The Dream Merchant (2 page)

*   *   *

Three days later my wife and I were standing on the dock at the Blue Water Marina with our duffel bags and fishing rods, looking around. It was twelve o'clock, but there was no million-dollar trawler yacht tied up at the fuel dock. There were a few pelicans sitting on the pilings and it was very hot. I was sweating, embarrassed. Why the hell would some stranger I met in a bar agree to take me on his yacht for a week? You couldn't buy such a trip for five thousand dollars. Sorry, I said to my wife, feeling like a fool and getting ready for the hot walk back to the north end of the island. Right then I spotted the high bow of a trawler coming around the point of South Bimini. In another ten minutes the boat was approaching the concrete fuel dock and Jim and Phyllis were waving extravagantly from the bridge. Jim came in hard against a piling and then he didn't notice the stern drifting off with the tide. He was grinning, not paying attention. He wanted me to take the measure of his pretty boat.

Hey, guys, we need a stern line! I called.

They didn't seem to know anything about boat handling. A lot of wealthy people buy big boats with no idea how to run them or navigate. It is amazing that they survive at sea.

Phyllis came down from the bridge and walked pigeon-toed to the stern where there was a coiled line. She weakly tossed it my way and it fell into the bay. She had to gather it from the water and throw it twice more before I managed to catch the end. She was an awkward, voluptuous woman of about thirty with a daffy smile. It was hard to pull the heavy trawler against the tide, but we finally got her tied up.

*   *   *

Our first days on their yacht were a dream vacation fantasy. Phyllis's sumptuous four-course meals followed long days on the water spearfishing and trolling. He was all about gamesmanship, betting, proposing dares, playing in the sea, enjoying the best cigars, discovering life's possibilities each morning after his oatmeal. Jim was six foot, and powerfully built, particularly in the chest and shoulders, his sandy hair thinning, and with a light complexion that burned easily in the Bahamian sun. Phyllis served him hand and foot, literally. Every afternoon after diving she gave him massages. She walked along his back cracking his spine with her little feet. She smeared goop on his lips to protect him from the sun. Phyllis mixed his drinks and handed him Cuban cigars. She seemed good-hearted, affable, and dumb—that was my first impression. In the evening she showered on the deck and waved whenever I glanced her way. She was nice to look at. The girls cooked together in the galley, got along okay, although I didn't think much about them. I was focused on Jim.

On the third day out I guided him to an isolated atoll about seventy miles south of Bimini called Orange Cay. It was hardly more than a large rock. But the surrounding reefs were untouched by local fishermen who couldn't afford the fuel to travel halfway to Cuba. There were lobsters, snappers, and groupers carpeting the bottom, so much game here that it felt unsporting to drop a line or dive down and spear them. But I never said that to Jim. He was in heaven and I wanted to please him. He had that effect on all of us. Every afternoon he came out of the water with his pole spear like James Bond and presented a bucket of fish and crawfish for the girls to cook. Of course any idiot could catch fish in such a place, but still I felt like a big shot for having brought him here.

I suggested playing gin rummy. It felt like a manly contest and I was good at cards. The first night playing with Jim I won thirty or forty dollars. I knew that I would. In my circle of friends I nearly always won. The second night I gradually lost back nearly everything. With a swagger that was not my own, I suggested raising the stakes. Jim didn't seem to care. Whatever you want, buddy, he said. I held my own for a while and then I began to lose. I was down five hundred before we quit—much more than I ever lost at cards. But it didn't matter. Jim evoked the larger picture while he racked up the score against me. What was five hundred when we were having such a good time bantering about women, diving for lobster, eating caviar and the best seafood, drinking wine beneath a galaxy of stars? He knew how to live. He would take me to places that I could not begin to imagine. This was implicit in the largess of those unforgettable days on Jim's yacht.

On the fifth night out, we were sitting on the aft deck drinking beer and watching gulls from the tiny island wheeling behind the stern in the glow of our anchor light. I knew that he wanted to play cards and he was waiting for me to ask him. The girls were below in the galley. Jim reached for a cigar in his shirt pocket, but then he put it back. In that moment all the banter went out of his face.

