After the noon meeting Don gives me directions to the marina a ways south of town where Riordan is basing his operations from, saying I’m expected around 2 p.m. I offer him a ride but he says no, he prefers to stay out of cars altogether these days. He adds that he has a couple of errands to run first. His eyes with that distant look as he turns to fetch his bicycle, scanning patterns scarred in his eyes
—Look for an old bucket called the Sea Purse, he says, heaving onto his bike. You won’t miss it.
***
Driving down this old stretch of US-1, it’s all heat-blasted strip-malls and trailer parks and boarded-up souvenir shops, the vibrant developments soaking up all of the money, sun and attention on a narrow isthmus of sand between land- and sea-ward preterition. No matter: in time God will come in some wind or wave to scour those bright coins from the shore and deposit them with the rest into eternity’s fund. The afternoon warmish, low grey clouds scudding in from the southwest, everything wan and bleak, obscured from the sun.
I think about this short route I’m venturing out on as a pathway of heart, leading from my sad house by the sea to and through an AA meeting which valves the next world, on toward a harbor ahead which offers alternate doors of departure that may take me back to the world or drop me off its edges. Not much really to show on the proper map stowed in the glove compartment, just a quarter of an inch of thicker red ribbon far to the northeast of any real Florida action.
Other maps suggest different leys I follow here. A map showing early contact between Old and New worlds, I travel a blank inch toward Ft. Caroline, the abortive French mission near the mouth of the St. Johns which was attacked and taken over by the Spaniards in 1530. Do I head for first contact?
A similar map of the same period showing the placement of Indian tribes has me trespassing into the heart of Timucuan turf, piercing a flank which runs all the way down the coastal lowlands from Cape Canaveral to Georgia. What old estate is now being pierced as I drive south, beginning its slow gassy collapse in penumbra of grief?
And then there is the crude treasure map scrawled by Eduardo del Silvio somewhere along his westward flight of the 1640s, a maddened gaze over a guilty man’s shoulder at the grave of a bullion ship, back toward a hazy region which conforms to the broad confines of the coast between Jacksonville and Marco Island, a map too imprecise to be of any real help to a salvage team other than to point an cold pale dripping Finger in the same direction I drive in today, to a boat in a harbor whose captain and crew have found its hoary X down fifty fathoms of midwinter Atlantic sea. The guilty adventurer in us all, an ancient mariner shadowing the Bridegroom’s door with songs of plunder and ruin and gold for us all.
On a cosmological map of the Dogon of of Central Africa, the universe is depicted as an animal with a placenta-like head for heaven and legs symbolizing the reaches of earth. Surely the wreck of the Cadiz in the latter wreckage of my life is located somewhere between the balls and anus of that cosmic beast, the best and worst of God to be found in the world this afternoon as I drive toward what seems a next door of the dream.
***
As Dan assured me, it’s no trouble finding the Sea Purse readily enough. An 18-foot Custom Hull built back in the ‘50s with twin diesel engines, the boat sits ugly and heavy in the water amid the cocksure dazzle of pure white pleasure craft docked around it. It’s a dirty, old, blue-bottom tug, a working man’s bucket parked on Rodeo Drive. But it’s the only decent marina for miles, and this time of year the millionaire playboys and retirees are playing with other things.
As I walk up, several men are offloading crates to another guy on the dock, who stacks and wheels them on a handtruck to an SUV parked nearby.
-- Looking for Captain Riorden, I say.
They all pause. I can feel their tension. One of they guys on board wearing cutoff shorts and a sweatshirt sets his box against the rail and scans me.
—Your business.
—A friend of his named Scoles referred me here for work.
Another moment. All of them are checking me out. I’m big but not young anymore.
The guy shrugs and heft back up the box.
—Down the way three doors.
As I wedge past them I see how tired they are, wary too, almost jumpy, as if being ashore was the worst part of the gig for them. Later I find out that they’re all divers, pitching in with this stuff because of the schedule and lack of help.
I walk down the hall counting doors and turn into the third one. Riorden is sitting at a desk writing in a log. He’s about my age, deeply tanned, hair closely cropped and thinning out, burly, his forearms knotted like Popeye’s, an aging man’s slowly loosening paunch pressing up against the edge of the desk.
When he looks up his eyes bore into with some kin of the distance Dan’s gaze has -- a polar cobalt girded with grey steel.
—You Brendan?
—That’s right.
—What do you know about ships?
I tell him about my college days as a yacht steward and the the deep-sea fishing jaunts, panning out the embellishments I’d used over the years to impress women -- the silver plates and monster wahoo.
—I’ve got good sea legs and my dad taught me all of the hitches, I finish.
He grunts. —You’ll need those legs now. Winter salvage is a bitch but we don’t have any choice. If we don’t get this stuff up now before the area is crawling with other operators. How much did Scoles tell you?
I recount what I heard from Don and finish by telling Riorden that I’m free to work how ever many hours he needs me for.
—Can you ship out overnight?
—Sure.
—No one waiting for you at home.
—Just some lousy overfed cats.
He looks at me and then out the window where sea and sky are one unbroken grey measure.
—Start right now and you have a job. Pay is fifteen bucks and hour with a two percent share of the find. You’ll be helping with the sifting — tables where we wash off the silt and search for the goods — unloading and loading with Dan, inventorying supplies, et cetera. As you know we are moving into a very heightened stage of the salvage, so I need two hundred percent from each hand.
He pauses.
— We think we’re damn close but you can never be sure. There are always false leads. You can miss the whole thing by an inch or a mile. We may have to angle out and back. This could be over in a week or go on for months. Can you handle that?
—Where do I start?
***
Draw a map of this world. Here is the land and there is the sea. Here is the hole in the ground where my old heart is buried. There is the treasure shaped like an X of black sea. Here’s me in between on this churl of a boat. This quest is my future history’s but the prize belongs to its mysterious boon and harm. The sea will drink me like a booze I can’t figure out how to keel it. And what do I know anymore but surrender? What can I say anymore but “—heave ho” ...
