Amerika (12 page)

Our adventure almost ended before it began. Just as I flared for a landing Orlando shouted, ‘Power!’

I instantly firewalled the engines. We’d been together too long for me to question his booming voice. Ava’s sharp intake of breath cut through the sudden roar as I pulled up in a sharp climbing turn to the right.

‘What’d you see?’

‘Line of coral, just off the end of the spit.’

‘I see it now. Didn’t before.’

‘Wind must have been blowing just right to ripple the water. Nobody could.’

He was just being nice, of course. An idiot could have seen that coral. But I didn’t because instead of being a pilot, I had been
acting
like one instead, to impress Ava. Why? Don’t ask me because I don’t know. Maybe her being a beautiful movie star made me act like an idiot. Why else would I have made such a big deal of fussing with the throttles, fiddling with the controls, all official-like? Why else would I have blabbed on and on about how tricky it is to land on water, and how you have to keep a sharp eye out for hidden obstacles, like coral reefs.

I let my breath out as we completed our three hundred-sixty degree turn and lined up again for a landing, one that would carry us far clear of the menacing coral.

‘That was close,’ Ava said. ‘I never saw it.’

‘Me either.’

‘Thank God for Orlando. How do you suppose he saw it?’

‘For one thing, he didn’t have this nose to fight with. Can’t see a damn thing over it.’

A lame excuse, I know, but all I could think of at the moment, especially since the embarrassing truth was not something I wanted to share with Ava for fear of her laughing at me.

So this time around I became a pilot instead, and the landing was textbook. So was taxiing up to the beach line where I lowered the gear, gave a quick burst of power to get us moving and we rolled up onto the hardened sand like one of Pan Am’s regular stops. All that was missing was my uniform.

I cut the engines. After they clattered into silence I said, ‘Last stop, Treasure Island, everybody out.’

The mid-morning sun was merciless as we unloaded the gear and set off in search of Ava’s buried treasure. The island had looked tiny from the air, but on foot a different story as we slogged through the soft, dry sand up to the brush line and then stumbled into the prickly underbrush.

Ava said, ‘I figure it’s about two hundred yards from here. See where those two palm trees line up over there? It’s fifteen paces south from the second one.’

I said, ‘Got your compass?’

‘Yes, do you?’

‘Affirmative.’

I patted the familiar lump in my right pants pocket, and then thought about her five hundred dollars cash, safe and sound back in the office. No matter what happened, I was ahead of the game.

‘Lead on, Captain Kidd.’

Orlando helped Ziggy navigate through the chest high bushes, but it wasn’t easy and the huffing, puffing little agent complained constantly as he dodged the sharp thorns.

Finally I said, ‘Pretend you’re an actor in
Treasure Island
.’

‘I’d rather be watching it with popcorn instead.’

After a half-hour’s struggle, we arrived at the palm tree in question and compared both of our compasses to determine south.

Ava took a few steps, turned and said, ‘I wonder how long a stride it was back then.’

I said, ‘I’m tall, Ziggy’s short. We’ll do it together and average the distance.’

With Ava counting the paces, Ziggy and I started shoulder to shoulder and I soon outpaced him. When we both stopped, she picked a spot that averaged where each of us had ended, and with her heel, made a crude ‘X’ in the hard-packed sand.

Her eyes danced with excitement. ‘Curtain up.’

We worked in teams of two: Ziggy and me then Ava and Orlando. Our first hole took about an hour. We managed to get six feet down before we hit water. The second took longer. The third, where Ziggy had stopped, took the longest. We didn’t talk much. What was there to say? Just bend and dig, bend and dig.

Orlando and Ava were at it when sea water began seeping into the hole again.

‘Nothing here either,’ he said.

Ava didn’t answer. She kept studying the map, brows furrowed, mouth pursed in thought. The sun, now moving into late afternoon, ducked behind a rising line of darkening cumulus.

I pointed to the sky. ‘I suggest we set up camp before the storm hits.’

She said, ‘What storm? It’s beautiful out.’

‘In about a half hour it won’t be.’

She stared into the empty hole. ‘I’m not happy about this.’

I studied her map. The drawing, though faint, was straightforward: two palm trees. Direct line, fifteen paces south from the second one. Child’s play.

‘Close, but no cigar.’

Ava said, ‘The only way to know for sure is to dig a five foot trench all the way along that line.’

‘By hand? It’ll take forever.’

She put her hands on her hips. ‘So?’

‘So, I’m a pilot, not a ditch digger.’

‘Fine. Ziggy and I will do it. You and Orlando can sit on your lazy asses and watch us count gold coins and know that you’ll not see a single one of them.’

‘How do you know they’re coins?’

A tiny hesitation. She glanced at the map. ‘I’m assuming they are. Maybe pearls and diamonds, too.’

‘You’ve got to be kidding.’

She threw down the shovel. ‘Listen, captain, if I were kidding you’d be laughing about now, wouldn’t you?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Well, are you?’

