Читать книгу The Luck of the Maya - Theodore Brazeau - Страница 9

LUCY

In the morning, before dawn, we went down to that smelly dock and boarded Tío Sebi’s shrimp boat. Once we put out to sea, I felt much safer.

It was good to see Tío Sebi. He hadn’t changed at all. Still very big. Still very loud. Still my favorite uncle, even though I hardly ever saw him any more. It’s hard to visit people who are always out in the middle of the ocean. But we would have two days of leisure on the boat. Tío Sebi would be busy keeping the boat going, but we would still have some time to chat.

And now, finally, I could to take time to fill Carlos and Jeb in about our plans, as far as I knew what they were myself. There would be lots of playing by ear on this venture.

CARLOS

The car stopped and Jeb turned off the motor. Can I get off the floor now? I asked. Lucy popped her head up, looked around. “There’s El Triunfo. De prisa, hurry. Let’s get aboard. We’ll be a lot safer when we’re at sea. Jeb, bring the car keys for el Capitán, it’s his car.”

We scurried across the wet fishy smelling concrete, down the pier. Lucy called out softly and a large, round face appeared above the rails of the boat. “¡Lucy!” came a harsh whisper “¡Pasen al bordo! ¡Rápido! ¡Arriba!” We ran up the ramp onto the boat.

There seemed to be at least three people aboard, although I wasn’t sure as the dawn light was just beginning to do some good. They pulled up the ramp and untied the ropes. The motor was already running and we were away within minutes. By that time we were hidden from prying eyes in the wheelhouse cabin.

“¡Lucy! ¡Que bueno verte! ¡Hace tiempo! ¡Demasiado! Eres tan bella como siempre.” An immense man wearing a captain’s hat was hugging Lucy, her feet a foot or more off the deck. I concluded this was the captain, and I thought he was acting a little familiar with Lucy. Was I getting possessive now? Watch it, I thought.

“I’m so sorry about Gonzalo,” the Capitán continued, but with a sorrowful face. “He was a good man. How did it happen?”

“There were four of them,” she said, “they got him by ambush on the highway south of Tampico. Three of them are dead, but the small one got away.”

“From ambush was the only way they could have taken him,” the Captain said, “He was the best. Were you there?”

“How do you think the others got dead?” She replied. “I wish I’d had another bullet to put into that redrojo too. I would have reloaded, but the little pendejo is fast.”

I guess we were back to calling him the Runt, redrojo. Pendejo wasn’t a bad concept either, pubic hair literally, and I thought he could pass for one. By the look in Lucy’s eye, and the crooked little smile, I figured we would be seeing him again, one way or another. Probably briefly.

She turned to Jeb and me. “Tío, te presento a mis amigos y compañeros,” Tío, I thought, her uncle, somehow relieved. What difference does it make I scolded myself. Shape up. This is business.

“This is my Uncle Sebastián. Tío Sebi knows what we are doing and has graciously agreed to get us to Campeche the safest way possible—on his boat.”

Con mucho gusto, mi Capitán, I said, shaking his immense hand. I’m fairly tall, but he towered over me. The man must be six eight at least, over 275 pounds with no sign of fat. I didn’t think I would be calling him Sebi any time soon.

He glowered at the both of us. “I want to be very clear on one thing,” he said in a booming Spanish, “nothing bad will happen to my favorite niece while she is with you. Are we in agreement?” We both agreed wholeheartedly, nodding our heads up and down like a couple of clowns. Capitán Sebastián has that affect on people. Completamente de acuerdo, I said.

“Good,” he smiled. His face lit up, and he didn’t look so menacing. “Lucy will sleep in the crew’s quarters. The crew—and you—will sleep on the deck. It’ll be comfortable, not to worry. If it doesn’t rain. We’ll get there late tomorrow. After dusk.” I’m not real crazy about always getting to places in the dark, but I suppose it’s best.

Lucy had explained that our destination was just a spot on the beach, but that we would be met by friends. Hopefully by friends. We would then proceed by car to the tiny town in the jungle to organize the next step. Los Muertos. The Dead.

