Benchley, Peter (6 page)

“What is it?” said Sanders.

“The bones of a piece of eight, ancestor of the bloody dollar.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Look.” Treece held the two halves of the lump to the light. In the black mass, Sanders saw the faint imprint of a cross, a castle, and a rampant lion. “That was once a silver coin. When it hit the briny, it began to oxidize.

Then it

became silver sulfide. That’s all that’s left, a shadow. Silver does that, unless there’s a heap of it, or it lies up against iron. Then it’s preserved pretty well.”

“You mean a

Spanish

piece of eight?” said Gail. “It can’t be.”

“It is that, girl. Eight silver reals, as common as a shilling in those days.”

Gail said, “It was worth a dollar?”

“No. What I meant was that it’s from the piece of eight that the dollar sign came. Look here.”

Treece spread the dust from the black lump and drew in it with his finger. “Spanish accountants used to register pieces of eight like this: a P next to an 8. That got to be a burden, so they shortened it like this.” He drew an 8 and a P together, rubbed out a few lines, and was left with: ..

“How old is it?” asked Gail.

“I don’t know. I couldn’t read the date. A couple of hundred years, anyway.”

“It can’t be!”

Treece laughed. “Do tell,” he said

tolerantly. “Where did you find it?”

Gail said, “We found it on

Goliath.”

“Not possible.” Treece paused, then said quietly,

“Goliath

went bubbles in 1943. She was carrying no Spanish coins.”

“Well, that’s where we found it. David did. In the rocks.”

“Ah well,” Treece said. “You do find them now and again. Sometimes they even kick up in the surf.”

“Could there be more?” Gail asked.

“Aye.” Treece smiled. “And beneath that could be Atlantis. You found one coin-not even a coin, a skeleton of one. Imagine: Suppose there was an earthquake right now that broke off this bloody cliff and plunged us into the sea. And suppose three hundred years from now some divers come across the wreckage, and the first thing they find is a penny that spilled out of my pocket. Now, they’d be fools to conclude that they’d come upon the treasure hoard of some Bermuda panjandrum.”

Sanders said, “But there

could

be more.”

“Possible, aye, I won’t deny it. There’s more mysteries hidden by the sea than you or I can fathom, and once in a while she unravels one, in her own time. But usually she just teases you, gives you trinkets to keep you interested. Then she spits in your eye.”

“I read somewhere about a kid who was walking in the sand and scuffed up a fifty-thousand-dollar gold chain.”

Treece nodded. “It happens. But if you wait around for it to happen to you, you’ll go mad.”

“Should we look for more coins tomorrow?” Gail asked.

“No. You wouldn’t recognize them if they fell on yonr foot. Don’t go picldng up every Christ lump of black rock you see.”

Treece led the Sanderses out the back door and around to the front of the house. The dog followed, sniffing and wagging her tail.

“How will we get in touch with you?” Sanders said.

“As you did today. A long ride it may be, but it keeps visitors infrequent and sincere. In an emergency, you could ring my cousin Kevin.”

“Not Kevin’s Lunch. We stopped for

directions.”

A hint of displeasure must have shown on Sanders’

face, for Treece laughed and said, “How much did they cost you?”

“Ten dollars.”

“He is some kind of mercenary bastard, Kevin is.

He’s all right, but if there’s a way to suck money from dirt, he’ll find it.”

Gail said, “He seemed very … protective of you.”

“He is. Most folks here are. It’s a tradition.”

“To protect you?”

“To shield whichever one of us Treeces is keeping the light. When the bloody bastards dumped us here as slaves in the eighteenth century, they put a sheriff and a band of thugs in charge of keeping us in line. But we didn’t take well to slavery, and after a bit we scalped the sheriff and threw him and his lot to the fish. Then they jolly well let us be.

We set our own order. A Treece was elected chief, for two reasons: We were always bigger than anybody else, and there were more Treeces around than anybody else, so we always had ample blood kin to help put down any dust-ups. It’s been this way for over a century.”

