A Salty Piece of Land Page 3

  My art appreciation began at a flea market outside Cheyenne, Wyoming, one spring morning. I had gone there to attend the annual cowboy version of Mardi Gras called Frontier Days. Like most tribal celebrations, the myths, cultures, and historical events that originally sparked them still present a slight attraction to the attendees, but it is more of an excuse to throw a wild party, during which time the local chambers of commerce and religious leaders tend to cast a blind eye toward the debauchery because of the business it brings to town. I admit I did go to Cheyenne in hopes of getting laid, but I also did it to hook up annually with friends.

  I had staked out my rally point for the week in the drive-in theater on the outskirts of town, which had been turned into a temporary RV haven. In the process of taking my horse for a morning walk around the property before heading off to the parade, I wound up in the middle of a giant flea market near the entrance to the drive-in.

  I am not a great shopper, and flea markets are not what I would consider exciting entertainment, but for some strange reason, that day I found myself stopping at a booth after a painting caught my eye.

  If the saintly woman in the painting was crying out to be rescued, then her prayers had been answered. She was resting on a puffy white cloud with beams of light extending from her bare feet down to a stormy horizon lined with jagged bolts of lightning. On the surface of the ocean, the light beam from her feet met a beam of light that came from a lighthouse. Where the two beams met, a tiny sailboat was following a safe path through the storm toward a patch of calmer water in a little harbor behind the lighthouse.

  The painting was in a big cardboard box that had HARTZ MOUNTAIN printed on the side, atop a pile of typical flea market junk: Tupperware containers, old Merle Haggard eight-track tapes, a battered Scrabble board, and about a dozen pairs of roller skates.

  As I made my way over to the cardboard box for a closer look, a bald-headed biker dude dressed in leather pants and a leather vest cut me off at the pass. Tattoos covered every epidermal cell from his wrists to his shoulders. He lifted the painting out of the pile and held it up to compare it with a tattoo of what looked to be the Blessed Virgin Mary that was spread across his right deltoid.

  “Hey, Spike. Check this shit out, babe!” he yelled to his soul mate, also adorned in cowhide, who stood at the end of the table holding an Army-issue .45 automatic that she was examining as if she were a Marine drill sergeant. “She looks just like Sally Field in that TV show I loved when I was an altar boy. I must be having a goddamn senior moment. What was the name of that show?”

  The woman with the gun glanced over at the painting. “The Flying Nun, and you are totally not even fucking close, Bart. You better start looking through this shit for a pair of bifocals.”

  She released the breech on the pistol and turned her gaze to the old woman running the rummage booth. The old woman sat in an electric wheelchair, sucking hard on a Camel.

  “How much for the gun?”

  “Make you a deal. The pistol and the painting for your boyfriend for fifty bucks.”

  “Just the gun,” Spike snarled.

  “Forty-five bucks,” the woman told her.

  “Sold.”

  Bart dropped the painting back into the Hartz box, Spike paid for the .45 and tucked it in her belt, and they climbed onto their motorcycles and roared out of sight.

  “So that painting is five bucks?” I said to the woman in the wheelchair.

  “No, it’s ten bucks,” she said.

  “But I just heard you offer it for five to that woman who bought the gun.”

  “That’s right, Cowboy. I offered it to her as a package, you know, like when you get french fries with a cheeseburger, and it don’t cost more than a nickel or a dime more than the burger itself. That gun and that painting were a combo platter.”

  “Well, ma’am, I can see an obvious connection between a cheeseburger and a plate of fries, but I’ll be damned if I can find a common thread between a .45 automatic and a religious piece of art.”

  “Oh, so we are a big businessman now, are we? I’ll tell you what, Mr. Home on the Range meets Harvard Business School,” the old lady said, “give me six bucks for the damn thing, and I will throw in a pair of roller skates.”

  “Tell you what. I will give you five bucks, and you keep the skates.”

  “Deal.” The old lady mashed a steering button on the wheelchair arm and pivoted in place. “I’m telling you, with a belt buckle like you got cinched around your waist and the business head you’re hiding under that hat, you could be fucking president of these United States one day, sonny. I’ll get you some bubble wrap for your painting,” she said and wove her way through the obstacle course of hanging racks, cardboard boxes, and bargain hunters like an F-14 pilot, leaving her own vapor trail of cigarette smoke.

