Sarah Fazakerley
1. RUBIO
ISLA MARIA MADRE, NAYARIT, MEXICO: MARCH 1989
Every day the same, but for Sunday; and the fortnightly boat.
No bells today. No siren. Only a mosquito’s fertility whine to urge him from his cot. The Blond slipped past his snoring, snorting compadres, out of the dormitory, and into the stark-white bright of the day. Time enough to sit, roll a smoke, and look out to sea for a sail or a whale. The vast, curving Pacific—his home, his freedom, and now his prison – stretched formless in all directions.
Nothing but waves and seabirds. All he’d ever wanted to see – but not like this, too far to hear. Yet he felt their call with every brush of breeze. The wind gusted up the ravine with a gritted, breathy malice that rattled the corrugated metal roofs and doors. But the Blond had heard much worse from the sea and other people’s structures weren’t his concern.
He ambled down the cactus-studded hill, skirting sagging razor-wire to bypass the lime-washed familia quarters and into the woodshop; where he’d work his day without reluctance to start nor eagerness to finish.
Selecting a half-inch chisel for the warm, worn grip of its wood handle, he tested its edge against his thumb. Good enough for opening a paint can, or an artery, but not for his purpose.
He set the hand-crank bench grinder in motion and leaned into his work, loosening a drool of spit to wet the metal.
He didn’t stop when the Sinaloan brothers came in; didn’t pause when Ramon flicked live butts to the shavings at his feet, nor flinch as the curled scrolls blackened and twitched. The Sinaloans resented this pet gringo-turned-mascot. They teased to see if he’d bite, stripped off layers to lay bare the man under the boy-hero cape.
Though the task was menial, its execution might win honour, if he correctly judged the care invested and its value to the recipient. If he got it wrong, Hector and the older compadres would defend him, perhaps to the death. He hoped it wouldn’t come to that.
SUMMARY OF NEXT CHAPTERS…
In La Paz, an English woman, KATE, meets sailors anchored in the bay. She quickly falls in with the community of misfit liveaboards, and partners with GREG, an older American on a 1939 wood gaffer, Wanderer. They explore the Sea of Cortez but for reasons unknown, Greg decides to trade in Wanderer for a near-decrepit ex-racing catamaran, Windsong. Together, they rebuild the cat – with significant alterations to the underwings and sail for the Mexican mainland. They get caught by a storm, and are blown off-course to the prison island of Maria Madre, where they are apprehended overnight.
At sea the next day, Kate is trapped in her cabin when a speedboat comes close, then leaves. Shortly after, the Mexican Navy searches the boat, finds nothing, and they sail on to Yelapa. Kate hikes up to a tropical waterfall…
YELAPA
Her first landfall.
Ahead, the sound of tumbling water. Sweating mud and tattered with cobwebs, she broke into a clearing, but the waterfall was beneath her, out of sight. Above, a trickle of water made its languid way over rocks to rest at a glorious, blue pool. Even better! She ripped off her clothes and waded in, the fresh deliciousness of it causing her land-battered feet to pump blood with a frenzy.
She relaxed, truly and exquisitely alone in this unspoiled abundance of natural fresh water, so stripped off her bikini and rolled like a seal, numbing her body with its chill and cleansing her mind of fear and doubt to take in this moment – her first landfall.
She wallowed to the edge where the vast Pacific curved westwards, rounding to the South Seas of her far-off dreams, peered over and there was the waterfall, cascading right below, . cascading right below, two hundred feet down to Yelapa’s magical tapestry, its jungled arms around a deep violet-blue blue bay. From here, it was evident how narrow the ledge of shallow water around the perimeter, studded with bobbing boats, and the farthest out was Windsong, which she could just make out within the North point. She pushed back against outstretched arms, entranced yet terrorised, by her flimsy strength against its flow.
“Pardon me,” A man’s voice, then his blundering body crashing through the undergrowth.
Kate groped for her bikini, but it was out of reach on a rock behind.
“Looking for this?” The intruder picked up the stringed pieces and tossed them to her.
“Don’t get dressed on my account, ‘bout to strip off myself, if you don’t mind that I join you?”
“Please yourself.”
