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Volume 1 ~ Number 2

Will

Irby’s Florida Stories

Illustration by Alexander Key

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STAFFPUBLISHER/ CREATIVE Adbiz, Inc. www.adbiz.com

EDITOR Kendal Norris

WRITER Will Irby

ABOUT THE WRITER

Will Irby works as a private investigator, journalist and writer, traveling and

writing extensively about Florida, the Bahamas and Caribbean. An acclaimed storyteller, his assignments often involve inquiry into little-known historical incidents, nefarious acts at sea and unusual natural phenomena. He has published over 60 short stories and feature articles. Will Irby’s work was featured in the documentary film Smuggler’s Paradise. He continues to chronicle the underworld of modern-day pirates and smugglers.

Will Irby is a former Florida Artist in Residence and gubernatorial appointee to the Florida Arts Council.

Levy Publishing P.O. Box 2990 Chiefland, FL 32644

Table of Contents

BUSTER KREBS

JACKIE COCHRAN A Florida Girl Reaches for the Star

BURL REEVE

RACHEL PERL A Key West Story

4101422

~4~

A brand new ’54 Ford convertible pulled away from the curb across from Pepe’s Restaurant near the intersection of Caroline and William Streets. A Key West taxi angled in and a woman in a red velvet blazer got out. The cabby’s arm extended

from the opened window, pointing out the marina a short block up William where the masts of trawlers and a schooner bobbed gently in the chalky green water.

BUSTER KREBS

In the bustle about the harbor a fellow known about as ‘Buster’ was down a dock ladder, quick as a rabbit, with a bucket and brush. Buster Krebs was a quirky, curious little fellow who worked around that wharf on the Key West Bight. He was blunt and cantankerous, thought generally to be a crotchety conch – one of the islanders by birth. But in truth, he’d appeared on the Key West scene little more than two decades earlier.

Buster had most certainly had a life (half a century at least) before Key West. Though what that life was exactly, Buster never said. Few asked, as even life-long locals felt Buster Krebs to be as much a part of the key as barnacles or an old brown pelican always about. Nobody remembers when the bird first came. It’s as

if he’d been there all along. Print or stain, the old fella was now simply part of the fabric of the place – until the episode known locally as Buster’s big splash.

The joke was that Buster Krebs had hooked a giant fish one night and not landed him until the next year! That’s because the fish first stirred on Buster’s line about nine o’clock on the 31st of December, and he didn’t land him until noon of the next, New Year’s Day.

It was quite an ordeal, though the night’s

fishing had begun no differently than usual for Buster. He’d washed down his last boat by 6:30 that evening and rode his rusty bicycle back to his rented room. This was a simple place with a private entrance at the rear of

~5~

a bamboo- shrouded bungalow up a lane off William. Despite Buster’s disheveled personal appearance, the grimy sleeveless chambray shirt and stained khakis he always wore, his room was immaculate. Buster tossed his crumpled captain’s hat to a neatly-made bed. He hung his shirt on a hook behind the door. The room featured a small alcove with a hot plate kitchenette and tiny icebox. Buster washed his hands and ruddy face in the galley-sized sink.

He fried some baloney in a pan on the stove, slicing off a raw onion to make a sandwich with chunks of Cuban bread. He stood looking out the window above the sink eating solemnly and watching a rooster walk the ridgeline of a shed visible behind the bougainvillea in the next yard.

There was a box on the bedside table. Buster extracted a Lucky Strike and sat on the back steps in the blue shade of a banyan tree to smoke. This was the one cigarette he now allowed himself each day. He was down to that. Buster didn’t drink alcohol anymore. He said that was because it confused him and got in the way of his cussing – the one vice he was steadfastly refused to tackle. It wasn’t that Buster liked to cuss or even that he thought to cuss. He certainly didn’t recommend cussing to others. It was purely that he was good at cussing. He was a natural, he said, and had a talent for it: “Same as some do for poetry or the xxxxx harp.”

After dark, Buster hooked an old paint bucket on his handlebars and pushed his bike back out to the street. He kept his fishing tackle in the bucket, clanking now against the brown frame as he peddled back up William to the bight.

Buster fished out on the wharf most nights. Depending on the tides, he might fish early or late. Sometimes, weather allowing, he might be joined by another of his acquaintances, Pitch Friday. Originally from Mississippi, Pitch had bounced around the South playing minor league baseball his entire adult life. The “Pitch Friday” nickname came about early on when an old coach welched continually on promises to start him. Pitch had played his last or “ridden the pine” finally for the defunct Key West Conchs in the late 40s. He’d been a fixture with the bums over on Mallory Square ever since. But despite that, Pitch was a reader and something of a learned man. He was quite a conversationalist, too, stirring the local chatter in much the same manner as troubadours did in their heyday.

So it came about that Buster was out on the dock that night, assuming his usual position in his usual place. He had line out with a small blue crab as bait scratching deep in the dark channel. Pitch came up and they exchanged gruff pleasantries before Buster started in on the too-small Hawaiian print shirt Pitch was wearing. Buster had another name for it which assigned such apparel to houses of ill repute. Pitch baited his line and countered with an apt description of Buster’s wardrobe, but he was no match for Buster when it came to cussing a thing.

They’d caught nothing that night. Then, about the time fireworks began to thud, then pop, spraying brilliant color high above the lawn of the Casa Marina Hotel across the island behind them, Buster’s luck changed. His line moved almost imperceptibly at first. Pitch said it was the crab latching to a rock or a submerged engine part in the outgoing

~6~

tide. Buster said he knew a xxxxx thing about fishing and that a xxxxx fish had moved his line.

When Buster felt the line move again, he snatched his light rod above his chest and said he’d set the hook sure and fast. He said he’d felt the hook set solidly into supple tissue, like that of a fish’s mouth, rather than some rock-hard, inanimate thing. This was not exactly how Buster described the set, nor was one particular body part identified here as harbor for his hook. But he was absolutely certain he had a fish on.

It was a big xxxxx fish, a giant xxxxx, Buster insisted, though Pitch was not a believer until about 3:00 in the morning. That’s when the line most certainly began to ease up more rapidly than the tide toward the dock. “Could be a ray,” Pitch intoned with genuine conviction. Buster gathered his line, cranking steadily in the light stirred by darting moths around the exposed bulb overhead.

Then the incoming line was still, holding fast nearer the dock. It didn’t move again for more than an hour. Buster tested the line carefully, certain that no matter what kind of fish, it was mammoth enough to snap his line in an instant. At best he suspected the Goliath on the other end of his rod to be mildly irritated by the itch of the small hook in his fat lip. For no apparent reason, other than the provocation of argument, Pitch retracted his conviction that Buster had hooked a ray. He decided that it was a tire or rubber boot maybe, shifting about on the whimsical persuasion of the current. Buster’s response was coarse and impolite, but Pitch Friday was immune to the caustic remarks of his friend. Oddly

enough, it was in that instant that Buster’s line was suddenly loose and surfacing. The green water boiled below the spot of light speckled by moth wings. There it was: the expansive, dark tail of a giant fish showing suddenly, if but slightly, before rolling back to the bottom.

“Ohhhh, I told you! Didn’t I?” Buster crowed. “He-a xxxxx jewfish, big as a big fat xxxxx sow!”

“That he is,” a wide-eyed Pitch agreed. He couldn’t have been more astonished by the effect of a mermaid surfacing. “Now what’ll we do?”

“What’ll we xxxxx do!” Buster repeated with profane emphasis. “Why we bring the xxxxx xxxxx up!”

“How?”

“He xxxxx comes when he wants to come,” Buster said wistfully. “He comes when he’s good and xxxxx ready. You don’t take a fish like this.”

“Not with the outfit you’ve got, you don’t take him,” Pitch muttered.

