The Bookman's Tale

by Berry Fleming

  But he didn’t call, and when Tuckwell reached him on the phone Monday afternoon he said only, Such things took time you know, tell those people down there to keep their pants on. “There’s possibly one little snag, Lieutenant.”

  “Snag!”

  “I can’t tell you any more right now—”

  “What do you mean, snag?”

  “I’ll call you in a day or two when I know something. Do I have your number? Yes, Paula says we have.”

  But the “people down there” had got the grant on the basis of the Ph.D. and they phoned him—the Chief’s assistant did—and most courteously asked about it. They needed some credentials to show the Foundation office; would really like to provide them with a copy of the certificate, “just as a matter of form. Let us have it as soon as you can, Doctor, it’s getting a little awkward for us.”

  The rest of it seemed to happen all at once, though of course it took hours, took all of a beautiful October Thursday—the early call from X, “Some not-good news, old fellow. Looks like a guy at Berkeley beat you to it,” waiting a minute, getting only a dead silence and going on, “same problem, same theory, practically the same demonstration. Happens all the time, of course. Two people, miles apart, never heard of each other, pop up one day with the same idea. Happens all the time. Darwin and What’s-his-name, you remember—”

  “You mean—”

  “Trouble is the Journal’s publishing this guy’s paper in the next—”

  “You mean I don’t get my Doctor’s?”

  “Not at all, Oscar. You just don’t’ get it on the basis of this dissertation—”

  “I just start all over again!”

  “It’s a lot simpler the second go-round, Oscar—”

  “Wait a minute! Who is this guy? You know this guy?”

  “Not really. No.”

  “Isn’t Berkeley your school?”

  “Now wait a minute yourself, Oscar—”

  “You didn’t steer him on to my idea?”

  “Now hold on, Lieutenant!”

  “Nobody else knew, I haven’t told a living soul—”

  “These things happen, I tell you. Happen all the time—”

  “You gave him my idea—”

  “You’re insane!” And the line went dead.

  X was crossing the yard to his car when Tuckwell tramped through a bed of late flowers at a corner of the house, bareheaded, unshaved, rumpled collar, service pistol heavy in his hand. X drew back rigid against the side of the car, so surprised he couldn’t find a directive of any sort, his mind like a jostled tray of tools; should he speak, say something, just to break the silence? caution the boy, warn him? Beg him? No words ready that seemed to fit, and no physical movement, no way open to escape with the car door against his back, a thought taking shape in his head that any move to duck and run, or even any spoken words would be enough to break some delicate balance in the air between them, trip some spring, all the choices seeming to cancel one another and leave him standing there, chest square to the front, staring at the pale young man ten feet away, and continuing to stare without moving, unable to move, as the young man put the pistol muzzle in his mouth like a fat cigar and pushed the trigger with his thumb.

  “You mean this Professor X got jealous and—”

  I told him there was no reason he should go to Georgia for the funeral—he was badly shaken—but he wouldn’t listen, and I went with him, just the two of us. We kept out of the way, stood off among the trees, the oleanders, some white camellias, didn’t speak to anybody, sign any book. Saw Meg from a distance, blank, dazed as if a bright light had flashed into her eyes; didn’t speak to her (she wouldn’t have known it if we had), flew back that afternoon.

  “You mean this Professor—”

  “I’ve told you all I know—except she married again, an Englishman trading in sugar with a plantation in Barbados. One reason I agreed to make the talks at the College. She’ll be surprised. She doesn’t know I’m coming.”

  Ray heard himself exclaim in not much more than a whisper to himself, “Doesn’t know you’re coming? She’ll hear about it through the College.”

  “Not likely. But even if she does?—Oh, I won’t just walk in the door. I’ll ask here and there, size up the situation. If I decide I’m not intruding, I’d like to see her. It’s been twenty years, more than twenty. I don’t like to add it up.”

