Tales of Old Brigands Key (2 page)

"I
can't," Ernest called back. "The engines died, just like that. Can't
get them up again."

"Shit,
man," the sentry called, "you don't need power, just turn the wheel
and rudder her away."

Ernest,
looking panicky, faked a hard twist of the wheel, and fake-twisted it back
again. "I can't get a response!"

The
Pauline
closed in on the CG.

"Shit!"
the sentry cried. "Sound the alarm!"

The
lazy bastard aft suddenly was all business, and sprang to a mounted bell and
rang it furiously.

"I
can't turn," Ernest shouted.

Lou
slipped out of the shadows and hurried to the dock. The two men on the CG deck
were riveted on the sportsman's boat. It looked to plow straight into the CG.

At
the last second, the
Pauline
edged out of the straight-on collision
course and struck a glancing blow. There came a sound of splintering wood. The
CG-400 lurched with the jolt. Men shouted, curses flew through the air.

The
sailor on the
Pilar
bolted up and stared at
the commotion.

Come
on, Lou thought. Get off my livelihood and go help your pals.

The
man stayed with his post.

Lou
had no choice. He sprinted down the dock.

In
the corner of his eye, he saw Ernest glance at him. The
Pauline
's engine
suddenly roared, and the craft drove into the side of the CG, pushing it
around. More shouting.

"I
can't stop it," Ernest wailed. "Now it's stuck!"

Lou
reached his boat and leapt aboard, hurling himself full into the Guardsman. The
man went down with a thud, and Lou slugged him as hard as he could in the
mouth. The man slumped and rolled, stunned. Lou snatched the man's revolver and
threw it overboard.

The
sailor was just a kid. A big one, so Lou didn't feel too bad about clobbering
him. He'd gotten the drop on the kid out of surprise and maybe a little luck.
When the kid came to, Lou knew he'd be manhandled, and at any moment the other
sailors were going to see that trouble had commenced aboard their rum war
prize. Ernest waved and shouted, a spectacle now, near hysterics, and hurled
abusive oaths and threatened each and every sailor who ever wore the Coast
Guard uniform with lawsuits that would bankrupt them.

No
time to lose.

Lou
tried the door on the wheelhouse. Locked. He grasped a fire axe from underneath
the gunwale and smashed the lock. Another blow, and he shoved the door in.

Anna
bounded out, grinning. "Lou! I knew you'd come!"

"Shut
up, girl. You
ain't
been quiet nine straight seconds
of your life, but you better be now." He took her hand and pulled her
along. He whispered instructions to her and pushed her out onto the dock. She knelt
in the shadows.

He
turned and reentered the wheelhouse. He reached underneath his jacket and
pulled out a taped bundle of three sticks of dynamite. He wedged it into a
locker against the lower hull, took out a match, and lit the fuse.

He
ran.

On
deck, the sailor stirred and looked dazedly about. Lou punched him again and
heaved him up onto the dock. He looked at the commotion on the other boats.
Five crewmen swarmed about, screaming at Ernest, who waved and stabbed a finger
at them, shouting back. Ernest saw him, turned back to his wheel, and spun it
starboard.

A
crewman turned and saw Lou, who scrambled onto the dock. The crewman shouted
and drew a sidearm. The revolver roared, and Lou felt something sting his foot
with fire. Another gunshot, and splinters of wood flew from the dock.

Lou
took two steps and collapsed to his knees, the damage to his wrecked foot too
great. Pain blossomed with each step, and he marveled at how goddamn important
a foot was. And how goddamn much it could hurt.

The
shooter took three swift strides closer, until he loomed close over Lou. He
steadied himself, and drew careful aim at Lou's face. He'd lost any interest in
taking a prisoner. And at that range, he couldn't miss.

"Hey,
you son of a bitch," Ernest shouted. He twisted the wheel hard and shoved
the throttle.

The
shooter hesitated a split-second, and glanced at Ernest. Lou rolled sideways.
The gun roared and a hole appeared in the deck of the
Pilar
.
The crewman swore, shook his head, and leveled his weapon again.

The
Pauline
pulled free of the CG-400 with a lurch and a groan. The crewmen
stumbled. The
Pauline
spun back to port and banged against the end of
the dock.

"Now,
Anna!" Lou shouted.

They
ran toward the
Pauline
.

The
explosion roared behind them. Chunks of fiery debris sprayed about.

They
leapt on board the passing boat, and Ernest heeled it hard to starboard and
opened the growling engines wide. The
Pauline
shot away into the
channel.

Lou
turned to watch. The sailors were scrambling about, one of them firing wildly
at them with his revolver. The captain directed this and that, demanding the
chase begin.

Pilar
rolled onto her
side and settled lower. Flames crept up the side of the wheelhouse. Air escaped
her with a sigh and she sank still lower. And then she slipped under.