‘I’m about to laugh at how stupid this is. Four adults digging in the sand like kids, pretending we’re going to find buried treasure.’

She snatched the map back. ‘Your problem is that if you don’t see it you don’t believe it.’

‘So?’

‘When I believe it, that’s when I see it.’

‘Who’s right so far?’

She poked my chest. ‘You are. But we’re not done yet, not by a long shot.’

A distant rumble of thunder cut off my wise guy response. Instead I said, ‘I suggest we continue this discussion after the storm.’

She spun around, picked up her shovel and stomped off.

Florida thunderstorms in August are not what you experience if you live in say, Virginia or Tennessee or Iowa. When they hit down here, it’s the one time I’m transported back to the inner wilds of Brazil, or Venezuela, or any of the South American countries I flew for Pan Am. Rain there is more solid than liquid. Sure, you can walk through it and fly through it, but the sheer force of it slamming into you or your airplane makes you think twice before doing so.

I’ve had engines drown when flying through a heavy thunderstorm cell. I’ve been right side up one second, and upside down the next from the winds packed inside their dark grey hearts. Snow I can handle but rain I respect.

That’s why when we got back to the beach, I realized it was too late to pitch any kind of camp. We had to take shelter inside the plane. Good thing we did, because Orlando and I barely had time to lash the wings to the dead man tie-downs we’d dug in the sand before the storm hit.

We tumbled inside just as the cold spatters began multiplying like angry hornets until they became a steady, drumming roar on the cabin roof. The stuffy, humid heat of the day surrendered to cold gusts of wind dumping down on us from tens of thousands of feet in the air.

Ziggy shivered. ‘I can’t remember when I’ve had a more wonderful time.’

‘Did anyone ever tell you, you talk too much?’ Ava said.

‘My mother and you.’

The four of us huddled in the cabin, me perched on a food crate, Orlando on the floor, Ava and Ziggy in the two wicker passenger seats. The drumming sound of the rain on the roof made conversation impossible. Maybe that was providential. Each of us had plenty to think about. As for me, I spent time on what I call ‘connecting the dots.’ It’s a mental exercise I do that helps me find order in the midst of a problem that seems to be happening because of random occurrences, but in fact is not.

It saved my life more than once in a plane when, in the midst of some heart stopping crisis I was able to solve things smoothly and efficiently, because I could quickly connect the dots between whatever the emergency was at the moment, straight back to its originating source and take action.

For example, a failing engine could be traced to a lack of oil. Cut power, feather the prop, and re-trim the aircraft. Problem solved.  A tail-heavy plane that won’t climb is traced to a screwed-up loading. Apply power, maintain altitude, and if impossible, start looking for a place to land. And make it FAST.

In this manner I connected the dots between leaving Providence, Rhode Island in a beat-up seaplane, getting forced down in Washington and spending the night in a Nazi jail. Then I continued skipping from one dot to the next until I arrived here, staring at Ava James’ neatly arranged tennis shoes she’d taken off to dry.

Everything looked normal, but I could feel trouble brewing. Something in the way she sat there, shoulders back, hands in her lap, made me think she was waiting for something I couldn’t see, but I sure could feel it. Time to connect some more dots.

‘So how’d that gold get here in the first place?’ I said.

She glanced at me, and then looked away. ‘They buried it.’

‘I mean the story behind it.’

She shook her head. ‘When you see it, you’ll believe it, remember?’

‘Be nice. I’m trying your way for a change.’

She gave me sharp look, took a deep breath and said, ‘Let me just say this; when we find it, it’s going to change a lot more lives than mine.’

‘How?’

She examined her fingernails instead of saying anything more.

‘Cat got your tongue?’ I finally said.

‘No, it’s just that I’ve got orders to do this the way it’s been planned. I can’t change it.’

‘Orders? What are you talking about? What plan?’

Ziggy interrupted. ‘Your honor, what my client is trying to tell the court is that she can’t spill the beans until certain conditions are met. Like finding the gold, for instance, right, darling?’

She nodded.

‘And if we don’t?’ I said.

Ava said, ‘Then you fly us back to Key West, and you and everybody else in America lives happily ever after underneath Nazi hobnail boots.’

‘Do you really believe that?’

‘If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be sitting here, soaking wet, looking for that god-damned gold.’

‘This has got something to do with the war?’

She turned into a sphinx.

I said, ‘We’re going to find that gold. I know it.’

She leaned forward and gave me the once over. ‘Change your mind?’

‘No, but I’m acting like it.’

After the storm passed we pitched camp near the plane. Tents for Ava and Ziggy, Mosquito netting over the wing for Orlando and me. And while Ziggy was all thumbs trying to pitch tents, he made up for it by being a great firewood scrounger, arriving with generous armload of twigs and thick roots.

Within minutes he had coaxed the wood into flame, and soon had it hot enough to make a bed of coals. Meanwhile Orlando and I went off to catch some fish. Not two minutes after casting our lines baited with shrimp, he got a strike.