The Curse of the Lost White City

by James Gray

  But when he scrolled down and keyed in the NOAA Hurricane website, he saw that the Category Five storm that had been all over the news had suddenly turned south and was pulverizing the Island of Guanaja. An alarm went off in his head. Between shifts in the engine room, he went up to the bridge to check the reports. It seemed that the hurricane had slowly churned its way south to exactly where Legris and his film crew were supposed to be. His good friend could be in trouble and would have to make a decision.

  At last, a deep yellow ray of sunlight cut through a split in the low clouds that afternoon, and the Talassa tied up at L’Anse-au-Foulon. That evening, the Chief finished off the rest of the required paperwork and packed his bag. His job on Talassa was done. Around 0500 the next morning, he walked out into the fresh morning air, down the gangway and hopped into a waiting taxi.

  “Señor, aeropuerto, y rápido por favor,” he said to the driver who did not understand a word.

  “Oh sorry, please take me to the airport as fast as you can.”

  In his head, the Chief was already in Central America.

  A CHAIN OF EVENTS

  Esmeralda was miraculously still hanging on despite the currents and the debris in the Patuca River. Its two big storm anchors were deep into the clay of the riverbed. Those anchors, each possessing two hundred and fifty feet of one-inch high-grade chain, could hold just about anything. In addition, both twin diesel engines were running. In forward gear at 1800rpm, the boat was able to reduce the tension on the ground tackle and prevent it from snapping.

  “I think it’s working!” Dog yelled to Ronnie — who was standing in the wheelhouse feathering the engines and trying as best he could to keep the yacht from being swept away.

  The wind was gusting to eighty-five knots when Rackman saw the radar’s oval dome tear from its bracket on the mast and fly overboard. Then the leftover structure that had held the canvas top that once covered the cockpit took a hit from a flying tree branch and crumpled. Soon afterwards, the long cockpit seat cushions were ripped from their Velcro strips and flew off like sheets of paper into the mangroves. At eighty-five knots, the sand on the other side of the bay had become airborne and began sandblasting the paint off the bow of the struggling yacht. Shortly after, Esmeralda started to resemble a target in a shooting gallery. Above, the masts and rigging were vibrating with such intensity that the entire boat wouldn’t stop shaking.

  In the galley, Shirley was valiantly stuffing towels into cupboards to stop the dishes from rattling. The noise was driving her crazy. When she’d settled the clattering dishes, she threw the mud-stained towels the guys had used earlier down into the engine room, where the washer and dryer were located. Her aim was a little off, so the soggy Martha Stewart towels fell into the bilge instead, slowly sinking into the murky sludge sloshing under the twin Caterpillar diesels and settling on the business end of the hose connected to the main bilge pump. With the main pump blocked, the engine room began to rapidly fill up with water. Esmeralda was sinking.

  Unaware of her mistake, Shirley went to her cabin, locked the door and dropped a pair of industrial strength pills to calm her nerves, washing them down with a can of Diet Coke. She flopped down on her bunk and put her precious headphones on. It wasn’t long before poor Shirley nodded off. Reggae music always put her to sleep.

  Valeska sat in the semi-darkness of the cargo hold, listening to the storm and wondering what was going on. She was hungry. The food that Dog had promised her hadn’t arrived. She yelled the Dog’s name until she was hoarse, but nobody answered. For a while, she thought that Dog and his crew had abandoned ship. Then she heard footsteps and shouts overhead and began to think that maybe things were beginning to fall apart. And she was right.

  Up on deck, the mainsail boom had broken loose. Dog’s two beefy deckhands had to crawl out on deck and secure it before it was ripped from the mast. Then the furled roller jib unwound, and in no time, the big sail was torn to shreds. But the most serious problem was that the river was now full of trees, roofs, dead animals, trash and whatever else the Patuca could swallow. The current was pounding these objects into the hull. Several of them managed to snag on the two anchor chains. It was just a matter of time.