Look there, he said.

What?

He was pointing off the stern at a pinpoint of light in the distance. Hardly anything at all.

What is it?

Wait here, he said curtly. He walked into the salon and I watched him disappear down the stairs.

Minutes passed and I began to feel uneasy on the aft deck by myself, peering off the stern at a light growing larger in the blackness. The sting of Jim's voice had put me on edge. I could hear our wives inside the galley, laughing. I wished they'd be quiet. Possibly it was another fishing boat, but that would be unusual, so far off the beaten track. These days, the
Miami Herald
was filled with stories of cocaine trafficking in remote areas of the Bahamas. American cruisers anchored in the wrong place had been attacked by Colombian drug smugglers; tourists were shot to death and thrown over the side. I tried to steady my imagination. But then the lights went off in the salon and then the anchor light went out. Everything was very quiet, but I could hear my beating heart and also the rumbling of an inboard engine idling closer.

Jim returned holding two automatic rifles. He slammed a clip into one and put it into my hands. I didn't know anything about shooting guns and the weapon felt heavy and forbidding. The girls were still laughing, but now they seemed miles away. My stomach knotted up. I was thinking, Put the guns away, Jim, before something terrible happens. His expression was entirely focused, but also he seemed to be relishing the moment, which alarmed me more than the approaching boat.

What the hell are you doing, man? I said, and Jim cut me off with a hand slammed against my mouth.

What are you doing, man? I repeated to myself. I was beginning to shake.

Not a sound, he ordered.

He didn't want to hear from me, not when the speedboat was only a hundred yards off and edging closer in the dark calm water. Now I could make out its narrow sleek hull. It was sliding right up to our stern.

Then a voice called from the boat in a heavy Spanish accent, Do you know where we are? What a preposterous question to ask in the middle of nowhere. How were we supposed to answer? The sleek boat kept edging forward and Jim motioned for me to get down on the deck. Once again, Do you know where we are? The man's voice was cloying with sweet innocence. It was disgusting.

Jim seemed to see something. He raised the gun fast, hesitated a beat, and he squeezed off three rounds.

Holy shit.

In a second, two thousand horsepower was roaring and the speedboat wheeled on its haunches, throwing white water on us, and for a moment I saw the alarmed face of the man at the wheel staring back as the boat shot off into the darkness.

Did you see the other guy pointing a rifle from the companionway? Jim asked, lowering his own gun. I hadn't seen a second man. I had never seen anything like this before in my life. I was trying to pull my heart back into my chest.

Were they gonna kill us?

What do you think?

Are they coming back? What's gonna happen?

He shrugged. I still didn't get it. Was this for real or a paranoid fantasy that Jim was filling up with life? I had no idea if he'd hit the men or shot to scare them. I hadn't seen any rifles except our own.

We'll have to stand guard through the night, Jim said as though situations like these were normal in life. I tried to imagine how we'd hold them off. Where I fit in. I was a writer from New York, not the right guy to go into a gunfight. The rifle felt clammy and too heavy for me to hold up. Honestly, I wanted to hide down below.

He led me up the companionway and positioned us on opposite ends of a Boston Whaler on the top deck. He took my rifle and clicked off the safety so that I was ready to shoot.

Don't pull the trigger by accident, he said. I've seen that before.

I nodded, pulling my right hand away from the stock. Looking across the taut canvas cover, I could see two lights in the distance moving back and forth. No, three lights. What the hell was going on out there? I couldn't tell if they were coming closer or moving off. How could we defend ourselves against an armada of drug smugglers? But why were they coming for us?

Jim had stopped answering my questions. The waiting was too much. After a half hour like this, clutching the gun against my knee, I was simply going crazy. To break the tension, I asked, What'd you do in Brazil?

I didn't expect an answer, but Jim coughed two or three times and put his rifle down on the deck.

I spent three years in the jungle mining for gold.

Tell me, I said, still trying to breathe normally.

