Buzzard Bay (18 page)

“Good,” she thought, “maybe I can keep this stud to myself all day.”

“Fucking bitch,” Grundman thought. She sounded half-asleep, probably still in bed. He sniffed a little coke just to clear the cobwebs then went down to eat. After that, he sat on the beach watching the bikinis walk by. He took another little sniff of coke; “I could live in a place like this,” he thought.

THIRTEEN

I
CLIMB OUT OF
bed and look out the hotel window. It is another balmy beautiful Florida morning. People are walking down the street in shorts, and a light breeze fans the palm trees. It is hard to believe that just a few days ago I almost froze to death. I head into the bathroom and look in the mirror. The bruises on my body are fading fast; only the very worst of them still remain visible.

“How will I disguise myself?” I ask, looking in the mirror.

“Some hair dye?” I decide not to shave; a tan would do wonders if I have the time.

Right now, I have priorities: get money from July’s account, do some shopping, and try to get hold of Arthur in Nassau. At least I hope he is in Nassau; I take a chance and phone the airport where he usually places himself early in the morning looking for a fare he’d take into town in his old car.

The lady who answers the phone tells me, “No problem,” so I hold my breath but am pleased to hear Arthur’s voice come onto the line. He is apprehensive at first until he is sure it is me.

“How’s Rikker and July?” I ask. This is of the utmost in my mind now.

“I saw them last night,” Arthur tells me. “We are trying to move them. Andros is too small to hide them for long.”

“Where will they go? I want to know.

“Friends of mine are to arrange something. I had to come back last night. I’m sure I’m being watched.”

“Okay,” I tell him, “I’m in Miami, but I’m sure they’re watching me too. Is there any way I can get there?”

Arthur said he would look into it for me, and we made arrangements to phone each other two mornings from now.

I have two days to kill. I decide to work on my tan and get some hair dye. Other than that, the salt water of the ocean should help heal my wounds. I head for the beach that afternoon. I lay in the sand, my mind floating back to the events that had brought me here.

It was always the same story from Tom Newton; the funding was imminent, just a few more days. How many days could they wait before they continued on with their own lives? This was discussed often (too often as far as Bob was concerned) among the group. Bob was fortunate in a sad sort of way. He kept busy getting ready for his farm auction which the bank had ordered, but the Shonavons and the Drinkwaters, they had placed their whole future on this project.

Bill Shonavon had sold off some of his equipment and expected to move the rest to the Bahamas. Tom had told him he would buy this equipment for the project. So Bill had not tried to land local contracts as he usually did each year.

The Drinkwaters were in a similar situation. Neither had shown much sympathy for Bob and July in their plight, but now that they were in the same boat; they seemed to seek sympathy and a shoulder to lean on from Bob.

July knew what Bob was going through in Canada and was glad she wasn’t there. She had found more work in Florida.

“Bob,” she told him, “After the sale, let’s get away from all that. You can find something to do here, and we’ll go from there.”

he realized it was hard on Bob. He’d had two hard hits, one after the other. A lot of people would be down and out. She knew Bob was depressed, but he was resilient. She’d have to help him though; she planned on returning home shortly to be with him. He needed her right now, and that was the most important thing—that they saw this through together.

As the days went, by it became more and more evident that Tom had led them down the garden path. It seemed that everyone in the group wanted to unburden their problems on Bob’s shoulders. With his own problems and theirs, the load was very heavy indeed.

Two days before the sale, the phone rang, waking Bob up from a troubled sleep. He looked at the clock; it was 5:00 a.m.

“Some damn fool early bird wanting to know what shape the machinery is in,” he thought. He’d received hundreds of such calls at all hours the last few weeks.

“Bob, this is Tom.” He didn’t wait for Bob to answer. “We’ve been funded. I need you on-site by tomorrow.”

Bob’s mind instantly snapped into focus. “You say the money came to fund the project?”

“Yes,” Tom answered.

“You know what we told you, Tom. We’re not spending another cent of our own money on this thing.”

“I know,” said Tom, “there’ll be airplane tickets issued in your name waiting at the airport. There will be funds available to you at your bank this morning when it opens.”

