Without a Grave

ELEVEN

THE NATIONAL VESSEL DOCUMENTATION CENTER FACILITATES MARITIME COMMERCE AND THE AVAILABILITY OF FINANCING WHILE PROTECTING ECONOMIC PRIVILEGES OF UNITED STATES CITIZENS THROUGH THE ENFORCEMENT OF REGULATIONS, AND PROVIDES A REGISTER OF VESSELS AVAILABLE IN TIME OF WAR OR EMERGENCY TO DEFEND AND PROTECT THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.Mission Statement, United States Coast Guard,National Vessel Documentation Center

I found Gator in the cockpit of Deep Magic, slinging empty air tanks on to the dock. I stopped to help.

‘You know that missing sailboat, the Wanderer?’

Gator stopped in mid-swing. ‘Yup.’

‘I think I found it.’

He lowered the tank to the deck and squinted up at me. ‘You’re shitting me. Where?’

‘It’s in Pinder’s boatyard. It’s been stripped and repainted, but I’m pretty sure it’s the same vessel.’ I explained how I knew the Parkers and had sailed on their boat. I told him about the tartan upholstery, the penciled numbers, the telltale screw holes, and even about the spaghetti sauce.

‘Come on. Let’s have a look.’

Faster than I would have thought possible, Gator stepped from Deep Magic to the dock, leaving his boat rocking. He double-timed it up the pier in the direction of his golf cart. By the time I caught up to him, he was already turning the key in the ignition. ‘Hop in.’

The engine sputtered and caught. Gator reached behind his right leg to shove the gear into forward, and we were off. At the boatyard, he brought the cart to a jarring halt in front of the utility shed, hopped out, and motioned for me to follow.

We found Daniel and another Haitian on board the Alice in Wonderland, busily brushing teak oil on the decking.

Gator knocked on the hull until he got Daniel’s attention. ‘Morning, Daniel. Fine boat. Mind if I take a look?’

Daniel beamed down on us. ‘Go ahead, mon.’

The direct approach. Why hadn’t I thought of that?

Gator clambered up the ladder, now propped against the stern of the vessel, and hopped into the cockpit. I followed. While Daniel and his co-worker went on with their task, Gator and I went inside.

If anything, the boat was cleaner than it had been earlier that morning. When I bent over to show Gator the spaghetti-sauce spill, there wasn’t a trace of it, either.

‘Damn.’

The only concrete ‘evidence’ I had left to show him were the numbers penciled on the bottoms of the drawers, and the two screw holes behind the half model where I suspected the builder’s plaque might have been.

While I watched, Gator unscrewed the model and studied the bulkhead behind it, touching a finger to each of the holes, looking thoughtful. He swept his ball cap off his head, and while still holding it, scratched his head. ‘Boat’s so clean you could perform open-heart surgery in here.’

I dredged up a smile. ‘You don’t believe me, do you?’

‘Oh, I believe you,’ he said. ‘That number you found is probably the boat’s yard number. They’d write it on the various components of the boat as they were being built to tell the installer which boat the part was destined for.’

‘Maybe Cheoy Lee kept records?’

‘Maybe.’ He returned the model to its original position and screwed it back down. ‘And Reliants are supposed to have a builder’s plaque right here.’ He tapped the wall with the knuckle of his index finger.

Gator stuck his head out of the hatch and called into the cockpit where one of the Haitians had started polishing up the bright work on the helm. ‘Michael!’

‘Wi?’

‘Kisa bagay vou…’ Gator cast his eyes heavenward, as if expecting God to write an English to Creole translation in the clouds. He shifted from one foot to the other uncomfortably. ‘Uh, what thing you take off that wall down there? Konprann?’

At first I thought Michael didn’t ‘konprann,’ but after processing Gator’s question for a few seconds, he shaped his thumbs and fingers into an oval about the size of a saucer.

Gator beamed, and plopped his hat back on his head. ‘Mesi.’

I beamed at Michael, too. ‘Nou ap chache…’ Now it was my turn to run out of Creole. I raised both hands, palms up and added, ‘Kote?’ Where?

‘Bokit fatra.’

I looked at Gator. ‘Bokit I get. Bucket. But what’s fatra?’

