Light Action in the Caribbean

by Barry Lopez

  “You gotta know some places, man, places nobody’s been before. I mean, that’s the deal here, right, with a private boat?”

  “Everyting be good, mon. It be good. You gon like everyting.”

  She felt drawn immediately to the boatman’s lean body, like one of the jacaranda trees in full bloom. She had never seen blacker skin, a more compact yet muscular torso. Every muscle, every sinew, was tight under his tight skin. His lips were full, the veins in his hands prominent, his bare shoulders square. But for a missing tooth, his broken and discolored fingernails and callused feet, she thought him the handsomest man she’d ever seen. She hoped he’d be nice. And maybe give David a little grief.

  “So, Esteban,” David was saying while they were preparing to cast off, “let me get you around on this, man. We’ve got to go to at least a couple of undived places in the next few days. All right? I’ve got to be able to tell people we were the first on a couple of these places, you know what I’m saying?” David had taken a fifty out of the envelope with the $5,000. Holding it up, he said, “Am I getting through here, Esteban? Do we have a deal?”

  She was embarrassed when he did this, his De Niro imitation.

  “Okay, mon,” said Esteban. “We hit some places. But I be pickin dem, because some places, de are no good to go. You know?”

  “Yeah, I get it. Currents.”

  “It ain no currents, ma frien.”

  “Drop ’em and light ’em, Esteban, and let’s get out of here.”

  His Kevin Costner, she thought, as David swung around by the steering console, folded his arms and gazed out toward the channel.

  “Why did you show him all that money?” she whispered later. “Don’t you think that was really risky, letting him see, and people all around?”

  “What he knows now is, there’s the possibility of a big tip if we see some cool stuff. The money’s totally safe. He’s just a chained dog at the resort. He’s going to try something?”

  The boat idled out of the small harbor and into the channel between San Carlos and Itesea to the south. When Esteban brought the throttles up full, the boat got up on plane and began cracking the flat swell at twenty-four knots, headed southeast for an area Esteban said was called Los Pachucos, because of the sharks. The morning sun lit the water dark blue over the deep channel and then a paler blue and turquoise as they came back to the shallower water. With her polarized glasses Libby could see the reefs flashing by under the boat and swarms of fish bolting. David leaned over to reassure her, to say the sharks would be no problem.

  Esteban cut the throttles and shifted into neutral but didn’t drop his anchor. He told them anchors damage the coral. Instead, he said, he’d follow their bubbles, and the most important thing for them to remember was to surface away from the boat, alongside him if they could, but never near the engines. It was very important.

  While they were pulling on their dive gear, she asked Esteban about the other island, Itesea.

  “Dat da military, miss. You don’ wan mess wid dem. We don’ go over dat way, that is what I am telling your mon here. Plenty good places to dive, but not over dat way.”

  Plunging through the surface of the water made her euphoric, feeling the powerful, effervescent stroke of her body, the weightlessness of astronauts. She was so happy entering that transparent world she reached out to high-five David. When their hands collided awkwardly, she had the momentary sensation she could have done this alone, that she did not need him. The passing streamers of brightly colored damselfish, of French grunts and sergeant majors, huge stingrays rising slowly, regally, from camouflage on the sand flats, the way tiny nudibranchs glistened like flower buds on the coral heads all made her light-headed with satisfaction, a sense of having chosen right. Brad, she remembered, hadn’t even thought to get them certified, and then he’d been too cheap to pay for the resort course. He wanted to surf.

  They moved to a new area of Los Pachucos and dove again and then had lunch. She was disappointed when Esteban confirmed that he had no picture guides aboard for the underwater life.

  “Any fish you tell me, I know dat,” he said, laughing. “But people, de don’ eat dat other. Gotta eat, you know.” He waited. He chucked his chin at her and winked. “I get de guides for you tomorrow,” he said.

  David had come up from his second dive with two large conchs, thinking they would bring them back to the hotel and have someone prepare them for dinner, but Esteban made him drop them overboard.

  “It’s illegal, mon. De never let you anywhere near de hotel wid it. Put it over.”

