A Salty Piece of Land Page 2

  “How did it work?” I asked her.

  “The prisms concentrated the burner’s light into a piercing beam that shot out to the horizon. The crystal lenses were held together by brass plates, and the whole thing weighed about four tons and floated in a circular tub containing about twelve hundred pounds of quicksilver. That allowed it to spin in a near frictionless environment. It was rotated by a clockwork assembly of ropes and weights that hung down the shaft of the lighthouse, and it had to be wound every two hours by the lighthouse keeper on duty. The sword of light it stabbed out into the darkness could be seen for twenty miles.” Cleopatra paused as if remembering specific images. “Seen from the deck of a ship, it radiates its presence like nothing else on earth. Sailors call it the soul of the light.”

  “I guess all that beauty and precision seemed way too complicated for the twentieth century,” I said.

  “You would have thought that such a thing of beauty would wind up in a museum, but not here. They severed the base with a blowtorch, shoved it out the window, and just let gravity finish the job. Thus, the soul of the light was ripped out, smashed on the rocks, and the brass frame that once held the intricate Fresnel-lens system in place was sold for scrap.” Cleopatra let out a big sigh. “That is what replaced it,” she said, pointing at the present light source. “In a modern world, there is just no time for hand-pumping kerosene or winding a clock. In the name of progress, they turned the Cayo Loco Light into a giant toaster.”

  As we wound our way down the steps and finally out of the dark interior of the lighthouse, Cleopatra also wound me around her finger. Her mission was to find a bull’s-eye lens before she died.

  “You can’t just order one up from the True Value hardware man,” she told me. “It’s a needle-in-a-haystack thing, but I’ll find one. In the meantime, we have to rebuild this place and make it look like it did in its heyday, and that is where you come in.”

  Back out in the fresh breeze at the base of the tower, Cleopatra reached into the pocket of her pants and pulled out a key. “Tully, I’ve been around long enough to know that the bullshit people heap on one another is more toxic than all the oil refineries in Texas, so I will come straight to the point. I know it all must sound wacko, coming from a bat-shit crazy old woman like me who you met on the beach in Mexico, but I think fate has somehow thrown us together. It seems that I bailed your ass out of trouble back there, so the way the karma thing works, I think you owe me one.”

  “I couldn’t agree more.”

  “Well, it occurred to me that maybe you could hang around here and fix the place up while I go find us a light,” she continued.

  “I have no problem with that,” I told her. A hideaway in the middle of nowhere was something I could use at the time.

  “This job ain’t gonna be no little fixer-upper, you know, but I just somehow know that you can do it.”

  “Well, I think I can.”

  With that, Cleopatra gave me a big, long hug, which was witnessed by St. Peter, hanging down from the branch of a sea grape. “I just want to show you one more thing before we go, and then we will go.”

  We walked past a battered radio antenna and then around the back of the light tower. Cleopatra started to laugh. “You know, when I was a lot younger, I had me a cowboy once. They weren’t much on huggin’, but they got the job done,” she said. “There,” she added and pointed at a corroded, half-moon-shaped object near the base of the tower. The sea grape branches had snaked their way through what looked like bolt-holes, and the piece of iron had become a part of the tree.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  “That is the old collar of the bull’s-eye that they threw out of the light tower.” Cleopatra gazed up at the tower and the indigo sky above. “At first, I wanted to cut it down and hang it on the door as a reminder of what I needed to accomplish, but then I decided it meant more where it was.”

  “I like that approach, boss,” I said. “I’ll clean up this mess. You go and find us a bull’s-eye lens. We are going to rekindle the soul of the light.”

  She didn’t say anything but stood there with tears in her big green eyes. St. Peter suddenly appeared on one of the branches of the sea grape as if he were bearing witness to a historic event. Then she handed me the key to the lighthouse door.

  That was the day I became the keeper of the Cayo Loco Light.

