by Captain Lee
“So where should I go?” I asked. “Is he just going to come by my place for a house call?” Back in the day, it wasn’t that uncommon for doctors to actually visit their patients for a house call.
“I’ll pick you up and take you to Dr. Faber’s office.”
“Nancy, there must be some kind of static on the line. Why would I go to Faber’s office? The grouper got me in the knee, not the jaw.” Dr. Faber was the local dentist, who seemed unsuitable for the task at hand. Not only was I suffering from a pain that wasn’t tooth-related, but I knew Faber was off the island, anyway.
“He’s not here, but his reclining exam chair still is, and that’ll be something we’ll need.”
Such was the way of things for island living. Nancy was a vet, and a semi-vacationing one at that. Menzie was a proper doctor, but he didn’t have an office in a larger, equipment-filled hospital. His clinic was only a few rooms and not set up to treat gunshot wounds or heart attacks or some of the other more serious things that you might encounter at a large, urban hospital. He was more accustomed to sunburns, STDs, dehydration, intoxication, and the bumps and bruises that came with that last condition.
Great. I was going to the dentist’s office to get treated by the off-the-clock doc and assisted by the off-the-clock vet. But Nancy was a friend, and I trusted her judgment. On the islands, there was really no such thing as an emergency. The general philosophy when facing some injury or accident was basically that shit happens—now let’s just deal with it.
Nancy told me she’d pick me up at Turtle Cove, and she was waiting for us at the dock when we arrived. We told the kids to find their way home, and that we’d see them at dinner, but that plan ran into a lot of resistance. The boys, after all, wanted to keep fishing. They weren’t the ones who got stuck in the leg. It might have seemed a little uncaring for them to be so blasé about me having to go to the doctor, but it was, now that I’d learned, a Saturday, and they didn’t want their weekend ruined.
They could navigate their way home without any trouble. They were eleven, and it was a small island. Years later, that might be the kind of parenting that would lead Child Protective Services to knock on your door, but in the eighties, on Turks and Caicos, an eleven-year-old could still walk home without it being a horrible case of neglect and abandonment.
I gingerly boarded Nancy’s Jeep, a vehicle without roof or doors, designed for island transport, trying as I did to keep the blood off the seats. It would just be lousy form for the island’s veterinarian to be driving around in a car covered in blood. It was only a five-minute drive to the dentist’s office, but my leg was still bleeding the whole way.
My leg was pretty stiff and numb by the time we arrived at Faber’s office. Menzie was already there. He’d apparently come directly from his tennis club, since he was still wearing his tennis whites—white T-shirt, white shorts, white wristbands. It was a good thing he liked tennis instead of golf, because being greeted by a doctor wearing loud checkered pants would have at least looked less sanitary.
“Lee,” he said, shaking my hand, gazing down at my bloody leg. “What seems to be the trouble?”
Like I said—very British.
They took me into the dentist’s office. I don’t know if he kept it unlocked while he was away, or if they had access to the key. On the islands, lots of people had a pretty casual unlocked door policy. And what was someone going to do to a dentist’s office? Steal three miles of dental floss and five hundred paper bibs? Not very likely.
We didn’t have a ton of crime on the island, and the kind we did have was mostly taken care of by letting it take care of itself. If someone got their car stolen, there wasn’t going to be an army of CSIs on the scene dusting for fingerprints and analyzing shoe depressions in the sand. It was an island—where was a thief going to go? Pretty much every stolen car was solved the next day when the police or a neighbor would find the car, the gas tank totally drained, abandoned on a beach somewhere. Drugs were a problem, but there wasn’t a lot of violence, no gunfire exchanges between rival groups. Some guys just got high, and some guys used their business partner’s cash to finance their habit, and everyone would try to live and learn from the experience, but for the most part, there wasn’t a lot of crime or a lot of precautions, so getting into Dr. Faber’s office wasn’t a huge ordeal.
“Have a seat,” Menzie said, indicating the dentist’s exam chair. I complied.
“You say you got spiked with a grouper’s spine?” Menzie asked. I nodded. He looked closely at my knee.