  “Don’t you have a few pals,” challenged David, “people who know how to do this? I mean, we don’t have to take them to the hotel, you could take them somewhere else, and we could come by and eat, at your place maybe. It’d make a good story, you know what I mean?”

  “Put dem over, mon. Drop dem in.”

  “You’re not a get-ahead guy, Esteban,” complained David. He let the conchs slip over the side, where they fell quickly through the water, rocking toward the bottom like leaves from a tree. “But I like you.” He gave Esteban his De Niro smile.

  Lunch was fried fillets of Atlantic cod on stale white rolls with organic chips, a banana each, and Blue Sky cream sodas. David winked knowingly at Libby, as if to say, You have to expect some breakdown in quality somewhere along the way. Still, she couldn’t believe it. Salt cod?

  While they digested the meal, she and David stretched out on lounge mats in the bow and held hands. She had to flick his other hand away a few times, with Esteban there. He got up and got his biography of Robert Moses out of his dive bag and finished the last twenty pages.

  “Handle a spliff, Esteban?”

  “Not today, mon.”

  “You’re cool, Esteban, you know?” He inhaled the joint and gazed at the passing water. “That’s good, about the conchs, no toking while you’re navigating. But you know, man, I’m gonna tell you something. You need to evolve—you know what I mean?—evolve to get ahead here. You own this boat?”

  “It’s ma boat.”

  “Ever think about owning maybe two or three boats? Getting some of your buddies to work for you, booking pax yourself in the States, not through the hotel? You into the Net? You could get a Web site. I could set it up. You could pull in a lot of money.”

  “I’m okay like dis. Ma boat, it’s all paid up. I’m good.”

  “Well you gotta get better, Esteban, or what are you here for? Right?”

  “I be tinkin about it, den.”

  They cruised on, watching white pelicans skimming inches above the water and the reef pattern quivering below sheets of broken light on the surface.

  “Ma fatha, he own dis boat,” Esteban began. “He fish, all true here, all di wata here, and out der, way out der, for marlin, for swordfish. De all gone now. Just de little ones lef. He was de fishermon, you know, and I am de divin mon. So we be makin de changes, mon, we be gettin on. Evolvin.”

  Esteban turned around to gaze astern. On the northwest horizon he saw the glitter of a boat moving fast toward Itesea. He shook his head with a wry smile and idled on.

  “This looks good, Esteban my man. Let’s jump in here,” said David.

  “We go on a little bit. It be betta. We comin a place call Zanja de Bacalao.”

  Esteban turned to look for the boat again. As he watched, it peeled away from the horizon and headed toward them. Esteban swung his boat all the way around to the north and brought the engines up to full throttle. The Whaler came up on plane and Libby sat up and looked around. David took a tight grip on the steering console.

  “What’s up here, dude?”

  “I takin a precaution, mon. You see dot? Dot’s what I tellin you. You never know out here anymore.”

  The other boat was driving toward them on a line to intercept. Esteban could tell it was fast, a cigarette boat. “Could be de military,” he said. “Tings always changin.”

  They could see the low coast of San Carlos looming beyond the bow and h
ear the smack of the skiff on the dazzling water.

  “You may haf to buy us outta dis one, mon.”

  David kept his eyes on the boat, closing fast, but said nothing.

  “You put dat money you got in de pocket of your BC, mon, and you leave a little in de envelope, cause if we haf to pay, de gonna want it all.”

  “I’m cool.”

  David split the money, putting $4,500 in his buoyancy control vest, leaving $500 in the envelope.

  “What’s happening,” asked Libby, pulling a linen wrap around herself and trying to stand steady on the pounding deck.

  “Military, maybe,” said David. “We might have gotten in too close to Itesea here, so these guys could be hard-asses about it. Maybe we’re going to have to buy our way out.”

