Mitla Pass - Leon Uris [46]
“Used to have an awful lot of pileups,” he said to comfort me.
At the last instant, with the stall button blaring, Tex leveled her out and let her glide. She hit the runway twenty feet in from the water’s edge and started an uphill run coming to a halt with—oh hell, a good ten or twelve feet to spare. Piece of cake.
And then I lightened up. At the side of the runway by the shack a pleasant-looking couple stood beside a battered jeep and waved us in. Denise and Pierre Dumont, Junkyard’s caretakers. They fussed over me as though I were visiting royalty. Who knows? I might have been the first Jew ever to have set foot on the place.
I really didn’t know what I was expecting—a thatched hut, a cave dwelling, a spear-carrying native chief. Junkyard had digs on a half-dozen islands. This one turned out to be a petite but nicely built villa. It obviously belonged to a skilled trader, for it was supplied to the gunwales with everything from bug spray to bourbon. All I would need was one pair of shoes, one pair of shorts, and my typewriter.
The location was primo. Villa Murphy was on a small hillside above a magnificent curve of beach, a bay called St. Jean. It was a three-minute walk from the front door to the strand.
In the next few days I made friends with the Dumonts and their five children, who had their own home a short distance away. They spoke French with a sprinkling of English and we worked out a palatable language. Pierre was Junkyard’s man on St. Barths, so to speak.
We jeeped every road on the island in the next few days. It was a speck of a place, a volcanic rock of about eight square miles. Leaping and bounding hills, cliffs, and rockfalls were ribboned by a few dozen kilometers of road, some of cement, some of volcanic rock, and some of washboard dirt. Tire busters, one and all. It was a roller coaster with a few flat stretches here and there with potholes—I hesitate to call them potholes, as they were large enough to make the jeep almost vanish.
A dozen Lilliputian bays were serene on the leeward side and inclined to violence on the windward. Warm water rolled or bashed up onto the most magnificent beaches of wheatfield-colored off-white sands. St. Barths was not what you would call a garden spot, but the ash was rich and there were many wild runs of bougainvillea wrapping around scrub trees and smatterings of wild-flower cover. No turn in any direction was without understated beauty.
There was little fertile land and it was easy to see that the islanders had to struggle to maintain a marginal existence.
Gustavia, a pearl of a little harbor, housed a waterfront quay and a half-dozen dirt streets. Most of the island’s fifteen hundred population lived around there. The Select Bar on the quay was the central watering hole.
St. Barths proved to be an anachronism for this part of the world. Because she was so tiny, one by six miles, no sugar plantation ever rooted there and thus the island never had slaves. The inhabitants were mostly of French ancestry from Normandy and Brittany. It seemed more of a misplaced parcel of France. Some of the older women still wore Amish-like bonnets and long black skirts and the men dressed in seafaring blue.
St. Barths had some beef cattle, a smattering of vegetable and fruit plots and, of course, the bountiful sea. There was intense trade with a radius of neighboring islands. One got the idea quickly that black market, white market, and free market were the key to existence. Junkyard had a small warehouse in Gustavia. It lacked very little.
Some wealthy French had found St. Barths. Yachtsmen had wandered on it. There were a few dozen small villas in spellbinding cliffside locations, including a half dozen belonging to Americans. One is always leery of being an outsider and crashing their solitude. I needn’t have worried. “Junkyard” was the magic name. He had shipped in most of the building materials for the homes erected since the war. Because it was a place where every outsider came looking for the same thing, friendships formed easily, and