John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 15 - The Turquoise Lament

by The Turquoise Lament(lit)

  We toasted the find in warm gaggy whiskey; and we laughed a lot at very little. Joe Delladio planted his waterproof gadget close to the cannon. It was fail-safe, would transmit for a year on its battery pack, and could be picked up at three hundred yards on a transmitting frequency too exotic for anybody to stumble on it. We took sightings, then pulled the buoys and headed home to the Trepid.

  By ten the following morning the Trepid was moored right over the spot, and Joe and I were below, fighting the dredge head, one man on each side of it clinging to a brace improvised from a spade handle, sucking a wide area around the target because the sand and muck were too loose to hold more than an 8- to 10-degree slope. We knew that if something of interest were sucked up and spewed into the catch mesh, the people up above would cut the big pump. Or if we had visitors they would cut it and we would go into our science-fantasy act.

  By early afternoon, having rotated tasks on the half hour, we were beginning to wonder if some old pirate hadn't deep-sixed a busted cannon. Ted wondered if they hadn't jettisoned everything heavy to try to save the ship. Frank Hayes kept close watch on his big pump, mumbling about how hot it was running.

  About three o'clock we uncovered the business end of another cannon, and then the dredge sucked up a pocket of miscellaneous junk. Ted and Meyer were on the cutting head, and when the pump was cut off, they came up to look at what we had. After all the chunks of shell, bushels of weed, pecks of sandworms, it was a pleasure to see some manmade objects.

  We spread corroding chunks out on the deck. It is a truly fantastic experience to watch what happens to iron after it has been in the sea for a few hundred years. When the air first hits it, the iron is chunky and solid. As it dries, the rusting process is so weirdly speeded up it is as though some terrible acid were working on the objects. They turned to flakes and powder, then to piles of dark dust in just the gentle motion of the Trepid.

  There was one prize. At first it was a chunk of corrosion in the shape of an old flintlock pistol. As it dried, most of it crumbled into flakes and scabs and powder, leaving some solid parts behind-an ornate brass trigger guard, green with corrosion, some brass screws, an ebony grip, a brass butt cover, and, untouched by the sea or the years, gleaming yellow and pure, two lacy, fragile pieces of gold, representing a curve of vine with small delicate leaves. Ted identified the two pieces as the gold inlay which had been worked into the metal on either side of the weapon, in the area between the trigger and the hammer. The art of putting a hole in someone was accomplished with a great deal more elegance in the olden days.

  The second prize came at ten the next morning, a single gold coin. A big one. It was crude but mintfresh. Joe Delladio was so excited he lost his English entirely. I saw a very slight tremble of Ted Lewellen's hands as he turned it this way and that. "Spanish five-peseta," he said calmly. "A beauty. Look at the sharpness of the die marks. Often, the first run of gold coins with a new die were presentation pieces, to be given to the king. If our luck is good, there'll be a lot of those down there. God only knows what they'd bring at auction."

  Maybe there were a lot. They are probably still there. Joe and I were on the cutting head when the pump stopped. When we climbed wearily up onto the deck, they told us that the big pump had suddenly started sounding like a washing machine full of broken stone. Frank came up from below, sweat soaked, with a fresh and ugly burn on his forearm. "Vibration cracked a fitting," he said. "Main seal ruptured. Sucked sand into itself. Scored everything all to hell. Blocked the cooling system and froze up a half second before I hit the switch."

  "How long to fix it?" Ted asked.

  After staring at him for at least five seconds, Frank said. "You've now got the biggest, ugliest anchor in Mexico."

  So after the conference about ways and means, Meyer and I flew back to Florida, Joe flew back to Guadalajara, and Ted Lewellen and Frank Hayes set a course for San Diego and a better pump. We were going to hit it again, the five of us, when the new season began, when we could count on good weather.

  But that had to be the year that one of the rare whirly ladies came stomping into that part of the coast. Most of them roam out into the Pacific and die. She started quickly, stayed small and intense, curved right into that area of the Mexican coast, and changed a lot of the geography of both the land areas and the bottom.