  When the Dog saw that the yacht was in serious danger, he began to prepare for the worst. He had his guys bring two-by-fours, hammers, nails and pieces of plywood to the front cabin in preparation for a puncture. While the crew was busy up front, the Dog and Ronnie stood in the wheelhouse, trying to figure out what to do next. During a short lull, Rackman looked through the driving rain toward the mangroves, hoping for sudden inspiration. All the leaves had been stripped by the wind, but the strong current slowed in the cluster of roots. They should have listened to the old man and tied up behind the thick mangrove trees. But it was too late.

  Without warning, there was a loud crunch, and Esmeralda trembled and heeled over violently to one side. Then there was a horrific scraping sound, like fingernails running across a blackboard. Down below, a cupboard full of pots and pans flew open, spilling its contents out onto the galley floor. The boat tilted even further, throwing Barker up against the chart table. “What the hell was that?”

  The Dog hurried up on deck in time to witness an enormous mahogany tree, roots and all, slam into the yacht. The anchors holding Esmeralda didn’t have a chance under the tremendous extra pressure of the giant tree. Dog quickly surveyed the situation, and just by accident, his eyes caught a small detail. On the lower part of the tree, protruding from the water, was a white wooden sign with the words “Casa Tio” painted on it in black letters.

  Screams came from below. Water was gushing down the hallway into the main cabin. On arriving at the bow, he saw his two deckhands standing paralyzed as they watched a thick branch bore deeper and deeper into the hull. Fountains of muddy water began to shoot in. At that moment, he wished that he had a steel boat instead of a wooden one.

  “We’re fucked! Quick, lift up the floorboards, get the chainsaw and saw that sucker off before it totally rips the hull open. I’ll fire up the emergency pumps.”

  He thought of Valeska, who was still locked down in the cargo hold. She would be safer with him on deck. He was on the way to get her when he heard Rackman yell, “Boss, come quick, we’re dragging anchor! That damn tree is pushing us backwards and there’s nothing we can do to stop it.”

  All sailors know that once Murphy’s Law is declared on ship, all hell breaks loose. What happened next on board the Esmeralda resulted from a long series of unconnected events that had finally come together. In her cabin down below, Shirley had been wrenched from a deep sleep by all the commotion. She sat up in the bunk, and as soon as her feet touched the floor, she pulled them back up with shock: Six inches of muddy river water covered the rug. For a few seconds, she sat paralyzed, watching the brown murky muck rush in under the door. Still dazed from the double dose of sleeping pills, she got to her feet, unlocked the cabin door and stumbled down the hall toward the main salon. If she had turned to look in the opposite direction, she would have noticed the two guys working frantically upfront trying to plug the hole. Instead, she slammed the door of the watertight bulkhead behind her and, without thinking, locked it tight. That way, she figured, the main salon would stay dry whatever happened, and she’d have less to mop up after the storm. Overtaken by dizziness, la femme à tout faire passed out on the sofa, unaware that those at the front of the yacht, Valeska included, were now locked in.

  As the water rushed in, it was obvious that there wasn’t much more to do up in the bow. Normally, the guys inside could have escaped through a deck hatch. But the heavy cases of artifacts that had been placed topside blocked all exits. With the watertight bulkhead door locked, and without anybody aware of their situation, their time on this earth was fast running out. Up in the wheelhouse, Dog Barker, already in an advanced state of panic, pushed the engine throttles to the limit.

  “Come on, you fucker, move! Move!”

  But the big yacht didn’t have
a chance. Now just another victim of the Patuca River’s madness, the boat was caught in the raging current and careened toward the village.

  ESMERALDA

  From his house on the riverbank, Anton had been watching this series of errors ever since the tree had punched a hole in the big yacht. He knew there was nothing anyone on board could do but hang on.

