One Breath Read online

  Jen was born in 1972, Belinda graduated in 1973, and almost immediately, they packed and drove to West Florida where Larry’s parents, Nick and Dolly, had recently moved. Belinda was seduced by her new hometown. A series of interlocking islands and bridges, with wide white-sand beaches on the green Gulf of Mexico and placid marinas on Tampa Bay, St. Petersburg was a place of stucco and sunshine, East Coast attitude and tropical rain, cheap gas and imported food. It meant easy living with wide, smooth roads and no traffic. A good Catholic girl, Belinda harbored some guilt about the nature of her marriage, so there was something about the distance from her own family and the newness of St. Petersburg that appealed to her. To Belinda, St. Petersburg was a blank slate. It had no memory.

  It wasn’t even well populated yet. The snowbirds hadn’t yet flocked. And when they did, not all the retirees enjoyed retirement. Larry’s father certainly did not. Nick the First was a butcher who owned a successful neighborhood grocery, called Nick’s, in Oaklyn, New Jersey, for thirty years. He sold it to move to the sunshine and try to do nothing, and soon found that doing nothing was boring as hell. He was not a golfer, or much of a fisherman. The man had no hobbies, so while Larry was working the mainframe computer in the billing department at Florida Power, his dad got back into the meat business, opening George’s Market in 1974.

  Larry, who cut meat in the original store growing up, took a job at the new branch, with the understanding that when his father finally retired for real, the market—which would soon gross over $500,000 a year—would belong to him. Around that same time it was becoming apparent to Belinda that she and Larry weren’t well matched. Larry was a social animal, with slicked-back hair and a thousand stories—real and exaggerated—on the tip of his tongue. Belinda, who was a teacher at a private Catholic school, was an introvert, an observer, drawn to quiet corners where she could hide in plain sight. Larry liked the flash and pop. His wife blended into the wallpaper, and as the years went on, it would be difficult to find two people with less in common.

  There were good times. Larry had charm, and Belinda wanted to love him. One afternoon they took a long drive around St. Petersburg to the nearby hamlet of Seminole, a suburb in waiting. They bought a plot of land and Larry promised his wife that one day he’d build her their dream home. A couple of nights later, on a sweltering summer evening, they enjoyed a midnight skinny dip while eight-year-old Jennifer slept. They made love and conceived a water child.

  The pregnancy was a surprise to both, but they embraced it. The store was a smash hit and Larry began devoting nearly all his waking hours to the family business. Belinda would often come to George’s in the afternoon for groceries, and she happened to be there when her water broke. Perhaps it was a sign of the times, when American culture was different and less was expected of husbands, or maybe it was a personality flaw that Larry would never shake, or could be he just screwed up when he gave Belinda some plastic bags to sit on in the car and walked her to the door. It was the afternoon rush, he said. He was needed at the store. Belinda drove herself home, and it wasn’t until after the store was closed a few hours later that Larry showed up and drove her to the hospital, so she could give birth to Nick.

  Such slights, large and small, exacerbated the distance between them. With two children there was twice as much work to do, and Larry was devoted to the store first. Belinda felt abandoned and betrayed. She was expected to do all the parenting and the housework, while working full time. Jen pitched in where she could. She would change diapers, make lunches, read to her baby brother, and lie with him while he faded off to sleep at night, but capable though she was, she was still in elementary school.

  Through it all, Nick was a happy kid, at least at first. After Smokey pushed him in the pool, he couldn’t get enough of the water. For his second birthday he got toy dive gear. There was a set of tanks and a mask and he’d often strap them on and jump into the pool, staying down as long as he could. The fights didn’t start until Nick was four years old. Whenever his parents argued, Jen and Nick escaped. She would wander the backyard or stroll the street out front, while he would hide in the pool, hanging onto the lowest rung of the ladder. He’d surface just long enough to hear if it was all over. If the shouting continued, he’d inhale and go back down.

  One evening, Belinda handed Larry divorce papers. She’d served him dinner, and this was dessert, foisted on him without warning. She’d even packed his clothes. Larry was baffled when Belinda cleared his plate, handed him his bags, and showed her husband the door for the last time, but he didn’t fight her. He blew off the hearing but accepted terms. He got the car, George’s market, and the lot for their dream home. Belinda kept the house and won her freedom. Nick was five years old.

