“There’s Madam Bovary’s,” said Coleman. “That last pink house with all the painted boards nailed to a post by the door: ‘Palm Reading,’ ‘Numerology,’ ‘Past-Life Regression,’ ‘The Psychic Is In.’”
Serge walked up the porch steps and glanced at a cheerful silk flag of flowers and rainbows and three words: Laugh, Live, Love.
Knock, knock, knock.
The door opened. “Please come in.”
A thirty-something woman with a wreath of daisies in her hair led them into the parlor, lit only by the orange flame of a kerosene lamp. They all took seats around a circular oak table usually used for séances. A crystal ball sat in the middle.
Serge brought out his own ball. He set it next to the glass one.
Madam Bovary looked up in confusion. “You brought a toy?”
“The Eight Ball is my quality-control element,” said Serge. “Like a double-blind test. I want to believe all this mumbo jumbo, but questions have arisen. For instance, since Cassadaga calls itself ‘The Psychic Capital of the World,’ then it should also be ‘The Lottery-Winning Capital.’ But where are all the mansions?”
A theatrical smile. “Skepticism is healthy.”
Serge checked the message window in his Eight Ball. “So far so good.”
“Let me have your hands . . .” She took them in hers. “Now close your eyes . . .”
“They’re closed,” said Serge. “But this better not be a ruse to silence the Eight Ball.”
“Shhhh, relax . . . Focus on a point in the center of your mind . . . Do you see anything? . . .”
“It’s just dark with barely visible little blobs floating around, except when I try to look at one, it just floats off to the side. What is that fuckery?”
“You’re still too tense,” said Bovary. “Take a deep breath. Let go and float . . .”
“I’m floating . . .”
A loud thud.
“Holy Jesus!” Serge jumped up. “What was that? Some dead relative trying to contact me? If they’ve been able to watch me all these years, I’m going to be sooooooo embarrassed . . . Who was it? My grandfather?”
The woman sighed and pointed at the floor.
Coleman lay sprawled on a Tibetan rug. “Time for my nap.”
Serge checked the Eight Ball. “He’s right . . . Proceed.”
“Uh . . .” Bovary looked dubiously at the unconscious guest beginning to snore. “. . . This is highly unusual.”
“You’re the one with the weird town.”
This time it was the psychic who needed a deep breath. “Now then, you mentioned when you called from the spiritual center that you had an interest in past-life regression?”
“That’s right. I’m all about history,” said Serge. “If I’ve had any past lives, I’d like to know of any pivotal roles I might have played, like inventing the cotton gin. Did anyone actually see Eli Whitney tighten that last screw? We need to tease out the bullshit.”
Serge’s eyesight had finished adjusting in the dim light. He reassessed the woman across from him. Not too hard on the eyes. And the daisies in her raven hair brought out a certain wild-child allure.
Likewise, she was noticing him. The eyes, smile, confidence. “. . . Oh, sorry, I lost my place there for a second.”
“It happens . . . Past lives?”
“Clear your consciousness and tell me if anything comes to you.”
Serge began to nod. “A pirate.”
“Pirate?”
“Yeah, I don’t know why, but just now I got the odd sensation that I used to be a buccaneer. Think it means anything?”
“A buccaneer?”
Serge noticed her voice had become throatier. She slowly ran a hand across her stomach, the top finger furtively tracing the underside of her breasts.
Serge winked. “You like pirates?”
A gulp. “Keep talking . . .”
He looked around. “You think this is the best place?”
“I know a better one.”
She took him by the hand, and they had torn off each other’s clothes before they got to the back room. Serge picked her up and tossed her onto a plush Elizabethan bed.
She sat up. “Wait, where are you going?”
“To get my Eight Ball. Just be a sec.”
He quickly returned and dove on top of her.
“Yes! Yes! Yes! . . . You’re a pirate! . . . Faster, faster . . . Close your eyes and keep regressing! . . . But whatever you do, don’t stop! . . .”
“I believe I can speak for the Eight Ball that you have nothing to worry about.”
Serge closed his eyes and the darkness with drifting blotches soon gave way to a sparkling light . . .
A skull and crossbones flapped over the schooner as it crashed through waves in the Gulf of Mexico.
The water was a deep cerulean blue, dotted with enormous loggerhead turtles. A peg-legged sailor in the crow’s nest sighted something in his telescope.
“Land ahoy!”
The creaking ship tacked starboard on a new course roughly seventy nautical miles west of Key West.
The land took shape in the telescope. Eight small islands scattered across the top of an atoll that rose abruptly from the fathoms.
The Dry Tortugas.
The ship’s crew knew the islands well, as did most sailors who charted these waters. The land was low with sparse vegetation and generally of little value in restocking provisions. With a single exception.
Bird Key.
It isn’t there anymore, washed away by the No-Name hurricane of 1935, but this was still 1788, and any seasoned mariner in the gulf knew that during the summer months, thousands of sooty and noddy terns migrated down from the Carolinas and converted the island into a rookery.
The schooner got as close to the key as its draft allowed and dropped anchor. The rowboats were lowered and two dozen swashbucklers made their way ashore. What they did next would seem baffling today, even mean-spirited, but there was a method. They began stomping every last one of the eggs the birds had laid in the low brush. Then they went back to the ship and slept fitfully on empty stomachs.
The next afternoon, the rowboats returned. Somehow, the crews had learned that destroying the eggs triggered a procreation instinct in the birds, and they immediately laid fresh ones that were suitable for human consumption. This time the pirates were more careful as they harvested.
They didn’t call them the Dry Tortugas for nothing, because there was no fresh water to be had. The eggs were about all the islands were good for. That’s why they were also perfect for a trademark seafaring practice of the eighteenth century.
Marooning.
The word conjures all kinds of romantic images of a shipwrecked Robinson Crusoe, or Tom Hanks going down in a FedEx plane.
In actual practice, marooning wasn’t intended to strand someone to live out their years in isolation wearing palm-frond pants. It was a highly sadistic ritual involving the selection of an island with nothing to offer, not even protection from the sun. A sandbar worked perfectly, and death was excruciating, from dehydration, exposure and wholesale organ failure. If the crew was Catholic, as many were, then there was a final, ultimate cruelty.
The condemned man was rowed ashore and given a flintlock pistol with a single lead ball and enough powder for one shot. The end was so horrible that the temptation to take one’s own life would become overwhelming. But under Catholic doctrine, suicide would damn the soul for eternity. And there you were: death with a dilemma garnish.
This particular crew had grown frighteningly low on their stocks. Fruit and meat were long gone, leaving stale, insect-ridden bread that was even less appetizing than hardtack during the Civil War. Bird Key just changed all that, and now it was time to crack the casks. Rum and eggs for everyone!