  Ted Lewellen had given up on it before I got a chance to talk to him a year later, when the Trepid came gliding into Bahia Mar, showing the effects of long sea duty. Maybe I asked too many questions about how hard they'd looked for Joe Delladio's little electronic beeper. Finally he said with irritation, "For God's sake, McGee! You can't even find where the Club de Pescadores once stood. You can't find a trace of a foundation. One of the islands is gone. Just plain gone. So is that rock the size of a church. Joe's gadget could be halfway to Los Mochis, in twenty-five hundred feet of water, or the damned thing could be in the top of a tall tree near Chihuahua! Part of the bottom we surveyed is dry land now. Part of it is three hundred feet deep!"

  "Okay, okay. I was just asking, Ted."

  "There are other ones."

  "Not like that one."

  His grin was tired, wry inverted. "Not exactly like that one, no. Some are smaller and some are bigger, and they are all out there for the finding."

  Out of almost every experience comes something useful. Sometimes you don't know what it is until you have turned it this way and that and checked it against the light, hefted it. I had learned that not finding treasure is almost as good as finding it. I had been given that absolutely vivid memory of how the lacy gold looked in the Mexican sunlight. And the coin. They were with me in total recall forever. So was the strange, sick excitement of making the hit, finding the place, knowing you were going to suck it clean.

  Meyer agreed. Ted Lewellen hinted that he might be going out again soon. We hinted of a casual interest in going along. He worked on the Trepid eight to ten hours a day. One afternoon he went over to the center of town to buy something he needed. He rode the little Honda he kept aboard the Trepid. As they tell it, a rain started to come down as he was heading back. It had not rained in a long time. After a dry spell, the first rain turns the roads to grease. Ted was hurrying along, shoulders hunched, when a small fearless dog ran yapping out to bite him in the leg. Ted swerved and the bike slid out from under him, and Ted and bike slid slowly under a giant-size transit-mix cement truck, one of the juggernauts of the Kondominium Kulture. Their massive bumpers are at decapitation height, and too many of them are driven by arrogant murderous imbeciles encouraged by a venal management to "make time." The one who squashed Professor Ted might not have even known it had he not caught a glimpse of man and motorbike sliding under him.

  He stopped, got out, took a look and had the grace to require hospitalization for shock.

  The semipermanent population of Bahia Mar takes care of its own. Sympathy may not be longlasting, but when it is focused, there is a lot of it. Pidge got a lot, and it helped her through the worst of it. There was no one else. She was halfway through school by then, and she thought that she had someone else, but the boy revealed to her an essential coldness by taking the death of the daddy as an irritating inconvenience. Looking at him with unclouded vision, she saw the poseur, the charmer, the manipulator, and told him to skip the trip to Florida, and skip everything else as well. Arrangements were made. Lewellen was cremated, and there was a small service at Lauderdale and then a graveside service in Indiana, where his urn was buried beside the one which held the ashes of his wife.

  Meyer researched the problems of money, estate, taxes, and red tape. Ted had moved his money business from Indiana to First Oceanside Bank and Trust and made the bank the executor. After the Trust Officer, a Mr. Lawton Hisp, had accepted Pidge's instructions to let Meyer know all, Meyer finally made a bemused report to me of the situation as Professor Ted had left it.

