Deep Water Blues

by Fred Waitzkin

  Now Bobby could see out the windshield. Just to the south he saw the big diesel tanks. But when he looked to his left, he felt confused.

  “Really, where are we?”

  “Wake up, Bobby. You’re home.”

  “No, really, we’re not.”

  They anchored the plane in two feet of water, right off the beach, not far from where Bobby had crawled ashore with his bow and arrow eight days earlier.

  “Where are my fucking guesthouses?”

  There weren’t any guesthouses overlooking the beach. Bobby rubbed his eyes again. No guesthouses but instead there were high mounds of sand and some ruts and deep tracks.

  “What the hell?”

  The four of them crossed the beach to the bluff and then walked south until they reached the concrete slab with the fuel tanks.

  From here they had a perfect view of the marina or rather a view of where the marina should have been.

  “Oh my,” said Hannah.

  It was gone. The marina was gone. There was no more clubhouse and dining room. No more hamburger bar. The laundry house had vanished. The fuel dock and the office, the surfboard shack had disappeared as well as most of the slips for the fishing boats. All the docks and slips were gone except for an eight- or ten-foot section of the old dock where Mike’s aged sailboat was tied up. There were no other boats in the placid harbor. There wasn’t a single standing structure.

  They walked the property taking in the mounds of sand, the emptiness. All of Bobby’s sculptures had disappeared, although here and there they saw shards of coral, a part of a barracuda tail, a turtle flipper, the shattered head of Neptune.

  Then, as they rounded the bend on the narrow sand path heading toward town, they could see one tiny building still remained. The shed where Bobby and Rasta did their sculpting in the afternoon was still standing, the soiled canvas door flapping in the breeze. It was the only remaining structure on the property.

  Bobby understood almost immediately. If Dennis couldn’t have the marina, no one would. He knew that Bobby would return to the island bringing help. Dennis came with his large bulldozer and two excavators and knocked it all down. Dennis and his crew tore down forty years of work in one day and then pushed it all into the sea.

  Bobby was remembering, smiling. Forty years ago he had come here from Miami as a spindly seven-year-old. He was a misfit in school, a cutup and troublemaker, always feeling badgered and hemmed in. He got into fights and couldn’t bear sitting in class. Bobby’s mom and dad had been standing about where the diesel tanks were now, discussing this remote place and their dream of building a little marina in the midst of the vast ocean.

  Young Bobby had looked down the expanse of virgin beach to the north and noticed a black stingray skimming just beneath the rippling waves. He started following the giant sea creature, jogging on the beach. He kept running along the sand, faster and faster to keep up with the creature. A little boy running with his arms flailing toward the emptiness and beauty of this place where the ocean reached the sky, nothing here at all and yet there was so much.

  Hannah seemed to get it without a word. Bobby appraised his wife and nodded a couple of times.

  ~

  In the evening, the four of them, and the female Lab, Cleo, walked back down the hill from Bobby’s house to the empty harbor and over to the tiny slab of dock where Mike’s sailboat was tied up, seemingly for all eternity just as Bobby had promised Mike. Biggy was now sitting on the dock where he’d often met Rasta for talks about life. He came here most afternoons to meet the boats, hoping to find a girl he could love. Dreams die very hard.

  Rasta’s little friend affirmed everything Bobby had surmised. Dennis had come to the marina with his heavy equipment and wrecked the place in one day.

  Then he reported another surprise.

  A few days later, some kids had been playing on the road, near Bobby’s little sculpture studio. They heard some town dogs barking and watched them running in and out of the canvas door to the shack that was buzzing with flies. One of the kids went over and pulled aside the soiled canvas and saw a fat man lying on his belly on top of broken pieces of coral and cutting and grinding tools. Dennis lay on the ground with his throat cut and his shorts pulled down to his knees. His legs had been partially eaten by the hungry dogs.

  The kids ran for their lives.

