Salty Sky (11 page)

That night, she searched her parents’ bedroom. It didn’t take long. It was only eight feet wide, ten feet long, and seven feet high. There was a dresser, a bed, a lamp. She found her father’s mason jar of cash above a ceiling tile. It wasn’t hard to spot. The ceiling tile was stained from where his fingers pushed it up and set it back in place every day. She found two pistols and the blackjack and the phone number for her grandfather. She recognized the name, but she had never met him, and she didn’t know where he lived. Her mother barely knew him. She said he went to sea when she was a baby, and her mother left with another man before the aircraft carrier returned.

She called the number, and a man answered. She hung up. Her hands shook. She grabbed a phone book and looked up the location of the area code. San Diego.

She packed the money, guns, blackjack, and two changes of clothes in her backpack and set the alarm clock in her room. She slept under the bathrobe on the recliner again. Her alarm went off before sunrise. She brushed her teeth, grabbed a pair of Mello Yellos out of the refrigerator, and added her toiletries to her backpack. She put on her mother’s cowboy boots. The boots took her to five foot eleven. She put on an Exxon trucker hat and slipped her blonde ponytail through the back. She locked the trailer, walked to the Ranger, and started driving west.

The Ranger traveled the state road for two hours before she
stopped for gas. At the first gas station, she didn’t pull in close enough to the pump to fill up the gas tank. She backed up and bumped a trash can. She panicked and pulled back onto the road. Thirty miles later, at the second gas station, she parked and fueled without incident. She bought an atlas of the western United States, a two-liter Mello Yello, and a package of pork rinds.

That night, she slept in a Walmart parking lot. The Ranger’s seat didn’t recline, so she leaned against the driver’s side window. She used the bathrobe as both blanket and pillow. The second night, she slept in the parking lot of a casino. By noon on the third day, she was parked off Cabrillo Freeway, near downtown San Diego, staring at a pay phone and hyperventilating.

She dialed. He answered. She hung up. She dialed. He answered. She got out “Grandpa” and then sobbed. Her first tears. He listened. She added three quarters before she was calm enough to be understood.

He came to get her. He brought a neighbor to drive the Ranger. They went back the way she had just come, to his house on the east side of San Diego.

She settled down, and he checked on her parents. They didn’t make bail. He got her mother to appoint him guardian, and she enrolled in school. She called him “Chief,” like his friends did, after his final rank in the navy. He died shortly after she graduated from college. She missed him.

Turning back to the east, Joe was now walking out of the water and into the dunes. She went to her cabin. She imitated the knocking pattern from last night. Her friends made seductive calls back to her knocks. They were tying on bikinis and laughing when she entered. She took her suit off the hook and put it on. They went to the galley, sliced cantaloupe and watermelon, filled a platter. A box of Cheerios, a strainer full of blueberries, and stacked bowls were on the table. There were carafes of milk and orange juice in a bucket of ice. This she could get used to.

Tony sipped coffee and worked a crossword puzzle on the couch in the salon. He winked at the girls. Ashley noticed there was a bottle opener built into the bottom of his flip-flops. She was pretty sure he didn’t know it was there.

The captain cleaned salt off the windows and portholes using a squeegee attached to an extension pole. He dunked the squeegee in a bucket and leaned slightly forward so he could see his work. He made several slow back-and-forth motions with the sponge, then spun the pole in his hand and made long, clean, upward pulls with the rubber blade. Not for the first time, Ashley wondered whether this type of work was something he loved more than something that needed to be done.

After breakfast, they swam to the island. Joe came through the dunes from the ocean side, discretely pulling in his gut when he noticed them. This made her feel good, and she gave him an extra squeeze with his hug. She found herself wondering how old he was. How many years would he still be active? And if she wasn’t trying to deny the truth, attractive. Ten? Twenty? She guessed he was near sixty.

On the ocean side, it was breezier. They walked south four miles, talked a lot about not much. It was pleasant. Birds ran away, and ghost crabs scuttled into holes. Ashley found a sand dollar still whole, brown, and slightly fuzzy. A broken piling lay in the sand. It was covered in barnacles that were alive. Their shells opened, gasping for water. The mass dying made Ashley queasy. Pretty funny for an emergency room nurse, she thought. Queasy over barnacles.

They didn’t talk much as they headed north into the breeze. She watched a surfer in floral shorts ride a wave nearly two hundred yards before hopping off his board in ankle-deep water less than twenty-five yards from them. She had watched his fluid physique and movements on the long ride and was surprised that up close his face, unlike his physique, indicated he was middle-aged.

The girls couldn’t figure out which path to take across the dunes,
and it didn’t really matter. They were just going to end up too far north or south. When they got to the mainland side, they saw the boat and reoriented themselves. There were plenty of sunbathers on the waterway side of the island. The girls waded in the warm water. The bottom was between sandy and muddy.

When they were parallel to the boat, they started to swim out. Halfway across, they were twenty-five yards behind the boat, so they swam back to shore and got a lift. A party was in progress when they arrived, the music pounding. Ashley shut the door to the main salon as she went in, dulling the noise from outside. She fixed a late lunch. She stood in the galley, eating and flipping through an entertainment magazine—oh, the struggles of the rich and beautiful once they became famous. Taking in the yacht’s salon, she wondered whether for her, getting the rich part would be worth the cost.

When she finished eating, she went outside and danced with her friends. She twirled away from a couple of guys who wanted to dance with their manhood pushed a little aggressively against her backside. She talked with Tony for a bit while her friends were getting cleaned up. She was the last to go into her cabin to shower.