  The boat closed on them like a barracuda, then roared along parallel with the Whaler. The driver indicated to Esteban with a hand gesture to shut it down. Esteban thought to just hold his course for San Carlos until he saw the guns. He throttled back, and then the big boat, twice the length of his, was wallowing alongside, its exhaust guttering as it rolled in its own wake. The boat had a low cabin forward, a sleek white hull, and no insignia. The barefoot man at the helm had dreadlocks and dark glasses and was wearing a dirty pair of pale blue trousers. Two other men stood braced at the boat’s gunwale, looking them over. One of them wore four watches, two on each wrist.

  “This is not the military,” said Esteban.

  The shirtless man in madras shorts raised a .9 mm Glock and began spraying Esteban. The first bullet tore through his left triceps, the second, third, fourth, and fifth hit nothing, the sixth perforated his spleen, the seventh and eighth hit nothing, the ninth hit the console, sending electrical sparks up, the tenth went through his right palm, the next four went into the air, the fifteenth tore his left ear away, the sixteenth ricocheted off the sixth cervical vertebrae and drove down through his heart, exiting through his abdomen and lodging in his foot. The seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth went out over the water.

  David watched Esteban shudder and fall like an imploded vase.

  The driver dropped white fenders over the side and powered the boat in closer. The other two snagged bow and stern cleats with a pole and gaff, snugged the boats together and tied off. Then both jumped on board. David raised his hands to say he would be no problem, take whatever. The first man to reach him seemed uncoordinated, as if he were drunk, but his first punch broke David’s nose and then he pummeled him backward over a seat, and when he fell the man slammed him repeatedly in the head with a dive regulator.

  The other man, who had a barbed-wire tattoo wrapped around his chest, plowed through the contents of the dive bags. He pitched the tin of marijuana to the first man. When he found the envelope he ripped the money out and stuffed the bills in his swim trunks. Libby stood in the back of the skiff, crying, with her hands over her mouth. The man in the other boat glanced at her, but she could not see his eyes. Once in a while he brought his throttle up to steady the boats on the swell.

  The man with the chest tattoo was ransacking the many pockets of the dive bags in a fury. The other one had yanked David’s gold Rolex Submariner off and was kicking at him to keep him still while he adjusted it on his wrist. The man in the swim trunks threw the doors of the steering console open, emptied out the lunch locker and opened the fish wells, until nothing around him stood unopened. He gazed at the man in the other boat, waiting for instructions. The whites of his eyes were marred with many tiny exploded blood vessels. The man on the other boat shrugged, as if it hadn’t been worth it.

  “You got more money, sweetheart?” said the man in the boat.

  Libby rushed to the BC, tore open the Velcro pocket, and held out the $4,500.

  “Nice, very nice,” said the man in the boat. “We goin now,” he shouted to the other two. “Kill dem.”

  “Oh no, oh no, oh no,” Libby murmured.

  The man with the tattoo hit her in the neck with his fist, knocking her into the engines, and then banged her head on the deck of the boat until she was unconscious. He laid her over the back of a bench seat and raped her. It took him a long time and in the middle of it he lit a cigarette. The man with the watches trussed David with monofilament fishing line and choked him to death while he raped him.

  When they were finished, the man in the boat hoisted over three pairs of concrete footings. The others tied the bodies to metal straps on the footings, rolled them over the side and dropped the blocks in the water. Tied to the two white people were their dive bags, zippered shut with their belongings. They handed the dive tanks and other equipment across to the driver, who helped the man with the tattoo board and then they cast off.

  The man with the watches used Esteban’s deck brushes to clean the boat, washing the blood into the engine well. Then he brought the throttles up on the idling engines and turned the skiff in a skidding arc after the other boat. The water in the engine well flushed out through the scuppers and Esteban’s Whaler came up on plane, following the other boat toward Itesea.

  A few miles east a man was fishing for grouper. He had caught only two among the reefs since sunup, not such a good day, but they pay very good at the dock, he thought, and whatever he brought in they always bought. He was thinking how he liked that, coming in with the fish at the end of the day. The guests from the hotel always liked it that he was wearing the Docker cut-offs his wife had fixed up and his J. Crew shirt or the shirt with the black Labrador. They liked his fish and his accent. They liked his laugh. He only had to get more fish, he thought, more fish and it was going to be good.

