The Deep Six

by Striker, Randy

  We walked out onto the warm October streets of Key West. The tourists, what there were of them, moved by us in a happy flow. Outside Sloppy Joe’s, a dirty young man of about twenty holding an equally dirty infant in his arms asked us for enough money to buy some Pampers for his daughter. The new breed of street merchants—they use brand names to give their line authenticity. Still in a daze, Boone reached into his pocket and handed the kid some change, then reached back in and handed him a twenty-dollar bill.

  “Hey—thanks, man. Really. I . . . I mean, the kid is really going to be able to use this.”

  “You know that the last thing that money is going to go toward is a box of diapers, don’t you?” I said as we walked on down Duval Street toward the Sheriff’s Department.

  “What?” Boone looked at me briefly, seeming to notice for the first time that I was there. “Oh, I didn’t know . . . I . . .”

  “It’s one of the more common scams of the drug-culture kids here. Eight or ten of them will go in together and lease an old house. They all live there, sharing their food, their drugs, their women—everything. The young mothers more or less loan their children out to the guys so they can work the streets. Or, for effect, the mothers might come along. The lines vary: the child’s sick and needs a doctor, or they need money to buy milk—or diapers. The woman and the guy split the take. It keeps the household in drugs.”

  Boone turned a hard eye at me. “You seem to be a very cynical man, Mr. . . . ?”

  “MacMorgan. Dusky MacMorgan.” I took his outstretched hand. He smiled a little sadly.

  “After what happened back there, I suddenly feel cynicism to be an indulgence. A very costly indulgence. The cost is something quite precious—time. The man I . . . killed back there. Abbey . . .”

  “Abbey?”

  “Well, it was a nickname, I guess. His real name was . . . well, some kind of Islamic name or something. I never really knew it. Anyway, his time was so short. It seems that for the first time in my life I really, truly know that.” He shoved his hands in the pockets of his khaki fishing shorts. His head was bowed. I knew the sadness—that great, great weight of guilt and realization that settles upon you when you have stolen the life away from another human being. “And it was such a silly thing!” Boone continued. “Such a silly argument! God help me. . . .”

  “Why was he mad at you?”

  “What? Oh. I don’t blame him, really—but we meant no harm. Our group—our amateur underwater archaeology club—worked for three long years to raise enough money to come down here and do some serious work. There are eighteen of us in all—many like those four young men back at the restaurant who had started with the club back when they were still in high school. We worked hard to get here, Dusky. Damned hard. I read everything I could about seventeenth- and eighteenth-century shipwrecks. I did my master’s thesis on it at Iowa City. And the kids studied hard, too. Very dedicated—they’re like young soldiers, the way they work and take orders. Such fine, serious kids. . . .”

  “But what about the guy back at El Cacique? Abbey?”

  Boone brushed his copper crew-cut with his right hand, thinking. “Abbey was a treasure hunter. We needed someone like Abbey—he had a boat, and a good working knowledge of the waters. And, frankly, he needed us. We would provide free manpower, the research, and some of the equipment. Legally, it was pretty complicated. But basically our deal was this: we would help him salvage any treasure we happened to find, and he would retain seventy-five percent of it—but we would do no salvaging until we had plotted the wreck and finished the archaeological work, which is really the only reason we’re here. We aren’t interested in treasure—it’s knowledge we’re after.”

  “That sounds like more than a fair deal to me—if anything, your people were being shorted.”

  “And we didn’t mind, as long as he put us on some wreck sites. But as I said, it was rather complicated legally. To make sure Abbey held up his end of the bargain, I had a lawyer friend of mine draw up a contract. This was two months ago. I asked my friend only to make sure that, legally, Abbey couldn’t take advantage of us. Some of these treasure hunters, you know, are something less than scrupulous. Well, my lawyer friend did a good job—too good a job. I mailed the contract off to Abbey. I assumed he had a lawyer read it over. He didn’t. It turns out that the state permits for the various sites we were to work would be held only in the name of our club. Abbey would receive seventy-five percent of the treasure—but only that treasure which we deemed to be of no historical value. Obviously, my lawyer friend had put us in complete legal control. As I said, I don’t blame him for being mad. Abbey was a very emotional man—the slave of his whims. Not an easy man to get along with. In shifts of six at a time, our whole group spent some very trying days with him on that boat. God forgive me, I can’t lie and say that I liked the man. I didn’t. But my religion—everything I feel and believe in—forbids me from hating any living thing. I didn’t hate the man, Dusky. But when he came at me with that knife something deep within me snapped.”

