College Man

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As soon as I’d raced through breakfast that Saturday morning. I headed for the boat yard. My mother caught me as I was going out the kitchen door, saying, “Jud, if you and Dake are going to spend the day water skiing, please don’t do any... crazy things.”

“I won’t,” I said. “Don’t worry.”

Eighteen years old and you’d think I was a little kid. She’s still a little gun shy on account of the way I broke my leg two years ago: Dake was driving the boat, and we were in the Gulf, paralleling the shoreline of Razor Key, and I tried to swing in and jump a low jetty. But the waves broke wrong and I didn’t clear the last inch of it.

I drove the heap down the key to Wally Wilton’s marina, where Dake and I keep the Banshee and work on her. Wally doesn’t charge us any rent in return for our helping him out when he’s jammed up. It’s covered storage, and plenty of tools to work with.

Dake and I bought the Banshee three years ago for sixty dollars. She was in twenty feet of water just inside Narrow Pass, with a hole in the hull as big as your head where she had hit a floating palm bole. Sixteen feet of low, flat, high-speed hull. It took thirty inner tubes to float her, and I don’t know how many hundred hours until she was clean and sweet. She had a ninety horse Gray in her, and we got that running right and had us a lot of boat. Last summer we sold the Gray and bought a ’54 Cadillac motor out of a rear-end collision that was a total loss, and sweated out the marine conversion ourselves. As a marine engine it’s a little cranky, but when it is delivering, we’ve got the most boat in Coral City. And the prettiest. We’ve glassed the hull and put on some real insolent tail fins. Jean Anne, Dake’s sister, painted “Banshee” on one fin, with a bolt of lightning going through the blue letters.

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