The Deep Six

by Striker, Randy

  I looked deep into her eyes. “Then don’t, woman.” I stood up and switched on the little Sony transistor radio. I toyed with the dial until I got something moody but not too sweet. Perfect music for the parting scene. Like in a movie. But my unhappiness was tempered by the knowledge that it could be no other way. She stood up and pulled me to her, rubbing her hands across my bare chest.

  “You know, don’t you, Dusky?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I know.”

  I felt her start to tremble a little, on the verge of tears. “Dusky, I just can’t go away and leave him like that. He deserves another chance. My husband was good once, Dusky. Like you. Good and brave and strong. What is it about the world that wrecks people? Does the business world rob all people of their souls?”

  “Some,” I lied. “But he can get it back. You two can work it out, Lee. I just hope he knows how lucky he is. Strong women aren’t all that easy to come by.”

  A touch became a caress, and a look became a kiss, and with a solemn, sad light in her eyes she stripped her clothes off, letting me enjoy the sight of her, because we both knew that this would be the last time. We made long, slow love then; a giving kind of love, making affectionate presents of ourselves. And finally, after a long time, we let our emotion join and peak in a great bursting swell. And then we drifted off to sleep; Lee still atop me, still intertwined as if we couldn’t bear to let it end.

  And the next day, we were strangers once again. Polite, smiling, and infinitely cordial—but strangers all the same. The emotional dynamics of the human being are beyond understanding sometimes. In just a few hours, in the space of one decision, we had transformed ourselves from the most intimate lovers to a friendly man and a friendly woman who just happened to be sharing the same bed, the same boat. I could expect nothing else from a woman of Lee’s character—indeed, she would have disappointed me had she acted otherwise. Before, she had been separated from her husband both physically and emotionally. But now, with her decision to return, to give it one more chance, she had reacknowledged her longago vows, and infidelity just wasn’t in that woman’s makeup. It seemed so absurd but, at the same time, so reasonable—ever admirable.

  What crazy little games we all play.

  As always, I was up at first light. A beautiful dawn. I sat on the flybridge and watched the sun spreading over the eastern horizon, changing the earth. It was a good morning to break rules. So I got myself a cold Hatuey from the beer locker and sat on the flybridge in the fresh heat of morning. No human being should be allowed to die without watching sunrise at sea. The islands of the Marquesas came into slow focus, transformed from black to soft gray, to green. Palm trees and Australian pines, leaning in windward strands, caught the light at angles, seeming to stand out, set apart, from the white sweep of beach. The sea was oiled and black, then black-blue, and cumulus clouds on the western horizon glowed with the golden cragginess of the Colorado mesas. White wading birds left their roosts on Mooney Harbor Key and flew in formation toward the sun and burst into flames.

  By the time Lee got up, I had eggs and fish frying. She gave me a sisterly kiss, suddenly bashful, then sat in the galley booth while I served her and pressed awkward jokes.

  “What are you reading?”

  She held up the book. “Far Tortuga by Peter Matthiessen. I found it in your library locker.”

  “How do you like it?”

  “You were right, Dusky—it’s one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read.”

  So we made small talk and small jokes, and avoided touching one another with hands or with eyes. And while I got Sniper ready for the trip back to Key West, she sat in her bikini on the foredeck, taking in the sun and reading.

  I wanted to see Gifford Remus once more before heading back. His actions the day before hadn’t seemed exactly normal, and I wanted to make sure he was all right. I started the twin 453 GMC diesels, enjoying the sweet muffled roar they made, shoved her into gear, then nosed ahead through the clear shallows. From my vantage point on the flybridge, I saw a huge ray fly away from us at an angle, and coral heads stood apart from the white sand, alive with grouper and snapper—all magnified in size by the water.

  The shallows off the Marquesas and Fullmoon Cay are trickey areas. You don’t want to mess with them at night. It has nothing to do with the natural hazards which had sunk the Gaspar and ships like it. These hazards are man made; the result of years of serving as a target area for the planes from the Navy base at Key West. The best known target wreck is the Navy destroyer Patricia, but there are plenty of others, too—all the victims of U.S. bombs and high-caliber slugs. So I took it easy. We had a good coming tide, and I nosed Sniper right up into the shallows of the long white beach of the Marquesas where I expected Giff to be.