  The police sergeant called in detectives from Nassau who flew into Rum Cay to investigate. Two detectives questioned every soul on the island. Bobby was an obvious suspect but he was off the island. Rasta had left weeks earlier. The detectives could find no murder weapon, no witness, no clues at all. After two days the detectives were called back to Nassau where there were murders to investigate every day.

  Epilogue

  The crew of the Ebb Tide woke to a rare windless morning with the surface of Port Nelson Bay so glossy it functioned like the lens of a gigantic magnifying glass. Except for Jim, who was limping more than usual, we climbed to the bridge to take in the view. Every triggerfish, strawberry grouper, jack, or crawfish meandering below was not just clearly visible but greatly enlarged as though you could take the creature into your hands. In every direction the clear shallow bay was busy with schools of cruising fish, stingrays, a few small sharks on the prowl. I noticed a five-foot barracuda idling behind our transom, flexing its jaws while waiting for us to toss scraps of breakfast. Watching this close-up panorama of life beneath was a little dizzying and after a few minutes I needed to turn away and get my bearings.

  In the morning light, it was clear that coral heads between us and the ocean had considerable distances between them and many were deep enough to pass over—our fears coming in the previous night were for the most part ill founded. The bay itself was lovely, a perfect anchorage except for a little surge from the ocean.

  But the shore told a different story. The lush green island I knew so well was colored a muddy brown. Most of the palm trees were broken in half and what trees and bushes remained upright were shorn of vegetation, hardly more than branches and sticks. I didn’t see anyone standing on the beach or walking on the sand road that runs parallel to the beach.

  We passed the binoculars back and forth, focused on the town cemetery by the beach about two hundred feet north of the broken town dock. Many headstones were toppled over, and mixed in with them were bones of the dead, forearms, skulls, thigh bones, ribs. Some bones were corkscrewed into the ground as if there had been a mysterious religious rite. It occurred to me that this desecration was payback for what happened years earlier, when the local people would not allow the Haitians to be buried here. The residents had not buried the bones again whether out of fear or laziness. The sight of scattered bones didn’t inspire our appetite for scrambled eggs.

  But we did eat some breakfast. Then I heard the raspy sound of an old outboard.

  It was Biggy steering an old Boston Whaler our way. He came racing up to us way too fast, shouting greetings and waving exuberantly. Doron called to him to slow down, but Biggy, excited to see us, forgot to throttle down the outboard. His bow rammed the Ebb Tide so hard, Biggy flipped off the stern into the bay.

  He came to the surface thrashing, petrified of sharks, shouting, “Get me out, get me outa here.”

  Jimmy Rolle was doubled over, laughing at the sight, and frankly it was a joy to see him laugh after he’d been so sullen the long trip here from Bimini. Finally, Jim managed to quiet himself, reached over the side and with one powerful arm he pulled Biggy into the Ebb Tide like a small marlin.

  Biggy put us ashore near the town dock. While we walked the hot sand road to Bobby’s house, Biggy described the recent hurricane, every single house and building knocked down except for the church, palm trees, and electric poles snapped like pencils and many graves washed from the earth by flood waters. All but forty residents had abandoned Rum Cay to live on other islands.

  When we neared Bobby�
��s steep driveway, Biggy darkened like an eclipse. “Bobby care only about Bobby.” He gestured for us to walk up the hill by ourselves and he turned back to the beach.

  ~

  Bobby’s house and yard were obscured by a hundred goats pushing and shoving to gulp slop from a few troughs and pots set around the yard while getting nipped and barked at by Bobby’s new brood of four big Lab puppies, the progeny of Cleo. The goats sounded like a chorus of frantic babies pleading for help. There were animals everywhere—chickens sprinting out of bushes, hundreds of chickens, cats preparing to pounce, huge pigs laying on the dirt, big dogs barking and jumping all over us.

  When the herd shifted, we spotted Bobby Little squatting in a pool of muddy water. The lord of Rum Cay was sponging down a four-hundred-pound pig and smiling like he’d found true bliss; although, it occurred to me that the theater of this moment did not escape him. He climbed out of the mud pond and hosed himself down.

