by Len Maynard
Touching the Sun
Len Maynard
© Len Maynard 2016
Len Maynard has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published by World Castle Books in the US in 2016 as Touching the Sun by Maynard Sims
This edition published in 2020 by Sharpe Books
DEDICATION
For Billie Jean Martin,
the main muse on this one,
and for the use of her name,
and for her talent as a translator.
And for John Ward, Tim Fox, and Lizzie Gleave,
who read this first and have offered their unflagging belief in this book.
Settle not for walking on this earth
When you could be touching the sun.
Old Bahamian proverb
Table of Contents
Prologue
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
Prologue
The boy was sitting in the rear seat of a Chrysler Grand Caravan. The car was white and clean. It was a standard vehicle, large, comfortable enough, but not even top of the range. To him it was a spaceship.
He’d never seen anything like it. Perhaps on TV when they got a signal back in the two room shack he had shared with his parents and his three brothers. Maybe on the American shows he watched when his parents were out. Never in real life. They didn’t have a car…neither his parents nor anyone he knew.
Travelling in his personal starship, he had been thinking about his family. Since the earthquake, Haiti had been in chaos; it had been fairly crazy before the disaster, and now it was lawless and wild in too many places.
He had been living in a makeshift camp, in a tent donated by some organization in Europe, which was somewhere he had never heard of, and had no idea where it was or what it looked like. The tent leaked when the rain got too heavy.
His parents had been killed when the first huge tremors hit the island. His mother had been swept away down the hillside when the slum city of similar wood and cardboard buildings had collapsed on themselves, and then formed a landslide that moved with the mud and the rocks like a slow-moving tide. He hadn’t seen his father die; he had been told the street his father had been walking along opened up like a mouth and the people were swallowed into the huge cracks and craters. He didn’t know what had happened to his brothers.
He was at school when the noises began. He’d seen a tree fall in the forest once, but that was nothing like the sight of buildings splitting apart and collapsing in heaps of dust and bricks. All the children began shouting; some were crying, others screaming. Everyone was scared. The teacher was scared, but she made sure all the children got out of the classroom and as far away from the school building as they could. The last he saw of her was when she went back inside the school to help some others, just before the roof sank to the ground.
What the boy could remember was the silence. At first there was noise, screams and crashes, the ground pulling apart and people and cars and buildings falling into cracks and holes. Then there were sounds of dust and debris whooshing into the air, and clouds of impenetrable fog obliterating everything. Then, as it all settled, the silence.
The children stood still for a long time, waiting for an adult to tell them what to do, to reassure them it was all going to be all right. Even at their young ages they knew instinctively it wasn’t going to be anything but very wrong.
No one came for them, and eventually they realized that nobody would. The older ones took control and led them carefully into Port-Au-Prince. They may as well have led them straight to Hell.
Already bodies littered the streets. Piles of rubble were as tall as many of the buildings had been. Although the first earthquake had been massive, the size and numbers of all the aftershocks added devastation to disaster, and was likened to kicking a dead body for fun.
A 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti at a depth of 8.1 miles. The epicenter was located fifteen miles from Port-Au-Prince. Since then there had been fifty-nine or more aftershocks, ranging from 4.2 to 5.9 magnitudes in strength.
Even before the earthquake struck, Haiti was the poorest country in the world, with more than two thirds of the people living on less than two US dollars per day. All of the people in Port-Au-Prince lived in slum conditions, mostly tightly-packed, poorly-built, concrete buildings that fell like decks of cards balanced on a needle.
A large proportion of the education in Haiti was provided in often poor-quality private schools, and although the state system generally provided better education, there were far too few places. Half of the people in Port-Au-Prince had no access to latrines, and only one-third had access to tap water. Before the disaster Haiti was a beggar scrambling for scraps.
Afterwards there were two million people living in the most affected areas, over two hundred thousand were dead, and over 180,000 homes were damaged or destroyed, leaving one and a half million people homeless. There were now nineteen million cubic meters of rubble and debris in Port-Au-Prince, and one and a half million people living in camps, including places that were at critical risk from storms and flooding. Over one thousand camps had been set up, and several held over five thousand people each. After the disaster, Haiti was too tired to scrabble for scraps and too traumatized to beg.
The boy in the luxury car was named Sonny. He thought he was lucky to get out.
He was placed in a shelter made out of canvas tent material, tree trunks, and corrugated iron sheets. There were over one hundred children there, and at first the humanitarian helpers that came from America and Europe fed them and clothed them and tried to keep them alive.
