In the process, Cleopatra kept me in a state of both sheer awe and hysterical laughter as she made me tape-record stories about her family every evening over several rum drinks. It was such an amazing and simple thing to do, and I wished I had thought of doing the same with Johnny Red Dust. So many people live such dull, predictable lives these days that the real adventurers are becoming a thing of the past—but their stories are like channel markers for the stormy waters of the future.
Besides my oral-history project, I was given a thorough discourse on the architecture of the house and the botanical makeup of the garden. I felt as if I were in school again and fully expected a pop quiz at any moment, but it never came. Meanwhile, Cleopatra packed her keepsakes into wooden trunks that were loaded onto the Lucretia.
While winter raged from the frozen iron mountains of the Upper Peninsula in Michigan down to the orange groves of Central Florida, Key West stayed unseasonably warm, and I took advantage of the weather. When I wasn’t working for Cleopatra, I actually got in some fishing.
Sammy Raye had put me in touch with Garnett Woolsey, the builder who had made the copy of my boat. He also ran a guide service in Key West and Belize and played in a local calypso band. Garnett was in the process of designing his own brand of flats skiffs, and I figured Sammy Raye had something to do with it, as he was in Key West a lot during this time. I spent many an enjoyable afternoon on the flats west of Key West and also in the shop watching the new boat come to life. I even bought a used bicycle. I explored the island from my red bike, weaving through traffic on the main streets as I went looking for the out-of-the-way parts of the island. Granted Key West was a small island, but it was the size of a country compared to Cayo Loco.
We stayed on into February, and the day before our scheduled departure for Cayo Loco, I heard a knock on the door of my cottage.
“I want to show you something before it gets too hot,” Cleopatra said as she clipped three climbing roses from the garden.
We strolled down Spoonbill Lane onto Angela Street and were driven to the sidewalk by a swarm of mopeds that sped down Passover Lane. When we got to the cemetery gate, Cleopatra motioned to the right. The street inside the cemetery was named Magnolia Avenue, but it was lined with palm trees. We passed among the elevated crypts and mausoleums covered with bouquets of real and plastic flowers.
“I figured I owed them all a visit.”
“Who?” I asked.
“The good angels and the bad angels. I guess we’ll start with the worst.”
I stared at the huge black obelisk that looked so out of place compared to the surrounding plots. “What’s that?” I asked.
“It’s not what, it’s who,” she commented. “Those are the Diamond boys.”
“They seem to think a lot of themselves,” I said, staring up at the grotesque monument.
“The Highbournes had money, but we didn’t flaunt. My father taught us that. But it all changed when the Diamonds invaded our family,” Cleopatra said.
“So these are the ancestors of Donald H. Diamond the Third?”
“Yup. Donald and Ronald, my no-good, nouveau-riche stepbrothers, their trophy wives, and several of their ne’er-do-well offspring, legitimate and not. My stepmother wasn’t so bad, but I seldom saw her since I was at sea most of the time. Still, she came with some major baggage in the form of Ronald and Donald. Just look at that piece of shit,” Cleopatra blurted out as she stared with contempt at the tall obelisk. “They wanted everybody to know who they were—alive or dead.” On the left side of the giant black obelisk, three large granite tombstones backed up to the fence. They were overshadowed by a pair of marble angels with ten-foot wingspans. “Just goes to show you, money never does buy good taste,” Cleopatra said. “Now for the good angels.”
We walked past the monument to a rusty gate next to the Diamond plot. A bronze anchor with the word HIGHBOURNE hung above the gate. She opened it and went in. I followed.
She walked to the shadow beneath a tree and placed the first rose on the gravestone of Lucretia Meador Highbourne, her mother. The second, she placed on the crypt of her stepfather, Patrick Highbourne. We left the plot and sat on a bench in the shade. “Donald was such an ass kisser,” she said. “And that goes for Ronald, as well. I love the fact that I outlived both the greedy bastards. Teddy and I had figured them out, but it was already too late.”
“Who’s Teddy?” I asked.
“The youngest and most decent Diamond in the bunch. Shortly after my father’s death, while Teddy and I were both out at sea, the Trojan horse popped open. Ronald and Donald and some venomous lawyers concocted a way to take over the company. That is when they left Key West and moved to Miami. This is way too boring to discuss further,” she said and sighed.
