Zane laughed. Miss Harper, the neurotic school librarian, was known to throw books at students who talked too loud during study hours. She chucked a book at Zane once, but he was in no position to complain—Miss Harper’s weapon that day was merely The Old Man and the Sea in paperback. An exceptionally defiant girl, it was rumored, once took War and Peace to the head.
They soon reached the bridge and Zane dropped a cinderblock anchor overboard to keep the canoe in place. He picked up a fishing rod and was about to cast the line when he noticed that Lucia was no longer staring at the universe. She was looking at him.
“Hi,” said Zane. He flushed. Couldn’t he have said something more interesting?
Lucia smiled. “Hi,” she said, and then she leaned forward and pressed her mango-flavored lips to his. Zane had never kissed a girl before, and he could not imagine there being any feeling closer to bliss, not even catching a 1,000-pound blue marlin or winning first place in a fishing tournament. He closed his eyes and felt the warm glow of God’s searchlight envelope him.
Zane and Miguel both heard the drone of the airplane at the same time. They were approaching the location where Miguel had demanded to go, so Zane slowed the boat to idle speed. As he had done several times that day, Miguel peered up at the approaching aircraft—this one a single-engine seaplane—and studied it with squinted eyes.
“Here we go,” said Miguel. He waved to the plane with broad sweeps of arms.
“What are you doing?” asked Zane.
Miguel turned. Zane’s heart sank when he saw the .45 revolver aimed at his face. “I shouldn’t expect a problem from you, should I, captain?”
“No, sir.” Zane shook his head.
“Glad to hear it. If you do everything I tell you, then maybe you won’t end up as shark food tonight. Am I clear?”
Zane trembled. “Yes, sir.” Was this really happening? It felt like a nightmare, albeit a vivid one.
Miguel turned back toward the plane which was now almost directly overhead and flying at an abnormally low altitude. He raised his arm with his fist clenched and then dropped it toward the water. A small door on the airplane flung open and a square object fell out. It tumbled end over end and struck the ocean fifty yards away, sending a plume of white water into the air.
“Get us over there,” said Miguel. “Quickly!”
Zane gunned the engines and brought the boat alongside the object, which now bobbed on the ocean’s surface. It looked like a large pillow wrapped in cellophane. Everything suddenly made sense. Zane could see that the object was a bale—a common way for drug runners to deliver their products to the United States, strong enough to survive an impact but light enough to float. It was probably filled with cocaine, Zane guessed, cultivated by modern-day slaves in the highlands of Latin America, and then put on the plane for delivery. Miguel was likely the middleman in charge of collecting the bale, dividing the drugs into saleable units, and distributing them among a network of dealers in South Florida. It would then be divided further, sold through various underground channels, and, ultimately, complete its cycle after being consumed by a microcosm of society, everyone from the wealthy to the homeless. It was, as Zane knew well, the ultimate product.
Miguel leaned over the gunwale with a boathook in his hand. “Closer.” When the bale came within reach, Miguel stuck the curved end of the boathook through a loop on the package and pulled it in. He grabbed the corner of the bale and strained to haul it over the side.
“Help me bring it in,” said Miguel. Zane paused. Miguel was leaning over the side of the boat, focused on the bale. Here, right before Zane, was the perfect opportunity to push Miguel into the water and save himself.
“I said help me, dammit!” Miguel snarled.
Zane sighed, then leaned over and grabbed a corner of the bale. Violence had never come easily to him. Together they wrenched the bale into the boat.
“Seems awfully heavy for cocaine,” said Zane.
“Who said it was coke?” Miguel gazed at the bale with eyes alight, as if he were looking at a beautiful woman. He ran his hand over the slick, wet plastic, and then he looked up at Zane with a crooked smile. “But if I tell you what it is, then I’ll have to kill you, and unfortunately I still need your help.”