He did; quickly divested of shirt and shorts, no underpants, then settled himself into the flow with deep sighs of satisfaction, still wearing his hat. He was about her age, mid twenties she guessed, or younger, with a farmer’s tan that demarked sleeves and shorts like a soccer strip. At his deck, hanging from a leather cord, he wore a heart-shaped seed pod, burnished to conkery copper.
A fellow scruff, she concluded, and lowered her guard in the face of his evident ease. Maybe she was the intruder here.
‘This place – we just arrived; I had no idea.’
‘Magical, ain’t it. You know it’s an Indian reservation?’
“Ohhh. I thought they were – different. Not just reserved but…”
“Invaded, is what they are. Used to be all shamans and Iahuasca ceremonies back here. Now it’s just a regular old Hotel California. Come for the pie, stay for the Green Slime.”
“Sounds vile.”
‘‘Trippy, actually – it’s a marijuana liqueur the Indians make. They sell it at the yacht club.”
‘There’s a yacht club?’
“Well, t’aint exactly a club, given there’s no members.”
“Nor many yachts.”
“Claro. There’s a reason for that,’ he continued, ‘You see those rocks? Just outta the bay – where that cat’s at?’
“Yeahhh.”
‘When those get waves on ‘em, you’d better boogie, means there’s a swell coming in – eat you right up. Happens fast too. My buddy Donny lost his boat here – munched to matchsticks before he even reached it.’
“Give it a rest, will you. I’m trying to relax.”
He sunk below the water like a hippo, and slowly resurfaced, gargoyling a gentle spout of water, like a babe in a bath tub.
“Damn. Ain’t nothing like fresh water.”
“Tell me about it. I’ve got bed sores from salt. Whole boat’s been soaked for a week.”
“Yuck. Fucking boats. Where’d you come in from?”
“La Paz. Just the two of us. Hand-steered all week.”
He spluttered, laughing. “Sorry, but – a week!”
“More or less – we…took a detour. Just the two of us – hand-steering.”
“Jeez. Nobody does that anymore. Rough passage?”
“You could say that.”
“Hey – you wanna smoke a doobie?”
“God yes!”
With a flash of white backside, he reached into the pack behind him, fumbled with its contents, pulled out a skinny J, lit it with a zippo and handed it to her. It was exquisite, like turning up the TV colour contrast and plugging in surround sound. She inhaled deep, held it, took another draw and passed it back with a luxuriant exhale.
“Thanks – needed that.”
She offered him the joint, but he declined, “Suck it up, sister – you earned it.”
“Too bloody right, I did!” She took deep tokes, and on the exhale, remembered her manners. “How about you? You an inmate here?”
“Excuse me?” His eyes flicked up to meet hers. They were dazzling blue sapphires. Like Greg’s. Like Ted’s and Scott’s. A sailor’s eyes.
“At the Hotel, duh! ‘You can check out but –
” – can’t never leave, right. Right. Done my time in these parts, but… I’m just passing through – south to Z town, maybe. Or West to Hawaii. Wish I’d never left that place. You been?”
He retrieved the joint, smoked it off without a care for his burning moustache, and flicked the stub with a filthy worn nail, sent it soaring over the pool’s edge.
“Zihuatanejo? Nope. I thought we would. Now – I’m not so sure.”
“You made it here!”
“Barely.”
“Sort the boat out and carry on. Why not?”
She dunked her head into the water, held it there, running her hair clean in silken golden fronds, then sat up, pushing her forefingers hard around her eye-sockets, “I’m starving,” she said,”Munchies.”
Say, you want some pie?”
He knelt at the pools edge, his back to her, rummaging the pack’s innards. His ribs stuck out like the bristle-eating cattle she’d seen on the way down the brown dusty Baja all those months ago.
He carefully extracted a green parcel, and quickly closed the pack, but not before she caught a glint of something big and metal inside.
Wrapped in banana leaves were two great slabs of creamy goodness wrapped in banana leaves. “Dig in. It’s fresh – just bought at the beach.”
“Coconut or banana?”
“Err, both?”
“Good answer,” he laughed, took an enormous mouthful of one and passed the pawful back. His fingers curled around a savage red scar in the palm.
Kate lunged into the pie, vacuuming its sugar. When the payload hit, she stopped.