“And your leg is feeling numb? That’s not right.”
“I’m glad you think so,” I said. Always a relief when the doctor believes your paralysis isn’t normal.
“Groupers don’t have poisoned spines is the thing,” Nancy said.
“I was thinking the same thing,” I said.
“Doesn’t have to be a toxin. Could be that the spine nudged a nerve. Maybe broke off inside the knee. That could account for the bleeding, and the numbness.” He tried a few drawers, some of them locked, some of them open, eventually finding what he was looking for—a pair of steel, angled scissors.
“What’s that for?” I asked.
“Just in case we need to cut your shorts off,” he answered.
“Let’s focus on the knee, and not the shorts,” I said.
“Suit yourself,” Menzie said. He placed the scissors on a table near the chair.
“Don’t you want to put that back where you found it?” I asked.
“Your shorts won’t be touched, Lee, but your leg is another story. I’m going to have to open it up a bit to see if that spine is still inside.” He opened his doctor’s bag and removed a scalpel and a few other instruments.
“Can’t you just take an X-ray or something to figure that out?” I asked.
“Sure. You know where I can find an X-ray machine on the island?”
He explained that the only way that he would be able to determine if and where that spine might be in my leg was just to go in and poke around. Island living didn’t have a lot of diagnostic equipment, apparently.
“That going to hurt?” I asked.
“It’s going to be . . . uncomfortable,” he said.
Why is it that when doctors are about to do something that will cause you to scream like a little girl, they say, “This is going to be a bit uncomfortable”?
“Can’t you give me a shot? Something to numb the leg?”
“If we were in a proper hospital, I probably would, but that’s not the sort of thing I usually have on hand. I tried looking for some Novocain, but if Faber has it, it’s behind the locked drawers.” He once again fished around in his bag a bit before producing a couple of pills.
“Try this,” he said.
“What is that? Tylenol?”
“Basically.”
That was how we were going to do the surgery. The doctor wearing his tennis whites, being assisted by a veterinarian in shorts and a tank top, cutting into a patient sitting in a dentist’s chair medicated with headache pills. That was pretty much island living health care in a nutshell.
He scrubbed up, then put on some rubber gloves. Nancy did the same. I just waited in the chair for the “medication” to take effect. After twenty minutes or so, they started in. It was like getting surgery in the wild west, except instead of a bottle of whiskey, I had a couple of aspirin, instead of a belt to bite down on, I had the vinyl arms of the dentist’s chair in a death grip. Piece of cake.
First, they poured some antiseptic on the wound. That let me know that the pills Menzie had given me weren’t working nearly as well as I had hoped. I inhaled sharply at the sting.
“Sorry about that,” he said.
Why are they always sorry? “Let’s just get this over with,” I said.
If they had some kind of X-ray, they’d know exactly where to go. But all they had was my bleeding leg as a guide. To find out where the spine was, they just had to go in after it and look around.
F
rom the patient’s perspective, it’s a hell of a lot more painful looking with your fingers than looking with an X-ray.
Every time they’d stick a scalpel or a retractor into the wound, it felt like they were sticking a hot poker into my leg. Since the spine had stuck me straight in, it made it harder to find. The missing spine would only look like a tiny dot. If they could even see it through the blood. If it was even there. Which required a lot of poking, prodding, and cutting.
It was exploratory surgery with pretty much zero anesthetic, just cutting into the knee until they finally found something hard and sharp that didn’t look like part of my knee. But there’s lots of things in a knee that are hard, like bone and cartilage and tendons, that don’t feel great when you try to pull them out to test whether they’re a foreign body. The instruments hurt like hell, but at least they didn’t feel excruciating and just wrong as the probing fingers, little fleshy worms burrowing into my skin. It must have been less than fifteen minutes, but it felt like hours, each exploration a new level of pain.
Finally, they found it.
“I think that’s the culprit,” Menzie said, extracting a thin, needlelike spine from my knee.
“Thank Christ,” I said, sweat streaming down my face.
“You want to keep it? A souvenir?” he asked.