“Not with any xxxxx outfit. You could have a xxxxx wire cable and winch like that hanging there,” Buster gestured toward a hoist nearby for hauling up large catches. “A fish like this could rip the whole xxxxx business up by the roots. He comes when he’s ready to come, when he knows the will on the other end of the line’s greater than his own.”

By daylight fisherman and crew, who weren’t still celebrating the New Year, drifted down to the dock to find Buster slumped over the

~7~

reel of his rod. Some scoffed and others ribbed, but Pitch Friday backed Buster’s play. “It’s down there,” he assured them leaning out. “Bigger than an oil drum, maybe two from what I saw.”

Buster wouldn’t give up. It made no sense, even to him by then, except to say he simply wasn’t giving up. He’d given up on other things, more important things, he’d told Pitch in his delirium. “But not this time,” he said. “Not this xxxxx time!” He was down to his last, he figured. It was him or the fish. Sooner or later one of them would have to give or break and run.

It was later. Nearly noon and the small crowd on the dock had dispersed. Pitch Friday was asleep on the dock with his ball cap covering his eyes. The giant grouper began to rise. It was as if he simply released himself from the shadowy bottom and relaxed into a buoyance that brought him dreamlike to the shimmering surface of the water.

Buster startled Pitch awake. He shoved the rod handle into Friday’s hands, as if it actually mattered that the rod be held. Buster went for the hook on the hoist cable. He snatched it down and placed his small foot in and rode the hook over the side. The fish rolled lazily like a hippo in the shadow as Buster held to a ladder with one hand and wedged the hoist hook into the fish’s mouth with the other. It was a most improbable and seemingly unsportsmanlike conclusion to the catch, if one considers that the catch was not yet made. Buster Krebs insisted otherwise. He said the deed was done when the giant jewfish, almost 400 pounds heavier than he was, presented himself.

The crowd reassembled as the gigantic grouper was foisted above the wharf. Among those hurrying up was a man with a camera and a press card. He insisted Buster pose with his miraculous catch and Buster, addled with exhaustion, complied with the photographer’s instructions. The little fellow stood erect, the fish taller, even with its tail draping upon the dock. His casting rod looked small and inconsequential, humorous even in relation to the gargantuan denizen of the deep.

Some weeks later outside Saugerties, New York over 1500 miles away, Neiman Bernard-Henri sat at breakfast examining his morning paper. A prominent Wall Street investment banker, he had already scoured the business news. Niemen turned then to the Sports section with a particular interest in the equestrian competitions. His wife, Kerstin was a top-ranked competitor. And the Bernard-Henri’s bred champion jumping horses on their stately farm that had earlier been a jewel in the crown of her industrialist father’s vast estate.

So, Kerstin’s youth had been spent there, where white fences and thick hedges lined the paved drive up to the old brick manse. Now she and her husband spent as much time as possible at “the farm” when not in “the City,” where Bernard-Henri’s apartment overlooked Central Park.

So it was that Neiman Bernard-Henri came across the photo of Buster Krebs and his giant jewfish. Bernard-Henri was most amused, as the big city Sports editor had intended in selecting it from others offered on the wire. It was a humorous and

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playful diversion in an otherwise dreary 15th of March edition. Bernard-Henri folded that section back, halved and quartered it with Buster’s photo exposed just above the fold.

It was there beside his plate when Kerstin came in from her morning ride. A servant in starched cap poured another coffee as the newspaper caught her eye. She brought it up instantly, scrutinized Buster’s image with the intensity of a desperate spy. “Oh my. Oh my!” she said breathlessly.

“Yes, quite a catch isn’t it?” Bernard-Henri said without looking up from the Arts & Culture page.

“You have no idea!” Kerstin Bernard-Henri gasped. Then she told him.

It was less than a week later that Kerstin Bernard-Henri, the woman in the red velvet blazer, walked out the Key West wharf. She stood where Buster Krebs was busy scrubbing fish chum from the afterdeck of a boat tied there. Shielding his eyes from the Key West sun, he looked up at the beautiful woman waiting with a jeweled clutch purse in her hands.

“Hello, Daddy,” Kerstin Krebs Bernard-Henri said.

~9~

~10~~10~

When the bomber leveled off in the night sky, the pilot made instrument readings before settling back for the long transatlantic flight. This was an American-made Hudson bomber being ferried over to England for the Royal Air Force.

A shooting star streaked from overhead and disappeared beyond the vague horizon. The pilot remembered herself back as a spindly child on a sandy Florida road near the sawmill town of DeFuniak Springs.

JACKIE COCHRANA Florida Girl Reaches for the Stars

She was a brown-eyed girl in patched overalls rolled to her knees, walking barefoot out the sand road with a live chicken under her arm. Where the road opened from tall pines, a broad pasture lay ahead. She heard the bulky bi-plane heading for Pensacola and ran to the open field. To keep it in view, she started running backwards so as not to lose sight of the marvelous machine. Its drone heightened to a whir as it came whooshing overhead with the shade of its wings racing out like cloud shadow on a hurricane wind. The girl turned with the hen flapping hysterically and ran after the plane, though it was already disappearing down

to a tiny, silent speck. Exhausted, she slumped to her knees and quieted the chicken in the rye and watched until there was nothing at all in the robin’s egg-blue of the sky.

The chicken provided all the meat the Pitman’s (a “sawmill family”) would have to eat that week. There were five of them and the girl, Bessie Lee as she was called, was the youngest.

Opportunities for a young woman were scarce in the hardscrabble flat woods of Florida’s panhandle

of the 1920s. But Pensacola wasn’t far away, and the naval airbase with its elite officer’s quarters was as promising as any place she

~11~

could reach. Besides, there were planes there. By age 14, Bessie Lee was working as a “live-in” shampoo girl – little more than an indentured servant – for a Pensacola hair salon. An apple for lunch with a view of the airfield was the Ritz for Bessie Lee Pitman.

Her fascination with all things associated with flight may explain her early infatuation with Robert Cochran, a rough-neck aircraft mechanic at the naval base. They were soon married. A child, Robert Cochran Jr., came sooner than expected. When the baby was old enough to travel, they moved to Miami where Robert expected better paying work. Four years later, they were no better off financially and worse problems doomed the marriage. With the toddler on her lap, Bessie made the long bus ride back to DeFuniak Springs – her entire worldly possessions in the luggage rack above her head.

She returned to her parents’ clapboard home in the sawmill quarters. Charlie was not yet five on the winter’s day when he got too close to a burn pile in the backyard. Bessie heard horrific screams and ran to cover the child in flames with her own body, the acrid scent of burned fabric and flesh entering her senses indelibly for her lifetime. The child didn’t survive.

Bessie Lee Pitman was not yet twenty, divorced and suffering the tragic death of the only child she would ever have. She returned to Pensacola and put her experience as a hairdresser to work. Bright and beautiful, Bessie Lee had a way of connecting with

her clientele, among whom were naval officer’s wives extolling the grand opportunities to be found in New York City. “You’re that good, Bessie Lee,” one of the wives told her. “Why, you’d be a smash in the City!”

And she was. With a purse full of letters of recommendation, her good looks and energetic personality, she signed on with a

prestigious salon at Saks Fifth Avenue. Her southern charm and flattering results caught on and clientele expanded. Some wealthy ones were even eager to pay her train fare to Florida holiday homes for their regular coiffure. Along the way, Bessie Lee Cochran herself made a style decision and changed her name to “Jacqueline.” So she was now “Jackie” Cochran and touting her own line of increasingly successful cosmetics.

It was on one of her holiday forays back to her socialite clientele in Miami that she met Floyd Bostwick Odlum. Isn’t it Romantic and Cheek to Cheek were on the charts that year when Jackie Cochran was asked to dance by a dapper, middle-aged man in the ballroom of

~12~

a grand hotel on suddenly glamorous Miami Beach. He was not only a good dancer, but he was an intent listener and genuinely delighted in Jackie’s enthusiasm for her stylish salon and fledgling line of cosmetics. He smiled as she segued her rapid-fire litany of high expectations to include flight. She was going to have to fly an airplane, she said, to meet all the obligations her promising enterprises would surely require. “Have you ever flown in a plane?” Odlum wanted to know.