“Not at all,” I protested.
Cleopatra fell silent for a moment as she stood in front of a simple headstone with the words THEODORE DIAMOND on the face. “Notice it is in the Highbourne, not the Diamond, plot.”
“Now you get to meet my dad.” Her voice was filled with excitement, like a teenage daughter on her first date. We exited the family plot, crossed a sand road, and walked over to an American flag. Under it, surrounded by a painted iron fence, were buried victims of the USS Maine. We walked among the small headstones that lined the perimeter of the plot to an area where the officers were buried.
“Nothing like a little closure.”
“How so?” I asked.
“I came to say good-bye and hello—like in that Beatles song.”
“That was my favorite song on Magical Mystery Tour,” I told her, thinking how odd it was to be discussing sixties music with a 101-year-old woman in a cemetery.
Suddenly Cleopatra began to cry. “I always have the same feeling when I come here.” She wiped tears from her face with her hand. “I knew my stepfather and loved him dearly, but I never knew my father.” She was sobbing now. “I hope I turned out the way he wanted me to be.”
I put my arm around her shoulder. It was the first time since I had known her that she looked and felt frail. I held on to her as she continued.
“I wonder what might have happened if I had just stayed here with my poor mother and had been the kind of daughter she wanted me to be.”
“Well,” I said slowly, “all I can say is it certainly wouldn’t have been as much fun for me.”
“And why is that?”
“Because I wouldn’t have met you, and my life would have been far less interesting.”
Cleopatra wiped her eyes and her composure returned with a laugh, which made me feel better. “You know, you’re right. Who else would have gotten your ass out of the clutches of those pole dancers in Belize?”
“Do we have to bring that up here?” I asked.
“Just messing with you, kid,” she said with a smile.
Intensity returned to her eyes as she stared at a dangling ficus vine overhead. Then, with catlike speed, she swept her hand across the branch. “Look,” she said, opening her hand to reveal a small brown tree lizard. It was in the process of turning from the green of the vine to a more undetectable shade. Cleopatra lifted the little lizard by the nape of its neck and placed it up next to her face, where it clamped its jaws around her left earlobe and dangled in the breeze. “It doesn’t hurt,” she said with a childish laugh. “We had a maid once who came from Martinique and showed me this little trick. She called it the dancing earring. Try it.”
Before I knew it, Cleopatra had gently pulled the lizard from her ear, and it had latched on to mine. A shiver went up my spine as I felt the little jaws hanging on for dear life.
“It’s kind of a Highbourne tradition to go around with lizards dangling from our ears. It is one of the many things that separated us from the Diamonds. They worshipped money. We were taught to love the natural world.” The little lizard hung in the air for a few more seconds and then dropped off. Cleopatra caught it and placed it back on the vine.
We walked past a few more military headstones, and then Cleopatra dro
pped to her knees and placed the last rose next to a headstone that read CAPTAIN ANDERSON MEADOR—SAILOR, FATHER, AND PATRIOT. She then stood at attention and saluted the grave.
Cleopatra again reached for my steadying hand, and we walked back down Magnolia Avenue. “Well, I have gathered my belongings, and I have paid my respects to my parents. That leaves just one final thing I have to take care of before we sail, and that will be best done over a couple of rum-and-coconut waters.”
“Okay.”
“I am going back to the house, but I need for you to pick up some ice at the Waterfront Market, if you would.”
I watched her walk slowly toward the gate of the cemetery. She seemed to lean a little more than usual on her cane.
“Are you okay? I can go get the car,” I said.
“Don’t be silly.”
I came back to Highbourne Hill with the melting ice, but Cleopatra wasn’t there. Lupe and Carmen were also gone. The phone rang as I was walking through the house to the kitchen. The voice on the phone sounded very official, and the man identified himself as Dr. Malta. He told me that Cleopatra had suffered a heart attack and was in intensive care at the Florida Keys Memorial Hospital.