  Ray said, “She won’t be the woman you remember,” as if speaking into a mirror, giving Geltstein (and himself) an excuse for changing his mind, but the Doctor only said, “Even so?” and after a pause, “A later bud on the same stem?” smiling a little to dilute the sentimentality then going on that he once knew a man who said he told a woman he loved her more than when she was beautiful. “She was indignant. He said if she had had a frying pan he would have been a dead duck. Beauty matters more than love—to some of them.…”

  Voice fading out for Ray under the temptation of recalling to the Doctor his cautionary “what you find is not what you were searching for,” but changing his mind at realizing it might apply to himself as well: two men each looking for a woman he had loved.—Or was he looking for the man who had loved her?

  In any case, the Doctor’s planning to see Meg seemed to strengthen Ray’s weakening resolve to seek out Claudia. If the Doctor was willing to chance it, determined to, why not Ray? Twenty years, for the Doctor? Closer to thirty for himself—since the train and the pulsing brakes and the door shutting, the snap of the latch saying, “End,” like a voice. And close to two since “Walter Motlow, in Afghanistan” and wondering through a restless night’s half-sleep after seeing it if the news might be excuse enough for writing her, breaking the long silence. And waking to realize he couldn’t write her: “Claudia Baird of Austin, Texas” didn’t mean she was living there now; and even if she were he had no mailing address.

  And without deciding anything, whether he would write her even if he could—only remembering the petty swindle Emily said she sometimes resorted to if she needed a far-away address quickly—he dialed “Directory Assistance” in Austin and asked for the phone number of “a Mrs. Walter Motlow.”

  A pleasant un-Southern voice said after a pause as if for thinking (or for touching the keys of a computer), “Five-one-two, four-five-nine, four-zero-one-five.”

  He said, “Is that the Mrs. Motlow at two-three-one University Place?”

  “No sir, the only Mrs. Walter Motlow we have is at seven-four-three Pedernales Drive.”

  “Thank you, Directory Assistance.”

  “Our pleasure, sir, have a nice evening.”

  “The same to all of you, miss.”

  And he wrote her. Six lines of insipid condolence that he rewrote as many times, not reminiscent, not asking her to remember—except in the full-of-time “Always” that he ended with—mailed it with no return address on the envelope for fear it would come back unopened. Week after week until nearly two months had passed, then eight lines: she was busy with selling her house, planning to move into a retirement community, “meaning a place for old folks” (Isabel’s plan, Isabel’s words—and maybe his own plan too, maturing in the dark); “costly but very nice.” Cool, occupied, looking-another-way; except, possibly, the glancing-back “Always, C”?

  Drop it? Did he really want her to meet young-Edward-(“Eddie”)-plus-thirty-years? Plus present-day infirmities (physical and possibly mental)? And yet with Isabel the old years had glowed with a quiet richness over his seeing her again; old years without the intensity of the Claudia years, but reassuring in the values that remained, the risen-to-the-surface creamy values—at the airport watching her mount the landing stairs to her plane with more alacrity than his game leg would have allowed him, in his mind Ora Mae’s staggering “Why don’t you marry Mr. Edward, Miss Isabel?” turning into “Why don’t you marry Miss Claudia, Mr. Edward?” and bringing back to him the web of imagined affinities, some of which might have weathered the years. And he wrote her again, after waiting ten days for
pride’s sake, a factual noncommittal note, longer than the first but not saying much, a tentative holding out his hand in the way he had seen his neighbor’s children tempting their rabbit (“Rabbit E. Lee” by name).

  No answer. Weeks growing into months—months filled with the night-and-day nursing of their Fall List (three titles); flyers to compose and fling out into the void, review copies to the mighty (who would ignore them—no fear of publisher pausing at luncheon table with, “What’s the matter with you people over there, can’t you read?”); authors unhappy at dustjackets, at advertising, at the inevitable typo, at the Conspiracy of Indifference (one of them grumbling, “Samizdat!” for the way the Press was “concealing” his work); publisher-editor-stenographer-shipping-clerk filling a dribble of orders in the mail—not even an order from Texas.

  Then one morning a thin envelope with a British-looking stamp canceled in San Juan de Pinos: Four lines on stationery of Mrs. Martha Freeland (crossed out but with a phone number showing); she was spending a few weeks with a daughter who had taken a sublet in the hills outside of San Juan. “Grandchildren under foot! Can you imagine? If you can, please don’t.—Toujours, C.”