“No. But I’m going to, and I’m going to fly it myself just as soon as I can get in one! I’ve always wanted to, and I just know I can!”

Odlum, as it turned out, could make that possible. As the enterprising founder of the Atlas Corporation and CEO of RKO Pictures in Hollywood, he was already one of the richest men in the country.

After her first ride in an airplane, an ecstatic Jackie Cochran immediately began taking flying lessons. She was a natural and was flying solo in just three weeks. Two years later she’d obtained her commercial pilot’s license. Odlum, ever impressed and increasingly her most ardent supporter, married Jackie in 1936.

With Odlum’s savvy marketing advice, it wasn’t just her flying that had taken off. So had her line of cosmetics called “Wings” which she promoted from the cockpit of her own plane. Jackie barnstormed the country in air races and promotional campaigns. Odlum also helped with his Hollywood connections, later signing Marilyn Monroe to endorse Jackie’s line of lipstick. Wings was now a multi-million dollar cosmetics manufacturing company.

The promotional photos and glamour shots notwithstanding, Jackie Cochran was a serious flyer. In 1938 she took first place in the famed Bendix Transcontinental air race. Her front page recognition on receiving a prestigious national award – as the person making the greatest contribution to aviation that year – gave her credibility and status in the burgeoning world of aviation.

By the early 1940s, Nazi troops were marching across Europe. Jacqueline Cochran, now a respected Republican businesswoman and ace pilot, was also the president of the National Organization of Women Aviators. She wanted to know what potential there might be for women to fly America’s military aircraft. Eleanor Roosevelt, the influential wife of then President Franklin Roosevelt, arranged a conference with General Hap

~13~

Arnold, Commanding General of the U.S. Army Air Forces.

Initially Arnold didn’t see a role for women flyers in the armed forces. As the war expanded and Cochran persisted, however, Arnold agreed to send her to England

where she could observe first-hand a wing of woman pilots flying for the Royal Air Force. The British were more receptive to Cochran’s petitions. She soon recruited and organized 25 American women pilots to fly RAF support missions by the time American’s famed 8th Air Force arrived in the European theater.

In late 1942, a severe shortage of pilots had developed in the thinning American ranks. Acknowledging the urgent need, General Arnold asked Cochran to return to the U.S. to train American women pilots to fly America’s military aircraft. On September 11, 1942 she was appointed Director of Woman‘s Flying Training for the United States. The success of the women pilots in ferrying aircraft, and in transporting equipment, munitions and supplies was phenomenal. In 1943 Cochran was appointed to the General Staff of the U.S. Army Air Forces to direct all phases of the Women Air Force

Service Pilots. Jackie Cochran, the first woman to land a plane on an aircraft carrier, led the way in service to American troops. She and the celebrated WASP pilots repeatedly distinguished themselves in the most severe flying conditions and under fire.

After the war in Europe, Jacqueline Cochran received the U.S. Distinguished Service Medal. She traveled to the Far East as an assigned military observer and witnessed the Japanese surrender in the Philippines. Flying solo, she was the first American woman to enter Japan after WWII.

Jackie Cochran flew for as long as she could, even into the jet age. On May 18, 1953 at age 48, she reached supersonic speeds exceeding 652 mph. That once barefoot Florida girl – Bessie Lee Pitman – broke the sound barrier in an F-86 Sabrejet, flying higher and faster than any woman in the history of the world.

Post Note: The wingman on Jacqueline Cochran’s historic flight was future astronaut Chuck Yeager, the first man to officially break the sound barrier several years earlier. Jacqueline Cochran died on August 9, 1980. She was the very first woman to be inducted into the Aviation Hall of Fame.

~14~

A cold wind swept over the salt grasses laying back the needle rush and rippling the tidal creeks that meandered in great loops through the vast estuary. Beyond the brown grass line and gaping mouths of the tidal creeks lay the silver sheen of the

Gulf, its water mirroring the sky so nearly one could hardly tell where the water ended and the sky began.

Pendarvis turned right, making a wrong turn. His new white pickup truck moved slowly over the rough road out into the wiregrass. He came to a small isle of cabbage palms laced with cedars. Nearby was a crude cul de sac of shell where pole fishermen sometimes parked and walked down the muddy path to the creek to fish. Pendarvis stopped. The chilling breeze had begun to gust, so he waited in the truck watching the white caps over the water beyond Tripod Point where creek access to the old hunting camp could be found.

This was not the place, not Cabbage Key, where Burl Reeve had insisted they meet. Pendarvis wasn’t sure, really. He glanced frequently in his rear view mirror looking for movement at the crossroads behind him. Reeve’s call had come late last night. It was an old voice Pendarvis had

Burl Reeve

~15~

not heard in many years, the voice of a man in terrible pain. A man on medication or maybe drinking, too.

A rough gust of wind ripped across the palm fronds. Pendarvis checked his expensive wristwatch. Now he saw that the speck growing larger in his rear view mirror was Reeve’s truck. Pendarvis remembered it, the old blue half-ton, a service truck the saw mill had let Reeve keep when he retired. Pendarvis recalled fully the stout, Bantam rooster of a man driving – a man who had lived with a knife in his boot. His code was a coarse one, his intentions not always good. He’d been foreman on a turpentine crew as a young man and made a harsh reputation for himself. Later, he’d run a swamp logging crew and the rumor that he’d once killed a man followed him into the dark hammock where giant cypresses grew along the coast.

Maybe that’s why he’s coming, Pendarvis thought, raising himself up in the seat to zip his leather jacket. Maybe he’s coming to commit murder or to confess murder, or to confess some other all but forgotten thing. Why not? Now he was dying. At least that is what Reeve had said of himself the night before.

Reeve rumbled up close behind and stopped. Pendarvis got out of his truck, his longer hair tossing in the wind. The dented door of the old truck opened slowly. Reeve adjusted his greasy cap and slid heavily to the ground. They neared each other with Pendarvis nodding. Reeve returned the gesture, but neither extended a hand. Pendarvis rested against the tailgate of his new truck and Reeve against the rusted metal grill of his.

Now their hands were deep in their jacket pockets. They did not speak at first. Reeve had on a heavy denim jacket, the style railroad men once wore. He moved the wad of tobacco in his mouth to his other jaw and spit. “This ain’t Cabbage Key,” Reeve croaked finally.

“No?” Pendarvis asked, looking about as the wind tossed his hair differently, then back again.

“I seen somethin’ movin’ out this way ‘bout the time you’d be getting’ here,” Reeve said. “Figured it was you goin’ down the wrong road.”

“Well, I haven’t been out here in years, Burl. To tell you the truth, I thought this looked a little small for Cabbage Key, but you know what the years do to memory.”

“Years don’t do nothin’ to mine, lessin’ they works like a magnifyin’ glass.” Reeve spat again. His voice was rough and coarse like the man. “I reckon I’m different from most folks like that. I remember everthang.”

There was a sudden rush of wind. A dead frond fell and a heron rose in the winds’ broad sweep over the immense wet meadow of marsh grass. “Is that why we’re here, Burl? About something you remember?”

“Yes, it is.” Reeve said slowly, his fierce eyes fixed on Pendarvis.

“Well then, do you mind if we get in the truck?” Pendarvis asked, gesturing toward his own. “We can talk in the truck. No sense standing out in this cold wind.”

~16~

“No!” Reeve answered sternly. “I feel better standin’ up right now. I ain’t got long.”

Pendarvis shrugged. He waited for Reeve to speak again, his eyes resting uncomfortably on the brambles of Reeves eyebrows cresting a face red and pocked as sun-burnished clay.

