And that’s how I happened to be out in my stilthouse off Calda Bank when the squall hit.
It’s some kind of place to watch a squall come in. It’s an old fisherman’s shack, built in open water eight feet deep, and the nearest land is Fleming Key—about a mile or so away. The old pine clapboard is a weathered gray, and the roof is tin. The sixteen pilings it’s built on are stout and smell of creosote, and they angle down into the clear water where barracuda hang in the shadows and big gray snapper swim their nervous figure eights. I had bought the stilthouse only a few months before. I wanted solitude, and I had the money—more money than I could use in a lifetime, after that deadly last mission off the Marquesas. I had plenty to forget, and I was tired of the strange April madness that had overtaken Key West.
I wanted to be alone, to rest, to forget. And there is no place on earth better for being alone than a stilthouse.
On the Friday before the squall, I ambled up to the marina at Garrison Bight and told Stevie Wise to cancel all my charters until the craziness was over. Stevie looked harried and weary, which isn’t hard to understand, really. He lives on an old lunker of a houseboat named Fred Astaire, which is as famous around Key West for its parties as Stevie is well known for his enthusiastic bachelorhood. But it was neither women nor parties which had exhausted him. It was the madness of what the newspapers were calling the Freedom Flotilla.
We stood in the little marina office staring out at the wild activity in the harbor. Cars with boats on trailers sat in a long line down Roosevelt Boulevard, waiting in the April heat to unload at the cement ramp. Fifty or sixty other boats were rafted in the harbor, while others tried to anchor with knotted lines, old engines smoking, their skippers screaming Spanish insults at each other.
“I can’t believe they’re letting this crap go on,” Stevie said. He had taken the phone off the hook to stop the endless barrage of calls he had been getting from the country’s news media, and he sat behind the counter on a wooden stool.
“Come on, Steve—you’d be going too if you had relatives trapped in Cuba.”
“No, it’s not that.” He brushed at his thick black hair with a free hand. With the other, he toyed with a pencil. “What I can’t believe is that they’re letting those poor people head across the Strait in those damn little boats. Look out there! What are they, mostly eighteen-to-twenty-three-footers? Shit, that’s suicide.”
“You’ve got to admire their bravery. They’re a determined people.”
“Yeah, determined to get themselves killed. I don’t see why they all just don’t hire shrimp boats—or licensed captains like you—to take them across. Makes a helluva lot more sense.”
“Stevie, you know what those shrimp-boat people are charging—and if you don’t, you ought to walk on down and have a beer at the Kangaroo’s Pouch. That’s where all the dealing’s going on. The shrimp boats are getting between fifty and a hundred thou in cash for a trip. And that’s in advance—with no guarantees. And the reason I’m not going is that no one I know has asked. The Cuban-Americans I do know are close friends, and I suppose they just don’t want to put me on the spot.”
“And what if they did ask?”
I thought for a moment. Would I go? Castro was making a fool of everyone who went to Mariel Harbor, no doubt about that. He was making a fool of Americans, his own people—everyone but himself. But the bottom line was that there were good people who looked upon this sealift as their only chance to rescue their relatives from Castro’s little commie paradise. Some paradise.
Stevie stared at me with his mocking brown eyes and began to grin. “If one of your friends asked, you’d be gone in a minute, MacMorgan. You know it’s true.”
I snorted. Maybe it was. And maybe that’s why I had decided to isolate myself on my stilthouse—to escape being asked. I didn’t want to haul Castro’s castoffs, so I was taking the coward’s way out. You don’t have to make any decisions when the world can’t find you. And I was tired of decisions. I wanted to sit in my little weather-scoured shack on the sea, drink cold beer, read good books, and catch fish—just to let them go and watch them swim free again. Key West could have its traffic and its Mariel Harbor madness. And it could have it without me.
I finished rescheduling my charters, shoved the long black calendar back under the counter, and turned to leave. As I did, Stevie stopped me.
“Hey, Dusky—I almost forgot.” He began shuffling through a stack of papers on a metal spindle. “You got a message here someplace. . . .”
“It’ll keep.”
“Naw, the guy said it was very important. Had nothing to do with a charter—hey, here it is.”
I took the narrow envelope he handed me and opened it. It was from Norm Fizer. Stormin’ Norman we had called him on one very secret mission a long, long time ago back in Cambodia. I had been a Navy SEAL back then, more fish than man, more killer than fish. It was a dirty, nasty, dangerous time, but I had come to respect and admire Fizer during our mission there. He’s a fed—and one of the rare good ones. I owed him a lot—and not just because of Cambodia. When the drug runners—the pirates who roam the Florida Strait and call Key West home—made the mistake of murdering my family and my best friend, Norm had seen to it that I had the chance to get even. He had hired me as a government freelance troubleshooter, working outside the law to expedite the work of the lawkeepers.
The note read:
Dusky,
Wanted to congratulate you again on the Marquesas affair. Well done. May have something else for you. Since you moved off Sniper, I don’t know where you are staying so it is important you call me at the Atlanta number as soon as possible.