We spent the day relaxing in folding lounge chairs in the shade of the wheelhouse drinking iced down soft drinks and discussing our situation. One sure thing about traveling by shrimp boat: you always had plenty of ice. We would have preferred beer, but Capitán Sebastián says no alcohol on board, except in port, when he insists on a lot of it. Says fishing, or anything else on a boat, is dangerous enough when you have all your wits about you, especially when you have a limited supply of wits to begin with. Jeb and I stuck with Fantas, Lucy preferred the little Chaparritas. To be practical, we wore our swimsuits. Lucy’s was yellow, if I remember correctly. And I do.

Our tiny brains were being stretched a bit by what Lucy was telling us. We were practical everyday down-to-earth smugglers, albeit romantic adventurers in our own minds. Stuff like this was not part of our portfolio. But, it was Lucy telling it, so we took it, if with the proverbial grain of salt.

As she had already told us, our Object had been around for a while, a few thousand years at least. “Family tradition tells of its presence for at least two long count calendar cycles,” Lucy said. “If true, that puts it at over ten thousand years right there, and maybe it was around a lot longer, much longer. It was supposed to be destroyed at the end of the last cycle, in 3114 BC, but wasn’t. The next opportunity will be in 2012, after that we would have to wait another 5126 years and I don’t think we’d make it.”

Nothing like planning ahead, I thought. But what is this about calendars? I asked. Actually, I knew a fair amount about the Mayan and Aztec calendars. During my brief career at the University of Texas I’d had courses in Mexican history and anthropology. We’d spent more time than I wanted to on those calendars. Very complicated. I got a C. It was a C+, though.

I had spent a couple of years at UT in Austin, back then. If nothing else it straightened out both my Spanish and my English, got most of the border slang out. I could now talk in either language without throwing in a lot of words from the other, and I lost my border accent. Jeb’s Spanish was better than mine to begin with, since he spent some time living with cousins and going to school down in Saltillo, being an orphan and all. He claims to have attended UT, too. And he did, although I don’t think he ever took any classes. As I recall, he spent a bunch of time hanging out on the campus, mainly doing things with girls.

I never really intended to quit college, just tapered off. We did a few gigs in the summers, but never enough to keep body, beer and soul together, so I thought I’d drop out for a while and build up a little nest egg, get a better idea of what to study and go back to finish up. Well, one thing led to another and I still haven’t got it together academically. Maybe if this job really paid off, I’d give it another shot.

Lucy was explaining calendars. “The Long Count calendar goes in cycles of 5126 years. The day-to-day calendars, the Tzolk’in , the Haab and the others, you and I are not concerned about here. That date in December of 2012 of the modern calendar is the important one. That’s when everything resets and changes. Or not.”

“You mean some disaster will happen?” Jeb asked. “The end of the world or some such?” Jeb reads about stuff like that in the supermarket tabloids.

“No, no,” Lucy said, “not that. Some people like to say that about the world ending, but that’s not it. Even so, it’s very important. As I said before, it’s all about luck, good and bad,” Lucy said, “about chance, probabilities, fortune. That’s why our ‘Object’, the lobil inside the golden head, must be destroyed on that date, or within a few days of it.”

“Why? What happens if it’s not?” Jeb asked. “Or if it is?”

“If it’s not, there will be no resetting. The world and everything and everyone in it will continue as is, just as it did last time. In that sense, I guess you could predict an end to the world, because I don’t think we can take another five thousand years of the way we’re going.”

“My family is Mayan now, but we have a family history and tradition that is much older. The so-called Mayan calendar is much older, too. We’ve watched over this Object for a long, long time and should have destroyed it five thousand years ago.”

“We failed at that time, family oral history tells of politics – there were those, in and out of the family, who did not want a resetting. There are those now who think the same way. It’s to their advantage for things to stay as they are, or so they think, even though the world will almost certainly be better off if the resetting takes place. And this may be our last chance.”