The
lines linking her to the CG-400 drew taut, and the vessel heeled over as the
weight of the sinking boat pulled it downward. The captain suddenly directed
everyone to the new threat and the crewmen feverishly scrambled to unhitch or
sever the lines. Too late. The bow of the vessel went low and wedged under the
dock with a shriek of metal and a splintering of wood.

The
gunboat was stuck.

Gunshots
chased the
Pauline
, and blasts of white foam where bullets struck the
water followed them.

*
* *

Pauline
sped into the
darkness of the open Gulf, its running lights dark.

"Where
to?" Ernest shouted.

"Hell,
I don't know. Veer south, drop us at Cedar Key. We'll hitch a ride out of
Florida from there. Reckon we'll work our way down coast and get to Cuba for another
boat." He peered down at his foot. Slippery wetness filled his shoe, and
blood seeped from it. "Son of a bitch plugged me in the foot! I'm gone
have to buy new shoes now."

"Christ,
man, you need a doctor."

"I
reckon that's so."

"And
you scuttled your own vessel! I thought this was a rescue only."

"Hell,
what did you think, I could keep out of reach of them Revenuers? They knew the
Pilar
now, and they got bigger, faster, meaner boats
of their own."

"But
why . . . ?"

"Principle,
son. I put a lot of sweat into that boat, but it weren't no living human being.
I got my little sister out, but I'll be damned if I let them sons of bitches
commandeer my boat and make it a Revenuer boat. It
ain't
right. I don't expect you to full understand, but some folks got it made and
most folks
ain't
. Haves and have-nots. I reckon I'm
one of them have-nots, and it don't look to ever change." He thought for a
moment. "Besides, it weren't a total loss. By now, all
them
hundreds of bottles of whiskey and rum will be bobbing on the surface of the
channel, being picked up by the good folk of the island. That'll be my late
Christmas present to '
em
, 'cause I sure didn't get
them nothing else."

Ernest
nodded. "This will make one hell of a story."

"It
might, son. But me and Anna's got to start over somewhere else, so don't go
using my name in your goddamn book."

"What
book?"

"Listen,
you
ain't
as anonymous as you think and I
ain't
as illiterate as I sound."

Anna
spoke up, grinning. Her red hair caught the fire of the sun as dawn broke.
"And you
ain't
as lucky as you think, Lou. You
thought it was a lucky bit of engine trouble that brought
Pilar
into Brigands Key? Ha! The Coast Guard's got top-drawer mechanics."

"So?"

"So,
their engines don't run so good when they got a bag of sugar in the
carburetors. And their mechanic don't feel so good when he's got half a bottle
of castor oil in his food."

"I'll
be damned. How'd you manage that?"

"Sailors
will do anything to impress a pretty girl. Now you think I'm smart?"

"I
think you might turn out to be a pretty fair Denton after all."

"One
hell of a story," Ernest said. He opened a small locker in the side of the
wheelhouse and withdrew a bottle of rum. "By my reckoning, we just passed
the twelve-mile limit. Drink up."

"Well,"
Lou said, taking the bottle. "Long as it's legal."

"Change is good," they say. I
say it's a matter of perspective and when you hear it, a prudent first course
of action is to grab hold of your ass and hold on tight. The Germans and
Soviets said it when they marched into Warsaw in 1939. I suspect the Poles
disagreed. Exactly one year prior to that tragic day, the following story takes
place.

Changes in technology always come with
growing pains. Some more painful than others, as in this story. Rural
electrification was a miracle for folks outside the cities and towns, but would
not necessarily have been welcomed by everyone.

—
kp

Brigands Key, September, 1938

M
cConklin
the light
keeper sat up reading all night on the porch of his house, same as every night,
poring over a grease-smudged copy of
The Sea Wolf.
He puffed contentedly
on a corncob pipe, and had just refilled and relit it when the lights went off
all over Brigands Key, everywhere but
his
porch.

His
porch was bathed in the bright reliable glow of kerosene.

He
looked out over the town, feeling just a little smug. Blackness everywhere. He
drew his pocket watch. Four AM. Most folks wouldn't even notice, being still in
bed. He ran out to the yard, looked up at the dark spire of the lighthouse, and
swore a blue streak when he saw that the lantern room was dark.

He
ran his fingers through his hair, and shook his head. Only a couple hours until
dawn. Maybe it could wait until then.

No.
Even a couple hours without a beacon would put men in mortal danger.

He
emptied his pipe on the ground, stamped out the ash, and hurried back to the
porch. He grabbed the lit lantern and two more unlit ones.

He
ran down the driveway to the rotting picket fence, aiming for the new power
pole. The electric lines came across the channel along the old wood bridge on
stinking creosote poles that dotted the town. The nearest pole was just inside
his fence, near the shed that housed the transformer. The other transformers
around town all hung on poles, but the town bosses figured the lighthouse
important enough to warrant protection for its transformer.

