“You should try the banana pancakes with coconut syrup. It helps,” he said.
“Thanks. I just wanted you to know that I don’t behave like that on a regular basis,” I said apologetically.
“It’s what sailors do after a long and perilous voyage,” Bucky told me.
“Oh, I’m no sailor.”
“That’s not what Kirk told me,” he said. “Hell, I was much worse my first night here. I got bulletproof drunk and then did this.” He pulled open his shirt to expose his left shoulder and turned around. Running from his shoulder blade down to the small of his back was what appeared to be a naked Mayan princess lying in the missionary position, being penetrated by an alligator with a bird face as she was strangling a large snake with each of her hands.
“Jesus!” I shouted, startled by the hideous sight. “Who thought that one up?”
“I don’t recall. I was told later that I told Hilo, the tattoo artist, to just use his imagination.” Bucky smiled.
Somehow I avoided having someone carve up my body last night, but that was about all I missed.
Bucky rebuttoned his shirt and said, “It’s those permanent reminders of a temporary feeling that you have to watch out for in these parts.” He signaled for the waitress, who brought a pot of coffee and refilled his mug. He took a sip and said, “I’ve got a problem that just might be a piece of luck for you. Are you planning to stay on with Kirk on the boat?”
I was surprised by the question. It had never occurred to me that working for Kirk was even an option. “He hasn’t asked me.”
“He’s going to. That is, unless you want to go to work for us at the lodge.”
I couldn’t believe what he was saying. An hour earlier, mangled by the jaws of guilt, I was wrestling with my future and what I would do. Now I had not one, but two job offers.
My pancakes arrived, and I went to work on them immediately, shellacking them with butter and drowning the plate in syrup.
“Have you ever read a book called Don’t Stop the Carnival?” Bucky asked.
As I gulped down the large glass of ice-cold milk that I had ordered, I nodded. “Of course.”
“It is the bible for expats. Kirk and I read it three times together before we leased the lodge from Tex Sex—trying to convince ourselves that the perils of Norman Paperman would never be the perils of Lost Boys.”
“Kirk owns part of the lodge?”
“He does. Can you think of a better partner?”
“You’re right about that. So what happened when you read the book?”
“We were wrong, like everybody else who thought they could lick the Caribbean.”
“But the place looks great, and you’re about to open for business,” I said.
“Exactly. And just when you think you’ve turned the corner, and there is light at the end of the tunnel—BAM, something else happens.” Bucky held up his left hand. A large bandage covered his index finger.
“What happened?”
“Norman Paperman referred to it as Kinja Rules.”
“Meaning?”
Bucky removed the bandage from the tip. I saw a dark, jagged thread of stitches that zigzagged around the end of his finger. “Last night, or should I say early this morning, I left you party animals because I had to get up early. I had promised to take a couple of American guys out fishing. One of them was a client of mine back in Wyoming, and he was down with his buddy, who—thank God—was a surgeon at Harvard. They had stopped in for a day to see the lodge on their way to Ascension Bay, and I wanted to drum up some future business. We caught a few bonefish, and he was happy, and we were about to call it a morning when this giant barracuda cruised up the flat. I urged the guy to make a final cast, and the fish crashed the fly, and the fight was on. Ten minutes later, the big fish was at the side of the boat, and in what would be the normal method of removing the hook and releasing the fish, the barracuda got pissed, flipped his head around, and wham. Next thing I saw was blood gushing everywhere. The fucking barracuda chomped off the tip of my finger, which was hanging like a Chicken McNugget by just the skin.
“Well, my old client’s friend happened to be a top-notch plastic surgeon. I got on the radio and called Kirk, who rushed down with his first-aid kit, and the doctor laid me down on the Ping-Pong table in the lodge and reattached the end of my finger. That’s the good news.”
“And the bad?”
“I’m left-handed. I got my finger back, but I can’t hold a fork, much less tie a knot or cast a fly. And I need to train my guides before the season.” Bucky looked at his mangled finger, and he winced slightly in pain. “How much fly-fishing have you really done?”
