On the Way Back

by Montague Kobbé

  I can see Nathaniel approaching in the distance. His face cannot mask the suffering of his heart. He has two drinks in his hands—his obligatory Guinness and, presumably, my usual rum-and-Coke. His walk is determined, if fatigued. I haven’t seen much of Nathaniel in months, and only now do I become aware of how much he has aged since I got here. Nathaniel called me to talk about Dragon Wings casually, informally, just a father and a son chatting the way we haven’t in ages. He greets me with a smile, goes straight to the point.

  We have a problem. All we have had since we started this business is problems. The only moments of joy have come from overcoming problems which have been followed by even greater problems. I received a visit from Deianira last night. She was representing Glenallen when she showed up. They’re threatening to press all sorts of charges against us. My initial confusion is only enhanced by Nathe’s expression, which shows not so much concern as resignation. Corruption, embezzlement, personal enrichment. Mainly concerning the loan from Jones Investments. I know that, if anything, we might have misrepresented the company’s obligations to Glenallen Rawlingson before he joined. Glenallen claims that even if the loan was legit it should have been refinanced not repaid, certainly not without consulting with the board anyway. Nathe’s voice is still serene. While I get more incensed by the second, he sips from his bottle of Guinness with thirst and delight, without allowing the slightest trace of anxiety to filter into his speech. There is some talk of administrative negligence, excessive expenditure, and I know not what more. I am shocked both by the nonsense of all these allegations and by the composure Nathaniel shows while telling me this. He brings up more charges and deals that look dubious on paper. I have lost interest, mainly because I can tell where this is going. Glenallen is dissecting arrangements like the one with Pinturas Borinquen and deliberately stripping them from their contexts. A shade of grief dyes Nathe’s eyes with sadness. I think they might have us by the balls this time. He sips the last drop of beer from his bottle, slams it heavily, loudly, but not violently on the wooden table. As he makes a tiny circle in the air with his right index finger to make the waitress aware that we need another round, it occurs to me that Nathe’s words don’t correspond with his attitude. He should be outraged, furious, like me. Instead, he seems hurt but calm—at peace, almost. I wonder if he is thinking of Sheila. I wonder if he is thinking of failure. But before I get the chance to ask him, he starts again. They won’t press charges if we agree to withdraw from the business immediately. His eyes land on mine, as if looking for consolation rather than relief, but I have little to give, because what confronts us is too complex, too difficult, too sad to digest. No, not so much what confronts us but what must follow. We are innocent, but that will have absolutely no bearing on the matter—no court of law in Anguilla will put our interests ahead of Glenallen Rawlingson’s, and dragging out the process for any significant period of time would run the airline to the ground. So financially we stand to win nothing at all from this case. More importantly, though, the real question emerging tacitly here, the real purpose of this conversation with Nathe, I suspect, is to determine whether there is a reason, any reason, why either of us should feel an inclination to stay in this godforsaken country fighting for Dragon Wings. Is there any point in being here, now that Sheila is gone? Is there any point at all in fighting till the end for something I’m not sure we even want anymore?

  Nathe’s beloved game of trust and intrigue has come down to this. I guess it’s safe to assume that he—that we—have lost. Maybe that’s where it all went wrong with Dragon Wings—maybe we let too many people in, too many opinions, too many personal interests. And now they want to force us out, to wrest control of the company from our hands. With Sheila gone, they can probably do that even if we went to trial and we won. Maybe it’s time we got on our way back, Nathe. I don’t know how long we have sat in silence but I can tell that all the while he has been entertaining similar thoughts, because as soon as he hears me saying this his eyes glow with something other than just the reflection of the fading sun.

