Republican Party Reptile Part 14

And for military, business, and personal strife, And the rest of the s.h.i.t you'll eat later in life.

P is for Prom night, most important by far If you enjoy vomit and hand jobs in cars. It's a night no sensible person would fail To forget, with exception of one small detail: The pictures your parents are sure to have took * Which they'll frame and hang in the vestibule nook. This picture will publish in all the newspapers If you have a car wreck or become a child raper. So be sure your tuxedo is plain and fits right And looks as though owned and not hired that night, And be sure that your hair is properly plastered To your skull like a man's, not a hippy disaster's (Nor parted in the middle like a local sportscaster's). This photo may get international play, Depending on what you do or you say. And you don't want the world to think you a loon If you happen to die or shoot the President soon.

* There is absolutely no excusage For this past participle usage.

Q is for Questions of every kind, The sign of an unwell and feverish mind. Don't succ.u.mb to the ill of curiosities. The cure is worse always than the disease. He's only more worried, he who knows. For your peace of mind let me propose The motto immemorial of the Bengal Lancers: "Don't ask questions. You'll only get answers.'

R is for Rah-rah, rah-rah, rah-rah, Boom-a-lacka, boom-a-lacka, sis, boom, bah. Control yourself, remain demure. School spirit is fearfully immature. Your high school fight song will strike a false note When you're older and pretending you went off to

Choate.

S is for Scholastic Apt.i.tude Test. Be sure to do better than all of the rest. That way you'll get into Harvard or Yale, And land a job in the government if you pa.s.s or you

fail.

And government is a lucrative field With loads of influence and power to wield. Plus a government job insures that eventually, When you're caught, you'll serve time in the best

penitentiary.

T is for Tender kind charity. Work hard at getting rich if you ever want to see Any of it. Since charity is most felicitous When its object is rich to the point of conspicuousness.

U is for the Unemployment rates, Still rather grim in most cities and states. There may be no jobs no matter what your knowledge, By the time that you matriculate from college. So work and study and practice night and day At something to give you social entree. There may be no jobs, not for doctor nor dentist, But you'll marry an heiress if you're real good at tennis.

V is for Verse, all adolescents write, Mawkish, self-pitying, derivative, trite. But at least, today, all verse is free, So verse is easier than it used to be. For poems once were written in doggerel thus: A-scramble for rhyme lest the scan make a muss. But nowadays, due to the work of a pack 'o Modernist bards and poetical wackos, There aren't any rules. You can do what you want. You don't have to, e.g., end this line with "daunt." Just to your emotions give long-winded venting,

And show it's not prose by frequent indenting. Just one restriction you can't throw out: Don't give the poem to the girl it's about.

W is for Women. They're awful, mendacious, Nasty and selfish, cruel and salacious, As thievish as gypsies, more crazy than Celts. Be sure that you never f.u.c.k anything else.

X is for the att.i.tude of eXistential anomie. The French mean nothing by it, and neither do we. So don't go around acting like Jean Paul Belmondo. Aspire instead to three cars and a condo.

Y is for Your future, supposedly pared By nuclear-holocaust world-end nightmare. Don't get disconcerted by apocalyptic jive. It's been just about to happen since 1945. And no matter the MIRVs, ICBMs, and SAMs, It's not going to happen before final exams.

Z is for Zany, eternal cla.s.s clown, Who won't stop kidding, who won't sit down. Bane of the Boys' Dean, cursed by the teachers, Source of amus.e.m.e.nt in cla.s.srooms and bleachers. Zany is cute in a kitten or pup. But as an adult, please shut the f.u.c.k up.

Horrible Protestant Hats.

I was getting ready to go outdoors on a drizzly afternoon. I put on a trench coat, picked up an umbrella, and deposited a waterproof canvas rain hat on my head. My girlfriend, a Catholic, began to laugh and point. "Oh!" she said, "what a horrible Protestant hat!" I looked in the mirror. True, the porkpie-style Brooks Brothers rain hat with the brim turned down on all sides does give one the look of. . . well, a poorly machined something on a recalled American car. It set me thinking.