“Thousands of years ago, things were different. Groups and individuals could have good or bad luck and it didn’t matter much overall. But when you’re dealing with nuclear weapons, biological experimentation, major pollution, big time wars and who knows what else, you can’t afford a lot of bad luck.”

We stopped stretching our brains for a while to watch the nets being drawn up. Tío Sebastián had been slowing down to fish from time to time, both to appear authentic to any observer and to add some shrimp to his catch in the hold. Also to time our arrival tomorrow. We didn’t want to get there too early.

The catch spilled over the deck in all directions. Shrimp and fish and other strange looking creatures I’d never seen before and certainly wouldn’t eat. Some looked like they might want to eat me. The deck hands, Eusebio and Humberto, started pulling out the shrimp and a few fish, then pushing the shrimp into the iced hold and the rest back into the sea through the slots in the boat’s rail. Seagulls swarmed behind the boat, hoping to cash in on all the good stuff.

“Lunch in thirty minutes,” Eusebio shouted, running into the wheelhouse galley with a pail full of shrimp and an armload of fish.

Lunch sounded good and, thirty minutes later, proved to be gourmet quality. Fresh shrimp and fresh fish five minutes out of the water, cooked on a galley stove by a seaman who knows what he is doing is the best anywhere. It puts the finest Houston restaurants to shame. I wish I could eat it every day, as these lucky fishermen do. Eusebio served it to us on tin plates with lemons and tomatoes and chiles “Contra el escorbuto,” he pointed to the vegetables, “to prevent the scurvy,” I didn’t think we would be out here long enough for scurvy to be a serious problem, but I squirted lemon on everything and ate up.

After lunch, we collapsed back into our lawn chairs, but were too stuffed to want anything else to eat or drink, so we settled for chewing ice while Lucy went on with her story. Jeb asked her about the ‘Object’.

“It’s sometimes called the ‘Object’, and has other names. In our family some call it ‘Pol’, which means simply ‘Head’, others call it ‘Lobil’ which means ‘Badness’—that’s the ancient thing inside. Take your pick. I prefer Pol.”

“Let’s go with Pol,” Jeb said. “I don’t like that other word.”

“Pol it is. As I said, I’ve never seen it, but people who have been near it say you can kind of feel it. I’m told that the Object itself, the thing inside, is shaped like a slice of apple. If you core an apple and slice it into eight pieces, you’ll get a shape like that. Family legend has it that it is somehow hard to look at and attractive at the same time, but no one has seen it for thousands of years, so who knows. It was sealed inside the golden head to hide it—a bad choice for nowadays, but back then there was no real point to stealing gold. Food, maybe, clothes, tools, girls, but not something heavy and useless like gold. Besides, gold weighted it down—it is weightless by itself and tends to float away if you’re not careful. I’d guess it probably made people nervous, just floating around. Also important, gold seems to mute its effects to some extent, makes them less extreme.”

“What effects are those,” Jeb asked. I was trying to keep my eyes open after that big lunch. So far, so good, but I thought a nap would be in order very soon.

“Again, luck, good and bad,” Lucy smiled. Not the funny little smile, just regular. “If you touch it, even through the gold, your luck will probably change. For better or worse. For most people it will be for the worse, sometimes mildly, sometimes horribly. In our family, there are some who touch it eventually, but probably not until after they’ve had children, if they intend to have them.“

Why is that? I wondered aloud.

“The reason is that, because of our long term responsibility, we traditionally have large families and people whose luck changes to bad tend to die young one way or another. They fall in a cenote, a tree falls on them, they cut themselves and die of infection, a snake bites them, who knows? Better to have your family first. Most such changes are for the bad, but not all and sometimes it’s hard to tell.”

Hard to tell? I asked, still awake. “Yes. An awful example, an uncle of mine, a great-uncle actually, was caught in a terrible fire, along with his whole family, his wife, both their mothers, ten children, some cousins, friends, animals. There was a drought and the forest was burning, their houses and buildings went up in flames. Deer, jaguars, snakes, everything running from the horrible heat. My uncle was able to lead everyone, the bigger ones carrying and dragging the little tots, all to a cenote. He kept going back for others and finally he didn’t come back himself. He died in that fire, but he saved his whole family, maybe twenty some people. Is that good luck or bad? Is it luck at all?”

