A Salty Piece of Land

  I had agreed to Donna Kay’s request to take Mr. Twain for a quick ride before dinner. I was in the process of saddling my horse for her when I heard the screen door slam on her cottage, and I turned around to see Donna Kay coming toward me.

  I don’t know what it is about a good-looking woman in riding clothes, but it gets my immediate attention. Donna Kay sashayed up to the corral wearing a white sleeveless shirt knotted above her tanned belly button and a pair of tight hip-hugger jeans. Her hair was still tied in a ponytail at the back of her head, and she already had her sunglasses on. She smelled like Coppertone.

  “When’s the last time you rode a horse?” I asked.

  “Yesterday,” she said with authority. “Sammy Raye has a string of polo ponies and cutting horses up in Alabama, and he gave me one a few months ago as a present.”

  “Well, there ain’t much you can hurt yourself on if you stay on the beach. I keep the overhanging limbs trimmed back since I nearly decapitated myself once. Mr. Twain knows that beach by heart, so have fun.”

  “Thank you, Cowboy,” she said. She took the reins from my hand and grabbed the saddle horn but couldn’t quite reach the stirrup. “Could you give me a hand, Tully?”

  I lifted her at the waist, and as she swung up into the saddle, I felt her hips press against my shoulders, and I went primal.

  It was impossible not to think about Donna Kay naked in a French Quarter bed, which is exactly what was running through my mind as I adjusted her stirrups.

  “See you later,” she called out and galloped off to the beach.

  I headed down the path that led to the end of the pier. I needed a swim to get some endorphins in my system to battle with my testosterone. I dove in and did several laps around the pink plane. Next came work as a deterrent. One job led to another, and I washed the hull of my skiff, cleaned out the live wells, and removed the buildup at the waterline. Then I climbed up on the dock and went to work on a freshwater pipe that had sprung a leak.

  I was hanging over the side of the dock, wrapping the leaking pipe with duct tape, when I looked up and saw Donna Kay walking down the dock. She stopped in front of the spigot.

  “That was a wonderful ride. Mr. Twain still has his stuff,” she said. She scanned the half dozen guide boats moored to the dock. “Now let me guess which one is yours,” she said in a slightly mocking tone. She stopped next to the yellow-and-green hull with the blazing eyes of the Mayan fish god.

  “How did you guess?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, Tully. It just looked like your boat.” She studied the large pink letters scripted on the hull and then asked, “What does Bariellete mean?”

  “It’s skipjack, in Spanish. You know, the fish?”

  “And who picked the paint job?”

  “Well, that’s a long story, but she’s a seaworthy craft.”

  “Well, you certainly can’t miss her,” Donna Kay said.

  “She’s all ready to go for tomorrow. Looks like the weather’s gonna hold. I was about to take her out for a little test run. Want to come along?”

  “A cruise before dinner? Why not? It will take me a second to change.”

  “Bring a bathing suit!” I yelled as she ran down the dock.

  She returned in a couple of minutes wearing shorts, and I helped her into the boat and gave the rope start a crank, and the engine came to life. I cast off the bowline, and we steered away from the dock.

  Donna Kay dropped into one of the turquoise Adirondack porch chairs that sat in the middle of the boat, sighed, and took in the evening light. “Now this is the way to end a day,” she said.

  I brought the Bariellete up on a plane and headed south out of the channel. Now we were creating our own wind, and a cool breeze washed over us as we paralleled the shoreline.

  “I try to do it as often as I can,” I said.

  “Where are we headed, captain?”

  “Off the beaten path. There’s a pretty neat little Mayan ruin not far from here. We’ll be back before dark.”

  “Sounds per—. Shit!” Donna Kay shouted as she sprang straight up in the boat. A large crocodile was lazily crossing the channel in front of us.

  “Tully, that is an alligator! And so close to the lodge.”

  “It’s actually a saltwater crocodile.”

  “Jesus!”

  “Don’t worry, we haven’t lost anybody yet.”

  “They look so . . . so ancient,” Donna Kay said.