Protestants do wear terrible hats, especially well-off adult male Protestants of the type we usually call WASPs. They wear woven-vegetable-matter summer hats with madras hatbands. These look like hospital gifts that died at the florists. They wear "Irish" tweed hats no self-respecting Irishman would put on his plowhorse. They wear herringbone wool caps that can give a bank president the semblance of a rioting English coalminer. Old artsy WASPs wear embarra.s.sing berets. Middle-aged WASPs who've just gotten a divorce and a sports car wear dopey suede touring caps with a snap on the brim. Then there are the unspeakable hats favored by federal investigative agents and the fur Astrakhans worn by lawyers who, I guess, want their clients to think they run a gulag on the side.

Beyond city limits the situation is worse. Where I live in New England the summer people look like they're trying to prove that slouch hats cause Down's syndrome in adults. Panama hats produce a different effect-imbecility combined with moral turpitude. And there is no polite phrase in English for what a vacationing financial services executive looks like in a Greek fisherman's cap.

Getting anywhere near the water seems to produce WASP hat lunacy. Fly fishermen wear astonishing things on their heads and always decorate them with dozens of dry flies as though at any minute they might dip their very skulls into the torrent and land giant trout with their necks. It's hard to look more stupid than a deep-sea fisherman does in his swordbill cap. Hard, but not impossible. The ordinary Kennebunk cruiser hat accomplishes the task. This is simply the cap from a child's sailor suit with its brim yanked down over eyes, ears, and sometimes nose. Worn thus it resembles nothing so much as a white cotton condom for the brain. Boat hats, indeed, run the gamut of foolery starting with the simple watch cap, making its wearers seem only unlettered, and winding up with the enormous yellow rubber sou'wester foul-weather chapeau, in which even George Bush would look like a drunk cartoon character doing a tuna-fish commercial.

Snow and other frozen forms of water make for no improvement. If there is anything-va.s.salage, Bolshevism, purdah-more deleterious to the spirit of human dignity than the knit ski cap, I have not seen it. Professional circus clowns, medieval court jesters, Trans-Carpathian village idiots-any one of them would balk at wearing a five-foot-long purple, green, red, pink, and orange cranial sock with a yard-wide pom-pom on the end. And even this is not so bad as what a WASP will wear in the winter when not on the ski slopes. That is when he goes out to shovel the walk in a vinyl-brimmed plaid cap with earflaps that tie up over the head-the worst hat on earth, the hat that turned America's Midwest into the world's laughingstock.

I am only half Protestant, but when I look on my closet shelf I find a disgusting Moose River canoeing hat, a regrettable corduroy Cragsmere, an incredibly idiotic Florida Keys bonefishing hat with brims at both ends, several crownless tennis visors that make me look like an Olympic contestant in double-entry bookkeeping, a John Lennon cap left over from my hippie days, and a plethora of the ubiquitous ad-emblazoned baseball caps. To judge by these I have been renting out frontal-lobe s.p.a.ce to Purolator, Firestone, the NRA, and the Kittery, Maine, 1978 Jubilee Days. And let's not even discuss the International Signal Orange dunce cap I wear to go bird shooting.

Now, it's true, other ethnic groups also wear unusual headgear. Blacks, Orthodox Jews, Mexican archbishops, Italian steelworkers, to name a few. But the Stetsons of 125th Street are intentionally outrageous, yarmulkes are items of religious faith, and so forth. WASPs wear their hats in all seriousness, without spiritual reasons or historical traditions for doing so, and not a single one of their bizarre toppers would be any help if an I-beam fell on it. Nonetheless a WASP will tell you his hat is functional. It has been my experience that whenever anyone uses the word "functional" he's in the first sentence of a lame excuse. The real reason WASPs wear goofy hats is that goofy-hat wearing satisfies a deep-seated need. In gin-and-tonic veritas. Give a WASP six drinks and he'll always put something silly on his head-a lampshade, ladies' underwear, Gorham silver nut dish, L. L. Bean dog bed, you name it. In more sober and inhibited moments he'll make do with an Australian bush hat, a tam-o'-shanter, or the Texan monstrosity all WASPs affect when they get within telexing distance of a cow.

