Panama Gold
by Beto Caradepiedra
Early that morning, George, the most talented of the men in his fishing crew of five, started a job at a company that manufactured and repaired electrical equipment. He vowed never to return to the ports. A job at the electric company meant he could get Clara and the kids—there were seven now—out of the one-room apartment. And even out of Chorrillo. But the minute he fastened the company issued boots, and the comb passed through his hair, and he shaved, he knew something inside him had drowned.
He started at 5 a.m., climbing ladders in the big factory, learning which cables did what, which were live, which were dead, and which tools to use for the ones that were alive. The workshops smelled of coffee and detergent, and secretaries walked around in clean pressed skirts.
When he got home, he knew Clara would sense what he would say: he wasn’t going back. “You’re afraid they can’t do it without you. That they’ll get hurt,” she said. He was sitting at the small dining table, removing the company boots that made his feet feel stiff.
Clara pressed his blue uniform for the next day and handed it to him. It smelled of the lemons she put in her teas. Then they sat together on the concrete steps in front of their building, smoking Pall Malls.
It was 2 o’clock; his men would be ending their day, putting away fishing nets after weighing their catch at the port. The sun was still hot, and George wore his straw hat, and sat in the shade watching one of his daughters glide down the hill in skates.
He remembered that a year ago their apartment had been broken into. He’d been on the boat, and Clara had taken the kids to visit her parents. The thieves ransacked their apartment. They stole money, fishing equipment, an iron pot, and all of their food. Rice, lentils, cans of coconut milk. The food in their cabinet would’ve seemed like a lot to anyone in their barrio. But with seven bellies to feed, it was never enough.
George’s equipment hadn’t all been taken; he kept most of it at the port. But Clara missed the things that belonged to her: her good shoes, a dress he’d bought her for Christmas that she’d only worn once.
For days, she wouldn’t smoke cigarettes with him outside, using the time instead to bathe her kids in the communal shower, or knit her doilies. They didn’t have furniture nice enough for doilies. But she knitted dozens of them in preparation for better times.
When George got the job at the electrical company, Clara was thrilled. He’d heard her telling the neighbors that they wouldn’t move far, probably only to the new apartments they had in Santana, the ones with a view of the Canal. They could come visit her whenever they wanted. But in the back of George’s mind, he had other plans. He wanted a bigger boat. He wanted to hire more men. He would work like a dog, be with his guys, and build a fishing empire!
“You look like you owe somebody money,” Clara said.
“I’m not going to worry about them anymore. Que sera, sera,” he told her, trying to clear the troubled look on his face. He stood and took her in his arms. “I’m going to get you out of here. I don’t care what I have to do.”
George looked up and saw the messenger coming. The boy had been paid a loaf of bread and still held it in his hands. He walked the three miles from the port with a message. “One of your fishermen,” he said. “Your nephew, is gone.”
Not having had supper and forgetting his straw hat, George returned to the sea. The tide was out, and he found the three fishermen searching the damp ocean floor: bronze, silent, like hunters in a desert. In one hour, the tide would return, and this would all be covered again, feet upon feet of darkness, and waves.
“That boy,” Marco said, “he doesn’t listen. Never listens.” Before leaving the crew to work at the electrical company, George named Marco its new leader. “He must’ve gone out to catch fish after everyone was done for the day.”
“I told the boy not to do that. Didn’t you tell him not to?”
“I didn’t see him.”
“It’s your job to see everything.”
The thought George had, as he rushed to the port to meet his men, was that his nephew hadn’t made it. He kept thinking this, seeing the young face, a wave washing over it in the sand. Even though the messenger never said that the boy was dead, the image was still there, and it wasn’t going away.
All three men walked on George’s right side, keeping a straight line and breathing in windy air. George set his eyes on the horizon.
“He probably went to see a girl,” Owie said. “He’d been talking about her all day. Some girl that lives downstream.”
This made sense to George. The boy could’ve taken her out when the others weren’t looking and gotten back when it was dark. But the boat was never to be used for that purpose. The boy knew this and wouldn’t have asked.
The farthest from George was a man named Luke. He hadn’t said a word and looked straight ahead at the ocean. Luke was helpful and observant, and had once been a member of a gang in Chorrillo before ever dropping a fishing net in the water. The men all had beards, except George now, but Luke’s beard was the longest and covered his neck. While the others talked constantly, he always worked hard and never said much.
When George set his eyes on him, Luke straightened his back, showing a respectful posture.
“What happened?” George said.
“You know the small hole on the side of the boat? It annoyed the boy. He always said he wanted to fix it.”
Owie laughed. “That’s because Marco keeps sticking his culebra in it.”
“Idiota!” Marco rumbled. “I got confused; I thought it was your mother, pendejo.”
George reached over and put a forearm on Owie’s chest. He wasn’t normally that serious, but nothing was normal now.
“Sorry, jefe.”
The boat had belonged to an old, nearly blind fisherman, who refused to retire. When he died, his family had gifted the boat to George. It had been cruised for years and it had issues. But George always tried to get things fixed: caulking it up, changing the oil, whatever it needed. On the last day with his men, there wasn’t anything wrong with it. But that could change quick in these waters. You had to expect uncertainty and bad luck.
“The boy always wanted to make a name for himself,” Luke said.
“Where did he go to repair it?”
“I don’t know. I never saw him after we were done for the day.”
“None of us saw him,” Owie said. “He was gone. Now we have to waste our time.”
George looked at Owie and stopped walking. The others paused too. Tiny fish flailed in the damp sand. Then George came to the realization fully now: maybe the boy hadn’t died.
He shook his head, keeping his confusion and panic to himself. Then he started yelling.
“None of you saw him? All of you took your eyes off of him?”
The men couldn’t look at George and silently walked on.