“I fished the creeks and streams in Wyoming since I was a kid, but I’d never dropped a line in salt water until I was on the Caribbean Soul. We anchored off the Tortugas, and I played around for a few hours on the flats by the fort.”
“The wind is the only difference,” Bucky said. “That and the size and speed of the fish, of course.” I was listening to Bucky, but my mind wandered back to an ad I had read in the classified section of a fishing magazine back when I was about to go crazy at the poodle ranch. It simply read: “Flats guide needed—no previous experience necessary. Contact Vaughn: Last Mango Lodge, Isla Mujeres.” I had almost answered that ad.
Bucky took a sip of his coffee and leaned over the table and looked me in the eye. “I won’t bullshit you—we can’t afford to miss this opening season. We have clients due to arrive in two weeks. My plan was to train Ix-Nay and another guide, and we could handle the traffic this year. Then I’d train a few more local guides. But with this fucking finger, I can’t cast or pole the boat. I talked it over with Kirk. He was going to offer you a job on the boat, but it would really help us out if you would consider staying on at the lodge for a while.
“I can take care of your work papers,” Bucky continued. “I’ve got a good friend who works for the government, so that’s no problem. I can teach you enough in about a week on the water to be a flats guide, which is just about all the time I have. I’ve also got the books you need to study, and Kirk just brought me down a VHS player and instructional tapes that I was going to set up for the lodge guests. I can only pay you a couple of hundred bucks a week, but there’s an old cottage from the Tex Sex days that you can have. It needs a little fixin’ up, and there’s a nice little field behind it where we can make a spot for Mr. Twain. After this season, we can just see what happens.”
I was stunned. “You’re offering me a job?” I tried not to look shocked. “When do we start?”
“Yesterday,” Bucky said.
I don’t know what it is about all that sugar, flour, and melted butter, but after my cowboy nights in Wyoming, a breakfast like that was a necessity and referred to as a “soaker.” That’s because of its ability to absorb the abundance of alcohol that’s left in the body of a party monster. Those pancakes and the fact that I had plans for the immediate future were the medicine I needed to cure my hangover.
We went down to the boat to tell Captain Kirk, and he seemed very happy about my decision to work for Bucky. He was doing a turnaround trip back to Heat Wave and was leaving on the rising tide at ten.
I did my final chores as a crew member of the Caribbean Soul, loading handmade furniture that was bound for a beachfront home on Perdido Bay. With the cargo secure, I off-loaded my few belongings into Bucky’s beat-up old Jeep. The Tully Mars art collection rode shotgun with me. I propped the painting of St. Barbara up so she had a good view of the ride, and I tucked the other, rolled-up picture snugly behind her for safekeeping. Then we drove to the Lost Boys lodge—my new home.
I unpacked my stuff and took Mr. Twain for a ride back to town to see the Caribbean Soul off. When we got there, Kirk was all loaded up and about to cast off the lines. As I watched him I thought about what to say. There was so much I had to thank him for, yet I knew he would be embarrassed if I started some litany about how he’d given my life new direction. Captain Kirk is a man o
f a few, always well-chosen, words. He is a wise leader—one of those rare individuals who places everybody else’s well-being above his own. It earned him a medal in Vietnam, though he never speaks about it. He lives in the moment, not dwelling on what happened yesterday or what might happen tomorrow.
He came down the gangplank, scratched Mr. Twain’s withers, and shook my hand. “I’ll see you in a couple of weeks. Take care of my investment,” he said with a smile. In the next breath, he was shouting orders to the crew, and the lines were hauled in.
As Captain Kirk spun the big boat on her axis and headed north, the crowd at the dock waved for a few seconds, watched as the boat made its first turn toward Bird Channel, and then went back to work and chores.
I nudged Mr. Twain’s left shank, and he turned south. He seemed to know where we were going.
I returned to Lost Boys and the sound of chainsaws, hammers, and Tito Puente blaring from a paint-splattered blaster as the crew of workmen were putting final touches on the buildings at the lodge.