“The scar will be a good enough reminder,” I said.
“Up to you,” he said, dropping it in a tray. It made a brittle clinking sound. “Do you have any preferences on the stitches?”
“Just that they be close together and functional, I suppose. How many you think you’re going to put in?”
“Maybe a dozen or so? Should be a good story for your wife.”
“She loves a good story,” I said.
After the final stitch went in, Menzie started putting things back in his bag and found something he wasn’t expecting.
“Well, how about that,” he said. “It looks like I do have some Demerol. Think you’d want that now?”
They say better late than never, but I wish he’d never have told me that a more thorough inspection of his bag could have saved me a lot of pain on the table.
“No, thanks,” I said. “Once the last stitch is in, I like to stop using the painkillers.”
“Understandable. Well, we can still use them later.”
“For what?” I asked. “Did you find more than one spine up in there?”
“No, I just mean when we take the stitches out. If you want.”
“Please, doc. I’ll take the stitches out myself. Won’t be the first time. Write me a prescription for a beer, and I’m all set.”
For stitches, you wanted a steady hand on them putting them in, but anybody could take them out. Just needed to make sure you got them all. Making a separate trip to the doctor just to get rid of some stitches is like going to the doctor to have a Band-Aid removed.
“How much do I owe you?” I asked.
Menzie removed his gloves, looked up at the ceiling while he figured. “Couple of pills, couple of stitches, call it an hour of time . . . how about fifty dollars?”
That’s just how medicine worked on the island. No one had insurance. You didn’t get referred to ten different specialists. You didn’t have to submit a hundred different forms. You saw the doc, he did what he needed to do, he gave you a bill, you paid it. All in all, pretty simple.
“Okay if I drop it off to you on Monday?” I asked.
“When is that?” he asked.
“Day after tomorrow,” Nancy said.
“Oh, certainly, that will be fine.”
He and Nancy helped put a wrap on my knee over the stitches, and I was good to go.
The next day was Sunday.
A good day for fishing.
Chapter 4
You Got Your Tit in a Wringer
Surprises at sea are never good things. You keep your eyes open, you listen to your captain and your crewmates, but if something surprising happens, it’s usually going to be bad. Broken equipment, injuries, storms, rotten food. All were surprises, none of them good. It never happened that you’d reel something in while fishing and find your hook attached to a chest full of gold coins, or you’d find steaks in the galley instead of bologna sandwiches, or you’d make a four-day sail in twenty-four hours. If something good was going to happen, you’d know about it a mile off. The things that were able to find you without any warning—that was never going to be good news.
“We’ve got company,” Rick said, pointing beyond our stern.
Hadn’t expected that.
We were on our first day of a four-day sail to Nassau. Rick was the man in charge of our four-man crew. He was the same guy who’d owned the sport fish that I’d abandoned Crazy George to go work on. He knew what he was doing, that’s for sure. It was a pretty straightforward operation. The owner of the boat, Alex, had hired me and three other guys to sail it from Turks and Caicos to Nassau as a way to save some money. For luxury goods, like a sailboat, the cost of declaring residency in a country was a duty that could be 75 percent to 100 percent the cost of the luxury good. So, a $500,000 sailboat spending a year in port would merit duty of up to half a million dollars. But there was a pretty easy workaround to avoiding this crippling tax—go on a weeklong sail.
Maybe the original intention behind the law was to get nomads and wanderers to move to other places, but in legal terms, a boat owner could just sail away from Turks and Caicos, clear in to a foreign port, come right back, and they would manage to avoid the hefty duty. And hell, the owner didn’t even need to be on board when he made the sail—he could just hire a crew to do it for him. That’s why I was on board to begin with. Just help three other guys sail the boat into Nassau and come back, and we’d each collect $400 for a week’s work. Not too bad.
Unless you ran into any surprises along the way.