That was the first time Miguel had smiled in front of Zane, but, to Zane’s dismay, he had done it while delivering a death threat. Zane had only known this much fear a few times in his life. The first was when, at 13 years old, he had gone scuba diving with his father, Skip, off the coast of Hobe Sound, north of Jupiter, on the opening day of lobster season. A tropical storm had recently skirted the coast and muddied the water, but bad visibility did not deter them. They were hoping to catch their limit of “bugs”—the local term for Caribbean spiny lobster—and after splashing into the ocean and scouring the reef for ten minutes they came upon several of them huddled beneath a coquina ledge.
Zane tried to snare the largest lobster of the group but it bolted away, leaving only a cloud of drifting sediment. Skip swam after it and disappeared into the murk. Zane held onto the ledge and waited, but after a few minutes Skip had not come back. Panic swelled inside him and he swam off to look for his father. He shined his diving flashlight in every direction as he searched along the edge of the reef, hopeful that Skip would see the beam cutting through the cloudy water. Instead, a shadow much larger than his father appeared; the commotion had attracted an 8-foot-long bull shark. Zane froze and sank toward the bottom.
As the shark approached, Zane could see its black, emotionless eye studying him. The mouth gaped enough to reveal the tips of its serrated teeth, and its gills flared out like window shutters in a gale. As the shark passed him and circled around, Zane noticed a coral cave to his side. He pulled himself into it. The shark glided by and vanished back into the haze.
Thank you, he thought, not quite sure who he was thanking.
While he waited to ensure that the shark did not return, something inside the cave caught his eye: a small, yellow thing partially concealed by sand. A streak of sunlight swept over the object and it glinted. Was it a lost fishing lure? Or some hardware from a boat? Zane closed his fingers around it and pulled it in; the regulator almost fell out of his mouth when he opened his hand. There against the familiar creases of his palm lay something quite unfamiliar: a Spanish doubloon made of solid gold. The designs on the coin were rudimentary but clear. On the front was the number 8 and what looked like an old sailing ship, and on the back was an etching of the Virgin Mary with twelve stars around her head. A phrase was engraved on the border: Nuestra Señora de los Dolores.
Zane shot to the surface like a torpedo, forgetting all about the shark and ignoring the safety rules of scuba such as ascending slowly. He found his father sitting on the edge of the boat, tapping his bare feet to vintage reggae and nursing on a sweaty bottle of Kalik beer. If Zane hadn’t found something so wonderful, he would have been furious.
“There you are, kiddo,” said Skip. “Get any bugs?”
Zane removed his dive mask. “No bugs.”
“Sorry I didn’t come back for you. But look what I got.” Skip held up a large lobster by its antennae.
“Nice one, Dad. I got something, too.” Zane held up the doubloon. Reflecting the midday sun, it looked like a ball of fire in his hand.
Skip dropped the lobster. “Holy crap,” he muttered.
Upon returning home, Zane’s mother, Samantha, urged Skip to sell the doubloon to pay for the breast augmentation surgery that she so desperately wanted. Zane, their only child, begged them not to sell it, but they did anyway, and within a month Samantha was shopping for larger bras. That Christmas, however, Zane woke to find the doubloon on a leather cord around his neck. Without telling Samantha, Skip had purchased the doubloon back from the collector and hired a jeweler to make a pendant of it, and then he put it around Zane’s neck on Christmas Eve. How Skip acquired the money, Zane never knew. A few weeks later, Skip bought a new pickup truck, left Samantha, and move
d in with a younger woman, a student at Florida Atlantic University.
“Why did you leave mom?” Zane asked him several years later.
Skip thought for a moment. “I was bored.”
Even now as he stood captive by Miguel, Zane felt comfort knowing that the doubloon hung around his neck. It was his connection to something ancient, something eternal, and he often wondered about its origins. Sometimes he tried to envision who might have held it long ago.
Rubbing his fingers across it, he could feel the face of the Virgin Mary. His was a tangled faith: a concoction of his mother’s agnosticism, his father’s unbridled optimism, and his own intense love of nature. He believed in something but was not sure what. It—whatever it was—seemed as invisible as air, and yet just as essential.
Zane gazed at the bale on the deck of his boat, increasingly curious about what it contained. Although it was not uncommon for bales like this to wash up on the coast, he had never seen one before. He had, however, often wondered what he would do if he did. It was a frequent topic of conversation at waterfront bars with other captains and mates, usually spurred by a question like this:
“What if you were out fishing one day, no one else around, and you found a bale?”