I steered Mr. Twain off the beach and through a small grove of orange trees at the rear of the property while my mind tried to play catch-up and grasp the unlikely fact that this was where I would be living for a while. In the process of unpacking my clothes, hanging my pictures, and feeding my horse, I just had to stop and look out over the wide expanse of emerald water and pinch myself to make sure it wasn’t a dream.
That evening, Bucky and I sat on the beach with a couple of local carpenters who had done a little work on my beachfront property. We roasted lobster tails and conch steaks over a fire of coconut husks.
We were playing a story game Bucky had invented called the Last Supper. It consisted of allowing those evil, avenging creatures of God—horseflies—to light on the exposed skin of your arm or leg and take a bite. At that point, you make up an epitaph, which you deliver to the horsefly as he eats his last meal, and then you flatten the little bastard. The speeches are voted on by those in attendance, and the best speech wins a bottle of wine.
“I am simply trying to make the eradication of biting insects into a sport. There is only so much backgammon and Scrabble you can play on any given day,” Bucky explained.
We devoured the lobsters, which were coated with a Mayan home-brew hot sauce called Agua del Infierno, which I happily translated by myself to the delight of my professor.
“I think the Waters of Hell can give Tabasco a run for its money,” I said to Bucky as we sipped cold Coronas to take the sting of the peppers from our lips. Then we toasted the lucky stars above our heads. My cheeks hurt from smiling all day. I had been so caught up in the fast-track course change of my life—moving off the boat in the morning to sitting on the porch of my beachfront house at sunset—that I had forgotten my most important task: studying the books and tapes Bucky had given me that were my crash course in flats fishing. This brought my part of the beach party to a close as I suddenly realized that there was work to be done.
“It’s okay,” Bucky said nonchalantly. “I told Ix-Nay you had never fished in salt water but that you could cast into the wind.”
“Is Ix-Nay on his way back?” I asked. “What kind of name is that, anyway?”
“Mayan,” Bucky told me. “But Ix-Nay is more than just a Mayan. He’s a Hunan.”
“A medicine man?” I asked.
“How did you know?”
“My father’s best friend was one,” I told him.
“Well, this should be interesting,” Bucky said, shaking his head in amusement.
“When do we start?” I asked.
“As soon as he gets back.”
“I know you said he was off island right now, but where is he?”
“Last week he was suddenly called by the gods to Xibalba.”
“How far is that from here?”
Bucky started laughing. “Well, it ain’t down Highway 307. Xibalba is the nine-layered netherworld where shamans seek the wisdom of the spirits. There is a steep and secret road through a series of caves that can be entered only by shamans. It is a very dangerous place, with lots of snakes and dragons down there; torrents and abysses flank the road, which is covered with thorns. In this place, the evil demons live who dare to challenge the gods to combat.”
“I think I’ll wait until he gets back,” I said.
Ix-Nay, who was also supposed to be learning to be a guide, still hadn’t shown by the middle of my first week of training for the job. I attacked the art of saltwater fly-fishing like a hungry fish myself, gobbling pages of information and local knowledge from Bucky. At the same time, I was falling in love with the natural beauty and tranquility of the whole process of stalking large fish through shallow water and connecting them to thin lines on small rods. I was hooked.
I would read the fishing books well into the night and fall asleep to the symphony of crickets and tree frogs with my book parked on my chest. One night, I had a fishing nightmare. I was surrounded by a group of pirates who were watching me cast badly and shouting things like, “He ain’t no flats guide! Let’s string him up!” The early-morning light saved me from the gallows, and I boiled a pot of hot water for tea. Then I took Mr. Twain for a ride and spent the next few hours outside, practicing casting at a Frisbee until Bucky arrived.
We spent about an hour on the beach, where Bucky adjusted my cast, polished up the absolutely necessary “double haul,” and then pronounced me ready to fish.