Until the last years of the Eisenhower era, WASPs wore wonderful haberdashery. They went about in perfectly blocked and creased homburgs, jaunty straw boaters, majestic opera hats, and substantial bowlers. A gentleman would sooner wear two-tone shoes to a diplomatic reception than appear in public without a proper hat. Then something happened.

Adult male Protestants of the better-off kind are a prominent social group. They make up a large percent of our national leaders in business, politics, and education. Maybe it's no accident that the rise of the silly hat coincides with the disappearance of a coherent American foreign policy, the decay of business ethics, the increase in functional illiteracy, and the general decline of the United States as a world power. The head is symbolic of reason, discipline, good sense, and self-mastery. Putting a fuzzy green Tyrolean hat decorated with a tuft of deer behind on top of it means trouble. Our native aristocracy, those among us with the greatest advantages, the best resources, and the broadest opportunities to do good, have decided to abrogate all civilized responsibilities, give free play to the id, and run around acting like a bunch of . . .

Wait a minute! Down by the dock-I just saw a WASP with a pitcher of martinis trying to put a fedora on his dog. Does this mean Henry Kissinger will be made Secretary of State again?

The Ends of the Earth.

In Search of the Cocaine Pirates.

I had money in the bank, a pretty girlfriend, an a.s.signment from a slick magazine to interview some business executives. That is, I was bored, restless, and irritable. The difference between journalists and other people is that other people spend their lives running from violence, tragedy, and horror and we spend ours trying to get in on it. Blood was running through the streets of San Salvador, commie choppers thrashed the hills of Afghanistan, Africa was positively in the toilet from Addis Ababa to the Cape, and here I was in a G.o.ddam luxury hotel waiting to have lunch with a friendly corporate VP. I longed for stray mortar rounds, typhus epidemics, starving babies at the very least. Please understand, this isn't courage or a desire to tell the world the truth. It's sloth. Nothing makes an easier lead sentence than a stray mortar round hitting a starving baby in a typhus hospital. That is Pulitzer stuff. But try writing even a dependent clause about an honest comptroller giving you net sales figures over pasta salad.

In this funk of self-pity, a headline caught my eye: "Caribbean Islands' Top Officials Held in Drug Smuggling Plot." It seemed that on March 6, 1985, in a Miami Ramada Inn, the Drug Enforcement Agency had arrested Norman Saunders, the chief minister and head of state of a British Crown Colony called the Turks and Caicos Islands. Saunders was videotaped stuffing $20,000 into his pants pockets. He and two other officials from the islands' eleven-member parliament-Minister of Commerce and Development Stafford Missick and legislator Aulden "Smokey" Smith-were charged with seventeen counts of conspiracy to smuggle narcotics. Thus, at day's end, 27 percent of the Turks and Caicos elected government was cooling its heels in a U.S. slammer.

That was more like it. No national magazine had done a story about drug smuggling in the Caribbean for, I don't know, a week. I could fly to the Turks and Caicos in between chats with fiduciary nabobs and get trouble plenty.

Nor was this the first spore of dark narco evil to come whiffing out of these airstrip-dotted, many-harbored cays at the remote southeastern reach of the Bahamas chain. We journalists keep up on such things. For years the English press had been running articles like "Paradise for Pedlars-Island Colony Key to a Multimillion Drug Trade" (Daily Express, September 7, 1982). The London Times said that in the late seventies "law enforcement officials reckoned that 90 percent[!] of the marijuana entering the United States was being moved through the Turks and Caicos." The Sunday Telegraph warned, "Narcotics money is so influential that it is rapidly bringing about the creation of a completely new power structure in the Turks, a whole new political system."

I checked the Saunders story in various newspapers. Apparently the Turks and Caicos natives were not grateful for the DEA's efforts. "Talk of retribution, of hostages ... and of British warships rushing to the scene" was reported by the Washington Post under the front-page headline "Drug Arrests Raise Islands' Tension-British Governor Urges Populace Not to 'Take to the Streets.'" The New York Times said the new acting chief minister, Mr. Nathaniel "Bops" Francis, "declared indignantly that Mr. Saunders was 'framed' and he spoke angrily of a racist plot hatched by white Americans." "Aftershocks . . . rumbled through the eight-isle British territory," read the lead on a Miami Herald story which quoted the commerce minister's nephew as saying, "It's not a disgrace that they were interested in money. It is a disgrace that they got caught." And what kind of country has members of Parliament with names like Bops and Smokey, anyway? The place must be a new pirate republic.