I knew about cenotes. Big areas in the Yucatán have no surface water, no rivers, no lakes or ponds. The rivers are underground and the cenotes are natural holes from the surface, like wells, giving access to the underground water that runs through limestone caverns in the earth. Some are tiny, some immense. Life in the Yucatán would be difficult to impossible without them.

Would you touch it, Lucy? I asked.

“I’d be afraid, but I would.” I saw a trace of the little smile.

I didn’t know what to believe. I thought I might sleep on it. Soon. Jeb was wearing his serious look. “What’s all that got to do with someone in New York or Hong Kong now or in the future. Or, for that matter, in the past?”

“It’s subtle,” Lucy answered. “Like my uncle. I would have a problem arguing that the Maya are a lucky people, even before the ‘stinking people’ came – that’s one of the things we called the Spanish conquistadores when we met them—and smelled them. I think a good reading of history would draw the same conclusions regarding the whole human condition.”

“The Spanish didn’t destroy the civilization of the Maya the way they did the ones in Central México and Perú and elsewhere. I’m sure they would have, but we beat them to it. We did it to ourselves. Some time before the Spanish got here, we had decades of civil war that pretty much did it for the remnant of civilization we had left. We destroyed ourselves with jealous little city states, greedy kings, foolish fighting, bad luck, possibly too much touching of the Pol. It’s true that the Spanish religious zealots later put the cap on it by burning most of our books and art, but by that time we were all just farmers in the jungle. A few people, like our family, preserved what they could and, in our case, we had the Pol to worry about, and the long term duty to guard it that had somehow been imposed on us.”

“Maybe it’s only a hope, but what we get from our family’s oral tradition and from those who have thought about it, is that probabilities, chances, fortune, luck—whatever you want to call it—runs worse, not just for the Maya, but worldwide because this thing exists. Are we sure? No. But our best thinkers, who have been thinking about this for thousands of years, strongly think so.”

“I’m not one of those thinkers, so I can’t go into that in depth. I’m trained as an action person, an outside person. Out in the larger world, that is. I’m a doer and an operative by training, not a thinker or philosopher. I’m just parroting what I’ve been told.”

I’m quitting keeping track of the surprises coming out of this woman, I thought. I’ve lost count anyway.

“Each generation has a few of us scattered around,” she continued. “For instance, we had early warning of the conquistadores when they arrived in the Caribbean. We took their measure and knew we were all in for big trouble.”

“The same is true now, in a different way. There are some very rich and powerful people out there who don’t want to see any change. They would like to get hold of this thing and stash it away until after 2012 so it’s destruction can’t affect them and their wealth and power. Maybe it wouldn’t anyway, but they don’t want to take the chance. Some might want to touch it, thinking in their arrogance that their new luck would have to be the good kind. Maybe it would be, but probably not. They’re a bad bunch and will stay that way. Destroying the object won’t make evil disappear, it won’t generate goodness, but if it can skew us in the direction of good fortune, we might make it in the long run.”

“Why not destroy it now?” asked Jeb. “Why wait thirty some years?”

“Can’t do it,” Lucy said, shaking her head. It’s been tried and nothing happens. It has to be done at the realignment of the calendar. The legend is quite specific, and so is the calendar. This calendar is not just arbitrary. Astronomers are now calculating that in 2012 the sun will be aligned with the center of our galaxy – the Milky Way – for the first time in just shy of 26,000 years. In other words five Long Count cycles—25,630 years.”

“The Mayan idea of time is different. Time is circular. There are smaller circles within larger circles and they are within still larger circles and so on. The first creation date is calculated to be almost forty-two octillion years ago. Here, I’ll write that down.” She rummaged around in our box of stuff and pulled out a pencil.