  "When your work brings you into contact with shark-type sharks and two-legged sharks, you keep things neat," he said.
"He was a neat man. She gets the Trepid free and clear. He's been audited every year for four years, and he is okay with the IRS. There's cash to take care of the estate tax. There's a very nice portfolio which won't have to be disturbed, all in trust for Pidge. The only change Hisp will make is to divert the income to her instead of plowing it back into the kind of thing he has been buying, which are good solid convertible bonds and convertible preferreds. The yield based on current market value isn't so great, like four point seven percent, but because it is computed on a current asset value of eight hundred and seventy-seven thousand, she'll get a little over forty-one thousand a year taxable income. Hisp and I talked about moving it all into tax-free bonds, and she would get about the same income without taxes to pay, but we both felt uneasy about putting a person so young into fixed-obligation stuff. He's invested in the convertibles of companies big in natural resources, so if inflation ten years from now makes a new Chevvie cost forty thousand, the increase in the value of the natural-resources common stocks will have pulled the convertible bonds and preferred up-not in direct ratio, but certainly into the six-toone, eight-to-one range. We agreed she should pay taxes now and maintain her equity position. At twenty-one, which is very soon, she can tap the principal if she wants to, but no more than ten percent of the asset value in any calendar year. When she's forty, the trust is distributed to her and her kids, if any, in equal portions. If she dies before forty, her children get the income until the youngest is twenty-one, then they get the principal, evenly divided."

  We could all understand why she didn't sell the Trepid. It was the most direct link to happier days. And living aboard at Bahia Mar, she felt as if she was among friends. She had no desire to return to school. Whoever was handy helped her when she needed help. Pretty soon it was Howard Brindle who was taking care of the chores. He had not been around Bahia Mar for very long, yet he fitted in so well it seemed as if he'd been there a lot longer. He never scrounged. He gave full value in time and muscle for all favors.

  When it became serious, the whole village nodded and said that it was probably a good thing. Meyer and I appointed ourselves a two-headed daddy and grilled Howie.

  Meyer planted the needle beautifully. "What do you want to be, Howie? Who do you want to be? Or are you happy and satisfied just to fall into it?"

  This was aboard the Flush. Howie looked troubled and thoughtful and said, "We've talked about that a lot, Pidge and me. It comes down to this. I just haven't got much work ethic. We talked it out. It certainly isn't going to bother me if both of us live off what her dad left her. It isn't as if it was money Pidge earned herself. If it was turned around so my dad had left it to me, it wouldn't bother me living off it and doing nothing. I mean, how can you prove that anything a man does is really worth doing? She says it won't bother her because there's more than she needs, the way she wants to live. So what we want to do is get married, get the Trepid geared up for around the world, and then, by God, go around it, even if it takes three or four years. But it isn't as if we're closing the door on anything else. We could get restless. We could see something we think is worth doing, and then we could change our minds. The options are open. But neither of us is going to feel guilty if we don't take any other option ever. We've talked this all out."

  "Maybe," I said, "you might want to pick up where Ted left off."

  "I thought of that. He was getting geared up to go after something. We can't find a clue. She told me she'd searched every inch of the vessel. He hadn't left his research records at the bank, in the deposit box. We went over the boat together. We took three days, three whole days. Nothing. It's just as well. What would I be doing looking for goodies in the ocean? What could I buy I haven't got already?"

  So that made three searches, counting the one Meyer and I made that lasted from the time we heard Ted had been killed until dawn the next morning. Not for ourselves. For the daughter.

  Howie was plausible enough, and it was easy to see how happy they were just to be with each other. So there was a wedding, and there was a lot of work done on the Trepid, and a lot of intensive study of charts and celestial navigation and a lot of instruction in how to maintain and operate all the navigation aids and servomechanisms aboard that would go pockety-queek all the time she was trudging across the ocean blue.

  And this was the first time I'd seen the Trepid since we all watched her take off one morning in November over a year ago, moving out into the tide run, tipping to the first ground swell, aiming southeast once past the sea buoy, about 105 degrees, the farewell champagne still cold in the glass.

  I roamed forward, squatted on a big cleat, and picked, morosely at a clot of some kind of tarry guck stuck to the teak. When a boat carries you all those sea miles safely and well, she deserves better treatment. In the marriage row, the Trepid was the innocent bystander getting hurt. I wondered how much green beard was hanging from her bottom. I wondered if her engines would start without an overhaul. There was a good sting in the Hawaii sunshine.