As
he headed toward the shed, there was a flicker, another, and then the lights of
the town blinked back on. He turned his attention back up to the lantern room
high above.

Still
dark.

He
swore loudly. Ever' building in town except the most important one had got its
power back.

He
rattled open the tin door of the shed, spooking Mary Shelley, the broke-down
gray cat, from atop a crate of equipment parts. Stupid cat, didn't know how
dangerous living inside a transformer house might be. Mary Shelley rewarded him
with a hiss and a swipe. He retaliated with a kick and knocked the wide-eyed
thing aside. "
Git
, you worthless animal!"

He
hung the lantern on a hook and tweaked it brighter, sweeping aside the darkness
of the little shack. The transformer itself gleamed metallically, like the
silver the electric boys said it was.

He
stared at the goddamn thing, his pulse quickening, his face flushing with a
sudden hot resentment. Thirty-two years he'd tended the light on kerosene, and
never a stop in service. Seven months on electric, and down she goes. A perfect
record, shot all to hell.

"That's
progress," the electric boys had claimed, a thousand times. Maybe they
were right. Electric didn't stink and smoke like kerosene, and didn't have to
be refilled daily.

Better
most nights, but not tonight. Tonight the electric boys had failed miserably
and the Hammond Lighthouse had lost its beacon for the first time since it went
on in 1872. The first time that ships out in that shallow uncertain sea were
searching the horizon without success for the old Hammond beacon, relying on it
to keep them from running aground or sinking.

McConklin
swore out loud.
He'd warned them.

The
thing about electricity was, it was fancy enough to fool everyone with
convenience. Sure, it was convenient. But it was like holding a tiger by the
tail.

Kerosene
had done a workman's job, but
them
new boys argued that kerosene was the danger, not electric. Kerosene would burn
the place down one day. That was laughable; there weren't nothing in Hammond
Lighthouse that could catch fire. It was all concrete and steel.

Get
on with it, he told himself. Don't think about how they ruined it and how
they're going to somehow hang your ass for it.

He
thought back to the one lousy day of training they'd shoved him through as
they'd strung the wires and hung the contraptions. His son Roy had gone through
the same training with him. It seemed like the only time the kid had ever
gotten truly worked up by anything.

Roy.

He
hadn't seen his son for six months, but that wasn't his fault.
McConklin
had always figured Roy would inherit the light
keeper's job once
McConklin
retired, but the kid left
for Galveston and said he'd never be back.

McConklin
had gotten his
hopes up. Penny
Merriwether
claimed she'd seen Roy at
an inn in Perry just two days ago. She must have been mistaken; if Roy had come
that close, he'd have come all the way home. Wouldn't he?

He
and Roy didn't see eye to eye. The boy had once been the quiet one but turned
since his older brother, Tom, had died nine years ago. Tom ran around, drinking
and chasing girls, even married ones, and
McConklin
had tried to put a stop to it, clamping down on both boys. The boys' mother had
run off and left him to raise them alone. He wouldn't spoil them the way she
did.

Tom
had stayed out late one night too many. Not a word, just came home late and
went straight upstairs. He should've apologized. Everything would have been
fine if he had.
McConklin
shook his head, remembering
the blows at the top of the stairs, the long slow tumble, and Tom
laying
motionless at the bottom, his face turned an impossible
direction, and little Roy coming out of his room to see Tom's broken twisted
body, and blinking through tears at his father.

It
was an accident,
McConklin
reassured himself. It was.
Chief Toomey agreed, so it must have been.

But
Roy blamed his old man, and grew into a sulkier, more venomous hellion than Tom
had ever been, sniping, ignoring, resisting at every turn. But never fighting,
not like Tom. Roy's way was worse, and he got worse, and
McConklin
had to rein him in.

And
just as it had that one night with Tom, the demon come over
McConklin
again one night, and in an alcoholic haze he had beaten the unresisting Roy
bloody and senseless, somehow stopping short of killing him.

The
closeness to murder shocked even himself and he swore off the bottle for a
time.

The
boy said nothing to nobody. Just an explanation that he'd fallen in the
lighthouse. But the whispers began about town. Chief Toomey gave him a hard
threatening look and watched him real close after that.

Then
came the rural electrification. Roosevelt bought a lot of votes with that
nonsense, and poor folks in Brigands Key weren't no different than poor folks
in the Tennessee Valley. A boon to the economy, the local
Babbitts
claimed. Course, their jobs weren't threatened by it.
McConklin's
was. He'd gone from pillar of the community to unnecessary relic almost
overnight.

At
least he was important tonight.