  While I was waiting for her to return, I picked up my painting to get a closer look. As I was examining the picture, I felt a card glued to the back of the frame. I flipped it over and began to read.

  The faded yellow card described the lady in the painting to be St. Barbara, the patron saint of those besieged by lightning. The short, handwritten description of her sainthood said that she had earned her title when her mean stepfather was struck dead by lightning after he had lopped off her head for some minor offense.

  My painting of St. Barbara went home in a blanket of bubble wrap. Little did I know that she would lead me into a world where lighthouses not only still existed but still guided the lost souls loose on this earth.

  My travels with Mr. Twain had taken me all the way from Heartache to the Alabama beach town of Heat Wave. As Mr. Twain and I boarded the Caribbean Soul, Captain Kirk’s shrimp boat, I rubbed the wooden gecko I wore for luck.

  St. Barbara was looking over our collective shoulders as we ventured forth across the Gulf of Mexico. The surface was as flat as a pancake, and the sun melted away over the horizon to the west. I’d had an unexpected encounter with some unpleasant business from my past just before we left town, so I could not have been more relieved to be getting the hell out of Dodge. I was tasting the first bite of a new world that was to become a steady diet in time.

  With Alabama behind me and the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico off the starboard bow, I was doing my turn at the wheel, daydreaming about the stories I’d read of the explorer John Lloyd Stephens, the first American traveler to the Yucatán. He’d discovered the ancient Mayan cities that once composed a mighty empire—which were now my destination as well.

  As we traveled on, Captain Kirk stood at the open wheelhouse door, looking up at the boundless display of stars in the dark sky. I was too nervous to sleep. Captain Kirk said it was no big deal, just what happens when you leave land behind for the first time and start to feel your gills again. He told me I would get used to it.

  I tried to be as nonchalant as Kirk, but to no avail. In my mind I had dreamed, imagined, and willed myself onto the deep ocean for such a long time. I admit that the wheelhouse of a shrimp boat isn’t the rolling deck of a blue nose schooner like the one that had captivated me in my youth in the movie version of Captains Courageous. But the Caribbean Soul was exciting nonetheless.

  Captain Kirk seemed to come alive out in the middle of the ocean, obviously more comfortable on a rolling deck than on solid land. We amused ourselves recalling my odd way of coming aboard for this trip. I told him about my travels from the mountains to the ocean and my complicated feelings for a woman I’d met in Arkansas, Donna Kay Dunbar. I also mustered the courage to include the fact that though my journey had been a lifelong dream, it had been hastened by a crime I had committed back in Wyoming. I assured him I was no ax murderer, and he assured me that I would not be on his boat if I were. He told me he had actually gone to sea with an ax murderer once, and he knew how they behaved. Finally I asked him why he had let me on the boat with my horse in the first place.

  “I have a friend from Wyoming, and he’s a pretty square fellow. You reminded me a little of him.” That was all h
e said.

  When I was finished telling Kirk about Thelma Barston and how there was a warrant out for my arrest because of it, Kirk told me a little about his own path. He had grown up in a fishing family, having worked the family charter boat as a deckhand, then a mate for his father, combing the clear waters beyond the barrier islands off of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana for billfish and big sharks. When he went off to Vietnam in his late teens, he had wound up in the Mekong Delta as a boatswain’s mate on a “swift boat.” One day, his squadron was caught in an ambush, and Kirk had literally been blown out of the water. He had lived, but after that, he swore to himself that he would avoid rivers in the future and spend the rest of his life on the open ocean. And that is what he had done.

  As the boat moved steadily along on its southwesterly heading, the stars that had only been twinkles started to come alive as heavenly creatures and road signs of the universe. I couldn’t sleep even after my turn at the wheel, and I just stayed in the wheelhouse, reading a book about Mayans and waiting for sunrise. It was ushered in by a school of dolphins that crisscrossed our bow.