Slowly, she wrote on the deck boards: ‘41,943,040,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years’. She smiled. “This is only approximate, you understand”

“That number takes us way way back, back beyond the Big Bang the scientists talk about now. That’s only fifteen billion years ago. Here, I’ll write it.” She wrote 15,000,000,000. “See, not so many zeros. And the scientists, too, say maybe there are cycles, many Big Bangs, one after the other, or sideways through black holes. Who knows? Maybe the thing in our Pol is a remnant from some other Big Bang cycle somehow, a cycle when the rules and laws of the universe were different. Maybe it came to earth with the giant meteor that hit Yucatán sixty-five million years ago, the one that destroyed the dinosaurs—that would be recent to the lobil—and it’s been floating around ever since. Who knows?”

“This present cycle’s starting date was, on the modern calendar, August 13, 3114 BC, and it will end December 21, 2012.”

This was actually getting pretty interesting, if weird, but I was losing it. Let’s take a little break, I mumbled. I think Lucy and Jeb were ready for a nap, too. I didn’t hear any objections, but I guess I wouldn’t have, being sound asleep.

When I woke, the sun was lower, Jeb was snoring and Lucy was in the wheelhouse laughing at something with Tío Sebi. I rubbed some ice on my face to wake up and clean some of the sweat off. Lucy saw me from the window and called to me to come on up. Well, ‘up’ was only two steps, so I made it all right. The Capitán and Lucy were eating tiny shrimp and other strange looking things with toothpicks stuck in them. I tried some shrimp and a few of the milder looking weirdities. They weren’t bad. I avoided the ones that looked like they still might bite.

“We’re ahead of schedule, so we’ll slow down and drop the nets for a while. With any luck, I’ll have almost a full catch by the time we get there. We already had half a catch when we picked you up in Veracruz. I can top it off and sell it in Campeche.” the Capitán said. “Tomorrow at dusk we’ll be there. In the afternoon, we’ll be close enough to radio, make sure all’s OK.” I decided not to get nervous at least until then.

Lucy took my hand. It felt good. “I’m glad you and Jeb are with me on this,” she said. “I couldn’t do it alone. We have other outside persons, operatives, but not enough of them. They are out there helping us or doing their thing.” I decided she could keep the hand, if she wanted. I couldn’t think of anything I’d rather do with it. I didn’t say so, though, Tío Sebi being so near and so big. “I know you are here for the money, Sam, but thank you anyway.” Sam, I thought. I don’t remember telling her one of my names was Sam. Well, ni modo, nothing for it, let it go.

Since it didn’t rain, the night on the deck was actually quite pleasant. The two crewmen, Eusebio and Humberto, had been working for Capitán Sebastián on this boat and others for most of their lives and had an unending supply of fish stories to tell. You never know with fish stories, but my guess was that some of these actually happened.

Eusebio told us about the first time he worked with Capitán Sebastián. He wasn’t a Capitán then, just a crewman. They were working on an old shrimp boat, the Lily Mac. It was on its last legs, rotting away. The motor was not too bad, but the hull and deck were mostly patches, and the equipment kept breaking down.

One day, around noon, they were fishing two or three miles out of Tuxpan, south of Tampico. Eusebio happened to be in front of the wheelhouse when the bow of the boat simply split in two, opening up like a shark’s mouth. The water poured in and the bow sank down into the waves in seconds, the rest of the boat right behind it. Eusebio was thrown into the water, fortunately to one side. Sebastián was amidships. Capitán Alfonso was in the wheelhouse, yelling and shouting ¡Socorro! ¡No puedo nadar! Help! I can’t swim! He ran out onto the sinking deck, waving his arms in panic. They both jumped into the water, the Capitán off the starboard side and Sebastián to the port, almost on top of Eusebio, who was going down for the second or third time.

“El Capitán Sebastián is a very good swimmer,” Eusebio said. “I couldn’t swim at all. Still can’t. Never learned. I’m afraid of the water.”

