Republican Party Reptile(51)

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 cutlass 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 pass, 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. Umptity kilos of powdered self-esteem were left sitting on the tarmac and nobody 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 hell 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 pissed. 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.