  When finally, after seeing my third sunrise at sea, the buildings of the Key West waterfront popped up on the horizon, I could think only of what it must have been like for Columbus that day on a similar island in the Bahamas. Though my two and a half days at sea would never come close to equaling the feat of the Admiral of the Oceans, I still felt that kindred spirit and a certain sense of accomplishment at having made it across a large body of salt water for the first time. Tully Mars and his trusty horse had crossed the Gulf of Mexico.

  Key West nearly got me, like one of those collapsing galaxies out in the universe sucking everything in. My day started with a cop chasing me off the beach where I had taken Mr. Twain to run in the morning. I must confess that after riding the Conch Train and hearing all the stories of the wild things that had happened on that island and seeing the splendid old houses built by the wealthy wreckers and sea captains, I did have a momentary thought about leaving Captain Kirk and the Caribbean Soul to seek my fortune in that pirate town. But I had signed on for Mexico. I had a feeling that Key West would be popping up on my horizons for a while.

  Two days later, we were anchored off of Fort Jefferson, the old Civil War relic in the Dry Tortugas, getting ready for the big jump across the Gulf of Mexico to the Yucatán Peninsula.

  Needless to say, with a horse roaming the foredeck of a shrimp boat in the middle of the ocean, we had some curious visits from the local fishermen. I was getting used to the routine when this guy rowed over in a dinghy from a big powerboat and came alongside. “You look like that Lyle Lovett song personified,” he said.

  I immediately recognized Willie Singer. He was one of my favorite music stars and had gotten me through some pretty rough winters in Wyoming with his songs.

  Unlike most entertainers, Willie Singer became more popular the older he got, but he didn’t care that much for fame. Though he was still making great music, it was his other exploits that kept him in the headlines and also made him a fortune.

  He had taken up surfing late—in his early forties—but now he was hooked on it and spent most of his time on a long board looking for waves. As a by-product of his search for waves, Willie Singer had wound up investing and participating in a treasure-hunting expedition. In the Philippines, they had found a Spanish galleon that had traveled the ancient Pearl Road from Manila to Peru. The ship had contained the largest cache of ancient black pearls and Chinese porcelain ever discovered—along with a vast quantity of gold bars, emeralds, and the usual swords, cannons, medallions, and jewel-encrusted crucifixes.

  The story had made world headlines, and I vividly remembered the photos of Willie in Life magazine, sitting on the deck of a salvage ship with his guitar, singing to the crew. He was standing on a stage that they had built out of the gold bars from the wreck, and he had been surrounded by men in bathing suits who were shouldering M16s.

  If I’d ever had a modern-day hero, Willie Singer fit the bill. And that is why I was completely shocked when I found him bobbing alone in a small boat, tossing a line in my direction. He was quite curious about Mr. Twain on deck, and he asked me what a horse was doing on a shrimp boat.

  At first I couldn’t speak, but eventually a few dumb words came out. Meanwhile, Willie told me that he was out there shooting an album cover and that he was dying for some fresh shrimp.

  I told him that we weren’t rigged for shrimping, but I did have a large strawberry grouper that I had speared earlier in the day. We worked out a deal, swapping the grouper for some autographs on the half dozen cassettes we had on board.

  The next thing I knew, we were all eating on the beach with him and the photo crew. Willie played the guitar and sang and told amazing stories of his treasure discovery. Then, to validate his tales, he pulled a pearl the size of a gum ball out of his shirt pocket and passed it around for us to see and hold.

  I could have stayed up until dawn listening to Willie, but Captain Kirk called it a night. We had a tide to catch and a five-hundred-mile trip ahead of us.

  I tried to sleep, but it was pretty useless. I lay awake thinking about Spanish ships that had plied the very waters in which we were anchored and had spilled vast amounts of treasure on the reefs of the Florida Keys. I started to think that “treasure hunter” sounded like a good job description. I finally fell asleep thinking of the thousand questions I wished I had asked Willie Singer.

  The next morning, as we hoisted the anchor and fired up the diesel, we slipped a Willie tape into the cassette deck for good luck and were on our way. We were heading across the Gulf of Mexico, but I was still daydreaming about the Pearl Road and put it down on my list of eventual destinations.