  There is no way back, Dragon—there is only a way forward. Nothing could—hang on a minute, let me try again: nothing should be allowed to disturb the serenity distilled by Nathe’s words. I sit, placidly drinking my rum-and-Coke, staring into the west, where the distance hides the Virgin Islands from our sight, where the glow of the setting sun blinds the eye, while the silence that follows Nathe’s words creeps into the scene and settles with the ease of harmony. I think of Linda. I think of Mum. I’m going to have to buy two very big presents. I’m filled with gladness at the thought of how it’ll be once I get back home—the same kind of gladness, somehow, that I associate with memories of my time in Anguilla. I would confide this to Nathe but I recognize in his acquiescing eyes, in the understated smile on his face, the same peace of mind. There’s still one last drop of rum to be had from the bottom of my plastic glass. I tilt it toward me as I throw my head backward. From the corner of my eye I spy the last orange cord of the waning sun tuck itself beneath the blue surface of the ocean and—instantaneous, evanescent, like the glimpse of a bolt of lightning you have almost missed, but not quite, almost seen but not either—the green flash of the stunning afterglow. At last.

  MONTAGUE KOBBÉ was born in Caracas, Venezuela, and has resided in the UK, Germany, and Spain. He has had close ties to Anguilla for over thirty years and maintains a regular literary column in Sint Maarten’s Daily Herald. His work has been published in the New York Times and El Nacional (Venezuela) among many other media outlets. He is the author of The Night of the Rambler (a finalist for the Premio Literario Casa de las Américas) and Tales of Bed Sheets and Departure Lounges.

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  The Night of the Rambler

  by Montague Kobbé

  CHAPTER I

  MAY DE LORD BE WIT’ US

  When a new pocket of lights flared farther to the east through the deep blackness of the night, Sol Campbell finally vented the rage that had been eating up his insides, and with an intimidating Yo Rude! issued the prelude to his duel. He seemed to stand on higher ground as his voice rose above the rest to ask, Wha’ dem lights over dere be? Tell me, nuh—wha’ dat light yonder be, if it ain’ St. Kitts? Instantly, the roar of the engine receded and the surge behind the boat caught up with its hull, softly thrusting the sixteen passengers forward. Awash at sea, The Rambler drifted helplessly in no particular direction. The calm Caribbean waters rocked the boat melodiously, intensely, in the middle of the night, as its 115-horsepower diesel engine gargled on idle. Every now and then a wayward wave or ripple crashed against the underside of the hull, letting out an empty thump that reverberated inside the men aboard. There was no moon. The night, dark and clear all at once, was made thicker by a sinister haze which veiled the stars and the lights in the distance. Behind the wheel, on the bridge of the thirty-five-foot boat, a bitter argument ensued.

  Rude Thompson, captain for a day, had been entrusted to take The Rambler to the northwestern shores of St. Kitts in order to meet local members of the insurrection at the stroke of midnight. But that very stroke had gone at least half an hour earlier, as they’d seemingly found themselves off the coast of, not St. Kitts, but the neighboring St. Eustatius.

  The men had gathered at Island Harbour, on the northeastern end of Anguilla, that very day to pack the boat with guns, ammo, and a few provisions for the journey. The mission had been kept secret and the men involved had camped near the training site at Junks Hole Beach for the past three days, away from their families for added security. The Rambler was loaded for the sixty-five-mile journey southward on Friday, June 9, shortly after lunch. Alwyn Cooke, the mastermind behind the plan, showed up uncharacteristically late. He wore his usual gray pressed trousers and white cotton shirt buttoned up to the top. Yet there was something ragged about his looks—something that went beyond the three-day beard and the sunken rings around his eyes. He brought with
him the dark green canvas bag in which, ten days earlier, the police task force had intended to take their guns, before they were expelled from the island.

  At that time, Inspector Edmonton, head of the police task force, had carried the bag to the Piper Aztec that was supposed to take him and the remaining four members of the force back to St. Kitts. On his way from the small wooden building that was Wallblake Airport to the equally small propeller aircraft sitting on the dust strip, he was met by Rude Thompson, Gaynor Henderson, and the collective indignation against the man whose ill judgment had led to widespread violence months before, during the Statehood Queen Show. Rude’s first request for Inspector Edmonton to drop de bag an’ go on was more of an order. The inspector’s reluctance to obey gave Gaynor the opportunity he craved to restore the pride that had been taken from him three months earlier, on the evening when he was thrown in the dungeon. So, emboldened by the circumstances, Gaynor took a .32 pistol from behind his back and shoved it right inside Inspector Edmonton’s mouth, until it polished his uvula. You ever taste de taste of lead in you mout’? Inspector Edmonton had no chance to reply. You better drop de bag unless dis is de last t’ing you ever wan’ taste.

