“Hello, Cowboy. How’s that horse of yours?”
Del Mundo offered me first aid in the form of a full glass of wine. I had made an unbelievable trip back from death’s door to dinner, and to my wild surprise, I was sitting right next to Willie Singer.
Willie vividly remembered our first meeting back in the Tortugas when we traded grouper for autographs. He told me he had actually written a song about the evening and had recorded it for his new CD, which he had made with a host of old-school calypso singers in Trinidad.
Willie, it turns out, was from Mississippi originally, and he was a distant cousin of Sammy Raye Coconuts. They had actually written songs together back when Sammy Raye was still actively involved in the music business. One of Sammy’s regular pilots had gotten sick, so Sammy had called Willie to see if he wanted to go fishing and help out in the cockpit. Willie, it turned out, was planning a trip to the Yucatán himself. So it had worked out perfectly for both of them. Willie would crew for Sammy Raye and use the plane to go up to Mérida, where he had some business to handle while Sammy Raye and Donna Kay fished.
I needed more wine. I had nearly died, and the woman I had jilted had shown up along with one of my all-time heroes, not to mention Sammy Raye. Storytelling seemed to be a family tradition with these cousins, and Sammy Raye and Willie traded hilarious, outrageous stories back and forth at lightning speed until all of us were laughing so hard our faces were wet with tears.
Of course Sammy Raye had been an investor in the Pearl Road treasure hunt. When Bucky asked what it was worth, Willie just shrugged his shoulders and said, “Enough to keep looking,” but Sammy Raye interrupted, saying it had been a $30 million take between them. It was too amazing, and we all wanted to hear more. Sammy egged Willie on to tell about his latest adventure, and he did.
Willie had bought a new plane. Actually, it was quite an old one and, like all old planes, came with quite a story. He was working in a recording studio in Sausalito when he had taken a day off and gone driving up to the wine country. The ever-present fog that enshrouds San Francisco Bay had retreated away from the coast. Meanwhile, Willie had gotten lost and had wound up way off on the Tiburon Peninsula. While trying to figure out where he was, like most men, he refused to ask directions. After about a half hour of winding around the roads and seeing the same old abandoned lighthouse again and again, Willie finally pulled up to try to find help. A huge, rusty fisherman’s anchor was planted at the head of the lighthouse driveway. The sign on the chain read EQUATOR AIRLINES—KEEP OUT.
Willie slipped under the barricade. The place had an abandoned and haunted look to it, but music was coming from the building behind the old lighthouse. It was Glenn Miller’s “String of Pearls,” and as Willie rounded the corner of the building, he was not ready for what greeted him. In a deserted boatyard, he came face-to-face with an airplane.
At a table next to the plane, an old man was busy working on what appeared to be a model plane. He was shirtless in the hot sun, and his skin looked like a tanned hide. He was covered with faded tattoos. He wore a pair of tiny wire spectacles and a faded military beret, and a cigarette drooped from the corner of his mouth.
Willie called out to him, but the old man didn’t look up. He was entirely focused on the tiny pieces of model plane.
As he moved closer, Willie saw that the model was made of bamboo and matchsticks, and it was a replica of the antique seaplane that sat in the field.
Finally the old man looked up. “You lost?” he asked Willie.
“You got that right.”
“Most people are,” the old man said. “Have a seat.”
It turned out that the old man, Burt Brown, was the owner of the plane and the property, which he had turned into a flight museum. He told Willie his story, how he had flown for Pan Am across the Pacific in the Clippers and had retired after the war to Sonoma and had become a winemaker.
“I was looking for glamour, but wine making is just farming. It wasn’t as much fun as flying,” he told Willie. So he had bought an old DeHavilland Beaver seaplane in Alaska, and he’d gone into business operating out of a boathouse just north of Sausalito.
About this time, the whole wine craze hit Sonoma, and he sold his vineyard for a small fortune. He had no idea what he wanted to do with this newfound money, but the first thing he did was fly to Hawaii. While there, he read in the paper that a local island-hopping seaplane service was ending its flying-boat operation and switching to land planes. The retiring seaplane was a civilian S-43, smaller than the four-engine S-42 flying boats the old man had flown across the Pacific. He said they called them Baby Clippers.