The boat itself, Southern Nights, was absolutely gorgeous. It was a 60-foot Formosa, a twin-masted ketch made in Taiwan with a couple of beautiful hand-varnished wooden masts. The whole boat was just immaculate. Keeping a boat like that in shipshape required a lot of maintenance. It was amazing to look at and pretty damned comfortable to boot. But it wasn’t made for speed, and there was no way that we were going to outrun what was quickly gaining on us.
The Coast Guard.
It was a medium-sized boat, maybe 150 to 170 feet long, probably a Sentinel-class (Fast Response) cutter. Those boats could boogie to the tune of almost 30 knots, featuring four officers and twenty crew. And just to keep everyone honest, it had four crew-served Browning M2 machine guns, capable of spewing out six hundred rounds of .50-caliber ammo per minute, and a Mark 38 Model 2.25-mm autocannon.
“Where did they come from?” I asked Rick.
“That’s how they operate. They come at you from behind, every time. Keep you on the defensive.”
“Yeah, but we’re not an enemy cruiser sneaking through the Gulf of Tonkin.”
Rick just shrugged his shoulders. “Could just be routine.” Rick was a pretty laid-back guy, which wasn’t surprising since we all knew our jobs and he wasn’t captaining the Bounty. Having the Coast Guard behind us worried me, but it didn’t seem to cause him much concern.
It wasn’t uncommon, certainly. Coast Guard cutters made stops and inspections all the time. It didn’t mean that they were specifically looking for us. But it sure as hell didn’t mean that was off the table, either.
Our radio came crackling to life.
“Southern Nights, this is the Coast Guard. Lower your sail, reduce speed to under five knots, make your course one-eighty, and prepare to receive a boarding party for a safety inspection.”
Rick acknowledged the order and confirmed he would comply.
“It’s always a safety inspection,” he told me, rolling his eyes. How much safety did a sailboat require? Were they going to force us all to wear life preservers and stop running with scissors?
We sprang to action, lowering the sails and getting the diesel going, moving the boat to u
nder 5 knots. I asked Rick why they hadn’t told us to cut all power and come to a dead stop.
“It’s not a traffic stop on the freeway. Boats just floating around, vulnerable to currents and waves, are a lot harder to board than ones moving at a constant rate of speed.” Made sense.
The boat’s owner, Alex, hadn’t seemed untrustworthy. Alex was an expat, like me. The idea of a rich boat owner conjures up images of a tall, blond athlete in Brooks Brothers suits, but Alex was a fairly average-looking guy, a little on the shifty side. He was a bit stocky, seemed to have a few rough edges to him. Maybe that’s why he had decided to marry his wife, Louisa, who always caught the attention of every eyeball in the room. She was a smoking-hot blond trophy wife. I figured, that’s the reason he’d married her—because she would smooth out his edges. He wasn’t really in her league. He was certainly no Don Juan. She was friendly in a Southern way, and I got the impression that she was from Alabama. Maybe that’s why he decided to name the yacht Southern Nights.
Alex hadn’t talked a lot about what he did or what he used to do. He just claimed that he was mostly retired and had come to the islands without a lot of baggage but hauling a ton of money. This hadn’t raised too many eyebrows. Hell, back then, the island was full of guys like that, men with skinny bios and fat wallets. For a good chunk of the expats there, everybody was running from something. Maybe it was a failed business, or some problem with the law, or family that was trouble, but you didn’t have to leave America for a foreign island if all you wanted to find was sunshine.
Whatever he had left, whatever he was running from, money wasn’t a problem for him. He’d built a two-story house overlooking Grace Bay with a swimming pool that was practically linked to the beach out front. The cost of building that setup was about the same price per square foot as a plane ticket from LA to Paris, so it sure as hell wasn’t cheap.
Alex may have claimed to have been retired, but he didn’t just want to sit on the beach all day and sip piña coladas. He bought into a small hotel, a hundred-room concern right on the beach. Back then, there was a huge French Canadian contingent on Turks and Caicos. The French owned the Club Med on the island, Club Turquoise, a place so exclusive that it had its own time zone. Kind of amazing that an island that was only 17 miles long somehow required two time zones, but that’s how it was. There just seems to be something about speaking French that makes people arrogant and standoffish.
