Mr. Eternity (26 page)

I had contracted a dislike for this person, though I exhorted myself to generosity because he was just a slim and dirty fellow in a shirt made from a sugar bag, and furthermore he was doomed. I gave him a sad smile and thereafter I was quiet, as prescribed, like a stone listening to the wind, and all this time I held Daniel Defoe’s hand.

Edward Halloween did not notice these intimacies because he had made himself drunk in the evening’s protracted course. On the way back to the palace he outlined his own philosophical troubles and he was impervious to the thoughts and speeches of others. He said he was having a crisis. He said he wanted to choose whether he was a man or a woman and then cleave to his choice. It was hard to be neither or both, for that meant he was always only himself, which was an insuperable burden for anyone, and most especially for a poet. It did indeed seem like a problem, although he later forgot about it.

When we were safely returned to the arcades and pergolas of our palace, Edward Halloween vanished and I was alone with Daniel Defoe. I wanted to ask him to come up with me to my rooms, but then I thought it would demean his oath to Anna Gloria, which I honored. I was feeling melancholic to an extreme.

“Time keeps passing,” I said. “Life passes by whether I pay attention to it or not, and then it turns into history and it’s like a desert mummy and no one knows what it was truly like.”

He was quiet and stared off across the dark wasteland of our dehydrated garden.

I said, “What is it like to see the world swallow up so much time?”

“To me it seemed like the sixteenth century lasted forever, but the seventeenth century was like a feast day, which is hot and clamorous and rapidly concluded, and then the eighteenth century was like a turn around the garden before dinner. The nineteenth century was a cup of cutgrass tea. Everything since then has been wind under the door.”

“Is it really modern medicine that keeps you alive? You seem almost to be retrogressing and becoming younger. What is the secret formula?”

“It’s no secret. Take nutmeg for insomnia and Ceylon cinnamon for tonsillitis. Try to eat some fat from a camel’s hunch. Eat roc’s liver, if you can get it. Eat as many vaccines as you can find. It must be that the thought of Anna Gloria keeps me animated as well. But now, my princess, I have to say good night.”

So I walked with him to the yawning dark mouth of the camel pen, and he kissed my hand and issued inside. Out in the dry crisp darkness with all the stars above watching me in my loneliness, I had only Christopher Smart to talk to, for this cat now emerged from the shadows. I petted him and he vibrated with purring sounds.

The next morning we were down at the marina, where the ancient mariner knew a man who’d let us use his boat. It was a small fishing trawler that could be steered from the covered pilothouse or from up above, in what was called the tuna tower. Azar had made a printout of the treasure map.

“I’ll explain how to provision an expedition of this kind,” said the ancient mariner. “First we need cassava bread, which keeps better than any other bread in the heat and the damp. Cassava beer would be even better. Then we need some salt pork or ham. We also need a few horses, if we can get them. In Mexico I had a horse named Little Richard. What a horse! The thing about a horse is it makes the fighting safer, because usually the Indians will simply surrender rather than face such a terrifying beast. They trick themselves into believing that man and horse are one creature, like a centaur.”

“It’s just a day trip, isn’t it?” said Azar.

“Now, as for drinking water, we have one thermos of water, but we also have these bottles of low-calorie water drink.”

He’d purchased a case of something called “FreshWater.” The package identified it as an “all natural artisanal functional beverage.” It was just scented water in plastic bottles. He had raspberry, strawberry-basil, tarragon-blueberry, and plain.

“Plain?” I said.

“Water-flavored.”

“You like this stuff?”

“I love it. Quaco does too.”

“I do not,” said Quaco.

“You do.”

Quaco thought about this. “I like the strawberry-basil,” he said.

The ancient mariner had mostly recovered from last night’s ordeal, but he wasn’t yet so steady on his pins and just after we cast off he seemed to slip into a trance. After a few minutes of silence, he said, “Have I been making any sense?”

“You haven’t been saying anything,” said Azar.

“But if I had been, would I have been making any sense?”

I wasn’t doing much better. I’d slept like a tailor’s dummy in my hot sweaty tent, but because of the green pills I hadn’t been able to wake all the way up again. I had three cups of po but it was no good. Squinting red eyes, matted hair, dead man’s cheeks. If I sat still for too long my mind seemed to shut off, like a Prius.