“I reckon I’ll come to the point,” Reeve said in a voice filled with rancor. “I been thinking I orter collect on you, Mercer.”

Pendarvis, perplexed, looked down and nodded his head solemnly. A crooked smile formed at the corners of his thin lips. He looked from his fine hunting boots to Reeves heavy brogans, scuffed and worn. Reeve’s right hand moved in his jacket pocket. Pendarvis watched, thinking the pocket looked too full. “Well, Burl,” he said smiling nervously, “I imagine there are a few people on this planet that think I deserve as much as killing. But I don’t know why you’d be one.”

“No, I don’t ‘magine you do,” Reeve scoffed. “You ain’t give much thought to ol’ Burl, one way or th’other have you now, Mr. Mercer Pendarvis, Esquire?”

“It’s been a long while, Burl. Time gets away.”

“Do it? Don’t seem long to me, Mercer. Seems like yesterdee you and the rest of ‘um shamed me like you done.”

Pendarvis winced. “That’s what this is about, Burl? Some hunting camp horseplay, something that happened almost 50 years ago?”

Reeve’s face reddened more deeply. “That what you call it. Horseplay!” he screeched. “I call it a murder, if you ask me.”

Pendarvis looked at Reeve inquisitively, his thoughts scattering like a confusion of quail. “Murder?” he said beneath his breath.

“Yes sir! I was named for a liar. A cheat. I was winnin’. Maybe for the first time in my life, I was winnin’ big! All them big shots around the table, and the cards was a comin’ my way, brother.” Reeve jabbed his barreled chest with a thick thumb. “It was my night, by God. My night!”

“It was a card game Burl. Just a friendly game of chance, that’s all.”

“Now that’s where you’s wrong, mister sonny boy. I had my full pride to stake.”

“You pulled a knife on Terrell. You were drunk, Burl. Very drunk. I do believe you would have cut him or killed him maybe. That would have been the murder, don’t you see? That’s why Senator Lett threw that cast net over you. It might have been the only truly decent thing saving you from murder.”

Reeve leaned forward and spat into a swarm of fiddler crabs beyond the shadow of his truck. He looked up with fiery eyes. “Senator Nolan S. Lett, Sr. – he were the liar. He were the cheat!”

“Always was,” Pendarvis said with a wry smile.

“Yeah, he snatched me down in that nasty net. Mr. Big Boss Man!” Reeve shifted his weight. There was pain in the movement and a grimace formed over his face.

“You don’t think I remember bein’ rolled in that wet, sandy, mullet-stinkin’net? Bein’

~17~

synched up like a blistered, smoked ham!”

“Come on, Burl. Really … ”

“No! You listen,” Reeve’s growled, his head bobbing like a boxer in the ring. “It was Motes I reckon got ahold ah my wrist, so ya’ll could break my knife loose. And you, Mercer! You done like them men told you. I seen ya, Mercer. I seen ya through that mesh drawed up tight against my other eye. You was laughin’ too, you was. You was all laughin! Howard Jarvis even, and him a deacon in the church!”

“Burl, now see here – “

“No! You was laughin’. You all was a laughin’ and the high and mighty senator got his own boy to pull my britches down so he could put a boat paddle on my bare hide,” Reeve’s voice hissed like water over a hot griddle. “And you, Mr. Big Dog Attorney, Mercer Pendarvis. You held me down with the others. You was all laughin’ and holdin’ me across that card table. And the senator beat me like I was a shirttail young’un!”

Reeve took a deep, wheezing breath. Then he continued, “I’d taught you that very day how to field dress a deer. That very same day, and you held me down like that. Laughin’ with the rest, while I begged for mercy like a schoolboy, damnit all to hell!” The fierce old man hung his head. He looked up again, saying softly, “And I’ve lived with – that.”

Reeve began to cough. It was a deep hacking cough that continued until he was out of breath. He turned to rest against the front fender on the driver’s side of his truck. Pendarvis saw before him a man in agony. He

saw that forty years later, Burl Reeve still felt the severe sting of the boat paddle, a stinging that doubtlessly struck as a lightning bolt to his darkened soul.

“You okay, Burl?” Pendarvis asked compassionately.

Reeve let the wad of tobacco drop from his jaw into the thick hand he cupped over his mouth. He tossed the chew out into the tall grass. “I’m alright,” he rasped. “Your daddy was the only one done right by me,” Reeve continued. “Weren’t fer him ya’lled ah brought blood with that paddle that night. They’d been a killin’ fer sure.”

Suddenly the knife was in Reeve’s raised hand. He had brought it from his jacket pocket in a single motion with surprising swiftness. Pendarvis flinched in the instant thinking what Reeve might do. Then slowly, the angry old man turned to place the knife on the hood of his truck and shoved his hand back into his jacket pocket and lowered his head over the blade, as if saying grace over it.

“Put that knife away, Burl,” Pendarvis urged nervously.

“I ain’t ashamed of nothin’ I ever done.” Reeve muttered above the gust of wind. “Not now, I ain’t.”

“Good God, man, I don’t know what you have in mind here, but I was a boy then, Burl. Nolan Jr, he was a boy, too. Motes, Terrell, Jarvis and Jake Fieber – they were all liquored up, same as you.”

~18~

“I don’t care about them,” Reeve said in a low moan.

“Well, why do you care about me, Burl? You don’t think I remember? You don’t think I cared about you like I should have? Is that it?”

“I cared ‘bout you, Mercer,” Reeve all but mumbled, resting against the truck like a drunk man. “I cared enough about you to teach you to hunt. I taught you to read sign and how to get right with the wind. I took you on like you was mine. I pointed out your first buck. I helped to steady your aim. You was ten year old that month and was wearin’ a brand new pair of rubber boots. I still remember your birthday, Mercer.” Reeve paused, a deeper sadness entering his eyes. “Do you know mine, Mercer? Do you know when ol’ Burl’s birthday is?”

“You – you were really good to me in many ways,” Pendarvis stammered. “I did miss you when you left the camp, Burl. I guess I might have looked you up to tell you that. I don’t know. But I did tell Daddy I thought what we’d done that night was wrong.”

There was bitter disbelief in Reeve’s eyes, cutting back then to the knife on the hood. “Your old man, he was a busy man,” Reeve says vacantly. “I knowed that. Him comin’ into camp late, leaving early, mostly. Pendarvis Mill was stackin’ a lot of lumber in them days. I was proud of my friend, Roland Pendarvis. I was proud one of the biggest lumber men in this part of the country thought enough of me to have me a member of his huntin’ camp. Him and the senator with all their big political buddies, and fellers like that. I didn’t have

nothin’. But I could fix what needed fixin’. I brung in more ‘an my share of the game. I butchered mine and ever body elses, if you remember right.”

Reeve waited for Pendarvis to nod in acknowledgement.

“I knowed how you loved the camp,” Reeve continued, “so, I was always glad to bring you on in, or let you come out late, when I come. Your daddy trusted me like that. It meant somethin’ to me. I’ll admit that, I reckon.

~19~

“He counted you among his life-long friends, Burl. You all were boys together. He did trust you.”

“At ain’t no reason fer trust, bein’ boys together. You trust Nolan Jr.?

“No,” Pendarvis answered reluctantly. “I don’t trust him, except to be who he is.”

Reeve seemed to see something at a great distance in the last of the light over the Gulf. “Your daddy had dozens of friends like me. Workin’ men totin’ the load. The more you was his friend, the more you’d want to tote fer him. There’s men like that. People just want to do fer ‘um. They want to be part of somethin’ that men bigger than their selves has made. I don’t know why that is, but there has always been some men over others. But like I say, I was made a member of the camp and that was important to me. It was more’n the good huntin’ woods. I could ah hunted up in the scrub there near Shell Mound with my Mama’s people. But that weren’t the same.”