*   *   *

It takes over your life, he said while keeping his eyes focused on the boats that now seemed to be moving a little farther away. Everything changed for me the first day I walked into that camp. The smell of pig shit was everywhere. Jim shook his head slowly, remembering.

I had a friend in Canada who had signed a lease with the Brazilian government—they call it an
alvará
—to work twenty thousand acres in the deep jungle south of Manaus. He made a proposal for the two of us to go into business together. Why not? I was fifty-two years old and my life was in ruins. I found out that my partner didn't know anything about surviving in the jungle. His first visit to the camp the guy got scared, and he never came back in. I ended up doing it myself.

Jim took the cigar out of his pocket and put it in his mouth, but he didn't light up.

Now just imagine a few Brazilian Indians sifting dirt and gravel at the edge of a riverbank in the middle of the Amazon, he continued. On this first trip, I brought along four men from the city. I didn't know them at all, but they were supposed to have experience finding gold.

I was exhausted and hungry. I trekked through the jungle with the men for four days to get there. One of them spoke ten English words, but mostly I was guessing about things I'd never seen before. My partner had said there would be some basic house where we would live. I figured bunks and even a shower. There wasn't any house. There was an old pigpen made from tree trunks rotten with termites. It was all that was left from a mining operation ten years earlier. The jungle had grown over everything. The hovel was filled with shit. I guessed some wild pigs still used it. I couldn't imagine sleeping a night there. For lunch we ate a large anteater that one of the natives shot beside the river; it was a big animal with claws the size of a man's hands. My guys considered anteater great eating, but the animal had a terrible smell from ants. They cooked the meat with a sweet guava paste to kill the smell, but it was just awful. They cut up the rest of the anteater and tossed it in an old rusty barrel for later.

It was hot, a hundred degrees or more, with humidity worse than anything I had ever felt. I needed to get cool, but I was frightened to swim in the river because of snakes and who knew what was in there. I was thirsty and bitten raw by mosquitoes and ants. Worst of all, after walking sixty miles in the heat I was dead tired; maybe I was sick. I needed to sleep for a week in a cool room. There aren't any cool rooms in the jungle. But these little men I hired, they had such energy and patience. Hour after hour they sifted the dirt with large sieves called
batillas.
I was sweating and thinking, What the hell am I doing here? Maybe I was sick with malaria. I had no idea. I looked into one of those sieves and I saw a few clumps of hard, shiny metal. It was gold.

Jim paused a minute and lit his fat Cuban cigar, which seemed preposterous given our circumstances, but it calmed me a little. He wasn't thinking any more about the boats. He was remembering and barely nodding his head to some interior music.

Just seeing it, my God, what runs through your mind. The lust. What I could do with this! I mean, there was so much more money in this dirt than I had ever made in business. More than I had ever dreamed of. To hell with everything else. It starts exploding in you, that I could do anything, I could have anything on earth. I could be a billionaire like De Beers. This goes through your mind. Why the hell not? It's all around me on this property, tons and tons of gold; just look at the clumps rolling around in the
batilla.
I'm calculating the money, all the things I'm going to buy, when all of a sudden I'm looking around to make sure that no one sees what we've got here, this fortune that's just a half a foot beneath the ground. We've got to protect this property, because someone could take it. Maybe someone is watching right now from the trees across the river. How can we protect it? We'll need guns. People would kill us to get this gold. And it was mine. All mine.

Jim looked at me squarely. Are you getting this? Do you understand?

Looking at the shiny chunks of metal in the
batilla
brought on some wild ideas, he went on. I could build a resort, a casino in the Amazon. Anything at all. I would have my own Learjet, like before I went broke. All I could think about was this gold. I'm going to become rich. I'm going to show everybody in the world that I made it again after what happened to me. I made it back on top, but much bigger.

One of the Indians was trying to gesture to me, no, no, Jim—he was shaking his head at my excitement—the clumps of metal aren't real gold. They haven't found it yet. This is false gold. He is pointing up the river. We have to search other parts of the property until we find the real thing and begin our mining operation.