We motored slowly out of the marina and headed north, into a maze of mangrove islands. They weren’t real islands. They were just groves or stands of mangrove trees growing out of the water, and there was no soil and no rocky foundation. Apparently they often shifted their positions or blew away entirely, and no map could represent their locations, certainly not one drawn on the wall in a fit of delirium. We were looking, however, for a true island, a dome of coral rock covered in dirt and trees and a small Calusa shell mound. I did not trust the ancient mariner to find it, but I trusted Quaco, with what possible justification who can say. He was standing in the bow, scanning the horizon, keyboard swinging around his neck, bracelets of human teeth, but even so, even so, he had an air of real competence.

Meanwhile, Azar and the ancient mariner were having a cheery conversation in the stern. Azar was filming this, hardworking documentarian that he’d become. My own role in the project seemed to have diminished, which was fine with me.

“Here’s another thing I’ve been thinking about,” the ancient mariner said. “Have you seen that there are cacao beans for sale in the supermarket?”

“They’re an Aztec superfood,” said Azar.

“Of course they are! Now think about this. You can buy some, maybe a hundred beans let’s say, for ten dollars. Correct?”

“Correct.”

“But in Mexico you can purchase a beautiful embroidered cloak for a hundred cacao beans. So think about it. You can sell the embroidered cloak here for a lot of money, maybe a hundred dollars. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“You can exploit this disparity.”

“Ten dollars for a hundred cacao beans. A hundred cacao beans for a cloak. Sell the cloak for a hundred dollars. Buy ten bags of cacao beans, for a total of a thousand beans. Buy ten cloaks. Sell the ten cloaks for a thousand dollars. Buy ten thousand cacao beans with that same thousand dollars. Exchange the beans for a hundred cloaks. Sell the cloaks for ten thousand dollars. And so on.”

“Only two more cycles and you’re a millionaire.”

“What is it?” I said. “Cloaks?”

“Cloaks.”

“It’s the cloak and bean scam,” said Azar.

“You’re talking about the economy of old Mexico,” said Quaco, unexpectedly the voice of reason, “which you yourself helped to destroy.”

The ancient mariner reflected on this and then shook his head dismissively. “You’d need some initial money for the transportation costs, flights to and from Mexico, etc., but after a few rounds the scam would pay for itself. Maybe this is how I’ll use my share of the treasure.”

Deep in the bay, after about an hour, we saw three middle-aged men fishing from a little boat. I was thinking that they looked very peaceful, but the ancient mariner grew tense.

“Give me your shirt,” he said.

“My shirt?”

“Am I supposed to use Azar’s? Azar’s is white! I suppose you
want
to surrender?”

My shirt was red. I gave it to him.

“Actually don’t give it to me. Just get up in the crow’s nest and start waving it.”

While I was doing this, the ancient mariner began a chilling recitation: “On the part of the King,” he said, “Don Fernando, and of Doña Juana the mad, his daughter, Queen of Castille and León, subduers of the barbarous nations, we their servants notify and make known to you, as best we can, that the Lord our God, Living and Eternal, created the Heaven and the Earth, and one man and one woman, of whom you and we, all the men of the world, were and are descendants. But on account of the multitude which has sprung from this man and woman in the five thousand years since the world was created, it was necessary that some men should go one way and some another, and that they should be divided into many kingdoms and provinces, for in one alone they could not be sustained.”

He was speaking too quietly for the fishermen to hear, and after a while he seemed to lose track of his text and fell silent.

“I don’t remember the rest.”

“It’s okay,” said Azar. “I think you said your piece.”

“You have to say the whole thing or it’s not legal.”

“We’ll all sign something. We’ll tell them you said it in full.”

“I remember this,” I said. “I know about this. This is the Spanish Requerimiento. Why does he know this?”

“Never mind,” said the ancient mariner. “It never mattered anyway. It’s more of a trick than a law.”

In a little while we got close enough to the other boat that we could say good morning. They said good morning too and one of them asked us if we were catching anything.