  2

  The Song of the Ocean

  Back when I lived in Heartache, Wyoming, before Thelma Barston took over the ranch, my home was a little Airstream trailer decorated with palm trees and pink flamingos and situated up on the side of a half-frozen mountain. The location of my trailer was a direct result of needing a spot free of trees and power lines, where I could receive a clear signal from the heavens.

  The signal came in through a radio that had belonged to my father. It was a Hallicrafter S-40B shortwave model that he had bought in San Francisco the day he was discharged from the Navy. He came back to Wyoming wearing a flower-covered Hawaiian shirt and a cowboy hat and returned to civilian life as a forest ranger. A year later, he married my mother, whom he had first seen at the rodeo. She was a champion barrel racer. It was my mother who ran the ranch while my father managed a local state park from a cabin in a thick grove of fir trees just off the main road.

  The Hallicrafter was my father’s most prized possession. Not only could that amazing radio broadcast the local country music station from Jackson Hole but it could also, with the flick of the large green dial on the left side and a small knob labeled “sensitivity,” produce Polynesian melodies from his beloved Hawaii.

  He taught me at a young age how to tune in the world, from the fire tower at the top of the mountain to the BBC from Hong Kong. I would watch the light in the tubes grow brighter as the signal meter rose and the music got louder.

  When I wasn’t doing my chores around the ranch, I was listening to the radio and reading stories in Popular Science about people who could pick up radio signals with the gold fillings in their teeth. I wanted to be one of those people—a radio head. Well, it never happened. My molars remained silent, but I still had my father’s radio. It was over that radio that I heard the report of the avalanche that buried him while he was trying to rescue survivors of a plane crash in the Bitterroot Mountains.

  In the numbing days that followed, all I had were questions that adults couldn’t or wouldn’t answer. What had happened? Where was he? What do I do now?

  With no help given to me, it made perfect sense to try and call my father on the radio. All I needed was a tower tall enough to send a signal to heaven. If I just had a tower tall enough, I kept thinking, I could reach him. That was the only time I ran away from home. I was eight years old, and though I was terribly sad about losing my father, I wasn’t angry; I was just trying to stay in touch.

  I took my father’s radio and hitchhiked, walked, and paddled my way to every tall structure in the state of Wyoming that I could use as an antenna to call my dad. I was finally captured by the military police at a secret Strategic Air Command radio tower near Sheridan, and when they finally realized that I wasn’t an alien or a Communist infiltrator, just a boy missing his dad, they sent me home.

  My mother had no choice but to tell me the real truth about my father—that he wasn’t coming back. I cried my eyes out for weeks, but then one day, as I lay in my room listening to the steel guitars on the airwaves from Honolulu, I realized that though my father was gone, my radio was my window to the world— and maybe still to him. Life is unpredictable, but there is a lot out there to do and see if you just tune in to the radio.

  The tubes of the old Hallicrafter hummed and glowed a good number of years before I finally pulled the plug and told myself it was time to transmit instead of receive.

  I was working as a wrangler and living in my little Airstream trailer when a blinding snowstorm rumbled down from Alberta one weekend. When the storm finally moved on the next morning, I was busy digging a path from my trailer to the corral, not p
aying much attention to the task at hand. That’s when I saw the conch shell fly out of the shovel blade and back into the snowbank.

  I dropped the shovel and immediately began to dig carefully with my fingers for what I knew to be a delicate and rare find.

  “I’ll be damned,” I said as I pulled the little conch shell out. I held it up to the sun, then held it to my ear, the way the old medicine man who had given it to me had showed me when I was a kid, and a smile replaced the scowl on my face.

  The shell was a special good-luck charm, but it had disappeared a month earlier, during a surprise attack by a pack of raccoons who had pillaged my trailer and had made off with a string of rainbow trout from my kitchen sink. When I examined the scene of the crime, I sadly discovered that somehow, along with the fish, my conch shell was missing from its usual resting place on the windowsill in the kitchen. I was pissed. It was a bad sign.