He then went on to say that Howard Hughes had originally bought the plane for a proposed flight around the world. He had modified it for the trip, installing larger engines and more fuel tanks and a luxury interior, but then the seaplane nearly crashed during a test at Lake Mead in Nevada, and Hughes opted for a land plane instead. The S-43 was then sold to the airline in Honolulu. Eventually the plane would be auctioned off.
Burt Brown bought her for “chump change,” then hired the crew to fly him home to Sausalito. His dream had been to complete the trip Howard Hughes had built her for. He bought the antiquated lighthouse station at a government auction on the condition that he would maintain the light. He hauled the plane up the old ramp and turned the boatyard into his base of operations for the trip. Twenty years later, Equator Airlines Flight One still sat on the ramp.
“Shit happens,” Burt said. “I kind of got sidetracked.”
The story immediately infected Willie, and he told Burt about his recent adventures and good fortune. A few beers later, Willie offered to buy the plane. Burt said he would sell it to him only if he would do the trip around the world. They shook hands.
That was a year ago, and now the trip was going to happen. Once Willie flew Sammy Raye home to Alabama, he was heading to San Francisco for the final test flight and to wait for a weather window for the return flight of Equator Airlines Flight One to Honolulu. He had named her The Flying Pearl. He was going to fly and surf his way around the world.
I was so caught up in Willie’s descriptions of his adventures that I never noticed Donna Kay get up and leave the table.
Dinner evolved into dessert and after-dinner drinks and more fishing tales. Sammy Raye was busy showing Ix-Nay and the other guides the new underwater video camera he had brought along, and Bucky was getting out the cigars and fly-tying gear. Del Mundo said good night and went to his cottage to paint. I excused myself from the fishing fest and stepped outside to take a leak. I was feeling the effects of the wine, standing alone pissing downwind and staring up at the moon that had risen above the big banyan tree, lost in thoughts of stars and galaxies and spaceships.
“I still want to see that tree house.”
I nearly jumped out of my skin.
“Did I startle you?” Donna Kay asked.
“I think it borders more on cardiac arrest,” I said with a sudden tinge of anger.
Donna Kay then noticed me zipping up my pants. “Oh, my God. I am so sorry,” she said.
“Apology accepted,” I told her. I turned around to see Donna Kay in shorts, a halter top, and hiking shoes. While I had been spellbound by Willie, she had obviously gone back to her cottage and changed. She had wanted to climb the tree house the minute she saw it. Back in the boat, I had told her that I would take her up after dinner when the no-see-ums finished feasting on human flesh and the breeze picked up.
“I thought we could finish up our dessert with a view. The chef wrapped up some cake and the last of the La Tâche,” Donna Kay said as she hoisted a backpack on her shoulders. “Besides, the dinner table was piling up with bullshit. Listen, before you run off to find your fortune with Willie or Sammy, I think there are a few things we need to discuss.” She adjusted the pack and looked up to the top of the banyan.
I began to climb in silence. My fantasy about a treasure-hunting ship had just been torpedoed by a sentence uttered b
y a woman with a purpose. Paybacks are hell.
There was an unpredictable wind howling through the branches of the big banyan tree, and I could see small whitecaps splashing against the dock, rocking the string of skiffs at their mooring. Loose leaves swirled about my head, and for some reason goose bumps started to run down my spine.
The Mayans liked to attach stories or characters to anything unpredictable. Ix-Nay said that the appearance of a land breeze that shouldered no visible weather carried spirits instead. The journey up the banyan tree that night confirmed his theory.
I told Donna Kay I wanted to check the climb and put some lights up for her, so, armed with a string of small lanterns, I took my sweet time in making the familiar but still potentially dangerous ascent. I wasn’t Sir Edmund Hillary climbing Mount Everest, but it was adventure enough for the tropics on a dark night with a head full of burgundy and spirits on the wind.
While she waited, Donna Kay wandered over to Mr. Twain’s corral and chatted with him as I headed up. When I made it to the first big horizontal branch, I had the feeling that I wasn’t alone in the tree.
