Deep Shadow

TWO

THREE DAYS EARLIER, ON THE WARMEST, MANGROVE-SULTRY February afternoon in recent memory, Arlis had come clomping up my laboratory steps wearing boots, a coat, dressed for snow, and told me that, after years of searching, he’d finally found something very, very damn valuable. But it took us thirty minutes of verbal sparring before he finally told me what he’d found and where he had found it.

“It’s in a sinkhole,” he said. “A little bitty lake that’s shaped like a drop of water. It’s way the hell off the road, so nobody goes there. Ever, from the way it looks.”

Typical of the man.

Arlis is a talker, but, when he has something important, he measures out the information at a speed proportionate to the worthiness of his audience. The audience doesn’t have to be interested—and I wasn’t. Arlis kept talking, anyway.

The fisherman began his story obliquely, saying, “There’s a cold front coming. Feel it? If it weren’t for this norther blowin’ in tonight, we’d both be rich men by Tuesday. Friday, the latest.” He tossed it out there and let it hang.

It was a Saturday, Sanibel Island, on the Gulf Coast of Florida. I replied, “Weather radio says the front arrives tomorrow, late. I was just listening.”

“They’re wrong—as usual,” Arlis had snapped. After several seconds of silence, he returned to the subject of getting rich, saying, “You can’t comprehend the amount of money I’m discussing, so I don’t expect you to thank me now.”

“Then I won’t,” I said. I was fine-tuning an aquarium, just beginning a new project. Sea horses. It wasn’t research, really. The sea horses were a tangent inquiry. Animals of a more academic interest were in two large tanks nearby: electric eels from the Amazon, via some pet-shop hobbyist who had released them into a ditch east of Naples.

Arlis told me, “It’s part of my nature to share with my friends when I come across a big chunk of luck. Most folks would expect something in return. Not me, it’s just the way I am. But down the road, a man of character would want to return the favor.”

Arlis has a knack for shading innocuous remarks with subtle criticism. We are all manipulators, sly in our methods, but the man uses guilt as weaponry—a device I find particularly irritating. I didn’t look up, and I took a measured interest in showing no interest as I peered into the aquarium, watching four freshly netted sea horses adjust to changes in salinity and the absence of tidal current.

“You act like I’m interruptin’. Like you’re too busy to listen.”

I replied, “Acting’s on a long list of things I’m not good at.”

“But you heard me. Rich, I’m telling you. Both of us. Your hippie friend, too, if he’s willin’ to work for it. We can all kick back and retire.”

My hippie friend is Tomlinson, a middle-aged oddity, part sinner, part saint, a Ph.D. brain coded with a sailor’s sensibilities, all hardwired inside a scarecrow’s body.

I asked Arlis, “Which is it? A Spanish galleon or an investment scheme? I’d guess the track, but I know how you feel about horses and gambling.”

“Only thing stupider than a horse,” Arlis replied, “is a man dumb enough to bet on something dumber than he is.”

I smiled, filing it away for later, and replied, “I’m out of guesses,” then returned my attention to the aquarium, noting the balanced mobility of sea horses as they ascended and descended, erect as chess pieces. Four weightless knights powered by a hummingbird blur of fins.

Arlis baited me, saying, “You couldn’t guess in a month of Sundays.”

I replied, “Then I won’t waste my time.”

I was fiddling with the aquarium pump, having trouble with the flow valve. Wild sea horses are more fragile than the pet-store variety. They require a tranquil environment and no surprises. The man watched me open a yellow legal pad and calculate a stress-free rate of water exchange: 50 × 4 = 200 × 1.75 = 350 gph. Then he endured several more minutes of silence as I began replacing the large pump with two smaller pumps. Finally, he lost patience.

“Dang it, pay attention. This is big! I found something most men quit looking for years ago. But I finally figured it out. You’re the first I’ve told. How you figure it’d feel to have a hundred million dollars in the bank? Maybe five hundred million, depends on gold prices. I’m talkin’ about bona fide rich.”

He pronounced it “bone-a-FI-DEE,” a man with enough swamp and saw grass in his ancestry to speak with an authentic Florida Cracker accent.

“Gold,” I said. “You think you found a Spanish wreck. I was right.”

“Nope. Not the pirate treasure variety, anyway. I ain’t no schoolboy dreamer and I ain’t senile. I’m sure about this one, Doc.”

I stood, removed the glasses that were tied around my neck on fishing line and used microscope tissue to clean the lenses.

“Just like you’re sure about the cold front? VHF weather says it gets here tomorrow afternoon. You say tonight. Usually, faith and fact don’t have much in common.”

The man touched the zipper of his coat, then produced leather gloves from the pockets. “I’m right, you’ll see. You’re gonna need that new wood-burning stove of yours. By sunset, the wind will start to gust. Four hours from now, it’ll feel like Canada’s pissing on us with a cold hose. Nothing to slow that north wind but the Georgia border and a couple of parking lots at Disney World.”