There were a number of these in the Caribbean, Tortuga being the most famous. It was colonized in the 1600s by a group of French buccaneers called the Coast Brotherhood. They preyed on the Spanish plate fleet (and anything else). Another freebooter mini-nation was New Providence, on the site of modern Na.s.sau. Founded in 1716, it counted among its citizens "Calico Jack" Rackham and Edward "Blackbeard" Teach. Rackham was famous for wearing lightweight cotton clothing, Blackbeard for setting off firecrackers in his beard and drinking rum and gunpowder. They robbed ships and killed people too. The head of state in New Providence was a half-mad castaway the pirates found on the beach. They styled him "Governor" and made up elaborate official protocols.

The Turks and Caicos would be up-to-date, of course. There'd be no Jolly Rogers on the big Herreshoff yachts, just Colombian registries. Sinister black cigarette speedboats would be bobbing at the docks, no doubt, Learjets lurking under camouflage nets, big campesinos in Armani suits fingering their Uzis and MAC-10s while Guajira Peninsula warlords gestured grandly to scruffy Americans with Rolex watches. And, naturally, there would be tow-haired, Hershey-tanned, near-naked dope-dealer girlfriends everywhere-bodies hard, eyes hard too. Plus bartops slathered with fine-chopped pink-auraed Andean flake pushed into lines thick as biceps.

What to pack? Swim suit, flip-flops, .357 magnum ... On the other hand, given the Latin blow vendors' penchant for murdering wives, infants, not to mention writers, maybe a note from my doctor about taking a sunshine psoriasis cure. The travel brochures made prominent mention of bank secrecy laws, I noticed. The Third Turtle Inn on the island of Providenciales seemed to be the first-rate place to stay. I hit on a cautious, neutral sort of disguise: summer-weight blue blazer, chinos, and deck shoes-a bit lawyerish, a touch bankery, just a South Florida yuppie, you know, just brushing shoulders with the scene, in for a little sit-down with a client maybe or bundling some fungibles through a corporate sh.e.l.l. Businesslike, that is, but not undercover, for G.o.d's sake, or nosy or too businesslike. I flew in from Miami. The sweltering tin-roofed airport, the too-casual customs agents, the thornbush-and-palm-scrub landscape all breathed menace. I went to the bar at the Third Turtle, ordered a gin-"Make that a double"-lit a cigarette, and looked knowing.

"Jesus Christ," said somebody in the bar, "another newspaper reporter. How come all you guys wear blue blazers? Is it a club or what?"

"Uh," I said. "Er . . . oh . . .I'll bet folks around here are pretty upset about Norman Saunders and everybody getting arrested in Miami," I said, subtly turning the subject toward drugs.

"Upset?!" said someone else, "G.o.ddam right we're upset. Norman and Smokey are the two best tennis players in the islands, and the tournament is next week!"

Perhaps this wasn't exactly the story I thought.

The Turks and Caicos rope through eighty miles of ocean. They are outcroppings of eolian limestone, piles of fossil seash.e.l.l bits, really. There are a few hills, but mostly the islands are near sea level or at it. Mangrove tangles fill the low spots. On first glance, as tropical paradises go, the Ts and Cs are sort of like the roof of your apartment building. Rainfall is scant, topsoil rare. Nice beaches, though, and the wind and water carve the soft rock into rococo sh.o.r.elines and mysterious sea caves and startling sinkholes fit for Aztec maiden sacrifices. The people are hopelessly friendly. I had to trade in my rented scooter for a Jeep because of so much waving. You don't want to take a hand off the handlebars on what pa.s.ses for a road down there. A few hundred yards from sh.o.r.e are splendid coral reefs poised on the edge of "the wall," the thousandmeter dropoff at the end of the continental shelf. It's a good place to scuba-dive (or, I mused hopefully, lose a compet.i.tor wearing cement Top-Siders). The vegetation is low, harsh, and tangled, but it goes on for miles without human interruption, some of the last truly wild land left in the North Caribbean.

