Dusky MacMorgan: Cuban Death-Lift Part 1

Dusky MacMorgan.

Cuban Death-Lift.

Randy Striker.

For those of us who made it out of Mariel.

Introduction.

In the winter of 1980, I received a surprising phone call from an editor at Signet Books-surprising because, as a Florida fishing guide, the only time New Yorkers called me was to charter my boat. And if any of my clients were editors, they were savvy enough not to admit it.

The editor said she'd read a story by me in Outside Magazine and was impressed. Did I have time to talk?

As a mediocre high school jock, my idols were writers, not ball players. I had a dream job as a light-tackle guide, yet I was still obsessed with my own dream of writing for a living. For years, before and after charters, I'd worked hard at the craft. Selling a story to Outside, one of the country's finest publications, was a huge break. I was about to finish a novel, but this was the first time New York had called.

Yes, I had time to talk.

The editor, whose name was Joanie, told me Signet wanted to launch a paperback thriller series that featured a recurring he-man hero. "We want at least four writers on the project because we want to keep the books coming, publishing one right after the other, to create momentum."

Four writers producing books with the same character?

"Characters," Joanie corrected. "Once we get going, the cast will become standard."

Signet already had a template for the hero. He was a Vietnam vet turned Key West fishing guide, she said, talking as if the man existed. He was surfer-boy blond, and he'd been friends with Hemingway.

I am not a literary historian, but all my instincts told me the timetable seemed problematic. I said nothing.

"He has a shark scar," Joanie added, "and he's freakishly strong. Like a man who lifts weights all the time."

The guys I knew who lifted weights were also freakishly clumsy, so . . . maybe the hero, while visiting a local aquarium, tripped during feeding time?

My brain was already problem-solving.

"He lives in Key West," she said, "so, of course, he has to be an expert on the area. That's why I'm calling. You live in Key West, and I liked your magazine story a lot. It seems like a natural fit."

Actually, I fished out of Sanibel Island, on Florida's Gulf Coast, a six hour drive from Sloppy Joe's, but this was no time for petty details.

"Have you ever been to Key West?" I asked the editor. "Great sunsets."

Editors, I have since learned, can also be cagey. Joanie didn't offer me the job. She had already settled on three of the four writers, she said, but if I was willing to submit a few sample chapters on speculation, she'd give me serious consideration.

Money? A contract? That stuff was "all standard," she told me, and could be discussed later.

"I'll warn you right now," she said, "there are a couple of other writers we're considering, so you need to get at least three chapters to me within a month. Then I'll let you know."

I hung up the phone, stunned by my good fortune. My first son, Lee, had been born only a few months earlier. My much adored wife, Debra, and I were desperate for money because the weather that winter had been miserable for fishing. But it was perfect for writing.

I went to my desk, determined not to let my young family down.

At Tarpon Bay Marina, where I was a guide, my friend Ralph Woodring owned a boat with Dusky painted in big blue letters on the side. My friend, Graeme Mellor, lived on a Morgan sailboat named No Mas.

Dusky MacMorgan was born.

Every winter, Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros. Circus came to town. Their trapeze artists, I realized, were not only freakishly strong, but they were also freakishly nimble.

Dusky gathered depth.

One of my best friends was the late Dr. Harold Westervelt, a gifted orthopedic surgeon. Dr. Westervelt became the Edison of Death, and he loved introducing himself that way to new patients. His son, David, became Westy O'Davis, and our spearfishing pal, Billy, became Billy Mack.

Problems with my hero's shark scar and his devoted friendship with Hemingway were also solved.

Working around the clock, pounding away at my old black manual typewriter, I wrote Key West Connection in nine days. On a Monday morning, I waited for the post office to open to send it to New York.

Joanie sounded a little dazed when she telephoned on Friday. Was I willing to try a second book on spec?

h.e.l.l, yes.

G.o.d, I was beginning to love New York's can-do att.i.tude.

The other three writers (if they ever existed) were fired, and I became the sole proprietor of Capt. Dusky MacMorgan-although Signet owned the copyright and all other rights after I signed Joanie's "standard" contract. (This injustice was later made right by a willing and steadfast publisher and my brilliant agent.) If Joanie (a fine editor) feels badly about that today, she shouldn't. I would've signed for less.