Pendarvis had become impatient with the cold. “Burl, what was it you say got murdered? You had a point to make here. And I’m hoping it’s not a point you intend to make with that knife there,” he said, feigning good humor.

Reeve didn’t answer. He seemed to search the horizon, as if some black sail might appear across the chop of the steel gray water.

“Aren’t we talking about your pride here, Burl? You hold me to blame?”

Reeve turned to face Pendarvis squarely. “You the big time lawyer now, Mercer. You the man

with the brains and position. You tell me. I’m jus’ a dumb old redneck – a man made a joke fer life. You tell me!”

Pendarvis watched the knife. The tone in Reeve’s voice cautioned awareness, and a metallic taste traveled to the tip of his tongue. Pendarvis waited no longer to know Reeve’s intentions. “Look, Burl. You know as well as I do, you didn’t get me out here to kill me. You know it, and I know it. Now whatever all this agonizing is about, I’m sorry for you. I’m sorry I got caught up in all that happened – wanting my manly place among men, I suppose. If I’d truly been a man, I’d have put a stop to it myself. But I wasn’t. I was a boy then. But I’m man enough now to say, I’m sorry. I ask your forgiveness, Burl.”

Reeve looked up at Pendarvis with an eye as cold as the blue blade of the knife. “I’m ah fixin to give you somethin’ that I had fer you a long time, you privileged whelp.” The knife was suddenly in Reeve’s hand again.

Frozen in disbelief, Pendarvis waited within himself. The metallic taste trailed back along the edges of his dry tongue.

Reeve held the knife shakily while he reached with his other hand into a deep pocket of his jacket. A small notebook heavily bound vertically and horizontally with thick twine and boot string appeared in his hand. Reeve cut the bindings in the twilight to open the book before him, letting the knife fall to the crushed shells in the space between them.

Pendarvis waited with abject relief while Reeve fumbled through the gnarled pages.

~20~

“This here is what I want you to have and hold. This is all there ever ought to a been.” Between the lined pages were yellowed photographs, their scalloped edges bent or frayed. Each photograph included Pendarvis as a boy, and most included Burl Reeve nearby in the happiest days of that camp.

Pendarvis swallowed deeply, before attempting to speak.

Reeve raised a cautioning hand. He would not hear any more, nor would he speak again that night. He would return to his truck with a painful limp, an old injury stiffening in the cold.

Pendarvis waited, watching the distant tail lights of Reeve’s truck disappear behind the dark of the marsh grass.

Pendarvis retrieved the knife. A night bird rose beyond the palm shadows, screeching away into the wind. Pendarvis saw the flicker of Reeve’s truck lights once more. The lights reflected dimly upon the sand road where it climbed from the marsh back into the woodland. There the deer were feeding while the moon was rising. Pendarvis knew the trails the deer would follow back, deep into the slough before daylight. They were the trails Burl Reeve knew before him, the trails Reeve had taught him but would never hunt again.

~21~

~22~

RACHEL PERLA Key West Story

Rachel Perl was a busker – a street musician – with a big voice and a tiny brass band on Mallory Square. Three Hungarian brothers comprised the brass band.

They performed in newsboy hats and rolled their suspendered trousers above their limp socks and ankle boots for that Little Rascal effect. While working in the kitchens of one of those big cruise liners, the Balassi brothers jumped ship to make a life for themselves in the tropics. One played the trumpet, another trombone, the other a fugal horn, particularly suited to Rachel’s breezy melodies and jazzy solos.

Rachel was a young Quaker girl down from New England who looked Spanish or Portuguese, but wasn’t. She did speak Spanish, though she was of Romanian descent. A gypsy girl, maybe – I just thought of that. Anyway, somewhere up the line her parents had declared themselves Quakers, and so they were. And so she would be, a Quaker girl with large Spanish eyes and a big voice. She wore seashells in her thick, dark hair. And wore those peasant skirts made of gauzy batik, played anything with strings, and sang with the voice of an angel who smokes a little.

~23~

Sometimes she’d perform alone at night with an acoustic guitar down on Duval Street. She had a spot beyond the lights and blaring din of the open-air bars. This was down past the guy with the green iguanas and an albino python, there in a pool of streetlamp light where the sidewalk was good for spreading her sand. Her leather soled shoes made a scuffing sound over the sand in perfect percussion to the melodies she made. She was good. She was very good, and her buckaroo straw hat by the curb collected lots of greenbacks from the passersby. You could hear her perfectly well a block away and see sunburned tourists in clusters standing by, astounded that such amazing sounds could come from one so small.

Locals, too, were Rachel Perl fans. Among the more prominent Key Westers thrilled by Rachel’s big voice was a distinguished older man, a celebrated restaurateur and socialite, Bertrand Oliphant. Anybody that was anybody on the island knew Bertrand. And Bertrand knew about everybody, whether they were anybody or not.

In his time there, virtually all secrets in Key West came to Bertrand Oliphant. They were laid before him like lingerie by tawdry dancers from the clubs, or delivered in private soliloquies behind the slender, jeweled hands of the wealthiest women on the island. He was their confidant. The women depended on his advice in personal and social matters. The men, they talked business or politics with Bertrand down on the waterfront at his Blue Rendezvous, a popular restaurant and bar. Even the most astute and accomplished

of them were ceaselessly amazed by the breadth of Bertrand’s information and the depth of his business savvy. Along with local luminaries and the occasional celebrity in town, shopkeepers, sandal or soap makers, painters and street poets, hotel clerks, jewelers and snake handlers, even cops off duty might be included in the mix of his famous parties.

Bertrand was well regarded on the docks, too. Not the typical man’s man, Bertrand was nonetheless a top tier tournament fisherman. He owned one of the finest sport fishers in the A & B Marina where lines of the deep sea boats were moored outside the window of the Blue. He was also known to be every bit as congenial with the various crew members as he was with his ritzy competitors and their prized boat captains. Another thing to admire, Bertrand was absolutely immune to seasickness. The most seasoned salt might be green to the gills in stormy weather, while the diminutive Bertrand sat in his fighting chair, big sunglasses, white slacks and pink polo shirt, balancing a martini and vigorously gossiping above the gale.

It may have seemed that Bertrand was always drinking, but he was never drunk. He was always talking and he was always listening. Three other conversations around him would not escape his ear. Anyway, everyone sooner or later told Bertrand their secrets. And they knew, of course, that sooner or later he would reveal them. I suppose they didn’t care, really. Maybe that was because Bertrand had such a discreet and charming way of telling things. Maybe it was the way he’d make

~24~

even the most tasteless episode seem quite charming or adventurous, or at least eccentric in some fascinating way. It was a gift Bertrand possessed, really, this ability to illuminate the commonplace so that the secrets he told in his silken voice always seemed, as he put it, “Something woooonderfully special.”

So gossip was Bertrand’s stock and trade. It was a way of doing business. And there was a lot of business getting done in the Blue Rendezvous in those days. Not all of it his own. Some good music and literary deals had been inked there, alongside clandestine contraband deals. Saltwater cowboys rubbed elbows with international tourists, book editors, high-end antique dealers and art collectors. Oliphant knew them all as he mixed and mingled and made introductions. It was his business to know everyone else’s business as well as he knew his own. Bertrand may have talked slow in his syrupy, Louisianan style, but he was fast to tally his receipts each night to the penny. And he’d file a dozen or more profiles of patrons in his head, too, for further reference.

Connections? Bertrand Oliphant was most certainly connected. But what virtually nobody associated with him at the time was his best kept Key West secret. Bertrand Oliphant was a kingpin in the illegal immigrant trade.

So how did Rachel Perl connect? Well, as directly as Boca Chica just three miles

North on Highway 1 connects with Key West. At least twice a month, generally on the darkest of nights, Bertrand would step aside of the passersby on Duval and drop a twenty dollar bill in Rachel’s hat. Later at the second story apartment she shared with the Balassi brothers up Caroline Street, Rachel transcribed a series of neatly printed numbers from the twenty to a small note

pad. Deciphered, the sequence of numbers indicated an estimated time for arrival at an exact GPS coordinate off the coast of Cuba.