I turned to the windows above the dissecting table where chemicals and test tubes were lined on shelves. The sky was Caribbean blue. The bay was silver where clear water met mangroves along the shoreline. It was eighty degrees and calm. Pelicans crashed bait near an oyster bar where—bizarrely, but not unexpectedly—my boat-bum neighbor, Tomlinson, was sloshing in the shallows, wearing baggy Thai fishing pants, no shirt, a bucket hanging from the crook of his arm. He was as animated as a kid collecting Easter eggs.

Tomlinson was harvesting oysters for dinner, I decided. I made a mental note to pick a few fresh limes when I walked to the marina and buy a couple of more quarts of beer.

“Arlis,” I said, “I’m working. If you want to tell me what you found, tell me. If not, there’s one last beer in the fridge and plenty of books to read until I’m done. But take it outside.”

“Doc, you’re always in a hurry. You ain’t changed a gnat’s nut since you was a boy. You call this work? Now, mullet fishing’s real work, not playing around with little bitty fish to be sold to some laboratory or Yankee college professor.”

He was referring to my little company, Sanibel Biological Supply—purveyor of marine specimens and consultant for hire when a worthwhile project comes along.

I turned to him and saw that he was unzipping his coat, sweat beading on his forehead, as he came closer to the aquarium. “Man, it’s warm in here,” he added. “Don’t your ceiling fans work?”

I gave him a closer look. “Are you feeling okay?”

His face was flushed, and I noticed that his hands vibrated with what may have been a neurological tremor. Arlis is seventy, but the man is fitter than most thirty-year-olds.

“I’m fine, just fine,” he replied.

I told him, “Shed a few layers of that snowsuit—if you’re willing to risk frostbite. But do it outside. Don’t make me ask again.”

In reply, I received a pointed look, his rheumy gray eyes huge behind thick glasses, a young man alive in his brain, still in command of the aging body.

“You tellin’ me to leave?”

“I’m telling you I can’t talk about getting rich until I’m done doing what I get paid to do.”

“No need to get mouthy about it. A week from now, you’ll be wondering how a man could be so generous—that is, if I don’t get pissed off and march my ass right out of here.”

I replied, “Unless you messed with the bolt, Arlis, the door’s not locked. I wouldn’t want to be the one to stand between you and happiness.”

The man glared at me for a moment. “Well, if you did, it wouldn’t be the first time, Dr. Marion D. Ford!”

I knew what the man was referring to. It was a women whom we had both known and admired—and possibly loved, in our respective fashions—but then she had died. I sighed. I shook my head. I said, “Jesus, Arlis, let it go.”

“I didn’t bring her up—you did.”

I replied by returning my attention to the sea horses, suddenly envious of a species that is blessed by the inability to speak.

Arlis is a variety of old-time fisherman seldom encountered these days, possibly because, on the Mangrove Coast, men as irritating and assertive as Arlis often died suddenly while being choked, or shot, or left behind to drown.

I like the man but in small doses. I appreciate the fact that he’s among the last of a very few people whose toughness reflects the Florida biota by virtue of having been forged by its hardships.

Arlis continued staring at me for a long moment, before saying, “I found his treasure plane. Batista’s treasure plane.”

I said, “What?”

He said it again.

Suddenly, the man had my attention.

“This isn’t the first time someone’s told me that,” I replied, trying to recover from my surprise.

“It’s the first time I ever said it,” Arlis replied. “I suppose now you’re gonna tell me that don’t make a difference. This is me talking, Doc. By God, I found it. I’m not going to beg you to listen.”

Arlis was right. It was different coming from him. He was talking about a plane commandeered by Fulgencio Batista, the man who had ruled Cuba before Castro seized power.

Arlis paused, taking his time as he gauged my interest. “You know the story. I can see it.”

I said, “I’ve heard rumors.”

“This ain’t rumor. I know people who know people.”

“Everyone does. And everyone has a treasure story. They print wreck sites on restaurant place mats. It’s what boat salesmen talk about before they reach for the contract.”

“Not men who’ve lived on this coast long as I have. I’m discussing fact, not faith.”

The old man let that sink in, before adding, “Batista was a thief—just like the Castro brothers. I’ve heard he was an even worse killer. Nastier about it, anyway. When there was a man he particularly hated, I heard he’d march them to the zoo outside Miramar and toss them in a cage at feeding time.”

Arlis was watching my face, disappointed possibly that I didn’t react. So he added, “While the prisoner was still alive, of course.”

“Waste not, want not,” I said.

“You think I’m joking?”

“No. I’m thinking about the flow rate of this pump. I think the impeller’s bad.”

“It could be true,” Arlis said.

“Yeah,” I answered, “the impeller’s usually the first thing to go.”