  He held the baited hook up before his eyes. His father had taught him how to make the tiny marks he had cut in its shank, and he stared hard at them now and said, “Do your work.”

  He flipped the baited hook overboard and watched the line spool out under his thumb.

  The Mappist

  When I was an undergraduate at Brown I came across a book called The City of Ascensions, about Bogotá. I knew nothing of Bogotá, but I felt the author had captured its essence. My view was that Onesimo Peña had not written a travel book but a work about the soul of Bogotá. Even if I were to read it later in life, I thought, I would not be able to get all Peña meant in a single reading. I looked him up at the library but he had apparently written no other books, at least not any in English.

  In my senior year I discovered a somewhat better known book, The City of Trembling Leaves, by Walter Van Tilburg Clark, about Reno, Nevada. I liked it, but it did not have the superior depth, the integration of Peña’s work. Peña, you had the feeling, could walk you through the warrens of Bogotá without a map and put your hands directly on the vitality of any modern century—the baptismal registries of a particular cathedral, a cornerstone that had been taken from one building to be used in another, a London plane tree planted by Bolívar. He had such a command of the idiom of this city, and the book itself demonstrated such complex linkages, it was easy to believe Peña had no other subject, that he could have written nothing else. I believed this was so until I read The City of Floating Sand a year later, a book about Cape Town, and then a book about Djakarta, called The City of Frangipani. Though the former was by one Frans Haartman and the latter by a Jemboa Tran, each had the distinctive organic layering of the Peña book, and I felt certain they’d been written by the same man.

  A national library search through the University of Michigan, where I had gone to work on a master’s degree in geography, produced hundreds of books with titles similar to these. I had to know whether Peña had written any others and so read or skimmed perhaps thirty of those I got through interlibrary loan. Some, though wretched, were strange enough to be engaging; others were brilliant but not in the way of Peña. I ended up ordering copies of five I believed Peña had written, books about Perth, Lagos, Tokyo, Venice, and Boston, the last a volume by William Smith Everett called The City of Cod.

  Who Peña actually was I could not then determine. Letters to publishers
eventually led me to a literary agency in New York where I was told that the author did not wish to be known. I pressed for information about what else he might have written, inquired whether he was still alive (the book about Venice had been published more than fifty years before), but got nowhere.

  As a doctoral student at Duke I made the seven Peña books the basis of a dissertation. I wanted to show in a series of city maps, based on all the detail in Peña’s descriptions, what a brilliant exegesis of the social dynamics of these cities he had achieved. My maps showed, for example, how water moved through Djakarta, not just municipal water but also trucked water and, street by street, the flow of rainwater. And how road building in Cape Town reflected the policy of apartheid.

  I received quite a few compliments on the work, but I knew the maps did not make apparent the hard, translucent jewel of integration that was each Peña book. I had only created some illustrations, however well done. But had I known whether he was alive or where he lived, I would still have sent him a copy out of a sense of collegiality and respect.

  After I finished the dissertation I moved my wife and three young children to Brookline, a suburb of Boston, and set up a practice as a restoration geographer. Fifteen years later I embarked on my fourth or fifth trip to Tokyo as a consultant to a planning firm there, and one evening I took a train out to Chiyoda-ku to visit bookstores in an area called Jimbocho. Just down the street from a bridge over the Kanda River is the Sanseido Book Store, a regular haunt by then for me. Up on the fifth floor I bought two translations of books by Japanese writers on the Asian architectual response to topography in mountain cities. I was exiting the store on the ground floor, a level given over entirely to maps, closing my coat against the spring night, when I happened to spot the kanji for “Tokyo” on a tier of drawers. I opened one of them to browse. Toward the bottom of a second drawer, I came upon a set of maps that seemed vaguely familiar, though the entries were all in kanji. After a few minutes of leafing through, it dawned on me that they bore a resemblance to the maps I had done as a student at Duke. I was considering buying one of them as a memento when I caught a name in English in the corner—Corlis Benefideo. It appeared there on every map.