There are thirty-seven islands according to the New York Times, forty-two according to the Washington Post, eight according to the Miami Herald. I counted sixty-three on the only chart I could find, which was also a placemat. Anyone in earshot-taxi drivers, fishing-boat captains, hotel maids, people standing in the road-got involved whenever I asked this question. "East Caicos, West Caicos, North Caicos, South Caicos ..." Once they started naming islands it was impossible to stop them. "... and Middle Caicos and Providenciales and Pine Cay and Grand Turk and Guana Cay and n.i.g.g.e.r Cay but we don't call it that anymore and Back Cay and French Cay, Bush Cay, Fish Cays, Big Ambergris, Little Ambergris . . . wait, now, do you mean high tide or low?"

Only eighty-five hundred people live on only six of those islands. Almost as many more are in the Bahamas, Britain, the United States, or somewhere else they can find jobs.

Every spring in the Turks and Caicos there's a hatch of handsome black handspan-sized Erebus moths. They're called "money bats." If they land on you it's said they bring fortune. Obviously they don't bring much. The locals work at conch diving, lobster fishing, a few tourism jobs-there's not a lot to do for a living. In fact, there's not a lot to do.

I interviewed the British governor, the opposition leader, and (the arrested people having politely resigned) the new chief minister and the new minister of commerce, development, and tourism.

n.o.body had a bad word, or even an enlightening one, to say about former chief minister Norman Saunders. He's personable, generous, easy to work with. He's handsome and a tasteful dresser as well. On his home island of South Caicos he commands special affection. His picture is all over the place above a political slogan that sounds like rejected name ideas from "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves": "Firm, Frank, Friendly, Faithful." I was counting on an earful from opposition leader Clement Howell. But they've only had party politics in the Turks and Caicos since 1975, and as yet they seem politely confused about what to do with them. Howell is head of the slightly more populist PDM (Popular Democratic Movement). Saunders was or is head of the slightly more business-oriented PNP (People's National Party). "Sort of like Democrats and Republicans?" I ventured to Howell.

He pondered that. "What's the difference between Democrats and Republicans?"

"The Republicans won."

"Exactly," he said. Was this, I thought, the "whole new political system" the Sunday Telegraph had warned about?

Saunders seems to have founded the PNP because another fellow, the late "JAGS" McCartney, had founded the PDM. The PDM was founded because the Turks and Caicos were engaged in what may be history's most halfhearted struggle against British colonialism. This culminated in the "Junkanoo Club incident." In 1975 the British were recruiting Turks and Caicos policemen from other Caribbean islands. JAGS and fellow natives booed the off-island police officers. Some of those officers were, contrary to local custom, wearing guns, and they fired into the air. JAGS and his friends barricaded themselves in the Junkanoo Club and fired into the air back. Hostages were held. Demands were made. (Actually there's some doubt about the hostages. A local newspaper publisher and two other non-PDM characters were in the club, but they were being given unlimited free drinks and may not have known they were hostage.) The princ.i.p.al demand during the Junkanoo Club incident was that a commission be appointed to investigate the Junkanoo Club incident. After an all-night standoff the demand was met. The next year JAGS McCartney was elected the first native chief minister. The struggle for independence ended shortly thereafter when the Thatcher administration told the Turks and Caicos that they were going to be independent whether they liked it or not.

I got ahold of a British Foreign and Commonwealth Office doc.u.ment stamped "RESTRICTED" (though it had been marked down to "Confidential"). This detailed several meetings in London between JAGS and British minister of state Nicholas Ridley. Ridley offered the Turks and Caicos 12 million to become an independent country. JAGS said they wouldn't do it for less than 40 million. Secretary of State Lord Carrington popped in on the conference and "expressed surprise" that the Turks and Caicos were turning down such a generous offer as 12 million "and wondered that the Treasury had agreed to it." JAGS hung tough. The meeting ended on a testy note. "Mr. Ridley . . . offered them a deal, which they could either take or leave. Mr. McCartney said that he would not accept that. Britain was, he said, the captain of the boat and should pay the crew. Mr. Ridley pointed out that we might reduce the crew's wages." JAGS "retorted that in that case, we might have a mutiny. . . . Mr. Ridley made it clear . . . that the problem could be solved by starting again with new people."