  Johnny Red Dust was the man who had given me the shell. He was an old war buddy of my dad’s. They had fought together against the Japanese up in Alaska in what became known as the “Forgotten War.” They had survived bullets and frostbite and were rewarded for their efforts by being assigned to a unit in Hawaii, where they finished out the war years together.

  After the war, my dad came home to Wyoming. Johnny went back to the reservation in eastern Montana, where he took up his old job as a medicine man. My dad and I would go and visit Johnny every fall when the tribes gathered for the annual Crow Fair at Little Bighorn. My daddy believed in the magic of the Indians and passed it on to me.

  “Tully, city folks go to the doctor for a checkup every year, but the Mars boys prefer to charge up our good-luck streak with Johnny Red Dust.”

  What I remember most was the last visit with my dad, when I had just turned eight. It was a few weeks before the accident.

  Usually our visit consisted of eating, fishing, and watching the dances, but that year, Johnny Red Dust sat at a smoldering campfire late one night after the drums had stopped beating, looked at my dad, and said, “It’s time.”

  The next thing I knew, I was smack-dab in the middle of a full-blown ceremony of some kind, with Johnny and Dad smoking a long pipe. Johnny was speaking in tongues, and then he rattled a bag around my head and dropped the contents in front of me on the ground.

  What rolled out was a wooden gecko, rattlesnake tails, bear claws, arrowheads, wolves’ teeth, moonstones, and a purple-and-white-striped conch shell. The conch shell had fallen between my boots. Johnny looked at me and smiled. Then he said, “Pick it up.”

  I followed his command.

  “What you are holding in your hand is called a Strombus listeri, better known as a Lister’s conch.”

  I looked at the beautiful little shell, with its purple-and-white bands wrapping around the body all the way up to the high, conical spire.

  “That shell comes from deep in the Indian Ocean, and how it got to Wyoming is still a mystery that even I can’t explain. What I do know is that if you hold it to your ear, something magical happens.”

  I didn’t need to be prodded further. I held the shell to my ear and listened in silence for more than a minute.

  “What do you hear?”

  “I think I hear music.”

  “I think you do too,” Johnny Red Dust said. “It’s the song of the ocean.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  Johnny Red Dust took the conch shell from my ear and put it in the pocket of my shirt. “When the time is right, you will understand,” he said.

  Dad and I headed back to the ranch, and I certainly didn’t have a clue then what he was talking about. Still, I held that shell to my ear every night and fell asleep listening for the song, as if it were a life jacket and I was lost at sea.

  I’d kept the conch shell all the way into adulthood and had only lost track of it that one time. The morning I’d found it in the snow, the sun seemed to shine with an intensity that I could feel in my bones and my heart. The shell was a sign.

  That evening, one of the other wranglers rode up to my trailer with a message from Johnny Red Dust’s daughter. If I wanted to see Johnny again, I’d better get moving.

  The last time I had seen him was nearly five years earlier, when I had been hunting in eastern Montana and stopped by the reservation to check in on him. I didn’t find him in his double-wide on the reservation this time, but at a veterans’ hospital in Butte, where his shriveled body was stretched out in a bed, hidden from the evening sun by dingy sheets and dark curtains. It didn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out that the demise of Johnny Red Dust was due to the pack of Marlboros that sat on the bed stand next to the oxygen hose that snaked to the clear mask covering his face.

  He sprang awake at the creaking of the opening door, jerked off the mask, and greeted me with that old familiar smile. “You found it” was all he said.

  I looked down at the shell in the palm of my hand.

  “Well, let’s visit,” he growled. “I ain’t got much time, and let some goddamn light into this cubicle.” He pulled out a cigarette, took a puff, and started a coughing spasm that would tear any normal man in two. The coughing finally subsided, and he sat up. He held the Marlboro between his tobacco-stained fingers. “Nails in your coffin,” he gasped, staring at the cigarette. “That’s all these sons of bitches are, Tully. Nails in your coffin. But hell, I’m ready to go anyway.”