  And he had told the other half of the Press to expect him in two weeks (catching himself on the brink of “with a new wife”), gone to a travel agency and asked if there were boats to San Juan de Pinos.

  “Boats!”

  “Yes, I don’t fly well.” (And want some time to think, to consider,—to maybe re-consider.)

  And the ship still with him on the hotel porch as the muscles in his shoulders seemed to rock against the moving chair-back, his mind to rock between the black taxi driver talking to someone at the foot of the steps and the blistered castaways jabbering in the rowboat—and on to the jabbering hour on shore in Bridgetown with Pyt the diver and the pickle-man from Colorado who said, “Book-writing is an all-right business if it pays off,” the three of them wandering about the docks, the vast contemptuous heat like a motionless storm (Geltstein off with a wave in a taxi), the ladies doing the shops along Victoria Street—

  “Pardon, sir,” from “Thomas” with a tray of ice and scotch whisky; “the lady phoned to tell the gentleman not much longer. To bring him ‘something else to wait with,’” setting the tall glass on the arm of the chair and removing the empty one.

  “Thank you, Thomas,”—none of it seeming to break into the streets of Bridgetown and Pyt shouting, “Come along, Captain!” waving an invitation to join them at the Captain on the steps of the Harbor Master’s office, cap on the back of his head, pipe in his teeth, looking as uncomfortable ashore as the boats in the bay aground at low tide.

  No answer, and they took a table at the nearest cafe—the Café Divine—to get out of the sun, a table by an open window for the air moving in from the water, Pyt looking out at the flock of off-the-vertical masts and, when his drink had come, swallowing an inch or two.

  THE DIVER’S TALE

  Low tide once in Marriaqua Town, in the bay and in myself. Would have jumped off the dock if there had been more water. A man came up behind me, said somebody told him I was a diver. I said I might be. I had been working on a job out of Key West. The boss thought he had found the Señora d’Atocha. I went down three times, had a good look. Picked up a bagful of coins. Found four solid silver bars, managed to bring one up. Weighed eighty pounds. “It’s the Atocha!” says he. “No sir, she’s too small.” He kicked me out. Wanted her to be the Atocha. I hooked a ride to Marriaqua where I knew a shady lawyer from back home in Louisiana—not Louise-iana, named for Louis.

  This man, smelling like a shrimp boat, asked me if I was looking for a job, “something special?” I said I might be. “Depends.”

  “You ever see anything like this?” says he, digging into his pants pocket and bringing up a coin worn almost smooth. He wouldn’t give it to me to hold but he let me look at it in his hand. A gold doubloon with a profile that might have been the King of Spain on one side and on the other a pressing of the True Cross and under it, very small, you could hardly make it out, “Colon, 1621.”

  I said, “Where’d you steal this?”

  He said he had a “pile of ‘em.” Said he and his partner found them while fishing for turtles on a reef south of Cuba, “never mind which reef.” Said the wreck lay on her side in four fathoms with a heavy current, most of it half buried in silt. They figured she must be the Margarita that people talked about; what looked like an anchor sticking up not far off. “Had six prongs.”

  I said, “Ain’t no such anchor,” to him, but to myself I said this guy’s on to something; I’d been down enough to see those six-pronged anchors, three flukes each side of the shank. I said I had other pots on the fire but what was his proposition.

  He said shares, everybody got an equal share, and I said, “Who’s ‘everybody’?” He said there’d be him and his partner and two others to help. I said, “A five-way split, me doing all the work, breaking all the bones!” He said it was his boat, and I said it was my neck, “$500 and half of what I find. If I don’t find nothing, just $500.” He spit three inches short of my shoes and walked off, jingled his ducats or whatever they were and walked off.

