Mitla Pass - Leon Uris [45]
“Okay, but there’s one thing I want to know. You’ve known about this for a long, long time, Val. Why didn’t you stop me?”
She put her hands in her face and sank to the floor. “Whores,” she wept, “whores, whores, whores.”
St. Barths, 1956
OKAY, BUSTER, you fought for it, you won it. You now have the absolute right to go bust your ass on another novel. So, go get it. St. Barthélemy? I didn’t know the place existed or where it existed. The ultimate romance of the novelist, self-imposed exile. Real Somerset Maugham stuff.
My knowledge of the Caribbean was formed by Hollywood studios when I was a kid. So many of our conceptions of life and places were made on sound stages. Yo, ho, ho and a bottle of rum. Steamy jungles, miserable black slaves sweating in the sugarcane fields, voodoo rites. Devil’s Island where no man escapes, except in a wooden box. Maureen O’Hara, so magnificent, so voluptuous. Bruce Cabot—now there was a villain for you. I’d duel my way, Errol Flynn style, through ten Basil Rathbones to free my beloved from those driveling, one-eyed, hook-handed scums.
A blissful haze enveloped me after I boarded the plane in L.A. I usually became maudlin after a few drinks at eighteen thousand feet. Val, I’ve hurt you so badly. I can’t even comprehend the visions that must have run through your mind on the hundred and one nights when I was away from home.
Maybe I was predestined to go to St. Barthélemy to salvage something, to pay penance. Christ in the wilderness. Val ...Val ... I bit my lip hard to hold back tears for the want of another chance to stroke Penny’s hair and read to her, or the kicks I got watching Roxanne taking jumps on her pony.
“This is for you, Daddy. I made it in art class.”
Remorse was punctuated by the white-knuckle aspects of flying in the Caribbean in 1955. The trip wasn’t for sissies. After Miami, I changed from one baling-wire airline to another, from Cuba down to Jamaica and then up to Haiti and over to Puerto Rico to my first destination, St. Thomas.
I was met by Tex Richie, one of Junkyard Murphy’s pilots. Generally speaking, old, fat-bellied pilots gave me a feeling of security. They had survived. Tex Richie was old, fat, and spoke with a whiskey-flavored Southwestern drawl. He didn’t exactly fill me with confidence. The plane gave me even less. It was an odd, dumpy configuration made in Holland with a push-pull engine in the rear. Tex called it a STOL, acronym for Short Take Off and Landing.
When he put on a thick pair of glasses to read the map, I almost called the whole thing off.
“There’s the little mother” he said, holding a magnifying glass.
“Where?”
“There.”
SHIT!
“Where’s the runway?”
“Oh, it’s there all right. All thirteen hundred feet of it.”
“Thirteen hundred feet!”
“Hell, ain’t no worse than landing on the deck of a carrier. They keep the grass low by using it as a grazing plot for the island’s sheep. When it gets down low enough, they sweep the sheep shit off it and use it as a soccer field. Junkyard told me to take real good care of you. They’re mowing the field for our arrival.”
Reinforced by that bit of intelligence, we took off. The flight was short and choppy. We came to a confluence of islands. Tex pointed out a speck.
“St. Barths.”
Good Lord, was he kidding? He flew over it once to see if any emergency panels had been laid out and to check the wind sock.
“God dammit,” he grumbled.
“What’s wrong?”
“We got a twenty-five-knot tail wind. It’s gonna be a good one.”
He went out to sea, circled back, and lowered the plane until we were but a few hundred feet over the water, then he banked her almost ninety degrees. At this terrifying angle we were being kicked from behind by the wind. He slowed her till I thought she had to stall and drop us into the sea. Tex held this attitude and the stall warning beeped.
“Motherfucker,” he garbled under his breath.
The runway went from the water’s edge and then took off uphill into a dead end of boulder-filled hillocks. If we touched down too far up the runway it seemed there was little chance of getting her up