  When Esmeralda reached the village side of the enraged river, it began to slam up against the boulders and mud on the high water line. The old man and his grandson forced open the back door of the trembling house just enough to slip outside. Struggling against the wind, they hung on the balcony posts in front in time to witness the ship of fools crash through Anton’s own dock and continue its insane drift toward a large wooden shed built on pilings downstream. The sound it made as it crashed through the structure defied description. Then the stricken yacht violently smashed against the cement pilings of the municipal pier. The impact smashed a few starboard portholes on the hull. Water began to rush in.

  On board Esmeralda, chaos had taken over. In a last-ditch attempt to save the ship, Dog Barker threw his two diesels into reverse, hoping that he could keep the stern close to shore. He might have managed this maneuver, but in the fatal moment, he goosed the two big Cats and the engines died. Water had finally flooded the engine room, thanks to the towels that had clogged the bilge pumps. Worse than that, the pressure on the tree that had stabbed Esmeralda caused it to act as a lever. When the current yanked the tree around, it took along a large section of the hull with it. Luckily for Shirley, Ramón rushed down into the main cabin and dragged her limp body up into the relative safety of the wheelhouse, and dropped her to the floor. She awoke with a start.

  Their ultimate recourse was to abandon ship, but it was too late. A drifting mass of debris rounded the bend in the river and took the same route as Esmeralda, passing the spot where Anton’s jetty had been and careening toward the village pier. When it piled up against the yacht, the mainmast toppled over toward the bow and broke in half, gouging a gaping hole in the deck just above the cargo hold where Valeska stood up to her waist in water.

  When she saw exterior light pour in through what used to be the cargo hatch, she climbed the ladder, scrambled over the debris on deck and jumped over to one of the pilings that held up the dock. She hung on desperately and watched as Esmeralda inched its way toward the center of the river until it was clear of the pier. The drifting island of condensed debris stalled briefly in the eddy, with only the broken stub of the mizzenmast still protruding from the melee of rigging wire, broken spars and splintered wood.

  Anton and his grandson watched it all. They had seen someone crawl from a hole on deck and disappear from view under the pier before the heap of debris was propelled into the current. As the doomed yacht was swept away, the old man crossed himself for the second time that day. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d done that.

  “No one deserves to die this way,” he uttered aloud.

  A little further downriver, Ramón’s motley crew had managed to swim diagonally with the current to shore. They huddled together behind a beached fishing boat, watching wide-eyed as the wreck of the Esmeralda swirled by with Barker, Ramón and Rackman hanging onto the stump of the mainmast, as their jumbled-looking raft swept out to sea.

  “There goes our pay,” lamented the big Garifuna.

  “And there goes a real bad bunch of cabrons,” commented another. “Buena suerte!” He spat but the glob of spit just vaporized in the wind.

  NO CHOICE

  Our supply of food was running low, and hunting iguanas in the driving rain was hardly an option. The Lopez brothers and María were worried about their families and I kept thinking about Valeska. I wondered whether she was still alive, and, if so, where they’d taken her. I couldn’t do anything to help her if I remained holed up in the Ciudad Blanca. To find the answers, my expedition would have to be put on hold. That was the sad truth. We had to get back to the coast fast, but the raging Patuca River was out of the question for at least another week.

  We had another plan. There was a creek nearby that Uncle Tio had often used to return to the coast during the rainy season. Now there would be an open passage through to Barra Patuca. The trip would be difficult, but we had little choice. The next morning, we stripped down to our shorts and threw most of our packs back down the muddy slope. Then we followed another short trail to the creek behind the ground where Tio’s rickety outhouse once stood. When we reached the creek, we saw that it was overflowing with dark, reddish, swirling water, just as Chili-Chili had predicted. We covered the gear with a tarp and went to get the boats. In the downpour, George and Chili portaged the outboards while the rest of us tackled the jerry cans of gasoline. Chili explained that there were places where we’d have to get out and pole our way through in order to preserve our outboards. So the next thing to do was to find a bamboo patch and cut long poles with the machetes. That didn’t take long. There was bamboo everywhere. On the way back to the boat, Peter-Pedro pulled back the wide leaves with the end of his machete, uncovering a big river turtle sitting quietly in the mud. Peter-Pedro put it in the boat among the few boxes of food that were left. I knew what was on the menu for supper.