In the end the islands got their 12 million and didn't have to be independent either. I asked the British governor what had happened. "It's the post-Falklands era," he sighed.

Anyway, the political system in the Ts and Cs-whether created by narcotics money, crabby twits in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, or plain old vote-grabbing-is certainly different from ours. Ariel Misick, the minister of commerce, development, and tourism, wanted to talk about commerce, development, and tourism. Imagine a system of governance so unsophisticated that the head of a department knows what his department does. Misick (a distant relation to busted ex-minister Missick-with-two-s's) said there are two hundred square miles of empty Crown Lands in the Turks and Caicos. Two of the largest islands are uninhabited. There is half a mile of beach for every hotel room. The Ts and Cs are a last frontier for commercial development in the Caribbean.

What about drug-trade fracas and Saunders et al.? Well, there had been two people with protest signs on their cars. One of the cars belonged to the contractor who'd built Norman Saunders's new house. It was six months since the last crime of note. "As a lawyer," said Misick, "if I had to depend on going to court to defend people, I'd starve." The only major robbery in Turks and Caicos history was a $600 Cable and Wireless Company payroll heist in 1931.

Governor Christopher J. Turner wanted to talk about development too. Balanced development-nice tourists in big boats, cruising, diving, sport fishing. His other points of hope for the underemployed: the fishing industry, financial services, and agronite mining. (Agronite being a kind of sea dirt useful in making driveways and chemical things. There's lots of it around the place.) Turner was also hipped on some Smithsonian Inst.i.tution research being done about algae farming. It would be exactly like cattle ranching except underwater with algae instead of hay and with Caribbean king crabs as the cows. At least this is what I have in my notes.

What about drugs? Turner, a career civil servant appointed from London with responsibility for the islands' foreign relations and internal security, said, "Yes." A simple fact of geography. The Turks and Caicos are 600 miles from Colombia, 575 miles from Miami. "We'll always remain an interesting possibility to people engaged in the drug trade." Are the Ts and Cs a hotbed of international dope crime? "No. A refueling option." But, said Turner, "In a British dependent territory things like this aren't supposed to go on." He was the one who'd called in the DEA for a "straightforward double sting operation" which stung his own chief minister. Was Turner shocked? Satisfied? Incredulous? Cheesed off? The governor plays the cards close to his chest. "In the event of his being found guilty it would be a personal tragedy and a tragedy for the islands. Saunders had managerial skills." Any turmoil? Turner said, "I told a reporter, There's been no protest, no public demonstrations, and n.o.body has taken to the streets.' This was reported as 'British Governor Urges Populace Not to Take to the Streets.'" Alas, that's what comes of using understatement on the press.

One languid guard in full dress uniform was reading a magazine under a picture of Princess Di in the governor's waiting room. His walkie-talkie crackled with a report of an impending possible rain shower. "Just hang in and hold tight, ten-four," said the guard into his radio.

The high point of my trip to the Turks and Caicos was the interview with Chief Minister "Bops" Francis, or, rather, the time I spent waiting for that interview. There I was, actually "sitting in a dusty colonial outpost waiting to speak to a native official." Breeze whispered through palm fronds above the tin-roofed Government House. Bougainvillea-or something that looked like I've always supposed bougainvillea should-crept along the veranda railings. Etc. One doesn't get much of this in a modern journalism career. Next I wanted to go to the "Colonial Club," except there wasn't one, and have a "stingah," whatever that is.

Bops turned out to be a nice old man who was sick of talking to reporters. "I've commented all I can." He was miffed at the way the DEA had treated Saunders, the head of a sovereign or semisovereign or something state. "Mr. Saunders," said the chief minister, "is bitter that he was not taken into custody but to a penthouse and kept there waiting for the press to come around." I checked with a Miami Herald reporter and this was true. The DEA called newspapers and television stations, held Saunders, Missick, and Smith at the Ramada until media got there, and then marched them, in handcuffs, to a paddy wagon. "I don't think they would do this to a dignitary of the Caucasian race," said Francis. Was Saunders framed? "I've heard it. I believe it." He pointed out that the Turks and Caicos had failed to join the Reagan-sponsored Caribbean Basin Initiative.