  And I walked off too. But that “Colon, 1621” followed me like a stray dog. Hurricanes are down my alley: “July, stand by; August, come it must; September, remember.” 1621 was the year of the big blow. Or it might have been 1622, I wasn’t sure. The ships came in from Spain, you know, maybe picked up a few pearls at Cartagena, sailed on to Porto Bello and Colon and loaded up with silver from Peru, gold from Chile, minted at Colon or Lima. Then northeast on the Trades and into the Gulf until they hit the Stream, north on the current round the end of Cuba and up the Florida coast, then east for home. If the Saints held back the hurricanes. And held off the robbers, Trent, Black Beard, Lafitte and the rest. They gathered at Havana, the merchant ships; waited to make up a convoy, maybe waited for a galleon like the Margarita or the Madre de Dios—a police escort.

  But I’m getting off the track.

  I went to see my lawyer friend, needed to talk to somebody it didn’t much matter who. He had run into a little trouble back home in Pineville, nothing much. DUIs used to come to him, not everyday drunks, big-time drunks, Country-Club drunks, sheriff in the parking lot Saturday night waiting for them. His fee was a couple of hundred to get the hook out of their mouth that he split 50-50 with the sheriff; one thing and another. Managed to get himself disbarred and skipped out for foreign parts, for Marriaqua eventually.

  And landed on both feet. He had a boat. “Cup defender,” he said, whatever that means. Bought it cheap. The bank had it up for sale to settle an estate. Schooner-rigged, with a backup diesel. Didn’t look like a boat that would be running cocaine, heroin and all that.

  He said he was busy; said there were a thousand reefs “south of Cuba.” “Needle in a haystack.” Said to feel around, see if I could run into something with a little meat on it, said to try the Library, he had heard they had a file of old newspapers that went “way back.”

  I remember watching a redhead buzzard through a Library window, slipping and sliding on a tin rooftree trying to get a grip with his claws, and me there inside clawing into journals, histories, diaries, microfilms of letters, finding nothing—nothing with a scrap of meat on it. Then one day hitting on a quote from the Marriaqua Gazette of August 1622 that mentioned a “reception by the Governor for the Captain and officers of the Madre de Dios,” banquet, ball, cockfights, the works (I could feel the hair on my head lifting up). She was sailing on the morning tide, headed home for Cadiz.

  Cadiz? Why not Havana to join the convoy? And yet she might have sailed “for Cadiz” by way of Havana. The quote ended with, “She is believed to have aboard 47 tons of gold and silver in ingots and coin minted at Colon.”

  I followed such a hint on to the next issue of the Gazette. A three-inch paragraph said, “In this town, the fairest of all the English plantations, every house within view is leveled.” (It hit me like
a crack of lightning.) “All the vessels in the harbor are drove ashore and one Bristol ship overset and lost. At St. Iago de la Vega the rector reads prayers to keep up some show of religion among a most ungodly and debauched people.…” No mention of the Madre except indirectly in the last line: “Many ships are feared lost along the coast of Cuba or in the Windward Passage to the east, only 40 miles wide and directly in the course of the storm, the most violent in recollection.”

  Which way did she sail? West on the Trades, bound for Havana and the convoy? Or did she say to hell with a convoy and take the short cut due north through the Windward Passage? She was a battleship, didn’t need a convoy, could take care of herself—

  Frank Hardly breaking in with, “All right, all right! Did you get the loot, the moola?”

  We headed northeast for the Windward Passage, all sails set, the lee-rail almost level with the foam. Five of us aboard not counting the Portuguese steward in a flower-pot hat and his black wife the cook. We were drinking champagne about twelve o’clock on the second day, arguing about how far into the Passage she might have got before the hurricane struck her; you couldn’t say for sure because we didn’t know what time she had sailed. “Morning tide” didn’t help much. But we did agree the storm would have driven her west, on to the Cuba reefs (which fitted in pretty well with what the fisherman told me), and that was where we were headed.

  I was checking out my gear when I noticed the sky was fading out under a misty scud. To windward the squall had already whitened the near sea and was coming on with a strange and dismal sound. “Down mainsail! Down staysail!” And the great sail came down with a run and fell half overboard. I could see the steersman clinging to the spokes, face as gray as the wet sail. The squall fell in a solid mass of wind and rain and we stooped under the blow and wild noise. The foresail boom tore apart the last strands of the sheet and crashed to leeward. The ship leaped up into the wind and righted and the peak and throat halyards began to run—