  In their roomy kitchen, Hannah was taking a wonderful-smelling banana bread from the oven. There were dogs and goats inside the house as well, but clearly they kept many more outside for our benefit. John began making drawings of their lives in the stone house crowded with needy animals.

  “When she came to Rum Cay, we were living on the edge of war,” Bobby said, taking a piece of hot bread, “You could almost hear the tanks rolling past. We were in the trenches trying to survive. Finally the walls came down, and we had to retreat to a new zone. But there wasn’t a moment to catch our breath.”

  Soon after the destruction of the marina, a powerful tropical cyclone, Hurricane Joaquin, battered Rum Cay for twenty-four hours. Bobby had constructed a staunch hurricane shelter for their chickens. They bedded down the goats and their dog in the kitchen and living room of the house to survive the storm. But when the hurricane’s full force winds of more than 150 miles per hour hit the island, the stone house started to shake and the roof of the kitchen blew off. Bobby and Hannah were afraid the entire house would soon fly into the sea.

  When the eye of the storm passed directly over the island and the wind quieted, they gathered their dog and eighteen goats and led them on a Noah’s ark half-mile trek along the rough-hewn rim of the cliff. There was no vegetation left on the path to distract the goats, not a green leaf anywhere to eat, so the long trail of animals followed while Bobby and Hannah shook cans of feed to keep their attention. About a half mile from the house, there was a narrow path leading down the rock wall into a deep cave. Bobby knew that if the backside of the storm ramped up before they reached the entrance to the cave they would all be blown into the harbor. But they made it inside safely. The cave had a narrow entrance, but inside it widened at the back end and there were several stone slabs flat enough to sleep on. Hannah and Bobby bedded down with their animals for the next twelve hours while the backside of the hurricane tore over the island destroying virtually everything that was still standing.

  “After the storms passed, I needed to put this place back together,” he said, “to build safe enclosures for the animals so they wouldn’t wander off. There was so much to learn. I was the guy who’d created the ‘Bobby Show,’ ” he reflected. “Neither of us were farmers. Hannah studied blogs at night, learned how to make mulch piles and bins. How to care for our goats and chickens. What to feed them.”

  “The goats are our babies,” Hannah added. “They are Eddie, Alfred, and Bam Bam. I clean their poops and wipe milk off their faces. Soon as they’re born, they move into the house with us and the dogs. There’s always new babies arriving. In a year and a half since the hurricane, our herd has grown to more than a hundred.”

  “Rain is coming tonight,” she said a few minutes later. Hannah was being polite, lingering with the guests for a few minutes while waiting for the first civil opportunity to rush off to her animals.

  Bobby was ready to talk all afternoon about Rasta and Dennis and the loss of the marina, pointing to ironies and tragedies in the saga with literary panache. “As it turns out, I don’t need the glamour, the women, and fancy cars. This foul smelling house of animals is the dream beneath the dream.”

  But Hannah felt pressured to fix the roof of the Flamingo Inn, a shack she’d built and painted blue with a large pink flamingo on the door, so the goats would have a dry place to spend the rainy night. Then she’d go to the beach and haul heavy sacks of seaweed up the driveway to make fresh bedding for the goats and pigs.

  Living up here on the hill, mostly unobserved except by the animals, they’d both been liberated to jettison old baggage. Hannah discovered heartiness in herself she never would have imagined. Apparently, she’d left behind old demons as well as ambitions she flirted with in college but never fully embraced. Her many farm babies were more compelling than a journal of ideas and regrets although she often posted entries on Facebook about the births of goats and puppies. The farm became her art.

  Bobby had mellowed, become more reflective. This was my impression.

  He did farm chores in the morning and afternoons he made coral sculpture on the outdoor table set out on the bluff with a view of the ocean. For the first time in his life, he didn’t feel pressured to rush to the dock to catch lines from fishing boats entering the marina, or to the kitchen to make dinner.

