The Turquoise Lament

by John D. MacDonald

  He held his hand out to me. What can you do? He was about thirty, slender, dark-haired, with a reddened and peeling nose and forehead. I took his hand and said, “McGee. And Lewellen.”

  “Glad to meet you. You been doing any good?”

  I mentioned the fake survey and the fake foundation. Ted yawned. He signaled the bartender for a pair of refills. Don Benjamin sighed wistfully and said, “You know sitting here like this, it doesn’t seem possible that come Monday morning I’ll be right back there in Suncrest, right back in the old routine, peddling insurance.”

  He looked expectant. One of the afflictions of a transient society is the do-you-know disease. I knew a few people in Suncrest. But I didn’t want to play.

  “Too bad,” I said.

  So Bunny Mills came sauntering over. Don’s boss. Don introduced him. Beef and belly, and a broad and meaningless grin. A type. The nasal, slurred, high-pitched back-country Southern whine of one of the “good old boys.” I could guess that he moved his insurance business in political directions, had a piece of this and a piece of that, tiptoed on the outer edge of tax fraud, whacked judges on the back, and leaned hard on the serfs who worked for him. He came over to punish flagrant disloyalty. Don Benjamin had taken unauthorized leave of absence from his role as junior ass kisser to consort with strangers—without permission.

  Bunny Mills beamed at Professor Ted and at me and said, “This little ol’ boy here come so close to winning this here trip on the company, I tooken pity and sprang for it outen my own pocket, and never did I see a boy so plain dumb fumble-handed around a boat and tackle. He’s just plain in the way. He even damn near lost me my blue, right, Donnie?”

  Don Benjamin was staring up at him, his expression strained. “Mr. Mills, the premiums and renewals and the new business put me in the upper—”

  “Argue that with the home office, boy.” The grin was still there, with the small mean eyes looking out from behind it.

  “But the printed list had me—”

  “You got a sorry way of rubbing me wrong, Donnie boy. Best you shut your mouth and come back over to the bar.”

  We hadn’t wanted Don moving in on us in the first place. But I’ve never enjoyed watching the abuse of power. So, slumped deeply into the chair, I grinned up into Mills’s grin and said, “Soon as we finish our private conversation, Fats, I’ll ship him back over to you.”

  There are men whose passports should be stamped NOT VALID OUTSIDE THE CONTINENTAL LIMITS OF THE USA. The further they get from home, the louder, cheaper, and tougher they get. And the more careless. They rove the world in honky style.

  If I’d been wearing the right clothes for billfishing, I would have been a good old boy too. I made a serious mistake. I underestimated his capacity for violence, and I had not seen the weapon. I didn’t see it until he pulled it free. It was a fish billy, with a thong through the hardwood handle, the thong having been suspended from one of those brass belt hooks sold to men who like to plod about jangling with the tools of play. Fourteen inches of club with a wide bracelet of metal encircling the fat end, said bracelet studded all the way around with little pyramids of steel about a half inch high and a half inch apart.

  His face had clenched instantly into a red something that looked more like a fat boiled fist than a face. He planted his feet, snatched the club free, and made his whistling, grunting, earnest effort to cave in the whole middle of my face. Maybe he had never made a serious attempt to kill anyone before. God only knows what angers and frustrations had built him into this abrupt deadliness. He was ready, and I was there. And he was far from home.

  My reflexes were in fine shape. There was no time for any conscious thought. I caught a glimpse of the club flickering toward me, shoved hard with both feet and went over backward in the chair, not certain it would miss me until it had. I wanted to tuck and roll and come up onto my feet, but I gave my head a solid ringing crack against the flagstones, and in the roll I caught my feet over the arm of a chair at the table behind me. It was a very sorry performance. People were roaring and I was moving in slow, slow motion. Comedy routine. Mommy, watch the man with the red face crush the skull of the man on the floor!

  He was tippy-toe quick, the way some beefy men are. I did manage to roll just enough so that the second blow clanked the stones close to my ear. But I saw that he was definitely going to get me with his third try. Very definitely.