"Please do not carry the tone that I condone any actions in drugs," said the chief. "Under my administration there will not be forwarding of any part of the drug trade."

And that was the extent of "Drug Arrests Raise Islands' Tension." I did not see any drugs. I did not smell so much as the faintest bouquet of a burning spliff. The girls all had both ends of their bathing suits on. I met a stern and dangerous-looking Jamaican colonel, but he was working for a UN agency planning hurrican-disaster relief. n.o.body, not the police, not the governor's honor guard, carried a gun. A hotel manager in Grand Turk told me there had been "threats of violence." Threats of violence? "Well, over the telephone." I pressed him. "There's a rumor the governor received two crank calls." A taxi driver talked of drug smuggling: "No. I have my children to live for. I have my grandchildren to live for. I want to make my dollar every day and go and enjoy my happy home." A bartender said of his fellow citizens: "People will stick by you if you did right. But if you did wrong I pity you."

The only horror I encountered was flying the local airline. They have a little twin-prop plane. The cowling was off and a dozen mechanics were scampering around the engine. They looked to be sixteen and were working in rhythm to a portable radio. The engine caught fire. One of them ran up from somewhere with a coffee can full of water and splashed it at the burning gasoline. Then they put the cowl back on and we boarded the plane and took off. The thornbush-and-palm-scrub landscape really did breathe menace that time, let me tell you.

The Turks and Caicos don't even have a romantic history, maybe the only place in the Caribbean without one. A recent theory does have it that Columbus made his New World landfall on Grand Turk rather than Watlings Island in the Bahamas. But, as Turks and Caicos historian H. E. Sadler puts it, "After a weekend rest, Columbus was anxious to reach China." There's a note in Columbus's log to the effect that some natives he'd taken prisoner "signed to me that there were very many islands, so many that they could not be counted, and they mentioned by their name more than a hundred"-apparently a local pastime since at least 1492.

The Turks got their name from the French slang for "pirate," but actual pirate activity there was desultory. Calico Jack Rackham did operate out of North Caicos after the Brits cleaned house in New Providence. But Jack was not much as a swashbuckler. His crews twice mutinied on him because of his cowardice. He was most notable for his girlfriend Anne Bonny, a foul-mouthed vixen who dressed as a man, wore a brace of pistols, and wielded a serious cutla.s.s in the hand-to-hand stuff. Bonny had a roving eye. She got a crush on a handsome young sailor in Rackham's crew, made a pa.s.s, and discovered the sailor was one Mary Reid, also dressed as a man. The two became best friends. When Rackham was finally cornered by the British navy, he surrendered while Anne and Mary battled on to the last and then escaped death sentences by getting pregnant. As Calico Jack stood on the gallows, Anne Bonny said to him, "If you had fought like a man you would not now be about to hang like a dog." They were quite a bunch. But they didn't really spend much time in the Ts and Cs.

Other notable events in the Turks and Caicos annals: * 1783-Admiral Horatio Nelson failed to recapture Turks and Caicos from the French. (In one of his less heroic dispatches Nelson stated, "With such a force and their strong situation, I did not think anything farther could be attempted.") Later the French gave the islands back anyway.

* 1788-Forty Tory families fled the American Revolution, bringing twelve hundred slaves with them. They tried to grow cotton, failed, and split, leaving the slaves to fend for themselves.

* 1962-John Glenn splashed down near Grand Turk.

* 1966-Queen Elizabeth visited. A donkey race was held in her honor.

I did a lot of hard drinking, some deep-sea fishing, more hard drinking, much hanging out on the beach, some drinking in the daytime-all for the sake of research, mind you. And I came up with a few drug-smuggling anecdotes like the one about the South Caicos businessman who had been, I suppose, sampling his own wares and walked into the propeller of his airplane. Umpt.i.ty kilos of powdered self-esteem were left sitting on the tarmac and n.o.body on the island slept for a month. Another smuggler, on Providenciales, tried to bring his plane in from Miami at night. There are no lights at the Provo airport, so he phoned his wife and told her to take the pickup truck, drive down to the end of the strip, and turn on the high beams. He landed on top of her. This incident didn't exactly have anything to do with drugs. The smuggler had been in Miami to go grocery shopping. But anyway, wife and smuggler survived, though airplane and pickup were a mess.