  I first saw Punta Margarita on a chart under Captain Kirk’s pointed cedar pencil as he was teaching me how to plot a course and turn minutes of latitude and longitude into miles. With his guiding eye, I worked the ruler parallel along the weathered course line that ran from our present position at Fort Jefferson to Cape San Antonio Light at the western end of Cuba. Beyond that, the line continued to the southern end of the Yucatán, then fifty miles south of Tulum, around the tiny Punta Allen Peninsula, ending at a small island shaped like a crocodile, with its tail pointed northeast toward the high-rises and hotels of Cancún and with its jaws on the south end opened wide to enclose a deep channel lined with mangroves and shallow flats. The island was named la piedra del cocodrilo, or Crocodile Rock. Punta Margarita was the nose of the crocodile.

  According to Captain Kirk, the Mayans had originally named the place, and the Spanish kept it, varying from their normal habit of reanointing and renaming every spot in the New World after Catholic saints and martyrs. On the surface, Crocodile Rock was a picture of beautiful jungle splendor. Palm tree groves, crystal clear waters, and sand beaches collectively conjured up visions of paradise to the first Europeans. But as the conquerors quickly found out, hidden in the beautiful facade of the island were a variety of poisonous reptiles, freshwater alligators, saltwater crocodiles, big cats, fire ants, and clouds of mosquitoes. Add to that the natural-disaster wing of nature that resided in these latitudes—hurricanes, earthquakes, and the occasional meteor collision—and this little slice of heaven could quickly turn into hell.

  The Mayans had used their magic and cunning to carve out a civilization in the midst of all this beauty and danger, but the Spanish had tried to burn and blast their way through it. They had only temporary success, and the pirates and shipwrecked sailors who eventually founded and named the village of Punta Margarita took a more practical approach—they forged a coexistence with the perils of the jungle.

  Through tribal wars, European conquests, independence uprisings, and the like, Crocodile Rock was pretty much forgotten territory, left to those who dared to live there. Nobody came looking for anybody on Crocodile Rock.

  Punta Margarita had always been a pirate outpost, dating back to the days of Blackbeard, who had hidden out in these
waters in the eighteenth century, when the Indians had taught him how to navigate a secret channel where he hid his ship for many years. If they had issued travel advisories back then, the story on Punta Margarita would have probably read something like this: STAY AWAY!!!!! CROCODILES, PIRATES, POISONOUS SNAKES, AND HOSTILE NATIVES!!!!!

  Blackbeard left these waters and met his fate in the James River on the coast of America, where he was killed and beheaded, but it was another pirate named Jean Lafitte who established the village of Punta Margarita. After being pronounced the hero of the Battle of New Orleans, he had tried to go straight but failed miserably at being a businessman. It wasn’t long before he had moved to Galveston and was back to the profitable and familiar job of pillaging and plundering ships in the Gulf of Mexico. When he ran out of Spaniards to harass, he started preying on U.S. ships, which roused the U.S. Navy to pursuit, but he fled south just in time to get to the Yucatán.

  Though his headquarters were on the Gulf Coast near Dzilam de Bravo, he had plenty of hideouts stretching all the way down to Ascension Bay. But Crocodile Rock was Lafitte’s favorite hideout. The small bay lay between two promontory points and was guarded by a treacherous series of offshore reefs that he had learned to navigate with the help of the local Mayan fishermen.

  The village of Punta Margarita had its beginnings as the by-product of a Mardi Gras celebration. Lafitte had been forced to seek shelter in the bay from a vicious winter storm and could not return north to his headquarters in time to celebrate the time-honored ritual of Fat Tuesday. Not to be deterred, Lafitte instructed his crew to erect shelters on the beach and to build a large stage and floats.

  Mardi Gras came to the village, and it never left. After the bacchanal on the beach, the weather broke, and Lafitte limped home on Ash Wednesday. But in the fog of the Mardi Gras hangover, he had left about a half dozen revelers on the beach by mistake. The storms that winter prevented a return to Punta Margarita, and the abandoned celebrants took an immediate liking to their harsh surroundings. They sent word to Lafitte that they were quite happy to stay where they were.