I wrote seven of what I would come to refer to as "duck and f.u.c.k" books because in alternating chapters Dusky would duck a few bullets, then spend much-deserved time alone with a heroine.

Seldom did a piece of paper go into my old typewriter that was ripped out and thrown away, and I suspect that's the way the books read. I don't know. I've never reread them. I do remember using obvious cliches, a form of self-loathing, as if to remind myself that I should be doing my own writing, not this job-of-work.

The book you are now holding, and the other six, const.i.tuted a training arena for a young writer who took seriously the discipline demanded by his craft and also the financial imperatives of being a young father.

For years, I apologized for these books. I no longer do.

-Randy Wayne White.

Cartagena, Colombia.

1.

In a foreign land, a land of aliens and alien politics, the killing becomes easier. The screams still haunt you, but the faces lose shape; dissipate like a sea fog at first light, and you become more and more a stranger-and the shadows become confidants. Separated from the reality of your country, your friends, your home, the newly dead become nothing more than obstacles on a path already followed, like beads on an abacus, or fears that have been conquered, and you know-with a pain like a white cold light-that you must keep killing, you must stay on the path, because it is forever and always the only way back. . . .

The day before my federal connection, Norm Fizer, told me about the disappearance of the three CIA agents in Mariel Harbor, Cuba, the squall hit.

The word "squall" doesn't seem strong enough to describe the storm that came roaring down unannounced from the open ocean of the west-northwest. Winds gusting to ninety knots, seas walling ten to fifteen feet, death written all over the face of it. And the weather boys in southern Florida did a bad job of picking it up. A d.a.m.n bad job. For them it meant just one more mistake to log with the others and forget. But for the thousands of Cuban-Americans in small boats bound for Mariel Harbor to pick up relatives in the largest Cuban sealift in history, it meant disaster.

It was a Sunday in late April. Normally, April is a time for recovery in Key West. The barrage of tourism is over by Easter, and the citizens of the little island city that has become America's chic dead end usually spend April walking the spent streets, blinking their eyes at the new quiet, at the return of the old slowness, like bears just out of hibernation.

But not this April.

You must have heard all about it, headline after headline, with film at eleven. The international newsmongers have turned us all into victims. We've become headline addicts, and they've increased our supply so gradually and steadily that we don't even realize the seriousness of our addiction. Most of us forget the dreams we've just had in the white glare of the morning edition, and at six we're too busy with Cronkite's understated lamentations to hear the words of our own children. The little man from Walden Pond saw the folly of that, but he was no anchorman, so who listens?

So you know about the Cubans who crashed the gate at the Peruvian emba.s.sy outside of Havana and demanded political asylum in early April. It was nothing new, really. Cubans tired of Castro's pipe dream had long ago figured out that breaking into the emba.s.sies of Peru and Costa Rica was the most reliable way out. But this time the unexpected happened. When the Peruvians, as always, refused to return the would-be refugees, Castro sent bulldozers to crash down the gates, removed his military force, and announced that anyone who wanted to abandon "the dream of socialism" was welcome to take refuge at the little emba.s.sy. Within two days, more than ten thousand Cubans had collected on the grounds. There was no food, so they ate the mangoes off the emba.s.sy tree, and then the leaves, and then the bark. The emba.s.sy's cat and guard dog were killed and roasted over an open fire. By the time the Peruvians-with the help of Costa Rica-had started to airlift refugees (fifty at a time) to South America, the world press got hold of the story, and Castro was made to look like the maniac he is. He might not care a hoot about the needs of his people, but he sure is sensitive to world opinion. He saw the refugees getting off the planes in Costa Rica as the source of his disgrace, so he found a way to halt the airlift-one of his goons pushed a Costa Rican diplomat through a plate-gla.s.s window. It wasn't an admirable method of diplomacy, but it was effective. The airlift was halted immediately. Then Castro did something which at the time seemed even stranger. He let it be known that if Americans wanted to come to Cuba by boat, they were welcome to pick up relatives- whether they were among the thousands at the Peruvian emba.s.sy or not. At first it didn't make any sense. I followed the news reports, like everyone else in Key West, and couldn't figure it out. Why would Castro suddenly give his people the freedom of choice? And then I remembered something my little friend Carlos de Marti had told me. Carlos is in love with a Cuban woman-whom he had grown up with before his parents shipped him off to America in 1960. Once a month-if he can manage it-Carlos makes the dangerous ninety-mile crossing alone to visit his girl on a secluded beach, and then sneaks back, bringing with him two cases of Hatuey beer for me. After his last trip, he had told me the way things were in Cuba.