In 1980 the DEA launched Operation Bat, designed to intercept and disrupt boat-borne marijuana shipments. An Air Force C5A cargo plane landed unannounced at Provo, scaring the h.e.l.l out of everyone. The C5A was filled with speedboats. Ten DEA agents carrying automatic weapons pitched tents in all the places with the worst mosquitoes. Within a week every speedboat had been run aground and smashed on the countless (though not nameless) cays and sandbars.

Then there was the plane full of bootleg Quaaludes which made a fuel stop at South Caicos on its way from South America to the States. But the pilot didn't have any cash on him. He had to leave his drug shipment as security for the gasoline. The airport employees gave the pills away. People in the Turks and Caicos had never seen a Quaalude. They'd take them three or four at a time. There was a spate of eccentric driving. Cars were smashed in trees, cars were up on porches, cars were out in the ocean all over the islands. A week later the pilot came back with the money. No 'ludes. He was p.i.s.sed. He came back again a few days later with three hombres carrying M-16s. One customs agent was at the airport when they landed. He ran off down the road howling in fear. The hombres and pilot were ready for vengeance, but there was no way to get anywhere to find anyone to wreak the vengeance on. An old Volkswagen was parked at the airport, key in the ignition. But it wouldn't start. They stood around for a while, then gave up and flew away.

In the matter at hand-the United States of America vs. Norman Saunders, Stafford Missick, and Alden Smith a/k/a Smokey-there's also basis in some genuine hanky-panky. Saunders owns the fuel concession at that South Caicos airport. He did a lot of night business. And Saunders was living better than he should have been on his $18,816 chief minister's salary and the profits from an airplane gas station on a landing strip with one scheduled flight a day. He had a fair-sized house built on Grand Turk, a kind of Samoan-style peaked-roof affair looking like the Trader Vic family mausoleum. Local gossip says it cost $1.2 million, an estimate that's surely high and outside. But it is on the beach two doors from the governor's mansion. Saunders has a big car and a yacht. At election time there was a scad of campaign money bouncing and fluttering around in his South Caicos parliamentary district. Missick, too, has a nice house and an Oldsmobile. I don't know about Smokey. Generally speaking, there are more items of gold jewelry, Piaget watches, and Michael Jackson fashion jackets on the local population than you'd expect in a place where the last time anybody painted a building was 1956.

But it was ever thus all through the seedy archipelagos of the Caribbean. There never has been an unnaughty way to make a living. In the Turks and Caicos the traditional livelihood was raking up evaporated sea salt-an industry in gradual decline since 1780. In 1964 it petered out completely, leaving smelly pools of half-evaporated brine all over the islands. Other than that the only profession was salvaging the thousands of neighboring shipwrecks-most caused, probably, by distracted harbor pilots using placemats to navigate and trying to get the natives to shut up about what all the islands are called. Sometimes the locals would get overenter-prising. In 1864 an American frigate ran aground off North Caicos "and the Captain was forced to retire to his quarter deck and prevent the incursion of Salvagers with force of arms." All through the nineteenth century there were complaints of false lights being set out to drum up business. I like to think the smuggler's wife in the pickup truck was an unintentional party to this old tradition.

Some islanders, mainly white ones, will tell you that it was Saunders's predecessor, JAGS McCartney, who was involved in the drug trade and that when Saunders and the PNP came in the smugglers seemed to disappear. Certainly JAGS, who sported mild dreadlocks, looked a bit more criminal. When he and his cohorts were elected, they all flew to Haiti and had identical leisure suits made. If you fired anybody in the PDM, they'd come over to your house, all dressed alike, and glower. But JAGS is revered today, and the PDM supporters I met were the most likable people in the islands. Plus the present PDM leader, Clement Howell, has a reputation for probity standing somewhere between Lincoln's and Mom's. Yet JAGS died in a suspicious plane crash while flying to Atlantic City with a reputed American crime figure. However, it was also JAGS who first appealed to the British government for help in combating drug traffic. Who knows? There are no facts south of Palm Beach.