Just after midnight Rachel would drive her dented Volkswagen convertible up Highway 1. She’d stop for gas or coffee, something along the way to pay with the twenty. With that bill back into anonymous circulation, her destination was a weathered, nondescript boathouse down a shell road just North of Boca

Chica. Amazingly enough, the boathouse with its loft apartment stood in the moonlight across the dark mangroves from the Naval Air Station.

Here’s what was going down: a Cuban-American family, some wealthy patron or even a major league baseball scout (whoever came up with the cash) could “liberate” someone from Cuba at $10,000 a pop. The “rescue” occurred when an unlit speedboat slid quietly away from the boat house out the channel to open water. It then zoomed out of the Keys to cross the Florida Straits in less

~25~

time than it takes to commute from Jersey to New York City. A hundred thousand dollars in a single night was routine. Good money by any standard, and the consequences for getting caught were a lot less severe than other type of smuggling.

The take wasn’t all profit, though. Bribes had to be paid on the other end. Handlers, too. And then there was Redmond, Jack Redmond, daring and technically skilled enough to hone in on a small flotation beacon set in the pitch dark somewhere off the coast of Cuba. There the well-financed political refugees would soon be swooped on board before a Cuban patrol boat could close in. The black bow of the racer would rise, then the boat would pivot on its propeller and roar back to its U.S. destination undetected onto some dark stretch of beach back in the Keys.

Jack Redmond had never met Bertrand Oliphant who had been only an anonymous voice on the other end of a throw-away cell

phone. That’s how he’d been hired. That’s how he got assigned his digs off Boca Chica with the boat he was born to drive. So, Rachel Perl worked as a courier for Bertrand Oliphant, and she alone could connect the dots, though even she could connect them only so far.

The boat, for example. Neither she nor Redmond knew the origin of that. It wasn’t stolen as were most smuggling vessels. It wasn’t the typical center console, multi-engine, go-fast boats many smugglers prefer, either. Those were the ones routinely intercepted by Coast Guard and immigration officers. This boat – an 8-foot V hull, a sleek racer, covered from the bow back to the cockpit – was “loaned” for a bundle of cash. Oliphant handled that himself from a safe in his office at the Blue Rendezvous. He’d also had the boat outfitted with a defused lighting system and special paint scheme to camouflage it with the night. Not just any night, but exactly the night it was running.

~26~

Its twin Mercedes engines with a combined 1000 horsepower would hurl her at speeds exceeding 90 knots over calm seas. Even in a heavy chop she’d push 60. But of course, should the vessel be intercepted or wrecked, it would immediately be reported as stolen and an insurance claim filed by the shocked, shylock owner, a business executive up in Miami.

There was something else about the boat that Bertrand himself didn’t know. Rachel Perl could drive that roaring racer as well as Redmond. She was fearless and not reckless, though she’d push the high-powered craft to maximum speeds without running lights into the Cuban waters. Jack Redmond had taught Rachael to drive. She’d won his confidence and talked her way into the ride. Early on, Rachel pleaded her way in on humanitarian grounds, rather than some cold mercenary cause. It wasn’t about money, she said. It was about freedom. It was about her Quaker upbringing. It was about la libertad. And there was this, too. Hundreds were still fleeing Cuba monthly, paying as much to less scrupulous smugglers. Some were skittish and callously sent their human cargo overboard at the first alarm of an interception. Others never intended passage for their charges at all.

Having persuaded Redmond over time that she ought to “fly” with him as crew, Redmond let her ride. She proved herself on her first crossing by settling their frightened passengers and organizing them quickly and comfortably, securing them rapidly in a forward compartment while Redmond was already racing back.

There could easily have been another ten or more crammed in and packed like sardines. Some greedy boats with lesser capacity had reportedly skulked away with as many as thirty desperate souls. Ten, not more than twelve if children were aboard, were all Redmond would permit before he’d turn north and ram the throttle down. Then the spoken prayers of frantic fathers, the cries of children or sudden shrieks of sisters and mothers would be lost to the piercing whine of those powerful engines spreading a broad, frothy wake back to Florida in the dark.

By midpoint, Rachel would be standing in the cockpit. Redmond liked her. More importantly, he trusted her. She was pretty and smart and brave. He was older, deeply scarred and enamored of her wholehearted innocence. That wasn’t something he wanted to violate anyway. In fact, her innocence was something he devoutly protected, as if he were by her purity of heart shielded and might somehow win for himself a measure of redemption for past sins.

Back in Key West, Bernard Oliphant had walked his prancing pair of corgi dogs on the shady side of Whitehead Street. Sometimes he’d wear an Olympic style warm-up suit, blue with red piping and USA emblazoned on the jacket. With that he coupled a Saints ball cap, New Orleans being his “hometown.” Or if hurried, as he was on this morning, he’d walk “the girls” in his long, luxurious bathrobe and the old Panama with the cockeyed brim from a hat rack in his foyer. Either way, he was faithful to the morning regimen with the little dogs

~27~

dancing about the crepe soles of his Italian-made walking shoes.

On this particular morning, Bertrand was impatient with his girls. He had been walking with one of his cell phones in hand, and scanned its vacant face several times for any indication of an incoming call. The dogs sniffed and fidgeted at a wrought iron gate. Oliphant scolded in a sweet, syrupy voice laced with Old South idiom and expressions. “Now see he’ah, my sweets, your priss-butts are about to be food for the crows if you don’t get along back to the house.” As if they’d understood, the dogs were off again with Bertrand leaning back in tow.

They’d reached the latched gate before the grand old house Bertrand had been restoring for as many years as he’d lived in Key West. The tall Victorian structure stood in a narrow yard crowded by tropical plants. It was listed on the National Register of historic homes, although his unapproved renovations had modernized its interior extravagantly. When he was at the front steps, the phone began to buzz in his hand. Bertrand scurried the girls through the massive front door. While they dragged their leash over the polished oak floor inside, he answered, anchoring himself on the brick steps.

“Yes?”

A muffled voice spoke. “My friend needs a ticket.” There were commuter train noises in the background.

“Yes, of course.”

“He is a very special friend, and must have a private box.”

“I see. But, of course, that is expensive, the entire box for one friend.”

“There will be three, his mother and girlfriend, also. No more.”

“Very well, then. You have always been most generous to your friends. The entire box though, it is … expensive.”

“I know the number,” the voice said tersely into Bertrand’s ear.

“Of course.” Bertrand replied softly. “When may I expect your instructions?”

There was a long pause. The train could be heard clacking. “Immediately,” he said. The phone went silent.

Bertrand looked up as a man crossed the street toward him with a brown bag of groceries. A pineapple and celery stalks were visible above the serrated top of the bag. Deep inside would be a bundle with $20,000 in crisp one hundred dollar bills. There would also be names and contact information typed and printed neatly from an electronic typewriter.

As Bertrand received the groceries, a man on the commuter train into Boston watched out the grimy window. A gray cat walked in the gray Jersey morning along a heavily insulated pipe outside an abandoned factory looming from the cityscape flashing past. He remembered another cat, a white one walking out on the white parapet with the

~28~

blue of Havana’s bay behind her. That was at the rooftop bar he frequented for mojitos and conversation with Pedro. Pedro had tended bar there since before the revolution. He came to talk about baseball with him. More particularly to talk about Pedro’s grandson, Seve Acosta, the best pitcher in Cuba, maybe the best in the world, Pedro proudly insisted.

