The Men
Drug Wives - Episode 1
It was the kind of black sky that had made the old people of the island believe in duppies. There was no moon to speak of, but no one was speaking anyway.
The black water of the lagoon did enough of that with gentle sucking in and spitting back to shore, just quiet enough that approaching craft could be heard but just loud enough that the dipping of their oars could not. The only flashes of light came from underwater as a school of silver jacks cut through the otherworldly bioluminescence sending off a blue sprinkling with its movements.
The beat up kayak had begun its life unscarred on the other side of the island, its maiden voyage four feet from the shore on a bright spring afternoon captained by two American teenagers intent on getting away from their parents just long enough to have a sneaky make out session under the capsized craft. She had been rescued from her frivolous existence by a purposeful young man. He had now grown to captain craft of much larger sizes across distances much greater than the route he had taken from Seven Mile Beach to his grandmother’s backyard on North West Point. He now manned one set of oars, half flesh and blood, half duppy, pulling her closer to one such ocean-going craft.
She was good for this work, quiet and buoyant and easy to hide.
DUPPY: ˈdəpē/WEST INDIAN noun: duppy; plural noun: duppies 1 a malevolent spirit or ghost.
The two men and the kayak worked their way through the water of the North Sound toward the tangled shallows, still without a word. There was no difference perceptible to the inexperienced eye between the dark ink of the water, the dark reach of the trees, or the dark hollow of the sky. But their eyes were far from inexperienced. They could sense the trees and followed a well known path to their destination - if it could be called that. It would certainly not be seen as a destination by any casual passer by in daylight, this particular mangrove root that would need to be swung to the right to let the canoe pass into the thick mess of wetland swamp. There she would be waiting, the larger younger sister of this little boat, newly resurrected from her resting place in the depths, covered in months of undisturbed moss and seaweed growth, sitting low in the quiet water. Her engine had been re-attached earlier in the night, a spot scrubbed clean for the men to stand, and drums of fuel loaded, one drum per fifty miles. Maybe overkill, maybe not - anything could happen on the sea. The silent rowing slowed and shifted as the kayak bow sliced past the massive root into even deeper darkness in the tangle of roots and limbs more sensed than seen. Each man shifted, the one on the bow standing already, pulling himself over into the large Jamaican dory with one fluid movement. At the same time, the other man moved forward up the kayak to take the place of the first, nimble and fluid on the wake-less trail of his silent partner to land softly in the larger boat carrying the cash and the weapon strapped to his wiry body.
Safely boarded, both men turned together, and with practiced synchronicity, lifted the kayak into a space in the tangle of roots depressed by repeated pressures of this very movement to form a shelf in the trees. There the useful little boat that served as their tender would rest until fate determined their return. Would it be one of them, two or even four? Would the weather hold up? Or would they be stuck in Westmoreland for three months like the last time? The bigger boat slid, quiet under oar power, cutting a predatory line out of the bush.
She had made it just ten yards into the open after past the trees when the sound of an approaching boat had the men on board drop to the deck. A massive beam of light slid out over the water, the dying edges of it crawling around the place where the boat and water met, tickling deadening darkness of the thick fur coat of moss. The light, bored with its duty, moved past the boat that looked more like a rock and scanned the tree line for about a mile of coast, slamming hard into the massive mangrove root and the stillness of the jungle behind it. But the kayak, inanimate in her cradle, gave nothing away.
A few hundred yards to the West of the hiding place, the light landed on a flock of egrets asleep in the thick mess of mangrove, agitated by the intrusion into a noisy evacuation. The voices of men carried over the water, laughing out loud over the wingbeats of the fleeing flock before fading into the distance.
Twenty minutes passed before the men raised their lean bodies from the moss-carpeted fiberglass hull and resumed rowing as though nothing had happened. Nothing really had, and nothing was a good thing on a night like tonight. The drums on board weighed them to a slowness that clashed with the renewed commitment to silence and speed brought on by the search light.
Channel lights blinked closer and closer with each pull but it felt like an age before they were on either side of the boat.
Suddenly the boat bucked like a bronco, roaring to life, raising its bow with animal fury and flinging itself hard out into the sleeping wild of night.
—-
The boat was small enough to be wicked fast and large enough for worthwhile cargo. As the sun rose over the deep water, each man marveled in his own mind at the world it brought into view. The boat bounced and drove forward into the small mounds of deep water waves pressing toward the bigger island nation to the East - right into the sunrise. First the sky began to stir with silver wisps that then began to spread like smoke into wider bands of light. The brightness spread like cold flame across the sky, catching the water in its fresh grasp. One of the men marveled at the difference between sunrise and sunset, the freshness of the coming and hot tiredness of the going. They both settled into a daydream.
As morning woke up the water and caught up with the swift moving boat twenty miles out of Cayman waters, the men slowed down. It would do them no good to arrive in Jamaica early. A green bull turtle came up for air just South of the unseen path the boat was taking, raised one side of his head and body out of the water to stare at the passers by, and lazily slunk his bejeweled green shell laced with strands of brown moss back into the depths. The water changed its nighttime color of dense blackness first to a silver mirror to celebrate the dawn. Soon after it slid into something more comfortable, a deep unfathomable blue as opaque as the black of night and shiny as the mirror of morning. One daydreamer wondered, spliff hanging from the corner of his mouth, at what Columbus and the people who came before him must have seen as they took this journey under oar and sail, quiet without the engines. There would have been no birds for some time, as their path would have been slow between land. He could only imagine the beauty together with the quiet on the calm water. But every time he had taken this trip, it had been at speed.
The first time had been with his uncle. He would never forget it. His father had not long been arrested for some minor matter - a spliff and a ten dollar bag of herb found in his possession. An insult really, to be arrested and locked up for something this small considering the hundred pounds of weed and the key of coke he had just moved. They probably suspected, and were harsh with the small matter for not being able to prove the bigger thing. The run that would be the daydreamer’s first had already been planned before the old man got thrown on to the hood of the West Bay Police car by the new asshole British cop who didn’t care that he hadn’t been resisting. (The limey fucker would soon learn the importance of playing fair if he was to live comfortably on the small island he had been sent to serve.) His uncle had called the teenage boy out of his grandmother’s kitchen and talked with him in the hammocks hung from under the wild tamarind trees. The old lady had lingered at the back step of the house in the doorway to the kitchen, drying her hands over and over in the dish towel. She seemed to consider doing something, stopping the inevitable some how, but made up her mind a minute later and stepped back into the house door framed by peeling wood and texture 1-11. He had marveled at the sea on that first trip, so nervous about the first run that his hands had been sweating and his eyes had been frozen wide. The sea and the herb had been the perfect things to calm him, ground him, in the way they had both done for generations of men of his people. Those who had gone before him had been merchant marines, ship engineers and captains, turtlers and explorers, all seduced by this very same liquid lady into lives of danger and adventure. It is thoughts of them that are interrupted by water breaking all around the boat.
They have come.
In a single movement, smooth silver dorsal fins cut their way up from the blue mirror, slicing into the air. There are so many of them moving at once, in harmony. They call to each other, whistling and singing, pulling up around the boat.
Suddenly, all at once, they begin to dance, jumping and playing with their family members and the boat. There are more of them today than he has ever seen. Before the boat picks up speed again, a young one gets really close to where the interrupted daydreamer is standing, looking him straight into the eye before pulling away to join the others. A slow smile spreads around the spliff tail in his teeth as his eyes follow the whistling young calf as she begins to dance with her cousins.
When the boat bucks, lifting the bow with the power of the engine re-focused on speed, over seventy dolphins race the men to Jamaica.