I hung the first lantern and called down to Donna Kay to ask if she could see it.
“Just fine,” she answered.
At that moment, a sudden, violent gust of wind rushed through the branches of the tree, shaking the huge limb I was standing on. I grabbed for the first thing I could reach, which was a swaying vine, and hung on. That is when the familiar, gravelly voice of Johnny Red Dust rang out amid the rustling limbs and leaves: “I taught you to use your brain and connect it to your heart, but teachers can only teach so much.”
“What do you mean?” I asked as I relaxed my stranglehold on the vine.
“I didn’t say anything,” Donna Kay called out from below.
“Here’s what I mean,” Johnny replied. “One morning you are shoveling the snow away from the door of your trailer in Wyoming. You discover your lost conch shell, and it sends you off to see me for some answers to questions that are bothering you. I give you a gecko, and you get the picture and set out on a life-altering journey. On your way to the ocean, an invisible cloud of grilled-onion aroma ambushes your pickup truck outside of Blytheville, Arkansas, and you are steered by an unknown force into the parking lot of the Chat ’n’ Chew, where you follow the scent to its source—a hot grill being attended to by a beautiful waitress.”
“Tully, who are you talking to?” Donna Kay shouted from below.
“It’s just the wind,” I answered.
“How much farther to the top?”
In true island fashion, I answered, “Not much farther.”
Johnny continued. “Less than one week later, after a cheeseburger at the Camellia Grill and some slow dancing at Storyville in New Orleans, you are making love to the waitress in a four-poster bed in the French Quarter. Later that week, you stop for a chili dog in Alabama, where you meet a cowboy named Clark Gable, who introduces you to a shrimp-boat captain named Kirk Patterson in the village of Heat Wave on Snakebite Key. Captain Kirk needs a man to lend a hand on his next trip. You take the job. He agrees to bring Mr. Twain as well. It’s all going like you had planned, and then the shit hits the fan. You bail on the waitress, leaving her emotionally stranded. Then you run away and land in Punta Margarita, where everybody seems to have an unspoken past, which suits you well since you have conveniently avoided mentioning yours to Donna Kay, Kirk, or your new employer at Lost Boys.”
“That’s not fair. I told Kirk,” I retorted as the wind picked up again.
“Life is not fair. You should have told her first. Your brain is not connecting with your heart. You are cruising along, and then the waitress, Donna Kay, pops back into your life like a piece of toast. You try to jump her bones in a sacred pool, but she has come for answers. Get ready.”
“I’m confused,” I said.
“What did you say about my shoes?” Donna Kay called out.
“I said you won’t believe the views,” I called back. “This is not easy, having a multifaceted conversation with a spirit and a woman,” I whispered to the ghost.
“Mixed emotions can be as confusing as a Sunday buffet at Shoney’s,” Johnny added, “but unrest of spirit is a mark of life.”
I had reached the top of the branches where the ladder to the tree house began. I hung the last lantern and called down to Donna Kay. “See it?”
“Clear as a bell. I’m coming up,” I heard her say.
“Well, I can see that there is only room for two up here.”
“But I need more info,” I said.
“Just remember that contentment is a quality best suited for cows—not cowboys. You are searching for truth. Who knows? There may be a little to be found this very night in the top of this tree.”
The wind was suddenly gone, pulled from the branches of the tree as if it had been a gimmick in a magic show. The night was again still as I heard the rustling below me and saw Donna Kay coming my way. “How far to the next rest stop?” she asked.
“One floor up.”
10
Into Everyone’s Life a Coconut Man Should Fall
Donna Kay stood next to the telescope and stared out into the tropical darkness as she ate her chocolate cake with a plastic fork. There was no moon, so the dusty halo of the Milky Way filled the sky. The planets and stars above us shone with a piercing light upon our lookout spot above the jungle canopy. It was a long way from the Chat ’n’ Chew Café in Blytheville, Arkansas, where we had met. She was a country girl who could turn leftovers into gourmet meals and who loved to go to the city and dance. I was a cowboy who craved the seashore. It was New Orleans, with its strange sense of place and time, that worked its magic by throwing us together like the ingredients in a large pot of gumbo. In our case it had brought us together, pulled us apart, and dropped us in a big tree in the middle of Mexico, where I knew that something in my life was about to change.