  I put my hand on his shoulder. The poor bastard. He had never met the Creature before. The Creature that rests dormant within the brains of us all; the Creature that waits for the unsuspecting moment to rush blood-ready to the surface and prove that, even in the most intimate circumstances, we are all strangers, aliens even to ourselves. To take his mind off what had happened, I asked him about his work. No, I’m lying. I didn’t ask just to relieve him of the burden of emotion. The Creature within me demands an attempt, at least, at honesty. He had information about seventeenth- and eighteenth-century wrecks and wreck sites, and I needed information. Some guy, Dusky MacMorgan. Bleed the ailing; leech what you need from the unsuspecting. I felt a thread of guilt move through me even as I asked.

  “What areas were you and your people searching?”

  He rubbed his forehead with a shaky hand. “Hmm? Oh—the Boca Grande and Cosgrove Shoal area, but I really can’t . . .”

  “Off the Marquesas?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jason, I hope you take this in the way it’s meant. I’m interested in archaeology—I always have been. Perhaps we could sit down over a beer and you could give me the benefit—”

  “Of course, of course, but please not now. My mind . . . I can’t even think.”

  We were almost at the Sheriff’s Department. I said nothing more. He was crying. . . .

  7

  As much as I liked the Hervey Yarbrough family, and as much as they had helped me in the past, I wasn’t looking forward to eating dinner with them. The Yarbroughs are rarities in Key West—they are original Conchs. Natives. And they are proud of it. Hervey came from sailing captain stock; his forefather was the master of the old wrecking schooner Orion. His wife is a slightly pudgy woman who is always bustling around the house, always smiling wryly as if she understands some universal secret that no one but a mother and a wife could know. Both are good solid people; people with love and a sense of humor—people I would, and have, trusted with my life. But, frankly, Hervey’s daughter, April, scares me just a little bit. No, not a little bit—a lot. April is an eighteen-year-old firebrand beauty with hip-length raven hair, and eyes that are puppy-sized, more golden than amber. I had known her since she was a barefooted kid playing in the dirt. And I had watched her grow up, smart and strong and independent as hell. She has a first-class mind, and a body that looks as if it was made for those ripe bikinis you see in magazines. And for some reason—sympathy after my wife was murdered, I guess—April got it into her head that I was the man destined for her. There is no coyness about the sure ones, the independent ones. She had come to my bed one night and made her intentions known so sincerely, so lovingly, that I had almost succumbed. But that’s not why I am a little frightened of her. Aside from the more than fifteen-year age difference, she scares me because I know that, already a little in love with her, I could become so deeply and totally committed that it would ruin the life I know that awaits me. You cannot kill co
ldly, professionally, when you have something to live for. Loving me would only be her ruin.

  Lights were on in the little clapboard tin-roofed house when I walked down the shell driveway. It was just after dusk, that soft time between night and day when the afterglow of sun is a burnished blue in the west, and the frail new moon is up in the east, putting the whole earth and its inhabitants in gentle balance. I could hear the cluck-a-cluck of roosting chickens in the long shed down by the docks. Boats groaned softly, shifting on their lines in the warm seawind. It was my favorite time of day. And for my best friend, Billy Mack, it had been a favorite time of day, too. After a hard charter, fishing for the big ones in the black-blue shimmer of the Gulf Stream, it was our practice to sit on the docks with a cold beer, waiting for this soft time in which to walk the streets of Key West, home. Dusk. Billy Mack and I loved the dusk. We had known it together in our Navy SEAL training out in Coronado, California, and we had known the dusk together in the jungled hush of Vietnam and Cambodia, and we had known it here in the Florida Keys. Together. Always together. An orphan, I think Billy was the brother I never had. But no more. No more beer after charters, and no more enjoying the dusk. My wife, my best friend, my two fine, fine sons. Dead. All dead. It’s strange how a quality of light, the sound of a distant voice, a half-imagined odor will bring back so much; transport you from the present to a well-loved memory. Strange how your life collapses, adjusts to change, and then clatters on; clatters on like old photographs rattling in some forgotten box, or like a mobile skeleton, driven but empty. So in that nice time of day, I clattered on up the drive toward the little house. I could smell meat frying, and the acid hint of collard greens. I started to whistle—probably a mistake. The Yarbroughs are under the guardianship of a big, yellow-eyed Chesapeake Bay retriever they called Gator. Hervey likes to tell the story. He had been bass fishing up on Lake Trafford in the south-central part of Florida. He was wading the banks, plug casting. It was misty, just after sunrise, and he noticed something swimming at him through the arrow plants.