“He grabbed me and kept me above water. Saved my life. We were not alone in the ocean. There was another shrimp boat about a mile away, La Santa Teresa. It was owned by the same man and was not in much better shape than the Lily Mac, but they came to our rescue. If they had not I would not be telling you this story.”

“They saw what was happening, pulled up their nets and cranked up that worn out motor as far as it would go. We were all lucky it didn’t blow up. By the time they got to us, the old Lily Mac was at the bottom of the sea, along with our catch, all our clothes and the 300 pesos I’d been saving to buy a present for my girlfriend. I think her name was María. Well, I guess they’re all named María.”

“La Santa Teresa threw down some floats. You know, those old round rings. Sebastián grabbed one and put it under my arms while he himself kept treading water until they could haul us all aboard. By that time Capitán Alfonso had floated over to us, struggling to keep his head above water, so they threw down a rope ladder and we went up. The ladder was kind of rotten, like everything else on those boats that man owned, but it held us, one at a time.”

“There were no radios on those old tubs, so we couldn’t report the sinking until we finished the catch and got back to port. Wouldn’t have mattered anyway, what was anyone going to do?”

“But from that day, I stick with Capitán Sebastián. He’s the best. Without him there wouldn’t be an Eusebio.”

After a few more stories involving immense fish and possible sea monsters, we finally called it quits. Jeb and I nodded off about midnight and the gentle swells gave us a restful sleep. One of our last.

We were awake early the next morning. I would have liked to sleep in, since we would be having a leisurely day. At least we would until dusk, when the action would start. But it’s hard to sleep with the tropical sun attacking you.

We got up, had some decent coffee in the wheelhouse and were subjected to a fisherman’s shower. A laughing Eusebio squirted saltwater at us from the big hose they used to wash the deck. It was hard to stand up with that fire hose coming down on you. Lucy did better than either Jeb or I did. Maybe it was the yellow swimsuit. We then scrubbed down with the omnipresent ice to get the salt off and returned to our favorite lawn chairs in the shade of the wheelhouse to break out the Fantas and Chaparritas.

I appreciated your history lesson yesterday, I told Lucy, but I’d like to hear something about what’s coming down tonight and tomorrow and after that.

“Right,” she said. “It’s time we got to that. Tonight my cousin, Jaime, is going to meet us at the beach. He’ll have most of the supplies we’ll need, and a car, a Jeep of some kind. He’s only seventeen and this is his first big adventure. He’ll be very nervous, but it’ll be fine. Two of his big brothers will be traveling with us to make sure nothing goes wrong.”

“We’ll drive most of the night,” Lucy explained. “You’d better take one of your naps this afternoon because you won’t be sleeping much in the car. Some of the roads aren’t very good. And other places there aren’t any. You’ll be hanging on with both hands.”

“Tomorrow, at Los Muertos, we’ll pack up and get started toward either the first or second site. The first is the one I’ve already been to. The Pol wasn’t there then, but may be now.”

How will we know? I asked, where will we look? “We’ll know,” she said. “At least I will. I think you and Jeb will, too, but I’m not sure how sensitive you’ll be.” Sensitive to what, I asked. I’m a pretty sensitive guy. ”Well, the vibes,” she said, “you wait and see.”

“After that, assuming it’s not there, we’ll have some help finding the next place. Jaime’s big brothers, Arnulfo and Arnoldo are going with us and can make some good guesses. They don’t know the inner circle stuff, but they know the jungle. They often work as chicle gatherers, spend months at a time in the Petén.”

Chicle? I asked, as in chewing gum? “That’s the stuff. Here, have some.” She produced one of the little two chip packets of Chiclets that little kids sell on the street all over México for 20 centavos. “No charge.” The gum was OK, as usual, but clashed with my Fanta.

“We’ll be traipsing through the forest on horseback,” Lucy continued. “The horses and supplies will be waiting for us tomorrow in that little place, Los Muertos.” I still didn’t like that name. A bad omen. “It’s going to be a long ride, so watch out for the saddle sores.” Well, we’ve had saddle sores before, so I guess we’ll get over that, I told her.