  Alwyn Cooke had thought the gesture excessively violent, but ten days had shaken Anguilla’s world, and he presently approached with the same bag, except that it now looked heavier, bulkier. Come to de back of de truck. Is t’ree more of dem back dere. His shrill voice cut through the air and opened up the silence. By three in the afternoon, The Rambler was loaded with most of the equipment the police force had left behind: six Lee-Enfield Mk III* .303 rifles, such as the ones used during World War I; five Winchester Model 54 .30-06 rifles, the predecessor to the famous Model 70, launched in 1936; four M1 Garand .30-06 semiautomatic rifles; four M1 .30 semiautomatic carbines; eight hundred rounds of ammunition; two boxes of dynamite; four detonators; and four cans of tear gas. In addition to the material confiscated from the task force was a supply of more modern equipment from the USA, including five automatic .25 handguns, three .32-caliber pistols, and, crucially, two M16 automatic rifles and two Browning M1919 .30-caliber machine guns, both of which were popular at the time with the American army, particularly in Vietnam.

  However antiquated, The Rambler was equipped with an arsenal big enough to arm a small militia. Which is precisely what Alwyn Cooke, Rude Thompson, and the rest of the organizers of the operation expected to find in St. Kitts that night awaiting their aid. They would be in for a surprise—but not yet. Right now, burdened with the weight of sixteen passengers plus five hundred pounds of guns and ammo, the main concern was how much the boat could carry without sinking. Therefore, provisions for a trip that was to last at least nine hours were kept to a bare minimum: a demijohn of water, some dry crisps, and homemade johnnycakes—a local delicacy made of cornmeal and traditionally baked by women for their men to eat on the journey (later transfigured into johnny)—freshly prepared by some of the more diligent wives.

  The Rambler was loaded and ready to go by about three in the afternoon, but the sun wouldn’t set until some four hours later. The island, in complete control of the rebel government for the previous ten days, had been inaccessible to foreign traffic for forty-eight hours. Oil drums were carried in pickup trucks and lined up on the dirt strip of the airport to prevent any aircraft from landing, and all beaching points (there were no ports in Anguilla) had been guarded and officially closed to the outside world in an effort to keep any news of a plan which was largely unknown to the population in the first place from leaking to the enemy.

  Consequently, at three in the afternoon of Friday, June 9, 1967, The Rambler became the first boat to leave Anguilla’s territorial waters in two days. It sailed eastward from Island Harbour, and faced the tough Atlantic tides off the northeastern part of the island, before making the choppy journey past the cliffs of Harbour Ridge. Then it reached the treacherous seas off Captain’s Bay, only to drift into the narrow passage between Windward Point, the easternmost part of the island, and Scrub Island, a midsized cay to the east that still housed a dirt strip built as part of that obscure episode of World War II—the Destroyers-for-Bases Agreement.

  By four in the afternoon, The Rambler was cutting across the strait between Anguilla and Scrub, steering away from the waves that rolled in all the way from Africa, and heading in the general direction of St. Kitts and the rest of the Caribbean atoll. The first three miles of the passage were expected to be among the roughest of the day, but the sun still burned ferociously in the sky and the men aboard The Rambler still itched with desire to reach St. Kitts and get to the task at hand as the boat left Scrub Island behind on its port side and stopped challenging the high crests of the vigorous sea in order to roll with them toward Tintamarre, a.k.a. Flat Island, about ten nautical miles away.