  “The Mayans believe that the earth in its flat form is the back of a giant crocodile, resting in a pool of water lilies.”

  The crocodile gulped a breath of air and submerged, leaving a trail of bubbles as he set off for the deep water of the channel.

  Donna Kay cautiously sat back in her seat. “Tully, I trust you with my life, but I would prefer to put a little bit of distance between us and the crocodiles before I jump off the face of the earth.”

  I headed out of the channel and then turned north. We ran in silence for about twenty minutes along the deserted shoreline until I spotted the landmark I was looking for. I steered for the beach and pulled into a sheltered little cove that Ix-Nay had shown me a few weeks earlier.

  I slowed the Bariellete and spotted the cluster of coral heads that marked the way in. I handed Donna Kay a bucket with a clear bottom and showed her how to hold it over the side and see what was under her. “This is an amazing reef. I’ve never seen so many fish.”

  “And you probably never will. Ix-Nay and Bucky made this reef, and almost nobody knows it’s here.”

  “Jesus, look at the size of that barracuda.” She gasped. “How do people make such a thing?”

  “They worked last winter on a project up in Isla Mujeres to create man-made reefs with hundreds of wrecked boats from the last hurricane. Not all the wrecks made it to their destination off of Isla. Several of them lost their way here. It’s not even known by local lobster fishermen, and it’s too far south and too dangerous for the fishing boats from Cozumel and Playa del Carmen. We call it the ‘snack bar.’ Want to see it up close?”

  “Shit, I forgot my bathing suit,” she said.

  “This might be your only chance to see it. If the wind comes up, we can’t get back in here. Besides, I’ve seen it all before.”

  “Not lately,” Donna Kay instantly retorted. “You stay in the boat.”

  “I’ll do better than that. I’ll move the boat over to the beach, anchor it, and get a towel and your clothes ready for your return from the sea.”

  “How far away is that?”

  “Just over there, twenty yards. You can wade in from the reef.”

  “Okay. Turn your head,” she said.

  I followed her orders, and in a few seconds I heard a splash.

  “Can you hand me a mask and snorkle, please?” She was in the water, hanging on to the side of the boat, and I slipped the dive gear over the side, into her waiting hands. She donned them like a pro and propelled herself along the surface toward the reef as the sun illuminated her naked body.

  I headed for the beach, slipped the anchor over the side, cut the engine, then stepped off the boat. I got a towel out of my bag and arranged her clothes on the chair.

  She stayed in the water about fifteen minutes, and just as I was about to call her to come in, she was already swimming back. I did my about-face as she toweled off and dressed in the boat.

  “I have never seen so many fish. It’s like a personal aquarium.”

  “We can come back if the weather’s right and make a day of it, but I just wanted to have time to show you the altar.”

  The word seemed to freeze her for a moment. “What altar?”

  “Follow me,” I said and walked over to the collection of giant limestone boulders that marked the end of the beach. Donna Kay, with her wet ponytail swinging in the breeze, waded in and followed.

  At the edge of the beach, two of the large boulders formed an opening, and a path led under them.

  “Ladies first,” I said.


  We squatted down and duckwalked through the opening for about twenty yards in the dark toward the rays of evening light that lit the exit of the crawl space. We came out into what appeared to be a dead end of solid rock beside a patch of sand the size of a beach blanket.

  “Now, Tully, wait just a minute,” Donna Kay said.

  “We’re not there yet,” I told her and walked to the opposite side of the sand patch. I squeezed my body through a space about the size of a porthole and dropped down from a ledge to a worn path. “If I can do it, I know you can.”

  I had hardly gotten the words out before Donna Kay hit the ground beside me. We could hear the waves crashing against the boulders in the natural echo chamber they formed.

  “What is this place?” Donna Kay asked.

  “Come on,” I said.

  We tiptoed along the carved edge of one of the biggest boulders, then carefully stepped down a rock staircase toward the ocean. We were standing at the base of a tiny Mayan temple no larger than a phone booth. A series of steps descended into a small blue hole where a single ray of sunlight lit up the deep water.