  ~

  Three days before Dennis made his untimely exit from this narrative, and on the very morning he ordered his men to bulldoze Bobby’s marina into the ocean, Dennis first invited local residents to come onto the property and empty Bobby’s buildings and guest houses, bust out windows and doors, take everything that wasn’t cemented in place. Unusual generosity or a deeper form of malice? It’s difficult to say.

  “Today, when I walk around the village I see the fans and artwork they took from my guest cottages,” Bobby told us while we walked down the hill to the remains of his marina. “After the hurricane, when they rebuilt their houses, they used my stuff they’d squirreled away, my tables, my chairs, silverware, plates, paintings, even some of my sculptures. Everything you can imagine is spread throughout this island. My dive and fishing gear, generators, water makers, everything we worked our whole lives for. It’s still here but it’s tucked away in their houses… . When the town guys are hungry, they sneak up the hill in the night, take a chicken or a goat from our farm. Last week they took two of our pigs.”

  He shrugged. That’s the way life is here.

  ~

  The marina had returned to nothing. Just piles of shifting sand, the wind through the rigging of a forgotten sailboat.

  We walked around taking in the silence. No more buildings or pretty houses, no signs of the party. Sand dunes and a few memories unimpeded by the hustle of the docks, the promise of lusty pleasures.

  We walked to the ocean, feeling the soft sea air, a perfect afternoon for trolling the corner.

  Then I noticed that the entrance to the harbor had disappeared. The blast of three hurricanes had filled the channel with dunes of sand, just the way Bobby’s parents discovered the place forty years ago.

  The marina was now a small man-made lake with the masts of a few sunken sailboats breaking the surface. Only one tiny section of wobbly dock remained. Tied up with crusty lines was an ancient sailboat.

  I walked down to the boat and called out, “Mike, Mike.” I banged on the old hull. I really had no idea.

  After a minute, an old salt looked out his hatch squinting as though he hadn’t seen the sun in months. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Still here. All these years. Mike had survived three massive hurricanes in his boat. He’d witnessed the whole rise and fall of Bobby’s kingdom firsthand. I thought about disturbing and memorable sections of his book he’d read to me years earlier. I wondered if he’d written the last of it from the purgatory of this ghost marina. I hoped I could coax him to show me some recent pages.

  We chatted a little about pedestrian things. News in the States. His difficulty getting food. I told him that I had so
me fresh mahi-mahi on board and I would bring it to him. This pleased him greatly.

  Then when I asked about the novel, he told me that two years earlier the hard drive on his computer began to falter and he transferred his files to a thumb drive. Then one day it broke. He could no longer access his pages. They were gone, twelve years of work.

  I couldn’t believe this news. I felt so bad for him. But Mike had a different take. He was trying to fix the thumb drive and believed that one day it would work again and he’d have his book back. I tried to persuade him to allow me to bring the drive to the States and see if I could have the material salvaged by a professional, but he graciously declined. He was going to work on it himself like repairing an old fishing reel. Maybe he’d retrieve it and maybe he wouldn’t. Either way, Mike saw no tragedy here. He was a hermit living in a graveyard of dreams. A novel didn’t seem so important.

  Before we headed back to the Ebb Tide, Jimmy Rolle remarked to Bobby that he could clear his channel in two days of work. “Really, nuthin to it with an excavator.”

  Bobby nodded and turned away. He knew this, of course. Bobby understood that opening up the channel was an easy job. And after that, the boats would come back to Rum Cay and friends of his would offer to put up the money to fix the docks.

  But then, the “Bobby Show” would begin all over again.

  ~

  The following morning, while the other guys slept late, Jim and I were sitting in the salon of the Ebb Tide, sipping tea and considering the options. I was wondering if I would ever return to this island that had intoxicated my dreams since I was a young man. Probably not.

  I had the feeling the Bobby story had deeply affected my friend Jim. Long ago, he had also been the king of an island. Now he spent days sitting on a milk crate, looking at the dusty road outside an empty grocery store. That’s a lot to hold in your head.