“Better?”
She nodded, satiated and closed her eyes against the sun. She trickled her fingers in the water flow and let her words follow. She could finally speak.
“I’m just not sure I want to go out there again. It’s not like I thought it would be.”
“Never is. But you’ve done the tough stuff. The rest is all downhill.”
“Great.”
“In a good way. Once you get round that corner you’re in the real tropics. Big ‘ole corner, mind.”
Another challenge to look forward to.
“It’s not just the boat. My boyfriend seems to hate sailing with me. I know we’re both tired, but – he’s gone so moody – won’t talk to me anymore, doesn’t explain anything, then acts like everything I do is wrong but – but I don’t think I’m that bad.”
“Hell, I’ll bet he’s eating his heart out it’s been so shitty. Probably worried sick you’re going to jump ship.”
“I wouldn’t do that. It’s my home. I’ve got a cat.”
“Yeah, well – plenty do. There’s a ton of guys’d chew their right arm off to sail with a lady like you.”
“You don’t even know I can sail. And I’m not much of a lady.”
“Sailing’s the easy bit – I mean to put up with a shitty boat – when you could be on a fancy cruiser, being treated nice.
“Windsong’s not shitty. It’s a racing boat. A Classic.”
“I bet.”
Was he trying to be funny?
“How’s the showers? the freezer? Got yourself a nice VCR surround-sound set-up? Dive Compressor? Roller furling? Radar?”
“Well, no, but – “
“All down to what you want. Vallarta’s stuffed with party boats looking for stewies and deckhands. Wannna cross? – he nodded to the curved horizon – bluewater cruisers, stuck in marinas all along this coast, afraid to go west on their lonesome. Pacific’s a big place. But sure, if all you want to do is go right back to La Paz, stay right where y’are.”
” I just want us to enjoy cruising. Maybe it’d be easier with help – a crew. Hey – why don’t you crew with us to ZTown?. You’d be very welcome. And we could really use a hand.”
He spluttered on the words through globs of pie.
‘Don’t think the old man would like that, somehow.’
‘I don’t see why – he’s not jealous.’
‘Sure he is. If he cares.’
His words hung over the pool and settled there, leaving it muddily cold, fecund with insects and possibly leeches. Kate conducted a thorough bodily examination for the blood-sucking monsters, found none and saw him fixed on a point below. Brilliant had upped anchor and were motoring out of the bay. Shame to miss them, or at least Chuck, with his cold-beered enthusiasm, and Jenny’s baking.
“Look, Kate, it’s been real nice meeting you. But I gotta go. People to see, places to meet -“
Shit – this dope was really strong – had they done introductions?
‘Sorry – forgot your name already.’
He looked ruffled by the formality. ‘Rubio,’ he said, wiped his hands on his shorts and shook hers, proffered from the pool.
‘Nice name. Unusual.’
‘More of a hound’s name, really. Just Spanish for ‘blond’. Given name’s Leo – not used it in years.”
“I’m a Leo!”
“Y’are? He leaned close into her, so close she could smell him, “Yeah. I can see that – the hair, The eyes – all wild and woolly. You got that whole amber thing going, don’cha?”
She splashed him away. “Back off, Tiger, “I haven’t got woolly eyes.”
That cracked them both up, “Wouldn’t that be a thing!” He coughed on the spliff, laughing, “Yeah – that’s something I’ve yet to see, alright.”
He hopped about in a mistimed Hornpipe, trying to place legs in trousers whilst making a hasty exit.
She stifled a snort at his antics.
“See you at the Yacht Club”, she called after him.
“Yeah, sounds good” came his faint, unconvincing reply. Then he was gone, scuttling off into the undergrowth.
IN THE NEXT CHAPTERS
Rubio is revealed as an escaped prisoner, then as Greg’s son. The three sail south as outlaws – a dysfunctional family on the run, coming to turns with abandonment and rejection, all in the confines of the cabin, but pulling together to outwite – and outsail- the authorities.On the beach at Manzanillo, Rubio picks up a guitar and sings:
If I had a ketch
If I clinker…built a skiff
You’d be the leeboard that guides it
And if I had me a surfboard, you’d be the wave for to ride it
The pullcord to my outboard, the topmast to my yawl,
If I master yon schooner, you’re the Trades that power it all.