"Very bad, amigo," he had said. As always, he had brought the beer down to the docks at Garrison Bight in Key West where I moor my charter boat, Sniper. "My little love asked me if, on my next trip, I would consider bringing her and her family back. That is the only thing that keeps us apart-her family. But things are very bad there now and getting worse. Little bugs ruined the national sugarcane crop, and there is some blue fungus that has killed all the tobacco. At first it was a joke, see? No tobacco, so Fidel could no longer smoke his big Cohiva cigars. But then it was not so funny. There was no money, so there was no food. When starving people are caught stealing oranges from the national groves, they were imprisoned. My little love has gotten so thin, amigo, that I am worried. The next trip, she will come back with me-family or no family."

When I remembered that, it started to make more sense. American boats in Cuba would bring American dollars. And unloading poor Cubans would take some pressure off Castro's economy. When the first two boatloads of refugees came into Key West on April 21, I understood even further. I was out off Mule Key at the time, trying to chum up some bonefish for two doctors from Moline. The first boats back were two Miami lobster fishermen-the Dos Hermanos and the Blanchie III. I watched the Coast Guard escort them back to the submarine base beside the low, dun-colored geometrics of old Fort Taylor. The boats were pathetically overloaded. One of Castro's little jokes. Overload the American boats just to see how many would be lost on the dangerous crossing of the Florida Strait. And for all the people on those two boats, there weren't that many relatives of Cuban-Americans. For every three relatives Castro allowed to leave, he sent about twenty of his castoffs-the elderly, political prisoners, habitual criminals. Another of his little jokes. But the Cuban-Americans didn't care-and I couldn't blame them. Most of them still had mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers back in Cuba, and it was their only chance to get them out. So they filed into Key West, thousands upon thousands, trailering their small fishing boats behind their cars, gas in plastic cans, food in coolers, ready to risk their lives to make the crossing and get their loved ones back. There wasn't enough hotel s.p.a.ce on the island, so they slept in their cars and drank their morning coffee sitting on the curbs of sidewalks.

Yes, it was a strange April in Key West.

There were so many Cuban-Americans unloading their boats at Garrison Bight that the Sheriff's Department had to send deputies to direct traffic day and night. And the little harbor was packed. For those of us who had boats on charterboat row, it was a real pain in the b.u.t.t. Most of them had little knowledge of seamanship, so they were constantly running over anchor lines and ramming into wharves and other boats, occasionally catching fire. It was a deadly serious kind of Keystone Kops. It got so that the other guides and I were afraid to leave our boats unguarded. When you came in from a charter, there were normally two or three Cuban-American boats in your slip, and it wasn't easy getting them to move. There were people and noise and traffic everywhere, so finally I just said to h.e.l.l with it.

And that's how I happened to be out in my stilthouse off Calda Bank when the squall hit.

It's some kind of place to watch a squall come in. It's an old fisherman's shack, built in open water eight feet deep, and the nearest land is Fleming Key-about a mile or so away. The old pine clapboard is a weathered gray, and the roof is tin. The sixteen pilings it's built on are stout and smell of creosote, and they angle down into the clear water where barracuda hang in the shadows and big gray snapper swim their nervous figure eights. I had bought the stilthouse only a few months before. I wanted solitude, and I had the money-more money than I could use in a lifetime, after that deadly last mission off the Marquesas. I had plenty to forget, and I was tired of the strange April madness that had overtaken Key West.

I wanted to be alone, to rest, to forget. And there is no place on earth better for being alone than a stilthouse.