Would he abide by the law and call the authorities, or would he stow it in the bilge and try to sell it? There was a darker time in Zane’s life when he would have done the latter without hesitation, probably even keeping a small portion of its contents for his own enjoyment, but now he hoped he would do the right thing if ever faced with such a choice. An average bale of cocaine could fetch half a million dollars on the black market, casting a powerful temptation for fishermen, most of whom made barely enough money to live and who, on a daily basis, were surrounded by the glitz and excess of South Florida. Given that offshore anglers plied the coastal waters year-round, and due to the fact that white, floating objects could be spotted against the cobalt face of the Atlantic from miles away, it was no secret within the fishing community that wayward caches of drugs were sometimes picked up and secretly “disposed of.” Captains even had a code name for bales: square groupers. For a man with weak morals and nagging debts, coming across one was like finding buried treasure.
But what was inside this bale? If not cocaine, then what? A list of other drugs flashed through Zane’s mind: marijuana, heroin, meth, ecstasy. A searing memory descended upon him—his fingers on the soft fleshy part between Lucia’s jawline and neck, and his ear so close to her mouth that he could hear the hollow stillness, like the sound of the sea in a shell.
Miguel opened the icebox. Inside, the mahi lay submerged in icy water that was stained red by its own blood, making it look as if the icebox was filled with tomato soup. He picked up the bale, groaning as he did so, and slid it into the icebox, pushing it down beneath the fish and the crimson slush until it could no longer be seen.
He turned to Zane. “How much fuel do you have?”
Zane looked at the gauge. The tank was nearly full. “Plenty.”
“Enough to get to St. Augustine?”
“St. Augustine? But that’s—”
“I know how far it is. Do we have enough fuel to get there?”
Zane sighed. “I think so.”
Chapter Three
Dominic woke to the sting of a carpenter ant chewing on the nape of his neck. Like a small but intense burn, the bite roused a memory of the day he branded a native girl in El Salvador after a soldier accused her of stealing bread. It was a lenient punishment, he thought. After all, natives suspected of lesser crimes were often executed, but she was young, beautiful, and—unbeknownst to anyone but her and Dominic—several months pregnant.
When he overheard murmurs of disappointment from two soldiers who had expected to see blood, Dominic convinced them that a lesser sentence was justified because the girl was only half native. It was well-known and obvious that she had been fathered by a Spanish missionary priest whose vow of celibacy apparently excluded indigenous women.
“You stole two loaves,” Dominic said during the makeshift trial. He sat in a large chair towering over her while she kneeled, her eyes at boot level. He realized that he did not know her name and wondered if she even had one.
“I do not steal,” she said in a soft, dovelike voice.
“You stole, and God’s law dictates that justice must be carried out.”
“The priests tell us that your god’s law is to forgive.”
“You will be forgiven. First, however, you will do your penance, and you will be marked as a thief, because that is what you are.”
Dominic had stuck the tip of his sword into a pile of hot coals and now that it glowed red he pressed the side of it against her neck. Her skin smoldered and the smell of it reminded Dominic of a roasted piglet. She did not scream or whimper like he had expected. Instead, she gazed into his eyes with a look of deep sorrow. Everyone knew that natives were forbidden to look directly at the Spanish. To the surprise of his soldiers, however, Dominic did not reprimand the girl, nor did he intensify her punishment. He simply dropped his sword and told her to leave.
The next day, it was discovered that the soldier who accused her had been the one stealing bread, but Dominic felt no remorse about branding the girl. He was still infuriated that she had let herself get pregnant during one of their furtive trysts in the jungle. He was certain it happened on the night they heard the jaguars fighting. Dominic had held the girl in the darkness until the snarling waned and the nocturnal insects resumed their evening chant. Then, without knowing why, he kissed a salty tear off her cheek.
