it out with a razor so it’s not all ratty.”
    “I’m going to frame it.”
    “Really? You’d frame it?”
    “Of course. Why not?”
    “Well, I don’t know.”
    “You’re okay, you know that?”
    “Good Lord, thank you. I was worried.”
    Mikey thought he spotted something on the water and stood. There was something that didn’t fit.
    An off-color blip.

CHAPTER 12

    HE SQUINTED AT IT.
    They were trolling back closer to the coastline now, where the undersea ledges were, where the current churned and food was plentiful.
    Some kind of debris. A dark spot. Cane trash. Or maybe a log.
    “Yes,” Mikey whispered.
    He slid down the ladder and grabbed the polarized binoculars and brought them back up. He turned the eyepiece to focus.
    Blur, blur. There!
    A waterlogged coconut tree is what it looked like. Two or three hundred yards off the port bow.
    Alison moved up next to him.
    “It’s a coconut tree, I think. Here. Look over there. Keep your eye on it, okay?”
    Alison took the binoculars.
    Mikey scrambled down and told Bill, and Bill eased the boat that way.
    “Bring in one of the outside lines,” Bill said. “Replace it with light tackle.”
    “What kind of lure?”
    Bill shrugged. “You decide.”
    Mikey grinned and ran out to make the change. He chose one of Bill’s homemade jet heads. Thirty-pound test reel. He took the rig out and set it up, put the replaced rod in the rack on the side of the boat. He dropped the jet over the transom and let it free-spool out. What was it Bill said?
    Think, think.
    The drag. Set it too light and it won’t hammer the hook into the fish. Too tight, the line could snap. You wanted the hook to sink in as the fish runs.
    Mikey placed the lure and set the drag where he thought it should be, prayed it should be.
    He stood watching the jet work. Now that he was responsible, he understood why Bill spent so long studying the action.
    When