NF
It was typed in plain block pica, just typed initials for a signature. So it was business. But I wasn’t ready for any more business. Not now, anyway. I had been having a bad time of it since that brutal night off the little chain of mangrove islands called the Marquesas. At night I couldn’t sleep, and during the day I couldn’t seem to wake up. I was drinking too much beer, and my hands shook slightly when I tied new leaders. That’s what killing does to you. It steals into the middle of your brain and begins to eat its way out again. I needed more time to shake it, to put it all behind me, to crush the nightmares in the peace of isolation.
I crumpled the note and jammed it into the pocket of my khaki fishing shorts.
“You never gave me this.”
“What? Huh?” Stevie had a swatter in his hand, and he was swinging at a luminous deerfly that buzzed its complaints about the invention of glass windows.
“Do me a favor, Steve, and play along.”
He gave me an unconcerned shrug. “Captain MacMorgan hasn’t been in today, sir. Sorry, I don’t know where he’s living.”
Outside, I nudged my thirty-four-foot sportfisherman out of her berth, feeling the sweet sync of her twin 453 GM diesels bubbling me over the clear green water of the harbor. I had an icy Hatuey beer in a Styrofoam hand-cooler, a pinch of Copenhagen snuff wry in my lower lip, and as I piloted from the flybridge, I tried to recapture the delight I usually felt in going out to sea alone.
But it didn’t work. I couldn’t get the muscles in my shoulders to relax, and it seemed as if I looked out onto the world, through glazed eyes. I dropped Sniper into dead idle as I came up behind four ratty fiberglass fishing boats loaded with gas cans, boxes of food, and determined Cuban-Americans, all heading out Garrison Bight Channel, bound for the wicked Florida Strait. The guy running the point boat couldn’t have been more than eighteen. He had a tired outboard, belching smoke as it struggled to push the little skiff onward. The kid was shirtless, there was a smile on his face. But in the depths of my despair, it seemed as though a raven-shaped shadow haloed his head, diving and soaring, and the shadow was death. . . .
2
The storm came funneling out of the west-northwest across open sea. I watched it from the porch of the stilthouse, morning coffee in hand, noting the way the strange light which accompanied it cha
nged from copper to bile green as it approached landfall.
And I knew that it was to be no ordinary squall.
I had spent the previous day, Saturday, trying to work some of the rough edges off the stilthouse—and myself. It’s really a fairly large place for a house built on pilings out on the water. I went to work on the bedroom first. It only has one. I got rid of the old cot, and laboriously carried the wide double bed I had just bought and transported out on Sniper. The stilthouse faces south and north—with long porches on either side—and I set the bed up by the eastward window of my new quarters. The bedroom has a big brown oval of rag rug on the plank floor; it smelled musky and doggy, and I decided to keep it right where it was because I like dogs. I swept and cleaned and tacked black shades up so I could dark-out the bedroom if need be, and I built rough bookcases and transferred my small—but good—ship’s library to the stilthouse. It felt good to be doing mindless work; work that required just enough thought to match the light sweat that the labor required. There wasn’t much I could—or wanted to—do with the little galley and living area. There is an ancient stove and a small refrigerator, both of which run on bottled gas, and there is a sink with a faucet hooked up to the big five-hundred-gallon rooftop rain cistern that serves the little shower on the narrow dock built under the stilthouse. The man I had bought the place from—he had helped his father build it back in the 1930s as a place to store ice and supplies for the fishing boats—had left the giant shell of a loggerhead turtle on the wall, two sets of big mako jaws, a gas-station calendar from 1956 showing a blonde with improbable breasts, and four kerosene lamps hung in strategic spots. I filled them, changed wicks, then set about stringing fifty feet of copper wire outside the stilthouse to serve as an antenna for my portable Transoceanic shortwave receiver.
By dusk I had worked enough and sweated enough and relaxed enough to be pleased with my new home. After the death of my wife and sons I had taken up residence aboard Sniper. But Sniper was built and outfitted to stalk the Gulf Stream for the big ones, not to serve as an apartment for a guy who is six-two and a shade and weighs 220 pounds.
So this new place would be just fine. With its high ceiling and location on the water it would be cool in the summer, and with the little oil stove, it would be fairly warm in winter.
As a final touch, I hung a Wellington Ward print of a wood ibis in flight, and one of Gustav Ameier’s fine horizonless seascapes on the wall at a level where I could look at them when I wanted, then went out and swam the half mile to Calda Channel’s marker 22. On the way back I took it slow, so Saturn had thrown its narrow white starpath across the open sea above the furtive blinking of channel markers to the west by the time I had my fish supper cooking and sat back in the overstuffed chair by kerosene lamp to read and listen to the radio.
The world news was filled with talk of the Mariel Harbor exodus.
I opened my sixth beer of the day, took up A. J. McClane’s excellent New Standard Fishing Encyclopedia for the thousandth time, sat back and listened.
The BBC focused on the inexperience of most of the Cuban-Americans making the trip, and on the dangerous condition of the boats they were taking.
Radio Germany detailed the ambiguity of Jimmy Carter’s pretending to welcome the refugees with “open heart, open arms” while his administration threatened the people making the trip with heavy fines and confiscation of their boats.
