Go-Fast
The hull lurches, jackknifing the horizon, and spray rises over the bow to wrap itself around me. The tide is almost all the way up and the sun is filling all that spray with light, so that with each wave that changes gravity, the air the boat is suspended in crystallizes and shatters around this humming projectile of fiberglass and bones and gasoline. I am surrounded by shards of infinitesimal light. There is something about the light that beckons and something about the water that dares. I tip the throttle forward.
Go fast enough and you can turn still air into wind. Hot fingered breezes trace lines from the corners of your eyes, dragging at tears that cling to you until you are too far ahead for the past to touch you. I have learned to tell the difference between seawater and tears, even if that difference is only in my imagination. But if the boat is fast enough, they can become the same thing. I tighten my fingers and the engines behind me raise their voices from a roar to a whine and I keep leaning into the throttle.
The Jetty on my right is shaped like a hook, its point jutting back toward the shore as if it has changed its mind. This turn is where the fishermen set up their rods and buckets and coolers of beer. My grandfather used to be one of them. I called him Papí. He’d have me cut bait and we would split a beer after he cast a hunk of stingray wing off the pier, letting the tide carry it into deep water. Sometimes he’d have me pour a thin stream of lager onto the big Senator reel to bless the line. The rest of the time, he would smoke Lucky Strikes and we would watch the boats.
I remember seeing a pale man with a paunch run his canary yellow Cigarette boat halfway up the rocks of the opposite jetty. All the bodies around him catapulted out of their seats with loose-limbed momentum that flung some into the deck of the ruined racing hull and others into the rocks. But there was a moment between catastrophe and consequence, an instant when they floated just out of reach of everything. And when that moment was gone, my grandfather chuckled. It sounded like rocks laughing.
“Recuerda, mijo,” he said, nudging my shoulder, “go as fast as you’re ready to crash.”
I am halfway through the channel and the twin outboards are hailing me onward and the waters all around me are turning to mist and slapping at the belly of the boat and rushing in and out of the rocks in whispering voices I want to remember and ones I want to forget. I wonder how fast I have to go to outrun them all. If I’m going fast enough. If I’m ready to.
Travis Cohen Acosta is a Cuban American author and poet born and raised in Miami, Florida. He is a graduate of the MFA program at Florida International University and is currently a PhD student in Creative Writing (fiction) at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Permafrost, Fourth Genre, and The Sonora Review, among other publications.
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