“No! I’m talking about ol’ Batista. He had a special fondness for that zoo. That’s what some of the marlin fishermen told me, anyway, down there in Cojimar, before the Castros took over. Batista grew up poor. Like a lot of poor kids, he liked bright, fancy things—including circuses. Some of the animals for that zoo, he picked out personally and had them flown back to Cuba. You know—when he was traveling around different parts of the world, a very important man all of a sudden after being nothing but a broke-poor cane cutter.”

As I worked, I let my expression tell him, I’ve never heard that one before.

Arlis responded, “People forget what Batista was like. They forget that a lot of folks hated him.”

“That’s true,” I said.

“He knew he’d lost control of Cuba. He knew the Castro brothers were coming and that he had to leave the island—or maybe they’d cart him down to the zoo, his own self, come feeding time. But Fulgencio Batista was as greedy as he was mean, and he wasn’t about to leave that island empty-handed.”

I knew more than Arlis realized about Cuban history, but I asked, “What did he take?”

“Before he ran, he robbed the fanciest museums in Havana. He robbed the national treasury, too. In December 1958, four cargo planes loaded with art and gold—mostly gold bars and coins—left Cuba for Tampa. Only three planes landed. The heaviest-loaded plane disappeared. That pilot’s last radio transmission is in Coast Guard records, if you know where to look. The pilot called a few Maydays, then he said, ‘We’re goin’ down. We’re goin’ down in the water’—or something close to that—and that’s the last anyone ever heard.”

I crossed the room to the chemical cabinet, listening to him talk.

“For fifty years, the scuba-doo divers and treasure hunters searched for that plane. Some of ’em actual pros, like Mel Fisher’s bunch outta Key West. No one ever found the first trace. Draw a rhumb line ’tween Tampa Bay and Cuba, and men have hunted every yard of that route. In all that time, you’d expect someone to find something, wouldn’t you?”

I thought about it for a few seconds, before I said, “If the plane actually existed—maybe. Maybe not. Three hundred miles of water is a lot bigger than three hundred miles of land.”

The man appeared pleased. “Ab-so-lutely by God right, Doc. Most people, they don’t know the difference between water space and land space ’cause they ain’t lived the difference. That’s one reason I’m here talking to you now. We did okay a year ago, with that little salvage company we started.”

Arlis, Tomlinson and our fishing-guide friend Jeth Nicholes had worked a World War II yacht that lies in seventy feet of water not far from my home on Sanibel Island. Finding the wreck was pure luck. What I’d said about water being more voluminous than land is true.

Salt water is a shield, occasionally a mirror, but seldom a lens—which is why sea bottom is among the last strongholds of human legend. Dreams are more safely housed in regions not despoiled by light.

The wreck we had salvaged was real, but so were the long hours we’d put in working below the surface and above. We’d all made a little money, but the profits were tiny in comparison to the time we had invested.

Arlis asked me, “You got a chart around here? It’d be easier to show you on some kinda map.”

I said patiently, “It wouldn’t mean anything. Point to a spot on a chart, the width of your finger is thirty miles of Gulf water. There’s nothing to learn from that. I’ve got a business to run—this is the last time I’m going to say it.”

The old man zipped his jacket as if slamming a door. “Thirty miles in the Gulf of Mexico, huh?”

“Depends. On a big chart, an inch equals sixty nautical miles. You know that.”

“You just made the same mistake everyone makes who has ever searched for Batista’s plane.”

I let my expression communicate irritation. “Am I missing something?”

“The opportunity of a lifetime, Dr. Ford, that’s what you’re missing—if you don’t start taking me serious. The pilot’s last words were, ‘We’re going down in the water.’ Water, that’s what he said. The man never said nothing about the Gulf of Mexico.”

I asked, “He ditched in the Atlantic?”

“I didn’t say that. Didn’t say the Pacific Ocean or the Arctic Ocean, neither. The weather was bad enough to blow the plane off course a little—probably as cold and windy as it’ll be here in a few hours. She went into the water, but it weren’t the Gulf of Mexico. Let your brain work on that while I go outside, like a good boy, and have myself a chew of tobacco.”

I was picturing the Gulf basin, Cuba to the south, Key West dangling long into the Florida Straits, floating like a compass needle. Florida can be more accurately described as a land mosaic, not a landmass. The state is three hundred miles long, only a hundred miles wide and mostly water.

I thought about it for a moment, before saying, “There’s only one other possible explanation,” as the man pushed the screen door open. “If the plane didn’t crash in the Gulf, it went into a lake. They ditched in a lake somewhere between Key West and Tampa.”

Not looking over his shoulder, Arlis said, “Now, ain’t you the smart one! When you’re done playing with them fish, maybe I’ll tell you how I happened to find that lake. If I’m still in the mood . . . and if I come back.”

Arlis let the door slam behind him.