Not so the man standing on the schooner’s deck like he owned her. Cazar took one look at the wide stance, red clenching knuckles, and the potbelly overhanging the belt, and knew that this man would never guide the boat out to anything useful. Probably woudln’t know something useful if it jumped out of the water in front of him.
Stepping aboard behind the tourists, Cazar walked straight up to the man and extended his hand. “Cazar Villarreal, the Atalaya’s owner,” he introduced himself. Still holding the big hairy hand prisoner, he tightened his grip and picked a name like a shell out of the tidal-mud of the man’s thoughts. “Jimmy McAllister,” he said, “I’m not going to need your help today. Or tomorrow. Lookout Charters will give you two weeks’ pay and a reference that will help you find work elsewhere. Thank you for the care you’ve taken with my ship.”
“I never done anything amiss with ‘er,” Jimmy McAllister began to protest. But he looked at Cazar, and bits of the reflection washed past like ripples at low tide — Cazar standing as tall as Jimmy himself, not a small man, broad-shouldered and hard-handed, hard-faced, his gray ponytail blowing in the wind. McAllister, suddenly seeming young and at a loss, retrieved his hand from Cazar’s grip and waded away through the murky waters of his own predicament. He grabbed his lunchbox and a bobble-head hula girl from a shelf below the helm and left the boat without so much as a glance over his shoulder.
The Atalaya seemed to rise up in the water, lighter without McAllister on board. Cazar patted the locked wheel, getting racquainted. Victoria happened to come between his smile and the blue March sky, so he smiled at her also and said, “Miss, I suppose you’ll be able to run the tour without Jimmy’s stellar assistance?”
“Like I said, I do everything around here,” she replied. “All he did was steer the boat. If you want to captain your own ship, Mr. Villarreal, it’s your own business.”
That was how she introduced him to the ciegos: Captain Villarreal, the owner of Lookout Charters. Cazar touched his hand to his brow, tipping an imaginary hat, and otherwise ignored the ten paying customers on his boat. He took his time crossing the marina — remembering the feel of the ship and mentally tracing the ropes to their sources in the rigging. He even looked at the chart tacked up by the wheel: channels and passages through the reef did change over time, and routes that he’d memorized twenty or thirty years ago might have closed up. It would be the ultimate joke if he wrecked his own ship.
On the foredeck, Victoria was relaying a similar caution. “The marina is actually the deepest water we’ll cross today,” she told the tourists. “It’s dredged to a depth of about forty feet, for the cruise ships. The rest of the trip, we’ll only be in five to fifteen feet of water. The Atalaya’s design, with a keel that can be raised or lowered, lets her go where other boats can’t. Sixty years ago the harbor at Key West was full of boats like this, used in the sponge trade, and a century before that—” she quirked an eyebrow over her sunglasses “— they were used for wrecking.
“Gentleman’s piracy is another name for it. The town of Key West was built on the money. What happened was that trade ships moving up and down the coast of Florida would run aground on the barrier reef about seven miles offshore. Sometimes they were blown onto the reef by hurricanes, sometimes they misjudged the depth of the water. They didn’t have nautical charts and weather forecasts in those days.
“So whatever the reason, an amazing number of ships ran into trouble off the coast. People living in Key West built third stories onto their houses and installed telescopes, so they could keep a lookout for ships in distress. When they saw one, they’d hop in their schooners and sail out to rescue the crew and cargo, and salvage as much as they could of the wrecked ship. Then they’d sell it at public auction in Mallory Square, which you walked through on your way to the marina.”
“Why didn’t they put up a lighthouse, or mark the reef somehow?” asked the woman who had said the Atalaya looked like a pirate ship.
“They did,” Victoria said. “But somehow the lighthouse went dark on certain ights, and the markers ended up in some very deceptive locations, and the locals always kept one eye glued to their telescopes. Actually,” she added off-haad, “the name of the ship, Atalaya, means lookout or watchman.”
Victoria left her audience to ponder the connection and ducked into the galley to slice cheese and fruit. Beverages and snacks were included in the price of the tour.
Returning with the platters and plastic cups, Victoria said, “Help yourselves to wine and beer from the coolers. But first, I’m going to need a strong back to help raise the foresail… any volunteers?”
Only two of the male passengers jumped up; the others already had their heads in the coolers. Victoria bypassed the strongest back — a young man from Brazil, who was taking the tour with his shy mother, her face hidden under the brim of a wide sunhat. Instead, Victoria picked the balding chemistry teacher from New Jersey and showed him how to raise the foresail and tie it off in a figure-eight knot. Then the two of them turned forward to raise the jib, only to find that the Brazilian had gotten there first.
“Thank you,” Victoria told the young man, a pointed injunction against further help.
But he smiled, shy like his mother, and ducked his head and muttered, “De nada,” as if Victoria had meant it as praise.
The boy’s knot was better than Victoria’s. Cazar could tell as much from where he stood at the helm. He kept such observations to himself, shutting off the motor and turning into the wind, beginning what would be a long tack eastward toward the edge of the reef.
The sound of the others talking rustled past him like wind in the canvas. They were getting the drinks out. Victoria brought him a cup of water, then went back to talk to the chemistry teacher about rising seawater acidity. The teacher’s wife was trying to draw a conversation out of the Brazilian senora, unsuccessfully, from what Cazar could hear, though it wasn’t because she didn’t speak English.
Apparently, no one was in a hurry. They accepted the upwind pace of the Atalaya as if they were truly on vacation, nowhere else to go. Ironically, it was Cazar who had to stifle the urge to take in the sails and turn the motor back on, get everyone out to the reef and back as quickly as possible and return to Bonaire. The age of lost ships and sudden fortune was past. The shallow waters patting around the Atalaya’s hull held nothing of interest to a man of Cazar’s professional ability.
About Lake McCullough