Islander
When I weld us that ketch, your name will be on it,
Islander
Gracing her soft-chined hull
Islander – I’m gunk-holing your moats, holding steady in your eddies, ‘cos Islander,
I want you in my cock…pit, baby
I wanna be your master, and your crew
And when we reach that Southern Cross, I wanna roll all night in your stateroom
With you
Islander – no man can be one
Mi mujere vagabunda
Please let me split my sloop rig into two.
———————————-
In Manzanillo, Kate sacrifices her South Pacific passage for Rubio’s escape. Sailing back North with Greg, their boat Windsong is shipwrecked. All is lost.Eventually she rallies the liveaboards into a workers’ pirate co-op operating the Schooner Bonnie Anne. She’s not ready to go back to sea…yet…but tides have a way of turning and boats have ways of meeting.
———————————-
EPILOGUE
MAUI, HAWAII. A YEAR LATER.
Rubio worked his day at the boat yard. It was past the most filthy, exhausting stage, stripping down the layers of paint to bare wood and he was hourly grateful that he hadn’t to do it himself but had three local guys to do the worst of it, their sweat and dust contained under a tarpaulin tent, which was Brilliant’s cocoon. Next came the laying on of Kevlar strips, criss-crossed like bandages, to be over-painted with epoxy.
The guys called him Marigold, both for the household gloves he wore, and for the yellow flower of his hair. But it was good-natured teasing. They were keen to learn about the epoxy, and to use it for their boards and fishing boats, appreciated the old girl’s fine lines and how the epoxy would give her another fifty years.
He slept in a trailer in common land to the back of the yard. It was being prepared for building, but until they laid the infrastructure, it was free to use. Alongside Brilliant, his own project was starting to take shape. He’d lay up the hull first, learning to weld as he went. “She ain’t always pretty,” he answered their amused looks, “But she sure is strong.”
They told him it was too big, that he needed a catamaran to fly the waves after fish.
He said, ‘It needs a stateroom. A cockpit in the centre. And bunks forward for crew.’
‘What are they – midgets?’ Juan perused the plans. He himself was an immense slab of a man. Not fat, but typical Polynesian.
Rubio respects their women but makes only small promises, the ones he can keep. He takes from their their language, their recipes and their lessons in love – all the many and various ways to give pleasure.
Without being told, he respected the old ways – didn’t ride the sea turtles or sunbathe on their sacred places. Sometimes in the afternoons when it was too hot to work, he’d take a board into the bay, just paddling around with a dive-mask. Families of spinners would come into the warm shallow bay to rest, moving slowly across the bottom in great sweeping circles. Sometimes the teenagers would shoot to the surface, unable to contain their exuberance, but he didn’t dive down to play and excite. Just let them be; rested with them at the surface.
Sang her song as he worked, sometimes when the yearning was too great, instead of drying his tears he’d take them to the rocks, throw his body into the waves, let his salt mix with theirs, with hers.
————————————————————–
BIOGRAPHY
In 1989, long before GPS, our boat drifted too close to the Tres Marias islands, West Mexico. The place then was still a prison colony – and felt like a movie set. There were 76 escapes from the prison – 29 of them in 1986 alone, and that gave me the inspiration to write Islander. The prison has since shut down and the islands made into a biosphere reserve, known as “The Galpagos of Mexico”.
The novel is essentially about the cost of freedom – which never comes for free, bt is a quest born of a thousand sacrifices – of comfort, family, safety. It’s about why people still “run away to sea” and describes some things which are well known to non-sailors, like storms. But many other things which remain hidden, like the community we find in home ports, such as Alcoutim/Sanlucar on the magnificent Rio Guadiana.
The novel also describes the tight bonds formed between crew, when our whole world is contained within 40 feet. It touches on gender politics, which is less discussed, and celebrates “desenrascado” – a trait valued by the Portguese and by sailors: the ability to make do, to be resourceful.
Running underneath is the theme of Nature – its seeming power that belies a deep vulnerability to our meddling and greed. Nature is also a lifelong source of healing, if we can just allow ourselves to be.
Sarah Fazakerley, Castaway