“You’re the chief now?” Gail said.

“In a way. The job doesn’t amount to much. I arbitrate disputes, and I deal with the Bermudians whenever we have something to deal with them about, which is blessedly seldom. And I keep the light, which is the only part of the job that pays. But it’s not a bad job, especially in the years before you take it. It’s like being the bloody Prince of Wales. When my father was alive, the Islanders paid for

my education in England. There’s a feeling that the chief should be educated. I don’t know why: a degree isn’t much help in thumping a rascal or returning a fellow’s stolen goat.”

“There is crime here, then,” said Gail. “We were warned not to stay after dark.”

“Not to speak of, at least not among St. David’s people. But the warning has merit: Off-islanders are fair game.”

“And when you retire,” Gail said, “your son takes over?”

“He would,” Treece said evenly, “if I had a son.”

The flatness of Treece’s tone embarrassed Gail. Sanders noticed her discomfort, and he said, “We’ll leave the ampule with you?”

“I would,” Treece said. “Nobody’d be fool enough to come in here after it, and it’s for sure no dizzy bugger’s going to knock me down and try to rifle my pockets.” He moved to the gate. “Be sure you want to do this. You’re on holiday. There’s no reason for you to muck about with this if you’d rather not.”

“What could happen?” Gail asked.

“I imagine nothing. But you’re never sure what people will do when they smell money. Especially some of the black bastards around here.”

Treece noticed that Gail started at the words “black bastards” and he said, “Racist.

Prejudiced bugger. Fascist. No. I have no prejudice. But I do have my biases. And my reasons. The blacks on Bermuda have ample to complain about, and they do ample complaining. But they’ve got a way to go before they earn my respect.”

“But you can’t-was

“Come on,” Sanders said, cutting her off. “Let’s not turn this into a symposium on ethnic attitudes.” He said to Treece, “See you tomorrow.”

“Good.” Treece opened the gate for them and shut it after them. As soon as the gate was closed, the dog reared up on her hind legs, put her front paws on the fence, and began snarling and barking.

Treece laughed. “You’re tourists again.”

They walked their motorbikes down the hill toward the road in front of the lighthouse.

“We

should

be sure we want to do this,” Gail said.

“I’m

sure. What an opportunity to

do

something. I’m sick of reading about what other people have done or writing about other people’s good times. You can’t live your whole life vicariously. It’s like masturbating from cradle to grave. Anyway, all we’ve agreed to do is dive tomorrow, which we want to do anyway, and see what’s there. If we find anything-then we can worry about what to do next. But I’m not walking away from this before we know more.”

When David Sanders was seventeen, a junior in high school, his English class had been assigned Walden.

Most of Sanders’ classmates found the book dull and lifeless, a collection of maxims to be underlined, memorized, regurgitated on an exam

paper, and forgotten.

But Sanders had found Thoreau’s attitudes toward life so inspiring that he had two plaques made.

One said, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”; the other:

“… I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” Though they had chipped and faded with time, the plaques still hung over his desk.

When he was a junior in college, Sanders went to a lecture by Jacques-Yves Cousteau, and by the end of the evening he knew that Cousteau’s was the life he wanted to live. He wrote letters to Cousteau (none was ever answered) and drove two hundred miles or more to hear Cousteau lecture and see one of his films. Once, after a lecture, he had spoken to Cousteau, who told him-graciously but firmly-that there were hundreds of applicants for positions aboard the

Calypso

and that unless Sanders had credentials as a marine scientist or underwater photographer, he had no chance of being considered.

Immediately after graduating, Sanders entered the Army’s six-month program. When his active duty was over, he married the girl he had been dating since his sophomore year. He didn’t particularly want to get married, but, now that it was obvious that he would have to seek routine employment, Sanders thought of marriage as an adventure: at least it was something he had never done before.