  “Thought it was a big ol’ bull gator. But it weren’t. Was this anvil-headed dog here—and he was carryin’ a four-foot gator in his mouth. Thing was still squirmin’. Dog was lost, near starved, with no collar or nothin’—he’d taken to eatin’ gators for a livin’. They’d swim up thinkin’ to eat him, an’ he’d jes’ swim out an’ turn the tables. Never seen no dog swim better—atop the water, ten feet under the water. Didn’t matter to him. Well sir, he finished part o’ that gator’s tail, picked up the rest, and jumped in my truck. I had no say in matters. He’s owned us ever since.”

  That Chesapeake acted as if he owned the Yarbroughs, all right. When I started to whistle, he came roaring out of the new darkness; ninety pounds of head, yellow eyes, and muscle.

  “Gator! Gator, dammit—it’s a friend!”

  When he started to slow down, I knew I was okay. If he hadn’t recognized me, he would have speeded up. A porch light blinked on.

  “Dusky? Hey, that you out there?” The bulky figure of Hervey squinted out from the doorway. “That dog knows you; come on up.”

  Inside, Hervey’s wife, Flora, leaned over the stove, hands moving every direction at once.

  “Food’ll be ready in a short,” she yelled happily. “Hope you like pork chops and greens, Dusky. Jus’ threw it together, an’ Lord knows if it’ll be any good.”

  Hervey and I took seats in the living room, with glasses of iced tea. The chairs were threadbare but comfortable. The floor was covered with a throw rug.

  “Chew?” Hervey had his ever-present foil packet of Red Man, and a brass spittoon sat squatly beside his easy chair. “Nothing like a chew with a glass o’ tea before dinner.”

  So we made small talk, taking turns at the brass cuspidor. Yes, I had fixed the bow rail on my Sniper. Screws worked fine. Yes, the fishing was getting worse every year, and the canal and condominium barons had screwed up the drainage system of that great sweeping river of grass called the Everglades. Too much fresh water in Florida Bay now. Salinity was off, and the fish were disappearing: the effect felt clear down in Key West. Yes, federal officials, working in cahoots with their lamebrain advisers, had tried to correct the problem back-asswards. Instead of making the developer big-money boys correct the problem for which they were responsible, they outlawed commercial fishing in national park coastal areas—putting many of the small-time net fishermen out of business. Money shouts, politicians tremble, and we suffer. When the time was right, I asked Hervey if he knew anything about a treasure hunter named Abbey.

  He tugged at his bushy black beard. “Hmm . . . What’s his last name?”

  “I don’t know yet. It’s supposed to be Islamic.”

  Hervey spit. “Hard to keep up on all the foreigners coming into the island. Naw, ain’t heard of him. Most them other treasure hunters I do know about, though. Tough bunch. Always runnin’ around like they was carryin’ secrets. Like them gold prospectors you see in them western movies. Someone gets too close to their claim, a boat gets blown up mysteriously. One o’ their men gets drunk an’ does a bit too much talkin’, next thing he knows he’s on a plane bound for Dubuque. That question got anything to do with ol’ Gifford Remus?”

  “I don’t think so. I’m going to level with you, Hervey. I talked to a friend of mine at the Sheriff’s Department just before I came. I’d told him about seeing Gifford when I was off the Marquesas, and I told him where the Coast Guard could find Gifford’s camp. But when the Coast Guard checked into it, everything was gone. No tent, no pottery, no Spanish coins.”