Then gradually people began to arrive who wanted to take them away from the horrors and look after them somewhere else. There was a scandal of sorts when some Christian aid groups tried to adopt several of the children at once. Eventually the charities operating in Haiti realized they were losing control of the situation. When Tarradon Exports approached them with impeccable credentials, and, seemingly, arrangements to place large numbers of the ch
ildren – orphans all of them, so far as could be ascertained – with families in the USA, it seemed too good to be true, and an answer to their prayers.
The Chrysler Grand Caravan bore a discreet logo on the side doors that revealed it belonged to Tarradon Exports, but Sonny, floating in a world of his own imagination in the rear seats, hadn’t noticed it.
He had been kicking a ball around in the dirt with three or four other boys when the men came for him. He watched as the men spoke with Pierre, who was in charge that day. Pierre welcomed them, had obviously met them before, and took some paperwork from them that he put into a drawer without reading it.
Sonny had a feeling that they were coming for him, but he wasn’t scared. Since everything had happened, he didn’t really feel much of anything anymore. He was looking at them as Pierre pointed across to the boys playing football, but Sonny knew he was pointing at him. One of the men smiled and waved, but the other one didn’t even look in his direction, eyes hidden behind big sunglasses.
They took him that day, and by the evening he was on a boat headed for Florida. He didn’t enjoy it on the boat – he felt sick a lot of the time – but it was travelling fast and they made sure he was comfortable.
When the boat moored it was at a marina with dozens of similar sized yachts and launches. One more just blended in, and no questions were asked about passengers or cargo.
The men were quite gentle with Sonny, though he had been used to hardship and some cruelty in his six years of life. The Grand Caravan was waiting in a parking slot in a huge car park, the engine running and a driver casually seated at the wheel.
It took hours to drive even though they seemed to be going fast, and the roads were wide and long and straight. When they stopped, which they did a couple of times, they sat in booths at a diner and ate burgers and fries and drank Coke, which he had only ever had once, and the can had been warm. He slept some of the way.
One of the men turned in his seat and said to him, ‘You’re near Disney now. Know what Disney is?’
Sonny shook his head, though he had a vague idea.
‘You know. Mickey Mouse, princesses and fairy tales, and all that magical shit.’
Sonny looked out of the window, but all he could see were huge signs advertising food and cars and hotels. Everything was bright, the sun was high in the sky, and he thought that if this was Disney he would probably like it. Then he saw the lampposts were purple, and then they passed a road sign for a town called Celebration, and he thought that if there was somewhere called that then it must really be a magical place, though he knew enough to know that shit was a bad word.
They drove onto a wide road called the 27, and passed huge shops and housing estates with big houses and fountains. Eventually the car turned into a private drive and pulled up outside the only house that could be seen in either direction. It was large, a mansion, with manicured green grass that looked fake and probably was, and sweeping stands of colored bushes. There were three stories, and so many windows you could look out of a different one each day and have some left over at the end of the month.
‘This is it, kid, the end of the road.’
Sonny got out and was immediately hit by the intense Orlando heat and humidity.
‘Bring the boy inside, ’ a man called from the house. It was a Southern American accent, and as Sonny was ushered into the cool interior of the house he saw the man that the accent belonged to. He was dressed in a brightly colored shirt, but it was the size of a marquee; the man was grossly fat. His eyes were small and almost hidden by the excess flesh on his face. His fingers were like sea slugs, restless and stubby.
‘How old is this one?’
‘We were told six, but you can’t be sure.’
The fat man looked Sonny up and down but gave no sign of approval, or any indication he was welcoming him into his home.
‘Have you got the next one lined up?’
1
Ahead of them the sea in the secret bay was clear blue, the afternoon sun glinting from it as if a torch was shining onto a mirror. Gentle waves tickled the white sand at the shore, the beach stretching lazily in both directions, empty and inviting.
The three boys were best friends, and now that school was out, the rest of the day was theirs. They planned to spend it doing absolutely nothing, and being diligent about it. Most of the previous couple of hours had been spent laughing about what their teacher, Miss Robertson, had said to them.
They were in a crafts lesson, making a model airplane out of balsa wood. Harry was doing most of the assembly, gluing and sticking the pieces together, Jack was giving him advice, while Alan watched both and talked about what the finished plane would look like and where they could fly it.
‘Bahamas industrial structure in miniature,’ Miss Robertson laughed.
‘What do you mean, miss?’
‘The worker.’ She pointed at Harry Beck. ‘Doing all the work. The supervisor.’ She pointed at Jack. ‘Involved in the job, Mr. Dylan, but not doing much to help.’
‘And what about me?’ Alan asked.