David and Gloria moved to Washington. The romance of Camelot was in full flower, and David fancied himself in the Kennedy style. He swam, sailed, played touch football. He even brought with him a letter of recommendation from one of his history professors who had been a classmate of JFK’S at Harvard. He thought he might become a

speech writer-junior, of course-sitting at Ted Soren-son’s right hand, writing quips for the Leader of the Free World. He was advised that the best way to get into the government was to take the Foreign Service examination. He passed the written exam but failed the orals. He never knew why he had failed, but he guessed that one of the examiners had disapproved when he responded to a question about his outside interests by saying, “Scuba diving and killer whales.”

A letter from a friend of his father’s got him a job at the National Geographic.

After a year of writing captions-chafing at the sight of full-time writers returning, tanned and leathery, from exotic assignments-he asked his boss how long it would take him to become a staff writer. He was told there was no guarantee he would ever

become a staff writer. The best way to demonstrate his talent to the editors, said his boss, was for him to write a free-lance piece for the magazine.

He quit his job and began to deluge the editors with one-paragraph story ideas about far-off places, but he soon discovered that before the editors would consider assigning a piece, they wanted an outline so extensive and so detailed that only someone intimately familiar with the place in question could prepare the outline. Sanders had never been west of the Mississippi, and the only place he had visited outside the continental United States was St.

Croix. He started to work on a novel. He had written nearly twenty pages when Gloria announced that-despite the diligent use of every birth-control device known to science except abstinence-she was pregnant.

Sanders first considered Wall Street during a glum, drunken evening with a college classmate.

The bull market of the mid-sixties was just beginning, and Sanders’ classmate was making thirty thousand a year for doing, by his own admission, practically nothing. Certainly, Sanders reasoned, he was no less qualified than his classmate, and he found a roguish appeal in the stories about the young “gun slingers” on the Street. He moved to New York, rented an apartment in the East Seventies, read a few books, made a few contacts, and found a job-all in less than a month.

To his surprise, Sanders liked the work. It was easy and exciting and remunerative. He was gregarious, liked to take chances with money, and his early successes (accomplished simply by following the advice of more experienced brokers) brought him as many clients as he chose to service. He was bright enough to realize that though the Dow might hit the fabulous 1,000 mark, something would eventually happen to bring the market down, so he learned about hedge funds and selling short. The slide that began in 1968 made him, on paper, reasonably well off.

He took himself off salary and became a “customer’s man,” surviving solely on commissions received from buying and selling stocks for his clients. He was very good at his job (he believed he had a special gift for sensing impending changes in the market, and he relished taking risks based on hunches), and three rival firms tried to hire him at handsome salaries. He refused, preferring the unpredictable life of the customer’s man. The fact that he never knew, from one month to the next, how much money he would make, excited him.

He viewed it as freedom. If he

failed to make a living, he had no one to blame but himself. If (as was the case) he succeeded, there was no one with whom he had to share credit.

His wife, Gloria, however, regarded this freedom, this so-called courage, as madness. She was an orderly person who did not take chances, who liked to know exactly how much money would be in each of the envelopes she kept in a file drawer labeled “budget.” There was envelopes for food, clothing, toys, entertainment, and schoolbooks.

By 1971, Sanders had two children, a co-operative apartment on West Sixty-seventh Street, and a house in Westhampton. He knew he should have been a happy man, but he was bored. Gloria bored him. She was interested in, and knowledgeable about, only two things: clothes and food. Their sex life had become routine and predictable. Gloria professed a fondness for sex, but she refused to discuss-let alone attempt-ways of making it more interesting. Sanders found himself, during love-making, fantasizing about movie stars, secretaries, and Billie Jean King.

Soon his work began to bore him. He had proved to himself that he could make money in every kind of market, and he enjoyed both the making and the spending of money.

But the challenge was gone. He grew restless and began to do careless things.

He still dreamed, from time to time, of working with Cousteau.

He kept himself in excellent physical condition, as if in anticipation of a phone call from Cousteau.

But he was not satisfied with fine-tuning his body: he liked to test it. Once, he intentionally gained ten pounds, to see if,