Bob was stunned. “My farm auction is the day after tomorrow, Tom, can’t I wait till after that?”

“I’m bringing down five people. If you can’t come, I’ll get someone else.”

“No, no, that’s all right.” The excitement was beginning to show in Bob’s voice.

“I can be there. I’d just as soon not be here to watch my stuff sold anyway.”

“Okay, Bob, Bill’s coming too. I’ll meet you both at the airport in Nassau.”

“Dale Drinkwater’s not going?” Bob asked.

“Yes,” Tom told him. “He’ll be there in a few days. He’s picking up some stuff we need.” Tom hung up, leaving Bob sitting on the edge of the bed thinking of a hundred other questions he should have asked.

It didn’t take long for the phone to get hot; everyone started phoning as soon as the word got around.

“Don’t get excited yet, Bill,” Bob told Bill Shonavon when he phoned. “Let’s wait and see if the money’s really there when the bank opens.”

Both Bill and Dale were waiting at the bank when Bob arrived. Both of them expected to receive money for the preliminary work they had done for Tom. Bill even expected to be paid for his equipment which could run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Bob felt happy to be getting anything. Just to get the project off the ground was a major victory, but Tom had made promises before, so he kept his emotions under control. Tom wasn’t quite as quick as he had promised. It took an anxious hour before the electronically transferred funds showed up.

Bill and Dale were immediately deflated; the funds amounted ten thousand U.S. each. To Bob, it was a fortune; to Bill and Dale, it was a slap in the face. Both had expected to be rich even before they started work. They threatened not to go, but Bob remained silent. As far as he was concerned, Tom was smart. Hungry men work harder than fat men. They had no choice really; they could yell and scream, but they were in too deep to get out. He knew they’d go.

The only downer for Bob was again telling the kids they’d be apart for a while. Good old Grandma would be stuck with them again, but the kids were happy. They’d noticed the stress on their dad and were actually relieved to see him excited for a change.

Bob was anxious to see July. He was pleased to see they had a six-hour layover in Miami because as it just so happened she was working there, it wouldn’t be long, but they’d make the best of it.

July was ready for Bob when he landed in Miami. She said hi to Bill, and then they left him in the airport while she whisked Bob off to a motel room. They made love like two long-lost lovers. Time flew; they had so much to talk about.

“We’re still not totally going to be together for a little while, July, but at least we’ll be closer,” Bob told her.

July raised her head from the pillow and kissed his lips. She lay looking down at him, her hair brushing his face.

“The French have a saying,” she said, “L’Absence est à L’Amour ce que le vent est au feu, S’Allûme les grands et éteind les petits.”

miling, Bob ran his fingertips along her face.

“It sounds beautiful. What does it mean?”

he scratched her long nails against his chest. “It loses something in the translation, but roughly it means, ‘Absence is to love like wind is to fire, it lights up the big ones and puts out the little ones.’”

“Why is it only the French say it so well?” he asked.

I don’t know Bobby Green,” she said, rolling on top of him. “You are the wind, because I’m on fire.”

Tom did meet Bob and Bill at the airport as he said he would. They noticed one thing right away: no taxi. Now they rode in a limo to a hotel on Cable Beach where Tom briefed them on their assigned tasks. Bill wanted to talk money, but Tom told him he wanted Bill to focus on his job at hand.

“I want a machine shop set up on-site,” he told Bill. “I have hired a local company to start work on the airstrip. That’s our priority. Once the airstrip is in operation, we can start bringing supplies in. As soon as the airstrip’s in business, they’ll start on the road.”

“What about my equipment?” Bill asked.

“We’ll use that on the farm later. Right now I’m using what’s available locally,” Tom told them. “The government wants me to use locals as much as possible. The company I am using wants to use our airstrip for their own business. Apparently the government is charging an arm and a leg to use the local airport, so they’ll use our airstrip in exchange for doing the work.”

Bill was fuming, but Bob was pleased. This didn’t sound like the grand scheme Tom had at first promised. That plan was too big; maybe Tom had come to his senses and would scale things down a bit. Bob had found a lot of loopholes in Tom’s plan; not everything had been feasible in such an isolated place. Maybe, just maybe, this project could make it, and Bob was determined to do his best to make it happen.