The man on the train smiled faintly to recollect how cautiously Pedro had talked of big league opportunities in the U.S. Despite his Canadian passport, the conversation had been slow to develop. It could be dangerous talking to this man, this Canadian “fertilizer salesman,” whom he already suspected to be a professional baseball scout. This man, his new friend, what did he really know about big league contracts in the United States, about secret bank accounts in the Bahamas? This capitalist and Yankee lies, as Fidel called them. Better to be cautious, Pedro told himself. But soon he would be talking about his grandson again. “The greatest pitcher in all Cuba. Maybe ever.”

The train had lurched to a stop at Boston’s North Station. He got off and when he was on the river walk down by the Longfellow Bridge, he let the cell phone he’d used on the train drop from his hand to the dark waters of the Charles below.

Back in Key West, the kitchen of Bertrand’s home on Whitehead Street was finished now, its more prominent appointments being a vintage copper awnings over the stove and spacious, shiny black granite countertops. This is where Elle Rousseau, his housekeeper and personal assistant, was making coffee

in a French press. She was an older Creole woman. Tall and slender, she looked half her years, though she was older by half than Oliphant. It was her personal style to wear colorful silk scarves done up in a turban-like fashion. Her skin was dark and her eyes green, bright as freshly washed olives. Her features were refined and her movements purposeful, graceful as those of a dancer now fallen from grace with the stage lights.

Bertrand set the grocery bag on the granite counter. With no need for specific instruction, Elle retrieved the package of bills and counted them out across the kitchen table in an alcove overlooking a side garden of palms, colorful bromeliads, succulents and orchids

“So, ten this trip?” she asked.

“No, three,” Bertrand answered pensively, scrutinizing the names and contact information through half-lenses set low upon his hawk-like nose. “He’s bought the whole box. This, my dear, must be a major leaguer par excellence. ”

“Abuelita is on the 6:30 flight tonight for Havana.”

“Yes, that will be perfect.” Bertrand poured a cup of strong coffee and sweetened it with a praline creamer.

At this time, Cuban-American families were permitted to visit relatives remaining in Cuba. Four charter flights took take off from Miami daily. Forty minutes later, they landed in Havana. The excited passengers

~29~

applauded on landing and eagerly gathered up their bundles of gifts that ranged from perfumes to toilet seats, brake pads or boxes of chocolates. Many brought cash. The U.S Treasury Department estimated even then that millions of dollars a year were making it into Cuba from the U.S. About half of that was being carried by couriers, mules – mulas – as they were called. Bertrand had been using the same mula for seven years to ferry his cash and encrypted information to the island. Elle Rousseau called her Abuelita, or little grandmother. And she was just that: a petite, apparently fragile woman bent and stooped by her years. Her caramel skin had wrinkled darkly, yet she was spry and had eyes innocent as those of a child. Moreover, she was absolutely expert at her craft as a courier, and so disarming as to have Cuban customs officials carrying her packages and expediting her way through the terminal.

Later that same day she would be greeted in Havana by her nephew, “Ramon” and the ’58

Olds he drove as a taxi. Within thirty minutes of clearing the blue barriers outside the terminal doors, Ramon would have Abuelita deep within the maze of narrow streets that riddle la Habana Vieja, Old Havana.

Typically, Bertrand Oliphant required $2,000 paid up front in Cuba. This took care of his expenses and associates there. The balance would be paid per delivered passenger by their various sponsors. Other smugglers might expect payment in full, $8,000 to $10,000 per passenger before their stolen fast-boat ever launched. This was a special client. This one had done lots of business with Bertrand. They weren’t all talented athletes looking for lucrative sports deals in the U.S. As many or more were family members or loved ones sent for so as to protect those major deals from poor performance due to homesickness or the lovesick blues.

Bertrand operated exclusively with Ramon as his arranger and transporter. The fewer

~30~

involved the better. It was he who received his manifest and bankroll directly from Abuelita. She had separated out her own cut within minutes of meeting Elle Rousseau in a busy stall small market in Little Havana up in Miami. It was Ramon then who contacted the potential passengers. It was he who instructed them in their flight.

On this day his explicit instruction was for Seve Acosta to wear a red T-shirt and white trousers. Mariela, his girlfriend, was to wait at a different location with his mother. She was to wear a white blouse and red skirt, the older woman the opposite. This way they could be observed with certainty long enough to satisfy Ramon that they were not being watched. They would walk arm in arm, as if coming from the Catedral de San Cristóbal where they might have been lighting candles together. As they neared Ramon’s Olds he would ask, “Are you going to the party? If the answer was, “Yes,” then the coast was clear and they got in. If the answer was to a question Ramon had not asked, or the answer to his question was “No,” then there was suspicion of surveillance by the Cuban authorities.

On this night of passage, everything had gone smoothly. Ramon made good time out the coast road. They came to a turnout into a small grove of palms and low, windswept scrub oaks. Ramon parked off the pavement and got out pulling on a small back pack like a student might use for a book bag. He’d parked in plain sight from the road and quickly lifted his hood and removed a spark plug wire. He left the hood up and hurried his passengers down a long sandy path through the preserve

to the beach, where northward the scattered lights of the Florida Keys danced over the dark water just beyond the horizon.

They did not know yet, but the sleek profile of an exceedingly fast speed boat was going quietly out with the tide in a creek above Boca Chica. Rachel Perl was entering the GPS coordinates she’d decoded from Bertrand’s twenty dollar bill. Jack Redmond was accelerating steadily in the night out toward the Florida Straits. The moon was brighter than he preferred, but Redmond had adjusted his defused lighting system to work with the boat’s special paint scheme for camouflaging with the prevailing conditions. Rachel took up a satellite phone and watched its face light up with florescent green insignia and numerals.

A little over 90 miles away the satellite phone Ramon had extracted from his backpack lit up exactly the same. He stood out in the sea oats above the beach and began to dial. A sea bird lifted on the breeze. It squawked away into the powdery blue night, flying low over the surf lapping all along the sandy strand of Cayo Baracoa.

“No estamos aquí,” Ramon said urgently. “We are not here!” This of course was the opposite of the truth and a tactical method of response to be carried out in the operation. Interception of the satellite phone communications by security operations on either side of the Straits would be difficult but possible. The sat phones Bertrand had earlier deployed were programmed with extra layers of cipher software, rendering

~31~

an eventual decoding (however rapid) not to be in real-time. Minutes in intermission and seconds in his operations could make for the success of the “rescue.”

Down through the sea oats behind the dune on which he had stood to make his call, Ramon located an inflatable life raft buried in the sand. He brought it back up and knelt to release the inflating mechanism. The raft had never failed him and when fully inflated, he sat on its tightly-rounded gunnel and watched the moon over the dark water. He kept an eye, too, on the small thatch of palms where Seve Acosta, the already famous young Cuban baseball pitcher, huddled with his frightened girlfriend and mother who clutched the crucifix she wore round her neck. Ramon patted the inflated gunnel with confidence and waited.

There was something, someone else Ramon was counting on. The father of a childhood friend, Capitán Osvaldo, was an officer in the La Guarda Frontera, the Cuban coastal guard that patrolled the waters out of which Ramon operated. Even at an early age Ramon had known that this man was on the take. The exterior of his home in the Miramar district appeared as dilapidated as the rest in the once prestigious neighborhood, where now the fading pastel facades streaked by rust stains lined the still shaded avenues. Inside, however, there were always new furnishings – appliances, televisions and stereo equipment that was continually upgraded over the years.

Ramon, naturally adept and a quick study of technologies, had established a promising rapport with the officer. He’d exploited that

further when recruited into Bertrand’s network that had developed to a cash drop of $1000 U.S. per rescue. Osvaldo knew only a particular sector from which he was to divert any patrol for a one hour window. This he had accomplished easily enough by directing that radio communications had been received about suspect activity in the opposite direction. This information would be authentic (though the call was not), as a confidential informant would make the call from a public phone somewhere in the area. Osvaldo knew the call was bogus, but he had his explanation, his alibi if needed. What he didn’t have by this time (and did not bother to tell Ramon), was direct contact with Guarda marine patrols in that sector. In fact, he’d recently been promoted and reassigned to a desk from which his direct communication with the patrols could not – without raising serious issues within the command structure – occur.