  “Legend has it that Mayan navigators came here to chant prayers and make offerings to the gods, who then sent them visions of their impending journeys.”

  “I thought you were allergic to religion for most of your adult life,” Donna Kay said.

  She walked slowly down the steps of the altar, watching the water in the blue hole rise and fall as the ocean surged and then ricocheted off the rocks.

  “I always had a problem with blind faith and stories from the Bible,” I said.

  “They do seem to have been created more to terrify people than to help us understand what we’re doing here,” she added.

  “Exactly,” I said. “I prefer this spot to any church I’ve ever been in. I am more amazed by lobsters turning a car hood into an underwater condo than Moses parting the Red Sea.”

  “One man’s cathedral is another man’s fishing hole,” Donna Kay said and smiled.

  “Amen,” I added.

  At that point, without warning or notice, Donna Kay did a graceful swan dive from the altar steps into the blue hole. I instinctively followed. We broke the surface about ten feet apart and kicked our way to each other. All I could think about was making love to Donna Kay in the sacred pool under the navigator’s altar. I pulled her to me. She didn’t resist as I pushed the hair out of her eyes and kissed her firmly on her salty lips. I slid my hands up under her shirt and cupped them around her breasts and lifted her slightly out of the water. I felt her body tense as if someone had flipped a switch.

  “Donna Kay! Donna Kay!” a shrill voice screamed. We sprang away from each other immediately. Above us on the steps, two gray-haired women with cameras strung around their necks stood beside a guide. How they got there I had no idea, but all we could do was wave.

  “Can you believe it?” one of the women said. “We come a thousand miles away from Alabama on a ship, and we run into the owner of our favorite restaurant. Y’all have fun.”

  Donna Kay swam to the steps, and I just floated for a moment, wondering what other surprises lay in store for me.

  The aperture for a passionate moment without discussion, questions, or explanations had closed. All those things were now on the back burner. We rode home in silence with our wet clothes drying in the wind. I steered the boat, and Donna Kay sat in one of the chairs, twisting her ponytail in her fingers. The furrow above her brow told me she was thinking hard about something. I tried not to dwell on the inevitable moment when I would be held accountable by this woman for the wrong I had done her, but I knew it was coming. There were things we needed to talk about, things I had to explain, and issues that had to be addressed. But as Venus drew the curtain of the night sky up over the eastern edge of the horizon, we were simply jockeys straddling the back of that giant, unpredictable crocodile called life.

  9

  Fish Tales

  There was just enough twilight left in the day to illuminate the channel markers back to Lost Boys, and when I got there, Donna Kay jumped up on the dock before I even got the bowline tied. She thanked me in a nervous voice, suddenly as distant as a paying guest, and hurried down the path to her cottage. It was then, as I washed off my fishing tackle and cleaned up my boat, that I asked myself the big question of whether or not I really wanted something as complicated as a woman back in my life.

  I know it sounds odd, but from the time I arrived at Punta Margarita up until the moment that seaplane hatch opened, I had been so involved in covering my tracks, changing my life, and learning to be a fishing guide that women had somehow gone out of the picture.

  I guess one of those fancy radio psychologists would have said that since I’d come to Lost Boys, I had been running away from some deep-seated fear of relationships, but I just saw it as being really busy. Now I felt guilty that I hadn’t even been thinking about Donna Kay, at least not since I blew her off by not showing up in Belize City. Besides, I reasoned, she’d kept the rest of the $10,000 from the lottery ticket I’d sent her. Wasn’t that enough payment for my sins?

  I’d kind of become a monk in the sexual department, and the scary thing is that it really hadn’t bothered me up until the moment I saw Donna Kay again. It didn’t help matters much when Donna Kay appeared on the porch for dinner that evening looking like a forties movie star. She wore an almost see-through print sarong and no shoes. Her hair was now brushed out of the ponytail and fell across her shoulders, and she wore a choker with a single pearl that matched her earrings.