Later that day, Bob flew into the North Andros airport. The truck loading the bulldozer to start work on the airstrip was waiting for him. It was the only way he could get to the site right now, and Tom wanted him to start right away.

They worked till dark flattening out the runway that had been dug up only weeks before. A company truck picked the men up shortly after dark dropping Bob off at the Andros airport hotel where the group had stayed before.

It took three days to get the airstrip leveled out and packed good enough for the aircraft to use, and then they started on the road. Bill was on-site now with an old trailer and some tools. Tom made the maiden flight in the next day. He was beaming from ear to ear.

“Supplies are scheduled to start coming in tomorrow,” he told Bob. More of the crew was coming, and he’d hired another bulldozer to start to start clearing the land.

“You and Bill concentrate on that. The rest will be taken care of by our partner company, APCO.”

“What do you mean ‘partner company’?” Bob wanted to know.

“It’s a nongovernmental organization that’s financing part of the farm. Don’t worry, it’s one of these do-gooder organizations who are helping the locals get jobs,” was all Tom would say. Bill had complained to Tom that they were terribly understaffed and wondered when the rest of Tom’s recruitments would show up.

A week later, Dale and two others showed up. That put eight men in one pickup to get to the farm from the hotel every day. One morning, they met with Tom for a progress report. It was at one of the new temporary buildings along the landing strip. It was the first time they’d seen the progress in this area. There were pickup trucks everywhere, and two new buildings were being constructed. At the end of the runway sat a large aircraft. It was pretty evident where the priorities were.

Tom was quick to explain that the area around the landing strip was APCO’s responsibility, and as soon as they were done with their work, all the equipment would move over to work on the farm side.

Bill argued that the farm had to make money if the project was to survive, so Tom sent some local labor to help them out. Of course, they only got the men APCO didn’t want and were pretty, well, useless. Bob soon found out a lot of the locals knew something about farming, so he began going over to the airstrip in the morning and handpicking his men. Before long, they were producing enough vegetables to supply the kitchen on the project. It was a long hot summer; three of the eight guys Tom had sent down quit after the first month. That left five supervisors to build the hog and cattle barns, clear land, and raise produce.

The supervisors talked among themselves and decided to concentrate on the produce. There wasn’t enough power to supply what was needed for the barns anyway. Tom was seldom on the project, and if he did come around, it was to raise hell about how little was getting done.

One thing Tom did right was to have ten cottages built around the lake for his managers. Once they were completed, the wives moved down and brought their kids. July was home for the summer, so both Mindy and Rikker came to live with Bob and her in the new cottage. It had been months since they had lived as a family, and for a while, things went well, but then Mindy became increasingly bored. She became impossible to live with and began causing problems that embarrassed Bob and July. They finally sat down with her and asked what she’d like to do.

“I want to go back to Minnesota,” she told them. July knew Mindy somehow felt tied to the place where she was born. Only there had she seemed to find peace with herself. That night, Bob and July had a long talk out on their deck. It overlooked the placid lake the cottages that had been built around. It was peaceful and quiet, a good place to talk.

“I think we should let her go,” July told him.

“It’s not that I want to hold her here in the middle of nowhere,” Bob answered. “Sometimes I blame myself for not giving her a stable life like most kids have. Anyway, I’d like her to at least finish high school.”

“That’s bullshit, Bob. You’ve done as well as you could, you always try, that’s important. Mindy’s too much like you in a way. She’ll do all right. She just has to find her own way to do her own thing.”

“All right,” Bob said to her, “I guess her grandparents are close if she needs some help.”

“She won’t need much help, Bob, she’ll suffer along just like someone else I know,” July smiled at him.

Rikker, on the other hand, fit in very well. There were three other boys on the project roughly his age. Luckily, they mixed with the Bahamians very well, in fact spending most of their time with them. When it came time to start school again, Bob and July weren’t sure what to do. They had thought of sending him to a private school in Florida, but because he fit in so well, decided to send him to the local school. The only high school required a long drive down to Fresh Creek near the naval base.