  He was bending over me, feet planted wide, club high, hesitating so as to get a good aim and maximum impact. Everybody was too shocked to move. Except Professor Ted. There was only one way he could change the pattern of events in time. He said later he had jumped up as I had gone over backward and had come around the table as the second swing struck sparks off the patio rock. He kicked big Bunny Mills in the testes from behind. Though on the scrawny side, Lewellen was in good shape. And he had played soccer before, during, and after college. And he was in a hurry.

  I did not know what had happened. I heard a heavy thud of impact. I got a quick glimpse of big Bunny’s face as he stumbled across me, all wide eyes and round wide screaming mouth. My hazy feeling from banging my head on the stone was fading very quickly, and I got up. Mr. Mills was on his back, both knees jacked as high as he could get them, rolling gently from side to side, making sweet little sounds like a basket of kittens, gently clasping the spreading stains in the fine sportsman fabric of his crotch.

  Then, as is customary, everybody who had not done one damn thing until that moment began to try to do everything at once. They began running into each other and shouting orders at each other. Finally they picked him up and carried him tenderly into the clubhouse without trying to unfold him. Don Benjamin trotted alongside. I wondered if he knew that his career with that particular insurance company had ended then and there. The fisherman fellows perhaps handled their good old buddy a little awkwardly. I heard him scream twice, far away.

  Joe Delladio appeared about thirty seconds after the second scream. He got a quick briefing from us and then talked to the bartender, the waiter, and one of the owners of the place, all of whom had watched, with awe, the gringos at play. They retold the story with much emotion, with descriptive gestures.

  Joe came back to the table, minus his earlier apprehension. “An unprovoked attack,” he said. “Mills has been here before. He always gets tight and makes some kind of trouble. They’ll swear he tried to kill you and your friend saved your life. There’s no doctor here. They’ll arrange to have him flown over to Guaymas. So let’s have a drink, amigos. Professor Ted, you astonish me.”

  “But not as much as he astonished Mills,” I said.

  We drank until the buzz was exactly right, and then we ate the specialties of the house, cooked with tender loving care for their old friend Joe, for the tall gringo who nearly got killed, and for the tough old one who had doubtless gelded the fat animal. We had sea turtle, caguama, cooked in its shell with an odd spicy sauce, and bacha, the giant clam with the sweet, firm meat, broiled just enough. And bottles of that great dark Dos Equis beer. It looked as if it could come up rain, so we carried the stores down to the Whaler and got back to the Trepid a little past four, took a siesta, and woke to the sound of the wet storm wind shoving and snapping at the hull, noisier than the familiar drone of the generator.

  That evening I said to Professor Ted, “I owe you a Big One.”

  “I was trying to keep my work crew intact, McGee.”

  “I still owe you.”

  “When I need it, I’ll let you know.”

  “Fair enough. Your deal.”

  Three

  Yes, we found the cannon and we found gold. We found the site ten feet below the floor of the sea in a water depth of seventy-five feet, on the tenth of July at eleven o’clock in the morning. We used the high-pressure hose to wash our way down to it. It had whacked the needle way over against the stop. Ted said the cannon was of the right period.

  We toasted the find in warm gaggy whiskey, and we laughed a lot at very little. Joe D
elladio planted his waterproof gadget close to the cannon. It was fail-safe, would transmit for a year on its battery pack, and could be picked up at three hundred yards on a transmitting frequency too exotic for anybody to stumble on it. We took sightings, then pulled the buoys and headed home to the Trepid.

  By ten the following morning the Trepid was moored right over the spot, and Joe and I were below, fighting the dredge head, one man on each side of it clinging to a brace improvised from a spade handle, sucking a wide area around the target because the sand and muck were too loose to hold more than an 8- to 10-degree slope. We knew that if something of interest were sucked up and spewed into the catch mesh, the people up above would cut the big pump. Or if we had visitors they would cut it and we would go into our science-fantasy act.

  By early afternoon, having rotated tasks on the half hour, we were beginning to wonder if some old pirate hadn’t deep-sixed a busted cannon. Ted wondered if they hadn’t jettisoned everything heavy to try to save the ship. Frank Hayes kept close watch on his big pump, mumbling about how hot it was running.