‘You, Mr. Lancaster, you are the manager, the owner, the entrepreneur. Giving the instructions, not getting your hands dirty, and probably reaping most of the profits, if there were any. Time to break for lunch, boys.’
All three boys were headed for eleven years of age, and were starting to notice how their personalities were taking on patterns that repeated themselves.
‘Worker,’ Jack pushed Harry from behind, making him stumble on the steep path down to the beach.
Alan, as he regularly and instinctively did when Harry was even mildly threatened, pushed Jack. ‘Supervisor.’
‘Owner, owner.’ Harry and Jack ran ahead, calling out and laughing.
The sand was warm, and they hopped and skipped across to the cluster of rocks that was their den, their beach house. Alan laid his towel out on the best spot, slightly shaded but facing the sea. Jack and Harry let their towels fall close by.
‘Swim?’ Alan said.
Harry jumped up. Jack shrugged.
‘Last one in is a tarpon,’ Alan shouted, his shirt already thrown onto his towel.
They all had their swimming shorts on under their school trousers, and they were so busy laughing and splashing each other that no one noticed who was last into the sea, because no one cared.
The pecking order of the boys was becoming well established. Neither acknowledged it, and maybe didn’t even notice it consciously, but they all obeyed it as the natural order of things. Life was good in the Bahamian summer of their youth.
‘I can hold my breath under water for ten minutes,’ Jack announced.
‘Course you can’t,’ Alan said. ‘You’d die.’ He swam away from the other two as if the pronouncement was final.
‘I can,’ Jack insisted. ‘Watch me.’
‘I wouldn’t if I was you,’ Harry said.
Jack had started to submerge himself, but he trod water instead. ‘Why not?’
‘Whether you stay under water for ten minutes or ten seconds, who cares?’
‘It’s a challenge.’
‘So?’
Losing interest in diving under water, Jack lay on his back and swam parallel to the shore. ‘You never want to do anything, Beck.’
Harry looked up at the sun. ‘I just want to enjoy doing what I like.’
Alan had swum back so all three were close together in the water. ‘And what do you like, Harry?’
‘Lots of things and nothing.’
Before anyone could say anything else, a roar of engines damaged the quietness of the day.
During the late 1970s and the early 1980s, the US Coast Guard had increased its resources to attack the growing threat of drug smugglers. They tested and evaluated the surface effects ship (SES) Dorado for a period between 1981 and 1982 to check its effectiveness as a patrol craft for the shallow waters around the coast of Florida.
When the tests proved successful, the coast guard acquired three SESs for ac
tive use: Sea Hawk, Shearwater, and Petrel, beginning in the summer of 1982. Although the coast guard had experimented with non-traditional vessels such as hydrofoils as late as the 1970s, no such craft had seen extensive service until the SESs.
They were rigid sidewall hovercraft constructed of a lightweight aluminum alloy. Their lift engines powered fans that created a pressurized air cushion under the cutter, lifting the craft, reducing drag and draft. The solid sidewalls pierced the water, creating a catamaran hull, and the air cushion was sealed by flexible rubberized skirts at the bow and stern. This allowed the boats to operate at high speeds in waters both shallow and deep, making them ideal for the waters off the coast of Florida and well out into the Caribbean. Their wide beam and the catamaran hull also made them extremely stable craft, even in high seas.
What had disturbed the boys was one of the first patrols in the waters around the islands of the Bahamas.
‘Wow, what must it be like to ride in one of those?’ Jack said.
‘I’d love to skipper something like that one day,’ Harry said.
Alan dived to the bottom of the sea and surfaced a few seconds later with a handful of small shells. One by one he slowly let them fall from his hands, watching, fascinated as each made a small ripple in the calm surface of the sea.
‘Would you like a boat like that, Alan?’ Harry said.
‘I’ll own one someday.’
‘When’s that?’ Jack said ‘When your father gives you all his money?’
‘No.’ Alan let the last shell slip back to the sea. ‘When I own the Islands. When I’m rich.’
‘Owner, owner.’ They began to splash water over Alan until he leapt as far out of the sea as he could and tried to jump on both of them at once.
They fell backwards into the warm water, the teasing forgotten, futures unplanned, dreams still asleep, just boys with the whole world ahead of them, and a lazy afternoon to spend at the beach and in the sea.
Friends forever.
When forever was just another sunny day in paradise.
2
I sat on the end of the bed smoking a cigarette, staring out through the window of the bungalow. From where I sat I had a pretty good view across the Grand Bahamian landscape, all the way down to the small, private harbor where my boat, The Lady of Pain, was moored, bobbing gently on the incoming tide.