On the Friday before the squall, I ambled up to the marina at Garrison Bight and told Stevie Wise to cancel all my charters until the craziness was over. Stevie looked harried and weary, which isn't hard to understand, really. He lives on an old lunker of a houseboat named Fred Astaire, which is as famous around Key West for its parties as Stevie is well known for his enthusiastic bachelorhood. But it was neither women nor parties which had exhausted him. It was the madness of what the newspapers were calling the Freedom Flotilla.

We stood in the little marina office staring out at the wild activity in the harbor. Cars with boats on trailers sat in a long line down Roosevelt Boulevard, waiting in the April heat to unload at the cement ramp. Fifty or sixty other boats were rafted in the harbor, while others tried to anchor with knotted lines, old engines smoking, their skippers screaming Spanish insults at each other.

"I can't believe they're letting this c.r.a.p go on," Stevie said. He had taken the phone off the hook to stop the endless barrage of calls he had been getting from the country's news media, and he sat behind the counter on a wooden stool.

"Come on, Steve-you'd be going too if you had relatives trapped in Cuba."

"No, it's not that." He brushed at his thick black hair with a free hand. With the other, he toyed with a pencil. "What I can't believe is that they're letting those poor people head across the Strait in those d.a.m.n little boats. Look out there! What are they, mostly eighteen-to-twenty-three-footers? s.h.i.t, that's suicide."

"You've got to admire their bravery. They're a determined people."

"Yeah, determined to get themselves killed. I don't see why they all just don't hire shrimp boats-or licensed captains like you-to take them across. Makes a h.e.l.luva lot more sense."

"Stevie, you know what those shrimp-boat people are charging-and if you don't, you ought to walk on down and have a beer at the Kangaroo's Pouch. That's where all the dealing's going on. The shrimp boats are getting between fifty and a hundred thou in cash for a trip. And that's in advance-with no guarantees. And the reason I'm not going is that no one I know has asked. The Cuban-Americans I do know are close friends, and I suppose they just don't want to put me on the spot."

"And what if they did ask?"

I thought for a moment. Would I go? Castro was making a fool of everyone who went to Mariel Harbor, no doubt about that. He was making a fool of Americans, his own people-everyone but himself. But the bottom line was that there were good people who looked upon this sealift as their only chance to rescue their relatives from Castro's little commie paradise. Some paradise.

Stevie stared at me with his mocking brown eyes and began to grin. "If one of your friends asked, you'd be gone in a minute, MacMorgan. You know it's true."

I snorted. Maybe it was. And maybe that's why I had decided to isolate myself on my stilthouse-to escape being asked. I didn't want to haul Castro's castoffs, so I was taking the coward's way out. You don't have to make any decisions when the world can't find you. And I was tired of decisions. I wanted to sit in my little weather-scoured shack on the sea, drink cold beer, read good books, and catch fish-just to let them go and watch them swim free again. Key West could have its traffic and its Mariel Harbor madness. And it could have it without me.

I finished rescheduling my charters, shoved the long black calendar back under the counter, and turned to leave. As I did, Stevie stopped me.

"Hey, Dusky-I almost forgot." He began shuffling through a stack of papers on a metal spindle. "You got a message here someplace. . . ."

"It'll keep."

"Naw, the guy said it was very important. Had nothing to do with a charter-hey, here it is."

I took the narrow envelope he handed me and opened it. It was from Norm Fizer. Stormin' Norman we had called him on one very secret mission a long, long time ago back in Cambodia. I had been a Navy SEAL back then, more fish than man, more killer than fish. It was a dirty, nasty, dangerous time, but I had come to respect and admire Fizer during our mission there. He's a fed-and one of the rare good ones. I owed him a lot-and not just because of Cambodia. When the drug runners-the pirates who roam the Florida Strait and call Key West home-made the mistake of murdering my family and my best friend, Norm had seen to it that I had the chance to get even. He had hired me as a government freelance troubleshooter, working outside the law to expedite the work of the lawkeepers.

The note read: Dusky, Wanted to congratulate you again on the Marquesas affair. Well done. May have something else for you. Since you moved off Sniper, I don't know where you are staying so it is important you call me at the Atlanta number as soon as possible.

NF.

