The diesel ran hot and the old man let it. He stood at the wheel with the rum still in his blood and the money folded flat inside his shirt, against the chest hair that had gone white the same year the beard came in. Behind him the city burned its ordinary light, yellow and steady, not knowing he was leaving. Before him the Florida Strait opened black and without feature. He had fished these waters forty years and never once pointed the bow north and held it there.
Below, in the cabin he had built himself from cedar that warped in the humidity, the boy sat on the berth with his knees drawn up and the cloth still tied across his eyes. He hadn’t spoken since they cast off. The old man had carried him aboard like a sack of mangoes, one arm under the knees and one at the shoulders, and the boy had weighed nothing. Now the berth creaked when the hull met the swell, and the boy’s breathing came shallow and too fast, like a dog in heat.
The old man didn’t go below. He had taken the money and asked no questions, and now he had what he had paid for. He told himself this and watched the compass needle hold steady on three three zero. The moustache, which he kept white and trimmed in the manner of certain dead philosophers, caught the spray when the bow cut a trough. He didn’t wipe it. He had made his choice in the bar with the ceiling fan turning and the rich man smiling with teeth that were too new, and now the choice would have to carry them both across sixty miles of dark water.
The boy made a sound. Not words. Something lower.
The old man didn’t answer. He watched the wake unravel behind the stern, white in the black water, and he thought of his father who had also been a fisherman, and of the revolution that had taken the harbour and given nothing back, and of the boat which was all he had left that the state had not found a name for. The money in his shirt was more than he had earned in five years. It would buy fuel and paint and new line for the reels. It wouldn’t buy the boy sight, or return him to whatever fear had silenced him.
He pushed the throttle and the old boat, which had never carried a passenger who did not fish, leaned into the sea.
He saw the running lights first. Two points of white above the waterline, steady, not fishing. The old man throttled back and let the hull settle into the swell. The cargo boat was maybe two miles east, running south along the coast route, and for a moment he thought they would pass without alteration. Then the lights changed. One steady, one moving. They had turned.
He went below. The boy hadn’t moved from the berth. His knees were still drawn up and his hands were laced over them, white knuckles in the dark.
“Below,” the old man said. “Now. The floor.”
The boy didn’t respond.
The old man took him by the shoulder and pressed him down. The boy went rigid, then slack, as if some wire had been cut. He lay on the boards beside the berth and the old man threw the blanket from the bunk over him, and then the spare sail on top of that, the canvas that smelled of fish scale and mildew. The boy didn’t make a sound.
Back at the wheel, the cargo boat was closer. He could see the stack now, the low silhouette of a coastal freighter maybe eighty feet, not military but not civilian in any way that comforted him. They were running without the regulation lights. That meant either smugglers themselves, or something worse.
The old man reached below the console and found the shotgun he kept for sharks that would not leave a catch. He broke it open and checked the shells, then closed it and laid it across the dash where it would be seen. He had no intention of firing it. The intention was to be seen as a man who might.
The cargo boat altered again. Now they were on an intercept.
He could hear the engine note change, the deeper throb of a diesel that displaced more water than his boat ever would. They were close enough that he could make out figures on the deck, two of them, standing at the rail. Not uniformed. That meant nothing. The militia wore what they pleased.
A light hit him. A handheld spot, white and hard, that pinned him against the wheel and made his white mustache glow like a flag. He did not raise his hand. He let them look at him, an old fisherman in a old boat, alone on the water with a shotgun he did not reach for.
The light held. The cargo boat came alongside, close enough that he could have thrown a line and had it caught. A voice came across, Spanish with an accent he did not place.
“Where North?”
The old man said, “Fishing.”
“At night?”
“The fish run at night.”
The light dropped from his face and played across the deck, the empty holds, the cabin door that stood open to the dark. The old man didn’t look at the cabin. He looked at the man with the light, who was young and had a rifle slung across his chest that he didn’t touch.
“Alone?” the voice said.
“Alone.”
The light found the shotgun. Held there.
“For sharks,” the old man said.
A pause. The engines throbbed against each other, the hulls rocking in the same swell. Then the light went out and the voice said something he didn’t catch, and the cargo boat began to turn away, resuming its southward track as if the interruption had been a formality.
The old man stood at the wheel and didn’t move until the running lights had diminished to points, and then to nothing. His shirt was wet against his back where the money lay folded against his skin. Below, he could hear the boy breathing again, shallow and fast, from beneath the sail.
He didn’t go below. He pushed the throttle and the boat leaned north, toward the dark.
Author’s Note
(Or: How I learned to stop worrying and pretend I’m Hemingway)
Look, if this thing somehow miraculously blows up and becomes a massive bestseller one day, I want the historians to know the truth: I’m a teenager sitting in a room somewhere in Scotland, entirely winging it, and hoping nobody notices I have no idea how boats actually work.
I spent way too long trying to channel those rugged, hard boiled 1960s paperback writers who smoke unfiltered cigarettes and stare pensively at the sea. In reality, I was just staring at a flashing cursor at 2 AM, arguing with myself over whether a cargo freighter sounds like a “throb” or a “hum,” while surviving entirely on caffeine and pure delusion.
If you’re wondering where I’ve been hiding, the official excuse is that I’ve been locked in an epic, mental cage match with writer’s block. The unofficial excuse is that I got distracted playing too much video games and pretending I was in the Vietnam war. But hey, the block’s busted, the gears are turning, and I should actually have more stories for you sometime soon assuming my brain doesn’t completely short circuit before chapter two.
Thanks for reading, washing down this nautical nonsense with me, and sticking around. Now go hit refresh on the site, because I’m going to go stare at a blank Google Doc and pretend I’m profound.
The Havana Run (Ⓒ J.P. 2026)
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