  But he wasn’t there. His ragged canvas tent was still pitched, flapping in the soft breeze, and his campfire still smoldered.

  “I’m going to go ashore and have a look around,” I told Lee.

  She smiled at me and winked. “And have a dip?”

  It had become a standing joke with us. I never smoke, but I enjoy an occasional pinch of snuff. It’s something I learned to love as a kid; a habit I had converted into a weapon over in Nam. An adversary is in too much pain to fight when he has Copenhagen in his eye. But no matter how much I loved it, I was aware that some ladies aren’t exactly enamored with the idea of their suitors taking a chaw of tobacco. But Lee didn’t mind. And it amused her that I only dipped when she wasn’t around.

  “Yeah,” I said. “And have a dip.”

  I had hoped that Giff’s boat was anchored on the other side of the island, in Mooney Harbor. But it wasn’t. I pushed my way back through the mangroves, dodging the clumps of sandspurs. I wore only khaki shorts, and the mosquitoes feasted on my bare legs. I pushed back the flaps of his tent and looked inside. His sleeping bag was in a heap, and beside it there were two plastic garbage bags. I opened the first one. Aluminum beer cans and Coke bottles.

  The scavenger. Ever the scavenger.

  But I was surprised at what was in the other sack. It was heavy, and when I opened it I could smell the foul salt odor of sea rack. I stuck in my hand and pulled out a piece of pottery. It was very old, covered with moss and tunicates. Spanish? I studied the intricate design on the lip of what must have been an old wine vase. Yes, probably Spanish. The garbage bag was half full of pottery scraps and some kind of black goo, a viscous substance that smelled vaguely of pine pitch. And just as I was about to drop it back into the sack, I noticed something. A flash of silver; a bright glimmer from within the goo. I cleaned it off enough for me to see. It was an oddly shaped coin. There was a cross on it and, within each right angle formed by the cross, there were lionlike crests. I pulled more of the goo away and found more coins—a hundred or more, all encased and preserved in the goo. Gifford Remus had struck it rich, all right. It might not have been the mother lode, and it might or might not have been the Gaspar. But he had found his treasure, treasure aplenty to buy the new bicycle he had dreamed of.

  I waded back out to the Sniper and scanned the open water with my Bushnell-made zoom scope. The shallows off the Marquesas look so small on the chart, but seem so endless when you are on them. No wonder no one had yet found the Gaspar—or the dozens of other galleons and ships that rested beneath the sands there. And it didn’t really surprise me that Gifford was not to be seen. He was in a small, small boat on one huge stretch of water. His treasure site was probably nowhere near the Marquesas. He was someplace out there, on the blue sheen of sea. And I could picture him diving and hunting, those wide old eyes of his searching crazily for the gold he had always dreamed of finding.

  I remembered what one of the circus’s ten-in-one-show magicians had told me once: The only thing worse than having no dreams is to realize your dreams. And I wondered what Gifford Remus would do now that his lifetime search was over.

  “Do you see him?” Lee stood behind me, scanning the distance.

  “No, but I’
m sure he’s okay. Just a little crazy. I’ll give him his chain when he gets back to Key West.”

  She reached up and put her hand on my shoulder. “He trusts you, Dusky. Everybody trusts you. He made a wise choice. I hope my decision is just as wise. . . .”

  4

  It was a small item in the Key West Citizen. A short news story with a small headline: “Local Man Missing, Boat Found Adrift.”

  It was Hervey Yarbrough who brought it to my attention. I had stopped by his ramshackle house and marina on Cow Key to buy some brass wood screws. Hervey is a chunky, pug-nosed guy with a beard, one of the few native Key Westers still around. Most of them have been driven out by the influx of tourists and drug runners, and the decline of fishing. But Hervey had kept ahold of his jungled acreage on the bay, refusing persistent offers from developers which promised him eternal wealth if he would only allow them to come in and bulldoze his land flat and build the anonymous and sterile concrete condominium grotesqueries which now plague Florida.

  “Not no—but hell no!” Hervey always told them.