  I placed the conch shell on the table beside his bed. “I lost it and thought I would never find it again. Then early this morning —”

  “I know,” he wheezed. “Well, I guess I better tell you the rest of the story.” And with that, Johnny Red Dust rekindled the magic my father had taught me to believe in. He stubbed out the cigarette and then took several deep breaths from the oxygen tank. He sat up in his bed and took my hand.

  “Tully, there are no words to the song of the ocean, but the message is and always has been simple: not to forget where we came from. The melody is locked in the water that composes much of what we are. Most humans tend to ignore the song, but not all. You are one of the lucky ones who hold the melody in your heart. But be warned: it is a wandering song carried by the winds and the currents. It can turn you into a piece of driftwood that washes up on shore after shore, but one day, when you find the place that is meant to be, you will take root. Send me a postcard when you get there.”

  Before I left, he told me to fetch his old duffel bag from the corner of the room. As I did, he started to laugh and wheeze at the same time. The coughing fit lasted about ten seconds, and then Johnny caught his breath.

  Out of the depths of the weather-beaten canvas he produced the worn leather pouch from which he had given me my conch shell as a kid. He reached his trembling hand into the bag and produced a small carved gecko lizard that hung from a leather strand.

  “Put it on,” he said. “He is your traveling companion.”

  I took the pendant from Johnny and tied it around my neck.

  “It may not seem like it now, but you are heading home. The conch shell reminds you of where you are going, and the gecko is your traveling companion so you will never be alone.”

  “Something tells me there is a journey in my future,” I said.

  “Most people’s jobs suck. You just need to find one that sucks less. Fuck what is going to happen to your ranch,” he said, “and get on with your life.”

  After I hugged him and left, I stood on the steps of the entrance to the hospital and looked up at the window of Johnny’s room. I waved to an empty pane, knowing I would never see him again in this life. I held the conch shell to my ear and knew that it was time.

  Johnny was right. Things were about to change. A week later, the fine Wyoming ranch where I’d worked for most of my life was bought by Californians and was being turned into a poodle-breeding operation. It hit me like a bomb. The new owner, Thelma Barston, brought a fresh meaning to the title “Wicked Witch of the West.” It was only a matter of time before we clashed. The battle of the Heartache pood
le ranch certainly would not make the history books, but it was definitely a life-altering day in my world. Before I even knew what was happening, I had smashed Thelma’s massage table through her window. An hour later, I put the conch shell on the dash of my pickup; crammed my saddle, two-piece art collection, clothes, and radio into the tack compartment of my horse trailer; loaded in Mr. Twain; rubbed the wooden gecko around my neck for good luck; and never looked back. I was taking my pony to the shore.

  3

  The Patron Saint of Lightning

  One of the many pearls of wisdom I have picked up from Captain Cleopatra Highbourne goes like this: “There’s a strange sense of pleasure being beat to hell by a storm when you’re on a ship that is not going to sink.”

  The only problem with that thought is, I had not met Cleopatra before I went out on the ocean for the first time in a boat. So back then, all I had were my good-luck charms—the gecko Johnny Red Dust had given me, my conch shell, and a painting that Captain Kirk Patterson had let me hang on the bulkhead of the pilothouse for good luck on our journey to paradise, after he heard the story of how I had found it.

  I know it sounds weird, but I am a cowboy with an art collection—all two pieces, which traveled with me from Wyoming across the country to Alabama. That is where I hooked up with Clark Gable, the cutting-horse trainer, who introduced me to Captain Kirk, the owner of a shrimp boat. Kirk had agreed to take my horse, Mr. Twain, and me across the Gulf of Mexico to Key West and the Yucatán Peninsula.

  One of the pieces of art I brought along is a very valuable engraving that I packed away in a long tube inside a waterproof bag under my bunk. It belonged to my almost great-grandmother, who had run away from home to Ecuador from Tennessee. Her story and how the picture found its way into my hands will be addressed later. The other piece of art is called The Patron Saint of Lightning.