So on their recent encounter, Osvaldo had sat on the edge of his bed in his sleeveless undershirt and counted out the cash Ramon offered. He took the money with a shrug and his usual disclaimer that he would do what he could. Osvaldo simply neglected to say that what he could do was nothing.

The fact was that three of Bertrand’s missions had taken place since Osvaldo’s absence of any authority in commanding the patrol boats. All three had, even if narrowly, avoided by happenstance and good fortune the boat on patrol. Capitan Osvaldo was now taking the money and leaving the rest to “Señora Suerte.”

~32~

But Lady Luck would not hold this night. Though the sea was smooth as a quiet lake, the speeding boat ran roughly in extended fits. Redmond had Rachel at the wheel while he lifted a floor panel to examine one of the erratic engines. An adjustment to the fuel filter seemed to have fixed the problem. He settled back into the passenger seat and took up the satellite phone. According to the GPS calculations, they were about 30 minutes out from their pick-up point. Time to have Ramon position his passengers and set the beacon mounted on an inflatable flotation device in his backpack.

Ramon’s sat phone began to flash in dim, lime-colored flickers that silently announced an incoming call. He didn’t have to answer it. He knew what the call within that time frame signaled. If there was no immediate redial, then everything was on “go” with no need for risky voice communication with the oncoming craft.

Ramon raced down the sand dune with the raft sliding behind him. In stage whispers he instructed the three passengers to take up the raft and hurry to the light surf down the beach. They were soon wet to their waist and the women were helped into the raft before Seve and Ramon wedged in. The men took up the small aluminum paddles and dug deeply to propel the heavy raft another 30 yards offshore. That location would be sufficient for the arriving boat’s draft, but the depth must be maintained. Ramon tossed out a sea anchor to help. He set the beacon at exactly ten minutes from the estimated time of arrival and let the buoy carrying the honing device drift the

length of 20 feet from the raft before setting its anchor.

The speeding boat would be coming in fast and furiously, he cautioned the other three. There would be limited light by which to see. The driver would target the honing device and attempt to bring the fast boat broadside the raft in its turn. That is when each must spring from a step on the raft’s broad gunnel to one along the speed boat’s cockpit. Seve would go first and then reach back for the mother and then the girlfriend. By the time her shoe touched upon the fiber glass gunnel of the speedboat, it would be off again. And if all went well, each would be aboard in a continuous motion of turning and acceleration.

The night was warm, but all four in the raft were already shivering in the sea breeze when the first rumbling of diesel engines was heard. Ramon’s heart went to his throat. These were marine engines to be sure, but their faint sound came from around the far eastern point rather than out at sea in the direction of the Florida Keys. Then all was quiet again. He had everyone lay low in the raft lest they be observed by someone on watch with night goggles.

Once Ramon peered out toward the point, thinking that he’d seen movement – some jagged black object lifting on the purple sea beyond the silhouette of palms above the jetty. He had returned the sat phone to his hand. He could still wave Redmond off, he thought. But then there was the sound of the speeding boat approaching from the north, a

~33~

throaty screaming sound that began to fill the night sky although the boat remained invisible to the naked eye until it was merely feet away. Ramon had to trust Redmond’s boat driving skills and the accuracy of his reading on the homing device. “No problema,” he said to the others.

Then a spotlight flashed in a long searching beam, reaching near in the misty dark before the bobbing raft. The rapidly approaching speed boat was suddenly discernible and throwing a broad spray as it slid into its turn on the homing buoy. There would be time, but each foot must fall precisely, rapidly without hesitancy or loss of balance. The athletic Seve was over and into the escape boat before Rachel could steady herself to reach for him. He then reached back for his mother who was teetering on the gunnel momentarily, but then lunging out bravely for her son to haul her down to the floor of the cockpit.

By the time Ramon had the girlfriend positioned to leap, a second searchlight appeared ahead and the hollow, muffled voice of someone shouting instructions over a loudspeaker reverberated around the raft. Interception was imminent and inescapable unless Redmond rammed the throttle forward at once and ran a sharp westerly maneuver to outflank the Guarda boats

moving in fast. Rachel, seeing Ramon had no chance of escape, called to him and frantically waved him aboard, too. He made it by his fingertips as Rachel and Seve pulled him up by his belt loops and shoelaces into the now racing boat.

Ramon had no intention of fleeing with the rest to the U.S. It would be his dream to do so, but not yet. To get away from the Guarda, that was what urged his leap aboard. So by the time the racing boat had run parallel along the shore to west a quarter mile, he acknowledged

his intent to Rachel with a smile. In two bounding steps he leaped high as Rachel sprang up to stop him. They both went over. The screaming of the others was barely perceptible from that of the engines as Redmond roared out in a northbound arch.

When Seve was at his shoulder gesturing wildly, Redmond, confused, searched behind him for the problem without letting up on his full-throttled escape.

The Guarda boats were far distant in his wake. Then he saw that Ramon was not to be counted among the recued. Where was Rachel? He waivered for a second, then regained his focus and reminded himself that he had cautioned Rachel that purpose must be kept foremost should such a circumstance occur with either of them. It was in fact among the most important reasons that he

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had taught her to drive and perform general mechanics on the boat. He reminded himself of these things, but felt no better for it. Redmond abruptly motioned the refugees down into the forward cabin, where there were blankets, bottled water and thermoses of warm soup. This wasn’t over yet and he knew it.

The Guarda and the U.S. Coast Guard were communicating now, the Cubans having found it much more expedient and successful to cooperate with better equipped American vessels in interdiction. Since the Clinton administration, the U.S. had stopped admitting people found at sea. So the so-called “wet foot, dry foot” policy was in effect. Redmond knew his mission was not complete until the three below deck made it to a U.S. shore for a chance to remain in the country and later qualify for expedited “legal permanent resident” status and eventually U.S. citizenship. Absent a “dry foot,” the refugees would be returned to Cuba anyway. He would be arrested and the boat impounded. The politics of all this only sickened him more, while imploding thoughts of Rachel Perl echoed like drumfire in his brain. He made a code call by sat phone to Bertrand.

Redmond was correct to expect U.S. authorities to be positioning for his return. He altered his course so significantly, though, that the helicopter and two cruisers on alert never found him in the rising wake of the sea that night. He was beneath their radar and cruising like a bullet on an emergency tank of gas when he knew the end of the wild ride was near. He’d take no chance of a tackle now by U.S. authorities before reaching the shore. At about

Marathon, he turned in abruptly and shouted down for the refugees to steady themselves. Minutes later he was plowing through the shallows, gulls scattering frantically ahead as he rammed the boat up on the beach, its keel a foot deep in the Florida sand.

An hour later the three Cubans were in a blue Mercedes convertible being driven up U.S. 1 to Miami by Elle Rousseau. The boat on the beach was reduced to a charred heap of molten metal and fiberglass, its owner already preparing to report it stolen and file his insurance claim. Redmond called an old friend who wasn’t mad at him anymore, and she drove down from Key Largo to pick him up.

As for Rachel Perl, some months later a British couple came into Bertrand Oliphant’s Blue Rendezvous. They’d been vacationing in Havana and now Key West by way of the Bahamas. While regaling their adventures to some customers gathered about, they spoke of a remarkable phenomenon along Havana’s famed seawall, the Malecon, where they’d seen a busker, a young woman performing with a battered guitar. There on the promenade she’d spread her sand. Her leather-soled shoes, they said, made a scuffing sound in perfect percussion to the melodies she made. She was good, they said. She was very good, and her peasant’s straw hat collected lots of coins from the passersby. You could hear her perfectly well, they insisted, from blocks away. People assembled in clusters where she sang and danced, astounded that such amazing sounds could come from one so small.

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