  So I walked down the dirt drive and found Hervey hard at work scraping the bottom of a boat. Slaughtered barnacles lay in heaps beneath the boat, and flies buzzed over them merrily.

  “Well, well, looka what the cat’s done drug in!” he greeted me, smiling broadly. “Hope you know that daughter o’ mine is jes’ jealous as can be at you goin’ off with that blond woman from New York.”

  I grinned, shook my head, and said nothing. You learn to expect such things from islanders. I had told no one about the trip Lee and I had taken, yet he knew. And his beautiful eighteen-year-old daughter, April, knew. And his wife, I was sure, knew too. God only knows how the islanders find out all the stuff they do. But when you want world news, you pick up a paper. When you want to find out what’s going on in Key West, you ask an islander.

  “Need some wood screws, Hervey. Brass. One of my forward railings is starting to work loose and I want to fix it before it starts to score the planking.”

  He took a couple more long swipes at the barnacles, wiped his hands on his pants, and put down the scraper.

  “Heard you were out off the Marquesas, Dusky.”

  I followed him up the path toward the wooden shed he had converted into part store, part warehouse. “Yeah. Nice weather. Got into some late dolphin, and saw one hell of a big mako. Thousand pounds, I’d say.”

  “No kiddin’?” He pushed open the door of the shed and flicked on the bare overhead bulb. The shed smelled of dank wood and marine hardware. “Thousand pounds, huh?” He began to rummage around through assorted boxes, looking for the screws I wanted, all the while telling me a shark story of his own. In other small towns, local residents use weather as the bottom-line topic of conversation. In Key West, they use sharks. “In fact,” he finished, “I was tellin’ the old lady last night that it was probably a shark tha’ got ol’ Gifford Remus.”

  He suddenly had my attention. “What?”

  “Gifford Remus—you know him. That weird little ol’ guy who’s always riding around on that bicycle—”

  “I know who he is—but what makes you think a shark got him?”

  Hervey reached over, grabbed the Citizen from the desk, and flipped through it. “This is what makes me think that. You mean you ain’t heard?”

  The story read: Coast Guard officials in Key West reported they discovered a 22-foot diesel skiff adrift off Fullmoon Cay yesterday. An early investigation indicates that the vessel belongs to Gifford Remus, age 51, of 935 Banyan Street.

  A Sheriff’s Department spokesman said that eyewitnesses reported that Remus left Garrison Bight Harbor nearly two weeks ago in this boat. His destination was not ascertained. When Coast Guard authorities discovered the boat, there was hull damage and it was partially submerged.

  Remus was a familiar figure on the streets of Key West. A native, Remus rode the streets on a bicycle and made his living selling aluminum cans and soft-drink bottles. He was known to give pennies to babies, and Key West children often called him “Uncle Giff.”

  The Coast Guard is presently fronting an air-sea search of the Marquesas area. Boaters and commercial fishermen who have any information regarding Remus are asked to contact the Monroe County Sheriff’s Department or Coast Guard authorities.

  I put the paper down. So Giff was officially missing. Not necessarily dead—but what else could have separated him from his skiff? Hervey saw the concern on my face.

  “Hey—you knowed that ol’ man, didn’t you?”

  “Like I know most of the stray dogs in this town. I gave him a few bucks, and he mated for me every now and then. I’m a soft touch, Hervey. And I might be the last person to have seen him—out off the Marquesas.”

  “Hey, you better tell the law about that, huh?”

  I took another look at the newspaper story. “I plan to, Hervey. Did you know that Remus was a treasure hunter?”

  Hervey paused, thinking for a moment, tugging at his black beard. “Well, now that you mention it, I guess I did hear somethin’ about that. But heck, Dusky, everybody’s a treasure hunter around here ’cept you an’ me—and I ain’t too sure about me sometimes.” He laughed.

  “What exactly did you hear about Remus?”