‘Rubbish, I think.’

‘Trash bin!’ I shouted.

Gator and I practically tripped over one another in our race for the ladder, but only one of us could go down at a time. I descended quickly, backwards, rung by rung, with Gator several rungs behind, trying (vainly) not to step on my fingers.

Once on level ground, Gator pointed toward the stern of Alice in Wonderland. ‘You go that way, and I’ll check the shed area.’

I walked around the boat, looking in every container. I turned up wooden blocks, sandpaper, oily rags, bits of fiberglass, but nothing remotely resembling a plaque. I worked my way along the dock, kicking up debris as I went, following the track of the marine railroad down to the water where a school of yellow jacks was nosing about, angling for a handout. In the water I could see lumps of metal, sacrificial leads that had done their duty and disintegrated instead of the propeller shafts to which they had been attached. A few lost screws flashed brightly in the sun.

At the end of the pier, in deeper water, I identified a five-gallon gasoline can, a waterlogged seat cushion green with algae, and what looked like several hatch covers – four-by-four squares of corrugated steel, each tethered to the dock by a rope. As I straightened and opened my mouth to call Gator, he appeared behind me. ‘What are those?’ I asked, pointing to the hatch covers.

‘Lobster condos,’ he replied.

‘Condos? For lobsters?’

‘Traps, actually,’ Gator explained. ‘Those are being seasoned. In a week or two we’ll haul them out to the reef.’

‘How do you catch a lobster with that?’ I wondered aloud. ‘It’s just a flat piece of metal nailed to a couple of two-by-fours.’

‘Lobsters are nocturnal. They hide out in dens during the day. We used to use discarded bathtubs, car hoods, hurricane shutters and the like to make artificial dens for them. As you can see, we’ve gone high-tech.’

I laughed at the concept. ‘So what do you do? Send a diver down, lift up the condo and start grabbing?’

‘Something like that. Lobsters used to be taken by breath-hold divers using spear-guns. Sometimes they’d squirt bleach into the reef to force the lobsters out into the open.’

Thinking about what that would do to the reef, I gasped.

‘Exactly. That’s why it’s now illegal. This method is the least damaging to the reef.’

Gator bent down, picked up one of the ropes and tugged it, raising a corner of the condo so I could see underneath. No lobsters, but I’d hardly expect any in a busy harbor.

‘So,’ I said. ‘If I come across one of those condos out there, I can pick up a quick lobster dinner?’

Gator began to play out the rope. ‘I wouldn’t if I were you. Local fishermen take their traps very seriously. I wouldn’t want to be caught between a lobsterman and his catch.’

As the condo came to rest again against the bottom, a roundish object about the size of a coffee can half buried in the sand caught my eye. I swallowed hard, croaked, then managed to find my voice. ‘Gator!’

Gator dropped the rope and stared at me as if I’d lost my marbles.

I pointed. ‘Down there! Next to the condo.’

Gator peered into the water. ‘I’ll be damned.’ He took off his hat, handed it to me, then grabbed the hem of his T-shirt and pulled it off over his head, baring a fine set of pecs covered with sun-bleached fuzz. ‘Let’s have a look.’

Before I could say, ‘But you’re not wearing a bathing suit,’ he had dived into the water. He reached the bottom in two easy strokes, picked up the disk, rotated it, then stuck it into the waistband of his pants and shot to the surface. He swam along the railway tracks until he could stand, then waded ashore.

I ran up the dock to meet him as he emerged from the water. ‘Well?’

Gator flicked water out of his buzz cut with the flat of his hand. He reached into his waistband, pulled out the disk, and handed it to me. ‘See for yourself.’

I was holding a polished steel oval, neatly framed in teak. The varnish had peeled off the frame in spots, but the engraving on the metal was plain as day: Cheoy Lee Boat Yard. Yard #2304. And the date, 1969.

All it would take was an email to Ben Stavis, keeper of the Rhodes Reliant Owners website or a phone call to the Cheoy Lee Boat Yard, still doing business in Hong Kong to prove what I knew for sure. There could be only one Cheoy Lee Reliant, yard number 2304. Alice in Wonderland was Wanderer.

‘So what do we do now?’

‘I think we need to have a little chat with Jaime.’