Republican Party Reptile(48)
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 Nassau. 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 shell. Businesslike, that is, but not undercover, for God’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, “Goddam 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 seashell 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 shorelines 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 passes for a road down there. A few hundred yards from shore 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 competitor 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 Nigger 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?”