It was typed in plain block pica, just typed initials for a signature. So it was business. But I wasn't ready for any more business. Not now, anyway. I had been having a bad time of it since that brutal night off the little chain of mangrove islands called the Marquesas. At night I couldn't sleep, and during the day I couldn't seem to wake up. I was drinking too much beer, and my hands shook slightly when I tied new leaders. That's what killing does to you. It steals into the middle of your brain and begins to eat its way out again. I needed more time to shake it, to put it all behind me, to crush the nightmares in the peace of isolation.

I crumpled the note and jammed it into the pocket of my khaki fishing shorts.

"You never gave me this."

"What? Huh?" Stevie had a swatter in his hand, and he was swinging at a luminous deerfly that buzzed its complaints about the invention of gla.s.s windows.

"Do me a favor, Steve, and play along."

He gave me an unconcerned shrug. "Captain MacMorgan hasn't been in today, sir. Sorry, I don't know where he's living."

Outside, I nudged my thirty-four-foot sportfisherman out of her berth, feeling the sweet sync of her twin 453 GM diesels bubbling me over the clear green water of the harbor. I had an icy Hatuey beer in a Styrofoam hand-cooler, a pinch of Copenhagen snuff wry in my lower lip, and as I piloted from the flybridge, I tried to recapture the delight I usually felt in going out to sea alone.

But it didn't work. I couldn't get the muscles in my shoulders to relax, and it seemed as if I looked out onto the world, through glazed eyes. I dropped Sniper into dead idle as I came up behind four ratty fibergla.s.s fishing boats loaded with gas cans, boxes of food, and determined Cuban-Americans, all heading out Garrison Bight Channel, bound for the wicked Florida Strait. The guy running the point boat couldn't have been more than eighteen. He had a tired outboard, belching smoke as it struggled to push the little skiff onward. The kid was shirtless, there was a smile on his face. But in the depths of my despair, it seemed as though a raven-shaped shadow haloed his head, diving and soaring, and the shadow was death. . . .

2.

The storm came funneling out of the west-northwest across open sea. I watched it from the porch of the stilthouse, morning coffee in hand, noting the way the strange light which accompanied it changed from copper to bile green as it approached landfall.

And I knew that it was to be no ordinary squall.

I had spent the previous day, Sat.u.r.day, trying to work some of the rough edges off the stilthouse-and myself. It's really a fairly large place for a house built on pilings out on the water. I went to work on the bedroom first. It only has one. I got rid of the old cot, and laboriously carried the wide double bed I had just bought and transported out on Sniper. The stilthouse faces south and north-with long porches on either side-and I set the bed up by the eastward window of my new quarters. The bedroom has a big brown oval of rag rug on the plank floor; it smelled musky and doggy, and I decided to keep it right where it was because I like dogs. I swept and cleaned and tacked black shades up so I could dark-out the bedroom if need be, and I built rough bookcases and transferred my small-but good-ship's library to the stilthouse. It felt good to be doing mindless work; work that required just enough thought to match the light sweat that the labor required. There wasn't much I could-or wanted to-do with the little galley and living area. There is an ancient stove and a small refrigerator, both of which run on bottled gas, and there is a sink with a faucet hooked up to the big five-hundred-gallon rooftop rain cistern that serves the little shower on the narrow dock built under the stilthouse. The man I had bought the place from-he had helped his father build it back in the 1930s as a place to store ice and supplies for the fishing boats-had left the giant sh.e.l.l of a loggerhead turtle on the wall, two sets of big mako jaws, a gas-station calendar from 1956 showing a blonde with improbable b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and four kerosene lamps hung in strategic spots. I filled them, changed wicks, then set about stringing fifty feet of copper wire outside the stilthouse to serve as an antenna for my portable Transoceanic shortwave receiver.

By dusk I had worked enough and sweated enough and relaxed enough to be pleased with my new home. After the death of my wife and sons I had taken up residence aboard Sniper. But Sniper was built and outfitted to stalk the Gulf Stream for the big ones, not to serve as an apartment for a guy who is six-two and a shade and weighs 220 pounds.

So this new place would be just fine. With its high ceiling and location on the water it would be cool in the summer, and with the little oil stove, it would be fairly warm in winter.