  Hervey reached into his back pocket and pulled out a fresh packet of Red Man chewing tobacco. He opened it reflectively, jammed a massive chaw into his mouth, and spit. “Let me see here. This story goes way back. We both grew up here on the island, you know, and my daddy knew his daddy. You look at ol’ Giff, and you figure he had to have a pretty weird upbringin’—but that ain’t the way it was. His daddy was a fine man. Didn’t look nothin’ like Giff—which made a lot of the meaymouth people in this town talk, it did. His daddy looked a lot like you, matter o’ fact. Big muscular guy with saltwater-blond hair. Always smilin’. Well, like the rest of the folks round here in the Keys, he fished and trapped turtle and ran a little rum when the money got tight. Now he was a treasure hunter. Giff’s mama was from down in the islands; some kinda Spanish blood in her, ’cause she had crow-black hair an’ the darkest eyes you ever seen. And it was her that filled Giff’s daddy’s head with all them stories about sunken’ treasure. He was after one wreck in particular . . .”

  “The Gaspar?”

  “Yeah—that was it! Do you know this story?”

  “I’ll tell you what I know later. What about Giff’s father?”

  “Well, like I said, Giff’s mama was always fillin’ his head with these treasure stories. Don’t know where she got ’em. Stories musta been passed down to her or somethin’. Now, she was a weird one, she was. Used to tell fortunes and stuff like that. Some folks said she was a voodoo woman or somethin’. I was about five years younger than Giff, but I still remember what happened. Fire. They said one o’ them candles she used to burn fell over an’ hit the curtains. She never made it out of the house. God knows how Giff did—he weren’t but eleven or twelve. His daddy was off someplace huntin’ that treasure, and they both went a little crazy after that. One night his daddy came into Sloppy Joe’s bar kinda wild-eyed, flashin’ gold Spanish coins around. Said he’d found the wreck he’d been lookin’ for, and that he and his son was rich. No one heard from him after that. Key West has never had no shortage of rough characters, an’ folks figured he opened his mouth to the wrong men. Didn’t hear nothin’ about Giff bein’ a treasure hunter till long afterwards. He’d gotten crazier an’ crazier, and it sorta surprised me. Someone said to me, ‘Hey, you know ol’ Gifford Remus is still huntin’ for that treasure his daddy hunted for?’ I thought that he’da had enough of treasure huntin’. I admit I’m a superstitious kinda guy, Dusky—name someone who works around boats and the sea that ain’t. But I’m tellin’ you, treasure huntin’ is bad luck. All the way around. I don’t believe in ghosts and duppies and such—not when it’s daylight, anyway. But you start huntin’ for that old Spanish gold, and you’re just lookin’ for trouble.”

  Hervey stopped and spit o
n the sand floor of the wooden marina office. He grinned suddenly. “Bet you think I’m crazy now—talkin’ about spooks and such.”

  “Absolutely. Now you can listen to me and decide how crazy I am.”

  So I told him about Gifford’s sudden appearance on my boat. And about the gold chain, and the silver coins at his camp. I even mentioned Gifford’s Spanish ghost.

  “So Giff wanted you to be his partner, huh?” Hervey tugged at his beard, thinking.

  “Yeah. It didn’t make any sense to me either. He was an old street friend and I gave him a few bucks now and then when he asked for it, but he’d never mentioned treasure hunting to me. In fact, I can’t remember us talking about anything but the weather and his bicycle.”

  Hervey moved his chew from side to side with his tongue. “Well, like I said, you do kinda favor his daddy. Ol’ Giff was odd enough that that might make a difference.”

  “So do you still think it was a shark that got him?”

  “Well, I doubt if we’ll ever know. Like that mako you run into—there’s some awful big sharks out there an’ he was by hisself, in an awful small boat. Coulda knocked a hole in the bottom an’ ate him when ol’ Giff fell out. Or it coulda been some other treasure hunters that got him. There’s plenty workin’ that area. Or it could be that Giff’s out there on an island right now just waitin’ to be rescued.”

  Hervey put a dozen brass wood screws in a paper sack and handed them to me. He switched off the overhead light and we walked back outside into the warm October day.

  “Hervey,” I said, “tell your wife and your daughter that I said hello—”

  “Oh no you don’t!” He grinned at me bawdily. “You ain’t gettin’ away without talkin’ to April your own self. She ain’t here right now—she’s got a job waitin’ tables up to Becker’s Restaurant. Savin’ money so she can start college in January. But I ain’t passin’ no messages between you two. So come to dinner. Friday night?”