  Jen and Nick’s parents both remarried in 1988. Fred Rudzik, a music teacher at Belinda’s school, moved in with Belinda and the kids. Meanwhile, Larry was an apparition. He’d commit to picking Nick up at school or at the house and show up hours late, leaving his son to wait on the curb, alone. Sometimes he didn’t show at all. When Jen and Nick did hang with Larry, it was never just the three of them. Larry’s three stepchildren were always there.

  Larry did get his dream house: a 10,000-square-foot McMansion he built for his new wife, Mary. One afternoon, he took all his children to the construction site. The store was his by then and he was doing $1.5 million in business annually. Larry pointed out where Jen’s and Nick’s rooms would be. He promised them that when the house was finished, things would be different. They could stay with him and have their own rooms, their own space. But when the house was finally complete there were no rooms for Jen and Nick, and when they’d visit, usually on holidays, they felt out of place while Larry was consumed with the needs of children they didn’t know and a wife who was too overwhelmed to pay them any mind. Kids would scream, dogs would bark, Larry’s steady stream of guests would mingle day and night, and Jen and Nick would sit on the couch, lean into one another, and watch their father’s odd, dysfunctional universe spin.

  They were two happy accidents, a blend of introvert and extrovert, loud and soft, prone to deep thinking, sensitivity, and adventure. They walked the same twisted road, and though it would make them sad sometimes, it also made them, and their bond, resilient and strong.

  Jen was sixteen by the time her parents remarried. She was gorgeous—olive skinned and big eyed, and embraced her type A impulse, filling her schedule to the brim, leaving no time to think, which was exactly what she needed. She spent most of her time involved with her church group, playing on the school volleyball team, and studying with her boyfriend, driven to make the national honor society. Nick was still a young boy, and he rarely complained; in fact, he rarely spoke at all. He was a brooder who internalized his pain. He still loved the water, but his talent might have remained untapped, if not for his Uncle Paul.

  Paul Mevoli, Larry’s brother, wasn’t even thirty when his mother called him one summer day in 1989. Just out of dental school and starting his practice, Paul still lived like a college kid. Beach chairs were his living room furniture, and take-out dinners in front of the ballgame would do just fine. For Paul, house was not yet home, but shelter between adventures. He raced cars, and once a year he’d rent a house with his best buddies down on Marathon Key and go lobster diving and spearfishing. He was young, handsome, and making money, and life was good. But the news on the other end of the phone did not sit well. Larry had been skipping out on visiting Nick and Jen, and the day before had kept Nick waiting for five hours before taking him to the mall with his stepkids. Nick’s grandmother was worried about how quiet he had become and thought he was in desperate need of guy time. Nine years younger than Larry, Paul wasn’t too concerned about Jen, who was getting ready for college, but he worried about Nick, and it didn’t take him long to figure out what to do.

  A few days later, Nick was at the Daytona International Speedway, during one of Paul’s weekend races in the Sports Club Car Racing Series. Between heats Paul zoomed his GT into t
he garage area where he and Nick rotated and changed the tires, worked on the engine and refueled the vehicle together. Paul called Nick his one-man grease monkey pit crew and with his nephew’s help, he took the checkered flag in the final heat.

  As much as Nick loved the racetrack, he enjoyed their trips to Marathon Key even more. After she heard about his little adventure to Daytona, it took some lobbying to get Belinda’s blessing to join the lobster hunt with Paul’s Bonzo crew. There was Craig, the handsome executive; Tim Scott, the happy-go-lucky wiseass with the preacher’s soul; and David Schilt, aka Sailor Boy, a six-foot-four Irish American New Yorker turned Florida detective. Every year for the past decade the four friends had gone to Marathon for lobster season. On Nick’s first trip he was just nine years old.

  Though Key West, at the southern terminus of Highway 1, and Key Largo, farther north, get all the press, Marathon is the most beautiful of the famed Florida Keys. There are no big hotels, and no chic or trashy restaurants and bars either. Marathon is about the water. A flat, wide island fringed with mangroves and marinas, with the green Gulf on one side and the blue Atlantic on the other, it’s a place of second homes and hard-core commercial fishermen who make their living selling grouper and lobster. But before commercial lobster season opens, there is a mini-season for recreational fishermen like the Bonzo crew who scout holes for days to prepare for those forty-eight hours in late July when it’s legal to score lobster.