  “You think it’s murder, then?”

  I thought for a moment. “Could be. Anyway, I’m going to run my boat out there and have a look. Too much other stuff going on for the regular law-enforcement people to give it much time, so—”

  I was interrupted by the screen door swinging shut. It was April, as striking as ever, even in the white waitress uniform she wore. “Well, well, well,” she said, hands on her hips, “look who’s back from vacation!” Ludicrously, I found myself standing at her entrance, gentleman-like. Hervey, the bastard, just sat and smirked.

  “You recognize this big mean-lookin’ character?” Hervey said, playing devil’s advocate.

  “Why yes, Papa, I believe I do.” She smiled what seemed to be a soft, honest smile, came up to me and gave me a sisterly hug. “You don’t come round nearly as often as you should, Dusky—you know how much Mama and ol’ Papa here enjoy seein’ you.” She smiled sweetly again and headed for her room, calling over her shoulder, “I’ll be back after I clean up to help, Mama!”

  I sat back down. Hervey wagged his eyebrows. “Seems jes’ gentle as a lamb, don’t she? Well, you just wait, mister man. She ain’t gonna let you off that easy. Believe me, I know that girl.” He leaned back in his chair, laughing. “Yes sirree!”

  “For God’s sake, Hervey, why don’t you try to talk some sense into your daughter’s head? I’m almost twenty years older than her—dammit, I’m old enough to be her father.”

  “Wait a minute there now, Dusky.” Hervey waved toward the kitchen. “That ain’t what you’d call a good excuse around this house. I’m near fifteen year older than my old woman out there—never bothered us. Had an uncle once who married a girl from Immokalee who weren’t but fifteen—an’ he was forty-six.”

  April came out of her room. She looked at us wryly and gave her hip-length raven hair a toss. “My, my, my,” she said. “How you men folk do gossip!”

  The dinner was Southern cooking at its best, complete with hot corn bread and butter. But I forced myself to eat sparingly—not because the food wasn’t good, but because, for me, it was discipline time. Stormin’ Norman Fizer hadn’t given me much of a mission, but it was still a mission, and for me, getting back in shape after a few weeks of drinking beer and lounging around the boat is a tedious process. It means easy on the alcohol and starches. And heavy on the running, swimming, and pull-ups. At six-two, 215, a six-minute mile is about the
best I can do—six and a half minutes is acceptable. In the best of shape, I can do thirty-six backhanded pull-ups, and this morning I could only do twenty-four. So it was discipline time. I needed work, because you never, never know. . . .

  April was waiting outside after I had thanked Flora Yarbrough for the dinner and made my excuses for an early exit. I knew she would be there. She stood in the shadows of a massive banyan tree that scattered its air roots across the dirt lawn. She held something in her hand, and when I got closer I could see that it was a stalk of jasmine, the flowers white in the shadows of her hands.

  “Good supper, huh, April?”

  She pulled at the petals of the flowers, dropping them by her bare feet. “Couldn’t tell by the way you ate—hardly enough for a bird, if you ask me.”

  I put my hands on her shoulders and felt her sag slightly at my touch. “April, I’m sorry you’re mad at me.”

  “Who says I’m mad?” She pulled away, turning her back. In the pale moonlight, her long hair looked blue-black, the color of the Gulf Stream at dusk. There was a long silence. And then:

  “Was your blond New York woman prettier than me, Dusky?”

  “No, April. It wasn’t that.”

  “Dusky, you tol’ me once—after your wife died—that if there was ever another woman it was to be me. . . .”

  “And I also told you that you’re far too young, April.”

  “Do you love her, Dusky? That other woman?” She stood facing me, looking up into my face with her golden eyes.

  “In a way, yes. I did, but I never told her. . . .”

  She trembled, struggling, then dropped the jasmine and fell into my arms, crying. “I’m so worried about you, Dusky. You’ve made up your mind ’bout something and it ain’t good. You got to quit punishin’ yourself; you gettin’ killed ain’t gonna bring your family back. . . .”

  I held her away from me and tried to smile. “Whoa . . . wait a minute, girl. Just what is it you’re talking about?”