Hospital waiting is a strange state of existence. You’re filled with your own concerns for your loved ones, but you are also suddenly part of a community of people who are dealing with the comings and goings from this world that our mortality presents. I hadn’t been in a hospital since I saw Johnny Red Dust for the last time. But what happens in a waiting room is that time slows way down, even more so than on Cayo Loco or at sea. All you can do is wait. You read a story in the paper or in a magazine.
Usually when you read, you think for a minute, and then you go about your business. But when you’re sitting in a waiting room, about to get a life-or-death announcement, you reflect. I was doing just that as I waited for news about Cleopatra. I had spent the past hour mulling over an article about idiots in Northern Florida who had gone out and shot hundreds of pelicans and herons in a wildlife refuge. Then they had drunkenly bragged about it to the people in line at Dunkin’ Donuts, where they were arrested. In my mind, I had devised more than a dozen methods of punishment—from burying them in the sand so other birds could peck their eyeballs out to public flogging at halftime during the Florida-Florida State game.
I was deep in thought when a young man in a white coat approached me and said, “Mr. Mars, I am Dr. Malta. She wants to see you.”
I walked in the room not knowing what to expect, and I was shocked to see Cleopatra fully dressed in her khakis, sitting on the bed and staring out the window at the ocean.
“I am not going to die in a goddamn hospital,” she barked.
Three hours later, we were riding the Gulf Stream east. A cold front had finally draped across the Straits of Florida, and the temperature dropped twenty degrees in twenty minutes. The wind blew a steady twenty knots on the beam, and the Lucretia seemed to know that time was of the essence as she slapped aside the rolling waves along the Cuban coastline. Cleopatra called it the Mardi Gras wind.
She had been rolled out of the hospital in a mandatory wheelchair, but at the curb, she sprang up and walked to the waiting station wagon. Lupe had driven us to the dock. I had called Solomon with the news that we were heading to Cayo Loco at full speed, and when we reached the dock, the boat had been ready to sail.
The wind never stopped blowing, and we ran every stitch of sail up the masts, daring the cold front to tear at the rigging. Amazingly, nothing broke. We never saw the log drop below seventeen knots, and we covered the five hundred miles from Key West to Cayo Loco in just under twenty-nine hours, half the time it had taken us to come up.
Cleopatra had settled into her cabin with the help of Dr. Malta, the young doctor whom she had somehow enlisted into her scheme to get to Cayo Loco. Dr. Malta was from Pakistan and was an avid sailor with four days off. I knew from my own experience the lure of the ship and the adventure she represented. Dr. Malta had come with a boxful of supplies and had Cleopatra stable and resting comfortably.
I had heard Cleopatra’s orders to him as she came on board. She simply told him to keep her alive until we reached Cayo Loco.
40
The Seconds Between Light and Dark
The power of weather still never ceases to amaze me. A storm that is born in the frozen, sun-starved Arctic ten thousand miles to the north can cover that distance at twice the speed of the Lucretia and still chill you to the bone in the seventy-degree waters of the Gulf Stream.
Just south of the Cay Sal Banks, waters well-known to be shallow and dangerous, Solomon and I were taking sextant readings of the evening stars to verify our position. I have always thought of star sights as moving the heavens—which is exactly what you do with the help of a mirror and some tricky math. You move the reflection of a star on your mirror down the arch of the sextant and sit it on a visible horizon, which gives you an angle you can measure.
Solomon and I were busy working the sight, which indeed confirmed our remarkable speed and our estimated time of arrival. We were due in Cayo Loco the next morning just before sunrise.
I went down into the cabin to report the news to Cleopatra, but she was asleep and had suddenly begun to look her age. Dr. Malta followed me out of the cabin.
“What’s the story?” I asked.
“We are racing death,” he said in a somber but compassionate tone.
“Then let’s see if we can win.”
Back on deck, I reported my conversation to Solomon. He didn’t say anything but merely stared up at the rigging. The look on his face told me he meant to get Cleopatra home. It was confirmed when he called all hands on deck and ordered the fisherman hoisted. “If she blows, she blows,” he said.
When my watch was over, I did not go below but curled up on the pilot berth in the doghouse, closed my eyes, and said a prayer for Cleopatra.