  About three o’clock we uncovered the business end of another cannon, and then the dredge sucked up a pocket of miscellaneous junk. Ted and Meyer were on the cutting head, and when the pump was cut off, they came up to look at what we had. After all the chunks of shell, bushels of weed, pecks of sandworms, it was a pleasure to see some man-made objects.

  We spread corroding chunks out on the deck. It is a truly fantastic experience to watch what happens to iron after it has been in the sea for a few hundred years. When the air first hits it, the iron is chunky and solid. As it dries, the rusting process is so weirdly speeded up it is as though some terrible acid were working on the objects. They turned to flakes and powder, then to piles of dark dust in just the gentle motion of the Trepid.

  There was one prize. At first it was a chunk of corrosion in the shape of an old flintlock pistol. As it dried, most of it crumbled into flakes and scabs and powder, leaving some solid parts behind—an ornate brass trigger guard, green with corrosion, some brass screws, an ebony grip, a brass butt cover, and, untouched by the sea or the years, gleaming yellow and pure, two lacy, fragile pieces of gold, representing a curve of vine with small delicate leaves. Ted identified the two pieces as the gold inlay which had been worked into the metal on either side of the weapon, in the area between the trigger and the hammer. The art of putting a hole in someone was accomplished with a great deal more elegance in the olden days.

  The second prize came at ten the next morning, a single gold coin. A big one. It was crude but mintfresh. Joe Delladio was so excited he lost his English entirely. I saw a very slight tremble of Ted Lewellen’s hands as he turned it this way and that. “Spanish five-peseta,” he said calmly. “A beauty. Look at the sharpness of the die marks. Often, the first run of gold coins with a new die were presentation pieces, to be given to the king. If our luck is good, there’ll be a lot of those down there. God only knows what they’d bring at auction.”

  Maybe there were a lot. They are probably still there. Joe and I were on the cutting head when the pump stopped. When we climbed wearily up onto the deck, they told us that the big pump had suddenly started sounding like a washing machine full of broken stone. Frank came up from below, sweat-soaked, with a fresh and ugly burn on his forearm. “Vibration cracked a fitting,” he said. “Main seal ruptured. Sucked sand into itself. Scored everything all to hell. Blocked the cooling system and froze up a half second before I hit the switch.”

  “How long to fix it?” Ted asked.

  After staring at him for at least five seconds, Frank said, “You’ve now got the biggest, ugliest anchor in Mexico.”

  So after the conference about ways and means, Meyer and I flew back to Florida, Joe flew back to Guadalajara, and Ted Lewellen and Frank Hayes set a course for San Diego and a better pump. We were going to hit it again, the five of us, when the new season began, when we could count on good weather.

  But that had to be the year that one of the rare whirly ladies came stomping into that part of the coast. Most of them roam out into the Pacific and die. She started quickly, stayed small and intense, curved right into that area of the Mexican coast, and changed a lot of the geography of both the land areas and the bottom.

  Ted Lewellen had given up on it before I got a chance to talk to him a year later, when the Trepid came gliding into Bahia Mar, showing the effects of long sea duty. Maybe I asked too many questions about how hard they’d looked for Joe Delladio’s little electronic beeper. Finally he said with irritation, “For God’s sake, McGee! You can’t even find where the Club de Pescadores once stood. You can’t find a trace of a foundation. One of the islands is gone. Just plain gone. So is that rock the size of a church. Joe’s gadget could be halfway to Los Mochis, in twenty-five hundred feet of water, or the damned thing could be in the top of a tall tree near Chihuahua! Part of the bottom we surveyed is dry land now. Part of it is three hundred feet deep!”

  “Okay, okay. I was just asking, Ted.”

  “There are other ones.”

  “Not like that one.”

  His grin was tired, wry, inverted. “Not exactly like that one, no. Some are smaller and some are bigger, and they are all out there for the finding.”