  It continued to rain as we shoved off from the muddy riverbank and began the return trip to the coast. After being holed up in the foothills, none of us had any idea of the extent of the flooding. Further up the mountains, mudslides had wiped out whole villages. Slightly to the north of us, floodwaters had rushed in from two directions and inundated the lowlands, claiming numerous victims who’d had no way to escape. Soon the creek we were following was no longer a creek. It had overflowed its banks and widened out over the plain. Chili-Chili was careful to stay in the middle of the two lines of trees that marked the creek bed.

  As we battled the swirling currents and flotsam, I couldn’t help thinking about the chain of events that had led us to the present moment. I went back in time to the shipyard in Puerto Cortés, to old Ben, the philosopher. He had been right all along. Life was primarily a question of choice, with the outcome thwarted here and there by the unfathomable workings of destiny. But at that moment, all I could do was, for one more time, follow that old saying: Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.

  As rain poured down and we progressed north toward the coast, it became clear that the destruction of this once rich and beautiful land was almost total. Our two boats proceeded slowly through narrow passes and around broken, tangled branches. Time after time, we had to push past fallen trees that blocked the waterway and a variety of drowned animals — including a lifeless crocodile. Other creatures had taken shelter in the trees.

  The sun came out briefly, steam poured off the trees and a spooky mist rose up from the water. The temperature rose as if someone had turned up a thermostat. We were trapped in a sauna. Eddy and I filmed as we slowly wound our way north across the vast flooded plain and drifted into a narrow valley where the current sometimes pushed us sideways to the flow. It felt as if we would be compressed into a floating mound of branches. Finally, Chili found some open water and we managed to squeak through a narrow, flooded channel, which carried us through a field of long grass. The pass widened, and we had to get out and pull the boats over the mud for a short distance. Then I spotted something moving off to the left.

  “Anaconda,” said Chili in a low voice.

  “An ana-what?” Cowboy George exclaimed. When we were only a few feet away from the great snake, he finally saw it slide over some brackish green muck, slip into the water and disappear.

  He whispered, “Holy shit. It must be twenty feet long.”

  Late in the afternoon, we came to a cluster of half-submerged structures. This had been a camp for wealthy adventure tourists; they came with local guides to fish for tarpon. But now the lagoon was brackish water. We tied up our boats beside the only house just before another deluge fell from the sky. The water was so high that the front veranda now served as a dock. An entire wall was
missing. Hanging by a nail on another exterior wall, part of a wooden sign sculpted in the shape of a fish read “Pese Maya.” The other letters had blown away. Here at these modern ruins, most of the belongings had been looted by the wind. Clothes and pieces of debris were scattered throughout the tree branches. The only sound was the tapping the rain made as it fell on the few bits of tin roofing that had managed to hang on.

  A week before, people had been living here, going about their activities and not bothering a soul. Then a hurricane washed their entire existence out from under them. Did they have time to flee or had they been swept away in the current?

  It began to rain even harder. We quickly emptied the boats and put our possessions under the remains of the roof, beginning to feel like true flood victims, which, in fact, we were. In less than an hour, our little camp was set up. After that, there wasn’t much to do but sit around and try to make some kind of sense of what had happened over the past week.

  “Jacques, you know what I’m starting to believe?” said Eddy.

  “Tell me.”

  “I think that the Lost White City is better off staying lost. Man, those ruins gave me the creeps. There was a very intense energy in there.”

  “I felt that too. I just wanted to get the hell out,” said Cowboy George. “But hey, you guys, what about the film?”

  Eddy looked at me and waited for some kind of lead.