I wasn’t sure how long I had been asleep on the doghouse bunk when I was awakened by the sound of somebody singing. As I clawed my way back to consciousness, I saw through the portholes that it was still pitch-black outside. The wind was blowing, and we were moving at a fast clip. It was freezing. I bundled up in my wool crew sweater and foul-weather gear, then climbed into my harness. The ship was heeled over about twenty degrees to starboard, and I clipped onto the life rail and worked my way steadily and carefully back to the cockpit to join the party behind the wheel.
I wedged my body into the cockpit, using my legs to brace me against the wind, waves, and gravity. To tell the truth, I didn’t know whether I was shivering because I was freezing or because I was afraid of what might have happened to Cleopatra. As I climbed out of the confined space of the doghouse, I was shocked to see Cleopatra wrapped in a cocoon of blankets, sitting beside Solomon at the wheel. She had a large string of purple-and-gold beads around her neck, and she was singing to Dr. Malta in Spanish as he took her blood pressure.
“Happy Mardi Gras!” she exalted, trying to put on her best happy face. “I’m still here—not quite a neighbor of Grandma Ghost yet,” she added. “That was a song my mother used to sing to me when she was trying to raise me properly and distract me from boats. It didn’t work. Poor thing. I just had a dream about her.” Dr. Malta finished his work and tucked her arm back under the blanket. “Come sit with us, Tully,” she said as she patted the wooden seat at her side. “I have a present for you.” She pulled another strand of beads out from under the blanket and slid them over the hood of my foul-weather jacket.
“Happy birthday,” I said.
“Oh, that birthday thing.” She let out a sigh and then laughed. “Just one more trip around the sun for this old fart.”
I pulled out the small box I had wrapped back in Key West when I had expected we would be celebrating her one-hundred-second birthday on Cayo Loco. But as we huddled together in the cockpit of the Lucretia, this seemed somehow a much more appropriate place to give her my gift.
“Can you open it for me, Tully? A
nd Dr. Malta, I think I might have a medicinal nip while I am waiting.”
Dr. Malta pulled a pint of rum out of his black bag and poured a healthy portion into the coffee mug Cleopatra was clutching. “Care for a snort, swab?” Cleopatra asked me.
“Not right now, Captain,” I answered. I unwrapped the box and handed it to her. She lifted the lid.
“Tully, that’s your lucky shell,” she said.
“It’s yours now. Johnny Red Dust told me that it was to remind me of where I was going. It’s been bouncing all over the place with me for a long time. I think it needs to rest for a while, and the mantle of your cottage on Cayo Loco seems like a good spot to me. Besides, what do you get a woman who has everything?”
Cleopatra held the Lister’s conch up close to her eyes, examining it as if she were a child. “It’s a lovely thought, Tully, but I can’t accept it. My luck has just about run out, but I am sure you will find someone who will need it more than me.”
With that, she leaned forward, gave me a weak hug, and gently pressed the shell back into the palm of my hand.
Roberto came out of the doghouse. “We are making incredible time. I put us a little less than an hour from Cayo Loco.” He clipped into the lifeline, bent his body to the wind, and moved forward along the windward rail toward the mast, pointing a spotlight up into the rigging.
“Well,” Cleopatra said, “I appreciate all of your gifts and what you all have done for me, but I think I better say what I have to say right now.”
“Don’t be silly,” I said with a laugh. “We’re just under an hour away.”
“And what do you think I am going to do when I get there? Jump from the rigging and swim ashore as the first leg of a goddamn triathlon? Oh, Jesus, I am sorry about that. This close to my day of judgment, I probably should watch my language. Anyway, son, I am dying. It’s not that I am giving up on you, I am just giving out. So no more interruptions until I am finished saying what I have to.
“Solomon, when I am gone, the Lucretia is yours, and I mean as the owner, not just a captain. Hell, she’s really been yours all these years anyway. There is a trust fund set up to pay for the operation and maintenance costs. There is a bonus program for the crew and money to build a new school in Dangriga. I also want you to start a program for island kids all over the Bahamas to teach them to be sailors and preserve the tradition of sailing in these islands. It seems to me that if we saved the lighthouse, then we certainly have to have beautiful ships to sail by it. Don’t we?”