We did, but it took time.

“That’s about as far as I can take it right now,” Lucy went on, “after that we’ll be playing it pretty much by ear. Trying to find our Pol and staying out of the way of the bad guys, or anyone else for that matter.”

LUCY

I told them something about the history of the ‘Item’, which we called the Lobil or Pol. I don’t think they believed much of it, or cared. No good reason why they should.

They were more interested in immediate things, like what to expect tomorrow and the day after that, so I told them what I could.

“My cousins are picking us up at the beach. In a car. And are taking us to that little spot on the map you saw. Los Muertos. Don’t ask me how the place got that name. I shudder to think. Who would want to name their town ‘The Dead’? I guess they don’t have a Chamber of Commerce.”

“That’s where we’ll pick up our horses and supplies and head into the Petén. My cousins Arnulfo and Arnoldo and some others will be going with us, which is good, because they know what they are doing in the forest.”

“We’ll plan our route when we get there, and had best leave most of that to Arnulfo. He knows the jungle better than anyone. He’s spent lots of time there, gathering chicle among other things, and knows how to live off the land. If anyone can get us where we want to go, it’ll be Arnulfo.”

“I would like to provide more details, but I don’t have many of them myself. We’d all just have to wait and see.”

CARLOS

Later in the afternoon, Lucy was napping in the shade of the wheelhouse and Jeb and I were sitting inside, out of the sun and wind, visiting about trivial things as Capitán Sebastián manned the wheel.

The Capitán said, “Let me tell you muchachos a story.” I said, fine, we like stories.

“It’s not about Mayan gods, is it?” asked Jeb, pushing his luck.

“No, no, not about gods,” Capitán Sebastián assured him. “It goes this way.” He settled down in his captain’s chair and frowned at us.

“Many years ago, so long ago that I was a very young man, I was a sailor on a shrimp boat—not a Capitán, you understand.”

“The man who was captain had a sister whom he loved very much, and he was very protective of her. Now, the sister hooked up with this guy. He treated her bad and he treated everyone bad. Not a good guy.”

“Then one day the captain came into port and visited his sister. The sister had a black eye and other injuries. The captain got out of her that this guy had done this to her and that it wasn’t the first time.”

“You see, the captain was all set to kill the guy, but the sister begged him not to, so he told her ‘all right, I’ll just talk to him’. And he did. He warned him in strong language about hurting the sister, but kept his hands off him because his sister had asked him to.”

“Sometime later the captain again returned to port and found that his sister was in the hospital, having been beaten by the bad guy. The captain was, of course, infuriated and vowed he would take care of the guy.”

“Now, you know how seriously we take the protection of our womenfolk in this part of the world. Especially us seafaring types. Nothing must happen to our sisters or mothers or nieces! We get very upset, infuriated! And we are all very big and very strong!” He glared at us.

“Somehow—never mind how—the guy wound up on the shrimp boat. You might think that the captain would want to speak harshly to the guy, slap him around and maybe throw him overboard. But no, the captain didn’t do that. Instead, he pushed him naked into the hold, on top of the ice, with the shrimp crawling over him and the crabs biting him. He left him in there. He had plenty of raw shrimp and crabs to eat—delicacies, you know—and ice for water. After several days the captain brought him out and then, only then, did he throw him into the sea to drown.”

Lucy came up the steps into the wheelhouse. She put her hands on her hips and glared at Capitán Sebastián. “Tío Sebi, you stop that right now! You made that all up! You’re just trying to frighten Jeb and Carlos. I heard every word.”

“Well—uh—Lucy—I—uh— I just want you to be safe,” Tío Sebi stammered nervously.

“Well, Jeb and Carlos are good guys and they will already help keep me safe. They don’t need to be threatened. Besides, they’re already afraid of me. Aren’t you?” She turned to us, glaring. We both nodded vigorously, and again wondered what we had gotten ourselves into.

But then I saw just a hint of a smile on her face. She winked and turned to Tío Sebi, then poked him on the arm. Better him than me.