  Like Scrub, Tintamarre is a midsized cay just off the (northwestern) coast of its bigger sister island, St. Martin, which had little of interest for honest citizens outside one or two unspoiled beaches of white sand and turquoise water. Like Scrub, the island is flat enough to home a dirt strip, but with facilities in Dutch Sint Maarten to the south, Scrub Island to the east, and Dog Island to the north, the American army felt adequately prepared to monitor the traffic and disrupt the passage of German U-boats through the Anguilla channel. Perhaps understandably, their plans did not foresee the apparition of Jan van Hoeppel, a mercenary adventurer—half Quixote, half Saint Exupéry—who, in collaboration with the Vichy government across the French Caribbean, would foil the American initiative and develop a sophisticated replenishing station in Tintamarre for the Nazi navy to enjoy fresh fruit and water from Martinique, from Guadeloupe, from Dominica, while their submarines were refueled and replenished.

  Alas, German interest in the Caribbean was short-lived, so when the traffic diminished and, indeed, the bad guys were defeated, van Hoeppel turned to aviation for inspiration: he already owned a four-seat, high-wing, single-engine Stinson Reliant, which he dubbed La Cucaracha, so he flattened the ground in Tintamarre, invested the money he had made collaborating with the Vichy in two ten-seat Stinson Model A trimotors and a six-seat Stinson Detroiter, and, just like that, established the first operational airline in the northeastern Caribbean: Air Atlantique.

  Van Hoeppel had long shifted his focus from airplanes to real estate, and the role he plays in this tale hangs in the balance of untyped words, but as sixteen restless men approached the western shores of Tintamarre on the first stage in their voyage, the remnants of a fleet that had been reduced by frequent accidents and decimated by a severe hurricane more than fifteen years back glowed with a rare air of grandeur, of relevance, as if, somehow, one impossible dream could be mirrored in another. Then Alwyn Cooke intervened. Cut de engine. Rude Thompson looked at his comrade with a trace of disbelief, but did not venture as far as to question the order. A few seconds elapsed before Wha’ we do now?—a voice so anonymous echoed that it seemed to each of the passengers in the boat as if they had all asked the question at the same time. We wait for night to fall, and the ensuing silence filled the air separating the flat soil of Tintamarre to the starboard and the angled hills of St. Barths in the distance, shadowed in the center by a thick pocket of rain that poured down somewhere at sea, between The Rambler and the island.

  It had just gone five when the diesel engine of The Rambler fell silent. The first ten miles of the journey had taken a good two hours, but the sun still hung high in the sky, far above the horizon line. Alwyn Cooke intended to minimize the chances of being caught crossing the St. Barths channel by lingering near Tintamarre until night had fallen. On Friday, June 9, 1967, the sun set at 6:46 p.m. The tropical crepuscule, short-lived and dramatic, shed daylight for another half hour. Hence, The Rambler and its crew had to sit tight and wait out at sea, off the eastern end of Tintamarre, for two full hours. Of which, the first thirty, forty minutes were spent in utter silence, as if Alwyn Cooke’s instruction had dropped a tacit curfew on words.

  But it had not
been Alwyn Cooke, nor anyone else, who had imposed the silence. Instead, it was the simultaneous reaction of sixteen men, all far too absorbed in their own worries to notice the world outside. To the three American mercenaries aboard The Rambler, all scarred from their exploits in Vietnam, this might have seemed like a natural reaction. However, to the average West Indian, a group of sixteen men sitting in silence for this long in a small boat was an aberration. A talkative people steeped in a long tradition of humor and faith, West Indians are not prone to fall silent—to let pass an opportunity to lambaste one another with a copious dose of pique—on any occasion. But this was more than just an adventure, and more was at stake than any of them would have cared to admit: here were joined at once interests that were national and personal, common and individual; here was invested much hope, much time, and much money—money to pay for guns, money to pay for experienced men of war, money that in Anguilla in 1967 simply did not exist. Many of these thoughts never even crossed the minds of any of the sixteen men aboard The Rambler. Nevertheless, the tension, the fear, the uncertainty that reigned was adequately represented in this drawn-out silence that lasted from the moment Alwyn Cooke uttered his order to wait for night, until sometime after six, when the red sun approaching the horizon inexplicably triggered in the young Walter Stewart a need to hum the melody of “The Lord Is My Shepherd.”