There were hundreds of ants on his body now. They bit his underarms, his face, the backs of his knees, even his groin. Dominic could do nothing to stop them; his wrists and ankles were bound and his eyes were so full of soil that he could not open them. He heard a voice say several words in a language he had never heard before but he could not tell if the voice came from near or far because his ears were clogged with saltwater.
“Who are you?” Dominic screamed. “Untie me!”
There was no response. The ants burrowed deeper into Dominic’s clothes and it felt as if his body was being consumed by fire. He strained to free his arms and legs but they were tied too tightly. He writhed in the dirt to scrape off the ants but that only made them latch on harder. Where the hell was he and how had he gotten there? His mind was cloudy, but then all the memories of the day hit him as jarringly as a lightning bolt.
…………………………
“Do not leave me, Juanito.” Dominic cradled his son’s body in his arms and ran his fingers through his black hair. Juan’s hair was one of the only physical features that disclosed the presence of Dominic’s genes. When dry it was dark and flowing like the top of a thunderstorm. When wet, however, it burst into wild and unruly curls, and it was curlier now than it ever had been. Dominic tried to smooth it down against Juan’s skull but the winds of the hurricane—which screamed around him like a legion of frantic devils—lifted it back up. Drifts of sand surged down the beach with each gust and the oscillating bands of rain felt like barrages of little arrows on Dominic’s skin. He looked up at the swirling clouds. They seemed close enough to touch.
“Do not take him from me,” he pleaded.
He looked down again at Juan, hoping to see him start breathing again and open his beautiful eyes, like Lazarus rising from the dead. Nothing happened, though, and Dominic’s despair transformed into rage. Had God abandoned him? After all his years of service for the Lord—after all the natives he had converted and Protestants he had slain—was God now forsaking him? It seemed contrary to the reward he was taught he would receive.
“I have spent my life doing your will,” he said to the storm as if the storm were God. “Now, do mine.”
He looked down again but saw no change. The serene crescent moon smile on Juan’s face troubled him now more than ever. He pushed down the corners of Juan’s mouth with his thumb and forefinger but he did it too forcefully and the smi
le became a frown. He left it like that, though, because it looked more like the Juan he knew.
“You stupid boy,” said Dominic. “Why did you obey me?”
Dominic thought back on his time with Juan. The boy had always obeyed him, even when the task was clearly frivolous or dangerous, like the time he instructed Juan to walk into a native village as if he were part of the tribe in hopes of gathering intelligence about a brewing revolt. Unable to speak the native tongue, Juan was recognized as an intruder and taken captive, but an impromptu prisoner swap bought his freedom.
“You stupid, stupid boy. You cannot leave me now.”
Dominic closed his eyes and gathered everything he had in his heart—all his rage, zeal, ambition and hatred—and begged God one last time for Juan to revive. “Hear me!” he bellowed.
The wind ebbed and a shaft of sunlight shone down on Juan. Was it a miracle? Had God decided to be reasonable? But then the beam broadened and the entire beach became saturated in sunlight. Dominic gazed up, squinting. He saw the clouds disintegrating and realized that the abrupt break in the storm was not the divine intervention he had pleaded for; it was merely the hurricane’s eye—the placid, cloudless void in the center of the storm’s vortex that brought with it an otherworldly silence and calm.
I renounce you, Dominic prayed. Behold your enemy.
He looked down the beach and saw Pablo’s body partially buried in the sand, his rigid hand still clenching the rosary. Even now he wanted to crush Pablo’s skull with his boot.
You’ve offended God, he heard Pablo say in his mind. Your sins are unforgiveable.
The sun glinted off one of the gold doubloons in Juan’s hands, as if trying to remind Dominic of his transgressions. Fury ballooned inside him. He pried open Juan’s fingers, scooped out the coins, threw them into the cascading surf, and fell upon the body so heavily that some of Juan’s ribs cracked. Guttural sobs emerged from somewhere deep within Dominic—sounds he could not restrain and up to now was unaware his body could even produce. As he wept, the shadow of a person appeared beside his own. It grew larger and then the two shadows merged. He turned and saw what looked like a man in a dark robe silhouetted against the sun.
The Sound of Many Waters Page 2