  Bucky was up in a flash, attending her chair at the table. Donna Kay folded into her seat, trailed by a scent of citrus perfume. Bucky slid in next to her, thank God. I took a seat at the far end next to Sammy Raye and reached for the wine, asking myself this: What the fuck is she doing here?

  When I first saw her on the dock, my initial instinct was to recoil and run. I figured that she had come seeking revenge and that she would whack me over the head with a rolling pin or worse for leaving her stranded in Belize. But here we were, having dinner in the tropics. It might have looked like a party, but I felt like the piñata. It was only a matter of time before I got hit with a stick, but I wasn’t sure what would come out when I cracked open.

  To my great relief, the gay, rich, rookie fly fisherman from Alabama could have also made a living doing stand-up. He had the whole table in stitches that evening, telling us stories of his exploits in the less-traveled but heavily exotic parts of the world. It was welcome comic relief for me after my failed love moment with Donna Kay and the long, silent ride home. Drake came into the bar, but the other pilot hadn’t shown up yet when the bell rang for dinner, and we were seated at our table.

  Food immediately appeared from the kitchen, and the stories and conversations were fueled by several bottles of Romanee Conti La Tâche 1985, which were poured by Del Mundo. He had dressed for dinner in a tuxedo. I am no wine connoisseur—or let’s just say I wasn’t until I tasted that stuff. It’s a long way up the vine from Mateus to La Tâche.

  The subject of the evening pretty much stayed on fishing until Bucky mentioned that Tex Sex had been the previous owner of the property.

  “I knew Tex Sex in another life,” Sammy Raye said. “Did you know he was gay?”

  “Sammy Raye thinks everybody’s gay,” Del Mundo chimed in.

  “Well, it’s sort of like fishing, in a way,” Sammy Raye said.

  “What is?” Ix-Nay asked.

  “Being gay,” Sammy Raye replied in a bored voice. “Everybody’s got their pole in the water, and you just never know what you are going to catch.”

  “There are a lot of sharp teeth in the ocean, Sammy,” Donna Kay said.

  Sammy Raye flinched at her words, squealed, and cupped his hands over his crotch.

  “Not where we are going tomorrow,” Bucky told him.

  “I try. I really do,” Del Mundo said. “I’ve insisted on charm school and etiquette class, and I still get this big fruit from
Alabama.” Del Mundo shook his head.

  “Well, beat me, fuck me, and make me write big checks,” Sammy Raye responded. “Any way you sliced him, Tex Sex was still light in his loafers—which is not a big career enhancer in the country-music business. Take it from one who knows. Pass the La Tâche, please.”

  The table was collectively cracking up. From behind the kitchen door, one of the waiters was translating for the cooks, and this was followed by roaring laughter.

  “Will we see sharks?” Sammy Raye asked.

  “Big ones,” Ix-Nay said, “but they only gum you.”

  “Well, hell, boys, let’s go right now,” Sammy Raye guffawed.

  The wine was working, and I made the nearly fatal mistake of laughing as I chewed on a carrot stick.

  The next thing I knew, I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t talk. Everyone was still laughing at Sammy Raye, who had begun to imitate a shark. Nobody noticed that I was choking to death on a vegetable.

  I rose out of my chair in what seemed like stiff Frankenstein movements. They thought I was doing an imitation as well. Spots appeared before my eyes, and I was on the verge of passing out when suddenly somebody turned me around and looked me directly in the eye. I knew the face from somewhere, but I couldn’t put two and two together in my panicked state.

  “Can you talk?” the man asked calmly.

  I just wheezed. The next thing I knew, he had his arms around my waist, then jerked his clenched fists into my abdomen.

  The carrot popped out of my throat and shot across the table, dropping like an Apollo capsule into Sammy Raye’s wineglass.

  I gasped for air and felt my way back to the chair. Now people had finally figured out that something was wrong with me.

  “Can you talk to me now?” the familiar voice asked.

  “Yes,” I said hoarsely.

  My breathing began to get back to normal, and my head started to clear. I looked up at the man and was about to thank him when all the lights came back on in my mind. “Willie Singer,” I said in disbelief.