Radio Moscow, the announcer’s voice bland and without any trace of accent, claimed that the refugees were being mistreated, starved, and even tortured upon their arrival in the United States.
Feeling the relentless political maneuvering of international affairs restoke the grayness within me, I spun the dial and came up with the marine weather report. The reporter always sounds as if he is speaking from the depths of some cave, walls covered with charts and figures and military weather graphs. It sounds like a voice in which to have confidence—and usually it is. But people who don’t really know the sea can forget how lethal it can be to have complete faith:
Weather for Key West and vicinity through noon tomorrow: mostly clear with a sixty percent chance of precipitation, seas two to four feet inside the reef, four to six outside the reef. Line of heavy thunder showers moving east-southeast approximately one hundred miles off Cape Romano, but expected to weaken by morning. . . .
I flipped off the Transoceanic feeling the old grayness move upon me in a wave. Sooner or later, a storm would hit. And most of the poor bastards out there bound for Cuba didn’t know the difference between a cement block and a Danforth—let alone how to ride out a bad squall in a small boat.
Sooner or later, some of them would go down.
And on whose hands would their blood be?
Castro’s? Carter’s? Their own?
Or those of us who took the coward’s way out and watched with the same aloof interest we give the six-o’clock news, safe and secure in our isolation?
The squall came pounding across open sea, headed for Key West, dragging its tentacles of veiled rain and waterspouts like some kind of giant man-o’-war.
It was about nine a.m.; the day was overcast, just waiting for something to happen.
When I saw it coming, I dumped my morning coffee with a throwing motion, ran barefooted back into the stilthouse to see if anyone knew just how bad this one was going to be.
They did.
But too late.
The weather people were giving frantic updates, telling all boaters to head immediately for port.
Severe squall lines now approaching Key West and vicinity, winds expected at eighty knots or more, seas outside the reef twelve to fifteen feet . . .
It was going to be one roaring bastard, all right. I pulled some shorts on, ran back outside, and ripped off the clove hitches holding Sniper to the lee side of the dock. I shoved her off, hustled forward, and fired up both engines. I wanted her well away from the stilthouse when that brute hit. About four hundred yards away, I found about twelve feet of water on the flats. I broke out the extra anchor from the stern locker, nosed Sniper toward the storm and dropped the first, then drifted downwind at about thirty degrees and dropped the second, popping her astern as I did. I played out two hundred feet of line, still backing, then switched her off when I felt them bite. It was more than twice as much scope as she probably needed—but this was no ordinary squall.
Hand over hand, I pulled in the little Whaler skiff I had tethered astern, then pounded my way back to the stilthouse. It was already starting to sprinkle.
Only once in my life have I ever seen a squall like that, and that was in the South China Sea. But then I was on one of the big Triton boats and it was a simple matter of submerging to 120 feet and riding it out. Like that one, this squall came pounding down out of nowhere, hurricane-force winds kicking the crap out of everything in its way.
I battened down all the windows in the stilthouse, tied the door closed, got a beer, and then sat down in my reading chair to wait it out, smelling the rainy coolness and lightning in the wind.
There was nothing else I could do.
The surly old guy who had sold me the place had told me the way it would be in a bad storm. And he was right. The old stilthouse weaved and rocked in the wind, but she was solid as a ship, even when the waves began to break over the dock, slashing at the pilings.
There was no gentle pitter-patter of rain upon tin roof. The water roared down, thousands and thousands of gallons of it in a silver sky falls: the wind screamed and ripped, and lightning cracking at open sea actually sounded meek and hollow in comparison.
Just before the peak of it, I ran out to bail out the Whaler, and almost got carried away by the wind in the process. I came back in, soaking, pulled off my shorts, grabbed a towel, then sat back down and, almost reluctantly, switched on the Transoceanic.
I knew what I was going to hear.
And no one could look forward to that.
On VHF, the Coast Guard was being besieged by distress calls. The poor b
astard at the mike couldn’t log them fast enough—and almost all of them were in frantic Spanish or broken English.
Mayday, mayday, we’re sinking, Mother of God . . . If you have ever heard the voice of someone truly terrified, you never forget it. The voice seems to be laced with some potent edge which hits you like a drug and goes right to your spine. And the people on the radio begging for help were terrified. Hundreds of them. There was nothing orderly about their pleas for help. There was a chaos of voices, one distress call overlapping another, all broken by the static of lightning and the roar of the wind. It was all too easy to picture the way it would be out there in the bottomless sea of the Florida Strait. There would be that strange green squall light, and waves cresting eighteen feet high. Rain would be flooding down, slashing their desperate faces with the velocity of arrows, and they would be out there in their damn small boats—overloaded with food or fuel or refugees—as powerless as leaves in the centrifuge of storm and bleak sea.
Those that didn’t broach would probably go awash or pitchpole. Engines would flood, electrical systems would short, and the wicked wave surge would snap arms and legs like dry twigs.
I listened to the stuttered, desperate cries for help on the VHF and knew there wasn’t a damn thing I could do.
These were the victims. Innocent people who just wanted to go to Cuba and rescue their relatives. They hadn’t planned on getting caught in a death squall.
Cuban Death-Lift Page 2