After
his one day of training Roy got full of ideas and said that electrification was
the best thing that ever happened, and went off to study it for six more weeks
in Charlotte and came back with a fancy certificate. Not enough to call himself
an engineer or anything, but enough to make a dollar or two. He even got some
WPA work, stringing wires, hanging transformers, charging lines. Got the
hometown hero treatment the day they threw the switch and the lights came on
all over Brigands Key. They bought him steak dinners and drinks. Everybody fell
for the convenience. And when Tallahassee said the lighthouse kerosene lamp was
coming out and an electric lamp going in,
McConklin
could see the writing on the wall.

It
wasn't over yet. Roosevelt was banging his war drum, scaring people into
thinking that Hitler was up to no good and Nanking was an omen of things to
come, and insider talk was that FDR was going to nationalize all the
lighthouses and turn '
em
over to the goddamn Coast
Guard.

What
then?
McConklin
saw no way them military boys would
let him keep his job.

He
eyed the transformer housing. Where was Roy and all his training now?

Mary
Shelley meowed and watched him curiously.

"Shut
up."
McConklin
said.

For
his six weeks of training, Roy knew bunches of diagrams and whatnot.
McConklin
had gotten the six-hour training, and that seemed
like plenty. He knew the shutoffs, the shunts,
the
routine maintenance, which said basically, "call an expert." That was
an insult to a man who'd kept the beacon on without fail for three decades.

The
transformer was a hulk of steel, bolted to a concrete floor.
McConklin
held up his light, inspecting it. In his
training, they'd hauled out one that had blown, a blackened, smelly wreck. This
one was as slick as the day it was installed. Not a whiff of burned wires and
insulation. He looked at the row of arrestors, three glass mushrooms attached
to a beam alongside the transformer. Pretty little things, kind of like
miniatures of the Fresnel lens up top in the lighthouse. They were supposed to
protect the transformer from power surges, like if lightning struck the lines
somewhere. They'd explode if that happened, but they were intact and shiny.

So
the town lights were on, the arrestors looked good, and the transformer, too.
That meant the problem was in the line between the transformer and the lantern
room.

This
electric stuff wasn't so danged hard.

He
checked the conduit out from the transformer, and went outside the shed. He
followed the conduit to the base of the lighthouse, where it disappeared into a
hole that'd been drilled just for this purpose. Chest-high above it was another
steel housing box, the shutoff for the lighthouse. He opened the door with a
squeak, checked it, and shoved the heavy switch lever to the off position. If
the power came back, he'd be safe.

He
went to the lighthouse door, unlocked it,
pulled
it
open with a metal groan. He held up his lantern and located the conduit again
on the inside. He began ascending the spiral ladder, holding aloft the lamp and
checking the conduit as best he could.

Minutes
later, huffing just a bit, he reached the lantern room. The conduit and cable
running up the lighthouse shaft had been intact the whole way, as far as he
could tell.

The
beautiful old Fresnel lens, the finest in all the Southeast, sat there
motionless, useless. Since the upgrade, he couldn't even manually add a lamp to
it.

He
opened the outer glass door to the encircling catwalk and stepped through. He
hung his lighted kerosene lamp on the railing and fixed it there with a few
twists of baling wire. He lit the two remaining lamps and attached them
similarly to the railing, spaced equidistantly around the catwalk. He turned
the wicks bright as they would go, and studied them for a moment. They were
pitiful excuses for a beacon, but they'd have to do until power came back on.

He
leaned gently against the glass panes and stared out to sea, watching for
boats. He figured that was all he could do. If there weren't no electricity,
there weren't nothing else for it.

His
thoughts returned to Roy, and that damn girl that lured him away. What was her
name? Melissa? Little pie-faced Melissa. A life
wrecker, that
one, like his own wife, Georgette, had been. Georgette had left them all, left
the boys when they were little, on account of the fights and the discipline.

You
couldn't warn a boy about a girl when his pecker was doing all the thinking.
When Melissa tried to talk Roy into leaving,
McConklin
got after her and told the little conniver to stay away, to mind her own
business, to sink her claws into someone as trashy as herself. She left in
tears, and told Roy all about it,
tarting
up the
facts. She left town, which was what he'd hoped, but with an unplanned side
effect; Roy left a week later.

McConklin
reentered the
lantern room and studied the cable to the beacon lamp. It occurred to him that
the wiring from the distribution line to the transformer to here were all fine.
So the problem hid in here.

The
rain that had come tonight came in with a little bit of touchiness. There had
been lightning strikes off over the Gulf. So most likely lightning had struck
the lighthouse and knocked out the equipment.

But
the tower was equipped with lightning rods to take care of that, and there had
been no thunderclap. One that close to his house would have made him jump out
of his skin.

Something
else was wrong.

He
spotted it.

At
the junction of the cable to the electric motor, a second wire had been spliced
in, skillfully hidden under the main cable. It ran just a few inches over the
steel floor and was attached in a dark corner.