At the brand-new dock behind the lodge, we loaded into one of his skiffs. The boat was something of a shock; it did not look anything like the sleek skiffs I had studied in Lefty Kreh’s book, and I asked Bucky about it. He said he had just bought it from an old Mayan fisherman down in Punta Allen who had to give up the sea because he was going blind from years of squinting in the sun. Just before he lost the last of his sight, he painted the boat to represent a dream that had spoken to him.
The hull was covered with a multicolored chain of Mayan gods that were laid out down the port and starboard sides. At the stern, the chain was connected to a big green crocodile tail, and at the bow it was plugged into two giant, glaring eyeballs, which the old man said were the eyes of the fish god Chac Uayab Xoc, who provided a good catch but also devoured comrades. He told Bucky that he needed money for a cataract operation, but still he would only sell the boat under the condition that the paint job remained the same for the life of the boat. Bucky called it the Bariellete.
“What does Bariellete mean?” I asked.
“Skipjack,” Bucky answered. “She is an all-purpose rig. There are no flats skiffs down here yet, and quite frankly, I like the local boats just as well. All we have to do is modify your boat a bit for the flats.”
“My boat?” I asked.
“If you’re going to be a guide, Tully,” Bucky said, “you need a boat. It’s the least I could do.”
I didn’t know what to say.
That day, we spent the rest of the daylight hours on the shallow waters of Ascension Bay and the lagoons amid incredible natural beauty unlike anything I had ever seen before. This was to be my “office,” but that day, I never even made a cast. I just observed Bucky and listened to his instructions.
I learned the tides; poled the boat; adjusted my eyes to nervous water, mud, and tailing fish; and started picking up the words of the trade in Spanish. All these lessons took place in a classroom shared by crocodiles, monkeys, manatees, and countless species of waterfowl that seemed to be watching my progress. A particularly large colony of blue herons found us and circled, squawking loudly as they returned to their nests in the mangroves. I was like Alice falling through the looking glass. I had never seen such beautiful shallow water.
The next morning, there was still no sign of Ix-Nay. After our early practice run, I joined Bucky for lunch in the dining room, and we tested the new chef’s menu selections. Ix-Nay had helped to hire one of his cousins, who had cooked at the Four Seasons Hotel in Toronto. His cousin would be the camp chef, and we dined that day on lobster club sandwiche
s and potato leek soup, with a bottle of rosé to wash it all down as Bucky practiced eating with his one good hand.
He was called away to the office as I sipped my espresso and prepared to retire to my hammock for a siesta, but I overheard the gist of Bucky’s phone conversations. He was speaking with his first clients, who were due in a week, and he was assuring them that everything was fine—which it wasn’t. He said good-bye, came out of the office, thanked the chef, and said, “Come on! It’s time to solo, Tully.”
At the dock, he handed me a portable VHF radio and a box of flies. “Try these on the permit, and see if any work. I have some fires to put out here. You’ll do fine. I’ll be standing by on channel seventy-one.”
I stared at the big eyes on the bow of the Bariellete, hopped on board, and gave the starter rope a tug. The outboard coughed to life and engulfed me in two-cycle exhaust, thick with the smell of oil. I untied the boat from the dock and headed out the narrow channel into the lagoon, feeling as if I were the only human on the planet.
Twenty minutes later, I found the spot I was looking for—after running aground only once on the way. I anchored the boat, put on my wading shoes, lathered myself with sunblock, and checked the fly line. Then the fly and I slipped over the side into the knee-deep water.
For the next four hours of the incoming tide, I eased my way along the shore, scanning the surface for the incriminating mud cloud of a bonefish or a feeding permit’s forked tail pointing skyward. I had no luck at all, but I didn’t care. I was literally walking on water, and I was soaking in the whole experience like the sponges that lay scattered in the bottom of the lagoon. Near the apex of the tide, I climbed back in the Bariellete and found an indentation in the mangrove trees along the bank that provided a patch of shade from the overhead sun. There I took a short nap and a swim, where I just floated on the end of the tide, watching the food chain drift along from behind the lens of my mask. As I treated myself to an ice-cold Ting and enjoyed the silence of my new office, I saw the current shift. It was time to fish.