  Out of almost every experience comes something useful. Sometimes you don’t know what it is until you have turned it this way and that and checked it against the light, hefted it. I had learned that not finding treasure is almost as good as finding it. I had been given that absolutely vivid memory of how the lacy gold looked in the Mexican sunlight. And the coin. They were with me in total recall forever. So was the strange, sick excitement of making the hit, finding the place, knowing you were going to suck it clean.

  Meyer agreed. Ted Lewellen hinted that he might be going out again soon. We hinted of a casual interest in going along. He worked on the Trepid eight to ten hours a day. One afternoon he went over to the center of town to buy something he needed. He rode the little Honda he kept aboard the Trepid. As they tell it, a rain started to come down as he was heading back. It had not rained in a long time. After a dry spell, the first rain turns the roads to grease. Ted was hurrying along, shoulders hunched, when a small fearless dog ran yapping out to bite him in the leg. Ted swerved and the bike slid out from under him, and Ted and bike slid slowly under a giant-size transit-mix cement truck, one of the juggernauts of the Kondominium Kulture. Their massive bumpers are at decapitation height, and too many of them are driven by arrogant murderous imbeciles encouraged by a venal management to “make time.” The one who squashed Professor Ted might not have even known it had he not caught a glimpse of man and motorbike sliding under him. He stopped, got out, took a look, and had the grace to require hospitalization for shock.

  The semipermanent population of Bahia Mar takes care of its own. Sympathy may not be long-lasting, but when it is focused, there is a lot of it. Pidge got a lot, and it helped her through the worst of it. There was no one else. She was halfway through school by then, and she thought that she had someone else, but the boy revealed to her an essential coldness by taking the death of the daddy as an irritating inconvenience. Looking at him with unclouded vision, she saw the poseur, the charmer, the manipulator, and told him to skip the trip to Florida, and skip everything else as well. Arrangements were made. Lewellen was cremated, and there was a small service at Lauderdale and then a graveside service in Indiana, where his urn was buried beside the one which held the ashes of his wife.

  Meyer researched the problems of money, estate, taxes, and red tape. Ted had moved his money business from Indiana to First Oceanside Bank and Trust and made the bank the executor. After the Trust Officer, a Mr. Lawton Hisp, had accepted Pidge’s instructions to let Meyer know all, Meyer finally made a bemused report to me of the situation as Professor Ted had left it.

  “When your work brings you into contact with shark-type sharks and two-legged sharks, you keep things neat,” he said. “He was a neat man. She gets the T
repid free and clear. He’s been audited every year for four years, and he is okay with the IRS. There’s cash to take care of the estate tax. There’s a very nice portfolio which won’t have to be disturbed, all in trust for Pidge. The only change Hisp will make is to divert the income to her instead of plowing it back into the kind of thing he has been buying, which are good solid convertible bonds and convertible preferreds. The yield based on current market value isn’t so great, like four point seven percent, but because it is computed on a current asset value of eight hundred and seventy-seven thousand, she’ll get a little over forty-one thousand a year taxable income. Hisp and I talked about moving it all into tax-free bonds, and she would get about the same income without taxes to pay, but we both felt uneasy about putting a person so young into fixed-obligation stuff. He’s invested in the convertibles of companies big in natural resources, so if inflation ten years from now makes a new Chevvie cost forty thousand, the increase in the value of the natural-resources common stocks will have pulled the convertible bonds and preferred up—not in direct ratio, but certainly into the six-to-one, eight-to-one range. We agreed she should pay taxes now and maintain her equity position. At twenty-one, which is very soon, she can tap the principal if she wants to, but no more than ten percent of the asset value in any calendar year. When she’s forty, the trust is distributed to her and her kids, if any, in equal portions. If she dies before forty, her children get the income until the youngest is twenty-one, then they get the principal, evenly divided.”

  We could all understand why she didn’t sell the Trepid. It was the most direct link to happier days. And living aboard at Bahia Mar, she felt as if she was among friends. She had no desire to return to school. Whoever was handy helped her when she needed help. Pretty soon it was Howard Brindle who was taking care of the chores. He had not been around Bahia Mar for very long, yet he fitted in so well it seemed as if he’d been there a lot longer. He never scrounged. He gave full value in time and muscle for all favors.