  On opening day, the Gulf is always filled with hundreds of gleaming fishing boats, thanks to the droves that descend from across the state and beyond. Back in 1992, Paul and his buddies owned the worst boat of them all, a 1973 Pro Line with a duct-taped engine cover, patched-up hull, and flaking fiberglass deck. The thing looked like it had been pulled straight from a dumpsite, and Nick fell in love with it from the very first time he boarded “Bonzo.” Even as a kid, Nick enjoyed fixer-uppers.

  “Why do you call it Bonzo?” Nick asked when he was hosing down the deck after a long day of scouting.

  “You never heard of Bonzo the Wildman?” Paul asked, sipping a beer. Nick shook his head. “He used to be part of a traveling carnival. You would have loved him. Tell him about Bonzo, Sailor Boy.” With that, Sailor Boy gathered up his best vaudevillian mojo.

  “Come one, come all! Come see Bonzo the Wildman! He has no asshole!”

  “But, but, but mister, how does he take a shit?” Paul asked in childlike wonder.

  “He don’t, sonny, that’s what makes him so wild!”

  Nick cackled along with his uncle and Paul’s friends, who couldn’t get enough of Sailor Boy’s antics. The first night the Bonzo crew hung out together in Key West, Sailor Boy launched into his Wildman shtick in every bar they found. Not everybody understood it or found it funny, but the Bonzo crew didn’t mind. Inside humor was as much a part of their bond as lobstering, and Nick picked up both with ease.

  Throughout their week in Marathon, Nick had been the gofer. He’d gathered the gear, opened the beers, put together the weight belts, counted lobster nets, and helped scout holes. His Uncle Paul (aka Captain Bastard) did most of the pointing and shouting. But Sailor Boy, Craig (aka Salty Seaman), and Tim (aka Scotty) filed their share of requests, too. Nick worked all day tirelessly, and whenever he got the opportunity he dove underwater. All of it was new, all of it exciting, and none of it compared to the exhilaration he felt on opening day of his first lobster season.

  It began with a 4 a.m. wake-up call. Captain Bastard shook him awake from his bedroll on the living room floor. “Rise and shine, buddy,” he said. “Time to get us some lobsters.” They walked outside to a sky full of stars. A light, hot breeze filtered through the mangroves, which sheltered their neighborhood marina, and it was still dark when Paul piloted Bonzo from the backwaters out onto the Gulf of Mexico. As the sun rose, the sky and water seemed to merge. Dawn colors clung to the atmosphere, the clouds streaked pink, orange, and gold. The Gulf looked endless to Nick, but it was one giant bay: shallow, warm, green, and crawling with lobsters, which hid in her cracks and holes cratered in a seafloor caked in mud.

  Paul kept his nose in the Bonzo nerve center, a dog-eared binder of GPS coordinates—fishing holes they’d been tipped off to or discovered on their own, and kept guarded from their rivals, who occasionally buzzed past in state-of-the-art fishing boats. “Looks like the damn Spanish Armada,” Paul said to Nick, who glared toward another of the shiny new vessels that came too close, hoping to piggyback a lobster hole. Paul played possum and pretended to be lost, adrift.

  “Did you send out that SOS? We can tow you to shore after we get our fill,” joked the other captain. His crew pointed and laughed at the decrepit Bonzo. Outnumbered, the Bonzo boys kept their mouths shut. Nick was especially ticked.

  “It don’t matter what the boat looks like, Nick,” Paul told him when their rivals sped away. “What matters is who’s in the boat. Now drop one of those markers, right over there.” Paul flashed his Q-Beam on a dark spot in the green and Nick dropped a glow stick into a foam buoy and tossed it into the drink, illuminating the hole. Craig and Scotty strapped on their weight belts and scuba tanks and dropped in to grab their first bugs of the season. Nick dove in after them, with just fins and goggles, to hand them nets and ferry their catch to the boat.

  When Scotty and Craig had enough, Paul did some freediving with Nick, taught him to equalize and how to use a metal tickler, to chase lobsters out from their craggy hiding places, and into his net. At first they got away, but Nick was determined and stayed with it as Paul rose for another breath. When he went back down, Nick was still on the bottom, with a lobster in his net, another in his left hand, and a big bright smile on his face. The kid was a natural.