“This is an amazing perch,” Donna Kay said and sighed.
I sat at the bar, eating my cake. I had seen this view many times before, and though I never tired of it, I wanted Donna Kay to have the room to take it all in.
“It makes me want to be a pirate,” I added.
“Still haven’t gotten over that pirate thing, huh?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
That sick, nervous feeling I’d had at dinner had vanished with the voice of Johnny Red Dust, but it hadn’t taken long to return once the climbing had stopped. I knew Donna Kay had something else on her mind but had not yet brought it up, which was odd for her. She was a very direct person, and small talk was not her style. There was obviously a lot that needed to be said, starting with why she had surprised me by popping out of the seaplane in my backyard, to my no-show at Belize City, to the very big question of what exactly our relationship was now. I felt very unsettled in the top of the tree that evening. I didn’t know if catching up was the topic of conversation, but I did know that I wasn’t the one who would start it.
You see, I am a very bad communicator. I don’t blame anybody for that, but I spent most of my life with cows and horses, and they are a lot less complicated than women. I was well aware that I’d had a full year to get in touch with Donna Kay, and I couldn’t even really explain to myself why I hadn’t tried to do it, since I knew all along that she mattered to me. I guess I’d just been scared. And, judging by my sweaty palms, I was really scared tonight. Default questions such as “So, what have you been doing?” or “What brings you down here?” or “What did all that mean back at the blue hole?” didn’t quite seem to have the right words. All I could come up with was “So, what’s the story with Sammy Raye?”
“He’s my partner,” Donna Kay told me.
“I thought he was your boss,” I said.
“He’s both.” Donna Kay put her plate on the bar and slipped past me to the hammock, where she eased herself in and curled up. With her left leg, she pushed at the wooden deck and began to rock slowly back and forth.
r /> From her freshly made nest in the hammock, Donna Kay told me the story of Sammy Raye Coconuts, the man who had deposited her here on the shore of Lost Boys lodge.
According to Donna Kay, Sammy Raye Coconuts had made a wrong turn that had been the right turn for her. It happened one afternoon after his annual Elvis Presley pilgrimage. He had left Graceland, made a wrong turn on the interstate, and the next thing he knew, he was crossing the Mississippi River. Lost in Arkansas, he had pulled into the parking lot of the Chat ’n’ Chew in a pink Cadillac El Dorado, looking for a cheeseburger and directions home to Alabama.
After her disappointing return from Belize City, Donna Kay had thrown herself into her work. She had moved quickly up the ladder of success at the Chat ’n’ Chew from waitress to cook, and her culinary talents were striking flavorful chords with the local population and diners from Memphis to Mobile. Under Donna Kay’s tenure, the Chat ’n’ Chew had been crowned the best “meat, tea, and three” restaurant in the state of Arkansas. Donna Kay was no ordinary short-order cook, and Sammy Raye Coconuts was not just another hungry customer.
His real name was Simon Cohen Jr., son of Si and Dolly Cohen. They had fled Europe before the war, eventually winding up in Pensacola, Florida, where Si’s brother had trained as a pilot in the U.S. Navy. Si was no flier. He was a farmer by trade and eventually found the potato fields, watermelon patches, and pecan orchards of Baldwin County more alluring. He and Dolly moved to Fairhope, Alabama, where Si opened a grocery store and Dolly taught piano lessons.
Si’s grocery store eventually became the local farmer’s market, which he supplied with fresh produce from the dirt cheap farmland he started buying in small parcels. Little farms became big farms, and farmland became golf courses and residential, affluent neighborhoods when the snowbird migration from northern cities discovered the quality of life on the temperate shores of Mobile Bay. Si Cohen made a fortune, and they lived well. He and his wife and Simon Jr. visited New York several times a year to see the shows on Broadway and summered on the Mediterranean coast of Italy.