She put on a spaghetti strap dress and high-heeled sandals and joined her friends on the deck. Gino told her they were invited to the flybridge, so she climbed up and scooted in next to Joe. She smelled the day’s salt, sweat, and suntan lotion on him. The smell fit a leader at ease. She again tried to pinpoint his age. Tony entertained the girls, then left and came back with two guys she hadn’t met. One guy’s feet were so pink that a whole tube of aloe wouldn’t have helped. He sat next to one of her friends. She couldn’t hear their conversation, but her friend was all smiles and sparkly eyes.

At Ashley’s friends’ request, they left the Ferretti with Pink Feet and his friends. They hopped into a small boat whose owner, she realized, was the guy she’d watched surfing. Ashley sat in the bow and looked back, hoping to catch his eye, but he was focused on his work.

10

IN THE AIRSPACE
over the Caribbean, the drawing took shape on the notepad. At the top of the page were Francisco’s initials in blue ink. From there, three branches connected down to other men’s initials. These limbs forked to more initials, and the limbs below those were no longer identified by individual initials but were labeled by a combination of roles and locations such as
Peru, paste transport
. Subsequent levels continued the naming convention of location and role.

The page was a rainbow of highlights. Green highlighted occupied positions, yellow showed positions of concern, red indicated positions where changes were needed, and blue marked unfilled positions. The blue fields were largely tied to the long-neglected markets in Europe and the United States, although a few referenced China’s edges in Macau and Hong Kong.

With a black pen, Francisco put asterisks beside his priorities. A mental aside grabbed his attention. He picked the blue pen back up and circled the family members on the tree to see whether any branch was either neglected or overloaded. Too many brothers running one branch of an operation was an invitation to insurrection that Francisco might be slow to see if he was focused on growth. As the information began to visually pop from the page, Francisco scratched over and moved initials to get the skills and loyalty balance he wanted.

With family accounted for, he then looked at the green highlighted limbs without family member initials to see whether those running successful operations could move to a red or blue role. Did they have the skills to start a new operation or only those for maintaining an existing process? Did they develop talent in their organization to be able to replace themselves, or would their group fail without them?

Francisco asked, “Alberto, tell me, what do you know of the Uruguayan, Alfonso?”

“He is very …,” Alberto paused. He struggled to find the exact English words. He looked in Francisco’s eyes for permission to switch to Spanish and saw it was denied. Unable to find the precise wording, he resorted to a longer description, “He is very good at his men getting to the right spots. He employs good men.”

“Does he have a man trained who could do this in his absence?”

“Yes, his brother Jaime is very good.”

“Excellent, does he have a wife and children?”

“Yes.”

With that, Francisco wrote Alfonso’s name over a blue highlight on a limb far removed from the one his brother Jamie would now operate. He added a note to move Alfonso’s family to one of his villas in Colombia.

Throughout the long flight, he continued the process of reconfiguring the map of his soon-to-again-be-global operation. He promoted greens, filled in blues, and addressed reds with his long continuation of Pablo’s policy of
plata o plomo
by drawing either a dollar sign or bullet over the initials.

Francisco needed this exercise to order his world. He was a good leader but a reluctant manager. He bonded well with his people and got more from them than they would have provided another boss. Although he did not admit it to others, he felt he had surpassed even El Capo in this manner. He had his people’s hearts. Machiavelli would have approved of his mastery of being both loved and feared. But he
needed to force himself to deal with the tedium of daily operations. This tactical exercise of evaluating where to focus his improvements was enjoyable. But experience had taught him that the daily process of holding his people accountable was one that needed to be delegated to his inner circle.

The return of growth would be good for his family but it needed to be thought through. If he stopped the business today, money would not be an issue for ten generations and a thousand relatives. But ambition, ambition was an eternal issue. His cousins and nephews needed to find new markets and add to the family’s grandeur rather than squabbling over its vast remains.

He recollected a long-ago conversation with a retired Royal Air Force pilot Pablo had employed to fly the family’s Boeing 747.

“Francisco, why do you think people everywhere speak English? It is not an easy language to learn nor a particularly beautiful language to the ear. It does not smell of sex like French or convey excitement like Italian. There are not many native English speakers compared with Mandarin, Hindi, or Spanish. So why?”

“That is an easy question to answer. Because the
norteamericanos
speak English. Because to do business with them, you have to speak English.”

“That’s an inadequate answer for a lad with your noggin. The world didn’t start with business being done in English or with the bloody Yanks. Have you ever heard the saying, ‘the sun never sets on the British empire?’”

“Of course.”

“Tell me why a small island in the north Atlantic should have had such an empire.”

Quickly tired by the pilot’s Socratic style, Francisco said, “No, stop this. You tell me why you think this small country of people with bad teeth and fragile skin had an empire across the world.”

The pilot promptly replied, “The law of primogeniture.” He looked at Francisco and saw the small roll of his eyes. “Ah, you don’t believe me,
young master. You thought I was going to say because of the queen’s dominant navy. Or perhaps you thought I was an ethnocentrist and believed it was our naturally superior intelligence and appearance. But no, that would be rubbish. It was the rule of law—and particularly this law—that gave England the world’s greatest empire.”

Despite his desire to stop the old pilot’s show of superiority, Francisco was curious to hear the reasoning. “OK. Tell me what this law is and why it made everyone speak English.”

The old man explained. The law of primogeniture gave the family’s full inheritance to the eldest son once the father passed away. In the rest of Europe, when the father died, the inheritance was split among the sons. Therefore, many Englishmen who were raised in wealth grew up under the specter of needing to make something of themselves to avoid being impoverished once the eldest brother received his due.