  Of all their secret spots to catch lobster, Paul’s favorite was Grouper Gorge, a narrow depression fringed by a few boulders in the channel on the west end of Marathon, where the Gulf of Mexico meets the Atlantic Ocean and unpredictable currents thrash the pilings of Seven Mile Bridge. But as challenging as the currents were to navigate, the rewards were even greater; because of the flow of nutrients, life bloomed in the gorge like nowhere else.

  The sun rose higher as they approached Seven Mile Bridge. Nick tossed the marker, and Sailor Boy took the wheel as Scotty, Craig, Paul, and Nick dove in. The current was hammering, and Craig and Scotty had to hold on to the reef to gather lobster while Nick swam and spun with ease. He dove down to twelve feet, and effortlessly kicked his fins to stay in place. He wore weights, which helped, and in minutes he had three lobsters. Ten minutes later he’d caught thirteen. The team found a bounty in that hole and kept pulling up fat bugs. Paul sent Nick back to the deck to fetch his speargun, and Nick dove down with it. With the holes clear of lobster they checked for grouper, a flaky whitefish and a staple for seafood lovers in the Florida Keys. It was clear that Nick already had the longest breath hold, and Paul would soon learn that he had an eye for grouper, too. When Paul missed one behind the rocks, Nick never did, and when Paul surfaced for air, Nick stayed down, hunting shadows. During one such respite, Sailor Boy stared at Paul with wonder.

  “Where the hell is Nick?”

  “What do you mean? He’s down there.”

  “He’s been down there for a minute and a half.”

  “With that current, I don’t know, Paul,” said Scotty.

  “You guys are making me nervous now,” Paul said, adjusting his mask. “I’ll go get him.”

  Paul went back down and couldn’t find Nick. Ten long seconds passed, and Paul started to panic when he caught a glimpse of his nephew worming between two rocks pointing exactly where he wanted Paul to shoot. Paul handed him the gun. When they finally surfaced with their third ten-pound grouper of the day, Nick had been underwater for nearly three minutes. “Sailor Boy was worried about you, Nick,” Paul said.

  “How the hell does he do that?” Scotty asked. Paul chuckled. “I’m serious. What’s with this kid?”

  “I don’t know, Scotty. Apparently he was born for this
shit.” The Bonzo crew laughed with relief, as Nick smirked and tossed his grouper at Sailor Boy’s feet.

  They’d found dozens of lobsters in the gorge, which put them above their legal limit. Paul instructed Nick to measure them and throw back the smallest ones, several of which he had collected in the exuberance of his first hunt, and were still alive. “It’s fun to catch them,” Paul said, “but we’re good stewards of the environment out here. We can’t screw this place up, and we don’t take more than our share. Remember that.” Nick nodded, and with Paul’s guidance, winnowed the catch down to thirty prime lobsters. They’d hit their maximum after less than two hours at sea. Tradition called for beers, so the kid passed out a round of Bud Light, and grabbed a Coke for himself. They thrust their cans together, and Paul led a cheer.

  “Gooooooo, Bonzo!”

  The guys joked, drank, and enjoyed the sun and sea, still anchored in the channel just above Grouper Gorge when the boat they’d seen two hours earlier motored toward them. “Geez, how many lobsters did you guys find down there?” the captain asked, envious.

  “How many have you found out there?” Paul asked, cracking another beer.

  “We haven’t had much luck, to be honest.”

  “Yeah, that’s too bad,” said Scotty, as he opened up two coolers filled with lobster and grouper. The Bonzo crew glanced at their catch, then each other, then back at their rivals and exploded in laughter one more time.

  “The most broad definition would be having fun underwater,” said Will Trubridge, when asked to define his sport. “It could be spearfishing or it could be going for depth, distance, and time. Anything that would involve testing your limits underwater would qualify, but you don’t have to test your limits. Just as you could climb a mountain to look at the view, you can do the same thing in freediving.”

  “It is a lifestyle,” said former world champ, Carlos Coste. “It’s a philosophy of life around the sea. It’s exploring your limits, your abilities, and improving yourself all the time.”