The ancient mariner said, “Anyone who wants to join our crew can do so without fear, but anyone who resists will be killed.”

They all laughed in a pleasant way and then one of them said, “A pirate, huh?”

Now the ancient mariner slipped into the clear water, no more than eight feet deep in this part of the bay, and swam with surprising grace over to their boat. They helped him in and congratulated him on his excellent swimming. The ancient mariner thanked them and then picked up a metal bucket and bashed one of them in the head. It was not
a tremendously forceful blow, but the man’s face went blank and he sat down and put his head in his hands. His friends thought this was very funny and slapped him on the back.

“Uh oh!” said one.

The other said to us, “My own granpa was taken that way too.”

“Your grandfather turned into a pirate?” said Azar.

The wounded man had his head between his knees. He said, “Ouch.”

The one with the pirate grandfather, a large man with a red face and a Boston Celtics T-shirt, said, “He’s fine. Ain’t you, Stan?” But Stan didn’t say anything more. “Stan! Stanislas! He’s fine. Don’t worry about Stan.”

The ancient mariner was stuffing lures and things into his pockets, and now he snapped the whole tackle box closed and heaved it into the water. The fishermen retrieved it and recovered their other things too, but they let him keep a bright yellow lure. I was still up in the tuna tower with my shirt off, but Quaco had gotten behind the wheel or whatever it’s called and maneuvered our boat a little closer to theirs.

“You boys had better get him back into the boat,” said the man in the Celtics shirt. Then, seeing Quaco for the first time, he said, “Whoa! Nice keyboard there, my man!”

In a little while we were motoring away again. The ancient mariner seemed to feel that his act of piracy was a great success, and we indulged him. We complimented him on his skill and on the beauty of the lure his victims had let him keep. But when we got well clear of the other boat, he revealed that he’d also stolen a dry bag, which contained a watch and about a hundred dollars in cash.

“I just took the other stuff as a diversion,” he said.

This warranted some discussion, but no one said anything. I looked out over the water. Mangrove islands, wading birds, deep blue channels, even a manatee in the sea grass. It was a very beautiful place. I tried to imagine that I was looking at part of the Chesapeake Bay five hundred years in the future.

“But you haven’t talked much about piracy,” I said. “We didn’t know you were a pirate.”

“I’ll tell you about piracy. The average life span of a pirate was about two years. For two years you drank and stole things, but you knew you’d be caught. There was a sickening feeling about it. There was this carnival-at-the-end-of-the-world feeling. Tears and wildness, that was piracy, because every night was the last night and in the morning you were going to hang.”

“Why did anybody do it?”

“Why does anybody do anything? It was less bad than being a sailor on a merchant ship. On pirate ships you had big crews and everyone pitched in. Also these were kids, most of them. They didn’t understand they could die. They knew they were going to die but they didn’t understand it.”

“You didn’t die.”

“I spent some time in Newgate, though, until I was able to convince someone that I was just a merchant sailor who’d been forced into piracy, which did often happen. I was an old man, and what were they going to say? No one wanted to admit they had anything to fear from such an old man. I have often used my age to my advantage. I get no end of profit from it.”

“Maybe I should’ve been a pirate,” I said. “I’ve always had this feeling that I’m not meant for a quiet life. I’m biding my time now but I have this idea that I’m meant for immortality and destruction.”

“All young men have that feeling,” said the ancient mariner. “All young people, probably. Even me. Even in my long-ago days as a young person. Although in my case it proved to be true.”

We’d been out there for more than two hours when Quaco looked up at the sun—I should say he looked directly into the sun—and said, “What o’clock is it?”

“Eleven o’clock,” Azar said.

Quaco consulted the map.

“There’s the island,” he said, and there it was, higher than the islands around it, maybe eight feet above the bay, ringed with mangroves but with some real forest on it also.

Azar said, “It’ll be good to do some digging. Stretch out a little.”

We dropped our anchor and waded ashore. The island was bigger than I’d realized. There were at least two acres of old-growth tropical forest, gumbo limbo trees and mahogany and sea grape, an enormous fig tree, tall silver palms. The leaf litter was crisp underfoot. The wild coffee was flowering. I saw a blue snail.