  Howie came back aboard and I stood up and walked aft. He was sweating heavily and had lost some hide off the top of his right shoulder. He said the two of them had gotten the mast down on Jer's boat. Sorry it took so long.

  "You were saying you don't want to talk about your problem?"

  He flinched. "Not like that. Hell. I suppose why not? It's just that it's weird. Trav?"

  "Yes?"

  "I don't even want to say it."

  "Try hard."

  "I think... shem wummul neminum." He sat, big brown arms resting across his round brown knees, and he was staring down at the deck huge hands hanging loose from his wrists.

  "I can't hear you, Howie!"

  He lifted his head, contortion twisting his mouth, brown eyes agonized. "I think she's flipping! Losing her head! Falling out of her tree. Oh, God damn it all anyway."

  He popped up with that surprising, flexible agility, ducked out from under the tarp, and stood at the rail with his back to me. He made a single, gulping sob sound.

  After he settled down, he told me how it had begun. They had hopped the Caribbean islands on the way down, skipping some, hiding from bad weather, learning how much and how little they could expect from the Trepid, settling into the routines of who does what and when. Honeymoon voyage, masks and fins over the reefs, unnamed empty beaches, music tapes aboard, scream of the reel with the line being pulled out against all the drag one dared use, sail popping and tilting as a listless breeze freshened, saliy, sandy lovemaking under improbable skies. Santo Domingo, Guayama, Frederiksted, Basse-Terre, Roseau, Fort-de-France, Castries, Bridgetown, St. George's, San Fernando; and from there they hopped the coast of South America westward; La Asuncion, Puerto La Cruz, Carenero, La Guaira, with a run up to Willemstad, then west and down to Riohacha, Santa Marta, Cartagena, and then across the gulf of Portobello and Colon and the Canal.

  Things broke and were fixed. Other things wore out and were replaced. Sometimes the bank had to cable money. Twice, he thought. Maybe three times, but he doubted it. He could remember just the two times. They had worked their way slowly up the Pacific coast of Central America, and I broke into his recital of the ports they had hit and asked again where the trouble had started.

  "Well, quite a way back. Anyway, we stopped at Mazatlan and got everything in top shape and stowed all the provisions aboard and... came here. Mazatlan seemed like a good place to start from because it is almost the same latitude as Honolulu, which is about thirty-two hundred miles due west. We'd had a lot of practice in navigation by then. No sweat. We knew we'd hit it and we did. One storm made me wonder, though. It was one big rough son of-"

  "Howie! Get on with it!"

  "Okay, okay. The first thing that seemed weird-it didn't seem important at the time-all over the islands you've got these kids with rucksacks, guitars, and Granola, hitching boat rides. I don't have to tell you. Tie up in Puerto Rico and pretty soon they're at dockside with the sleeping bags, looking to go up to the Bahamas or over to the Virgins o
r down to the Grenadines. From the ones we used to get at Bahia Mar, Pidge and I know you have to watch it. Most are really great persons, but some of them, you'd be better off stowing nitro in the hold, or carrying lepers."

  Again he was sidestepping the obligation to be specific about Pidge. I waited him out. Finally he got to it. At Frederiksted, on St. Croix, two blond girls wanted a ride down to Montserrat, where one of them had an older sister married to a lawyer in Plymouth. They'd been traveling with a boy who'd had to return to the States because of some kind of family trouble. Joy Harris and Celia Fox. They had the crew bunks forward available to loan the girls if they chose. The girls couldn't afford to pay for the passage or the extra supplies, but they said they would work, really work, any kind of work aboard. They were tanned and pretty and young, trail toughened to a watchful and skeptical wisdom.

  Pidge and Howie had talked it over and decided the girls were all right, and when they came back they would be invited aboard for the trip. Pidge made some jokes about exclusivity and about becoming one of the three Brindle women.

  But only one girl returned. The Harris girl, the smaller and prettier of the two. She said that she and Celia had decided not to travel together any more. She said she thought Celia was going back to the States, but actually she could not care less what Celia did, or how she did it.