They each referred to the missing fisherman as “the boy.” Not because he was underage, but because he was the youngest, and the only one without children. George was six years older than him. But 22 and 28 was a difference. The boy still busied himself with girls and parting his hair and putting on good pants on the weekends to sit in bars and smoke cigarettes. He didn’t know what it was like to be a father. He didn’t know what it was like to buy marbles for the kids and meat on Fridays to make Clara happy—that it was impossible to go missing, that it was important to show up.
“I told you, you didn’t have to come with us,” Marco said. “That we would find him ourselves. You have a fancy job now.”
“Then why would you send for me?”
Marco did not answer.
George still hadn’t decided what he wanted to do about the big company job. After working just one day, he was sure he was going to rejoin the crew. Then Clara pressed his uniform, her way of telling him what she expected.
Now, he knew he would leave it up to chance, like any seaman would: if they found the boy, he’d go back to the factory. But if they didn’t, he would not let them down.
In the distance, the clouds grew red, and birds jumped in and out of the water. George was hungry, but this didn’t bother him. What was on his mind suddenly were the crocodiles. They were known to enter the ocean around this time of day. And men were no match for their experienced hunting.
The crocodiles were enormous and had bumps on their backs that resembled shimmering mountain peaks. Their eyes—little slits of neon—slimed over with a grimy film.
He had only seen them once up close. It was when he was ten years old, in the countryside, where he was raised; it had been when his mother had remarried.
His father had died the year before, and George had been sent to sleep outside in the tall grass in front of their home. He had been careful not to get too close to the outhouse, which stunk like the whole town’s diarrhea, and contained the chicken carcasses his stepfather threw away.
His mother’s new man was no match for his father, always bragging that he worked as a laborer on the Canal, and had skills that far exceeded the ones that George’s father had. But his mother never defended him. Just closed her eyes in order to escape.
His three siblings, all older than him, had moved out, leaving him alone to deal with the miserable new man.
But sleeping outside wasn’t altogether terrible. He didn't have to see his stepfather or mother. And under the luminous night sky, he drifted into unconsciousness somewhat easily.
His father had been a great fisherman, revered in their small West Indian village for hauling glorious catches that fed people for days. He was prolific, as George had heard the villagers say. That word stuck with him like a shiny medal. And when his father walked into town to sell his fish, people went out of their way to say hello. Good evening, Mr. Jones. Good day, Mr. Jones. What have you caught today? King fish? I wan a good blue fish to bring home for Jayne to mek. And his father would smile, holding the gallery of fish over his shoulders so that it wouldn’t touch the ground.
The ocean brought his father great joy, but he’d come home sometimes, telling George of the men who’d gotten cut or hurt at sea. Men who were caught in storms and died. George didn’t want his father hurt. “But Papa, why do you fish, so dangerous?” It boggled his mind that someone would put themselves in that position. And his father, being a great storyteller, would say, “You really want to know? I’m going to tell you, but you won’t ever believe me.” Then he blurted out, “For the gold. There’s gold everywhere, hijo!”
“Really?” George was astonished. And his father began to tell him more.
For centuries pirates stole gold from South America then sailed up north to Panama. And there were many shipwrecks, dozens of them at the bottom of the sea.
“Have you ever seen one, a pirate ship?”
“Sure, all the time. You have to be careful, though. When you dive, you could get blinded by the gold.”
“Have you been blinded, Papa?”
“No.”
“Have you seen gold?”
His father looked at him very seriously and widened his eyes.
“I haven’t seen any yet. But one day, I’ll find some and we can take a vacation.”
“But what if you get hurt? What if you get hurt before then and you’d have to stop fishing?”
George’s father held him by the wrists. His forearms weighed a ton, and he felt his father’s tremendous strength and invincibility.
“Hey, if you ever hear about me going away, just know I went looking for the gold and I’ll be back.”
His father’s stories about fishing, bad storms, and near-death adventures were what made him so great. But this new bar frequenter his mother was with, this slide-in man, didn’t even know how to swim.
Once, after the slide-in had badly beat him, George found his beloved bottle of rum and dumped it out near a tree in the backyard. Then he filled the bottle with his urine and some water to mask the taste.
It was all he could do to get back at him, make him drink his salty pee, guzzle it down, like an ocean of piss. His stepfather would taste all of the particles in it, even the tears George shed from losing so much. And later, what a sight it was to witness the slide-in take a swig, and immediately spit it out.
He wondered if his father would appear before him one day, as Charles the obeah man had said. Before he died, his father frequently visited the obeah man. And now whenever George saw Charles in town, he would say, “Like a vision of Christ, lad. He’s coming to you like a vision of Christ.”
But George didn’t want to see a vision, even if it would be as majestic as witnessing Christ himself. He wanted something he could touch. That when he embraced his father, their heads would rub against each other as they always had before. And he would feel his father’s warm, damp cheek.
One night, in the tall grass, he opened his eyes and what was staring at him was the face of a crocodile: long, massive, still as a corpse. Its nose was an inch or two from George’s mouth, and he could tell that the thing was smelling his breath.
George tried not to move and he remembered the chicken carcasses in the outhouse. He wished that the crocodile was just on his way to eat them.
The sound of crickets intensified, and the countryside whirled as if George was on a fast-moving wheel; tiny stars streaked by like millions of shiny planes in the night. He wanted to vomit. He wanted to scream. He prayed for his mother, but he didn't call her for fear that the slide-in would put his hands around her neck.
Then the crocodile’s claws dug into the ground and the mountain peaks on its back rose like white tides in the ocean. And when George saw this, he got up and ran toward the house.
But he knew he didn’t belong there. Instead, he ran for miles, and when he saw the ocean, he jumped right in it. Never would he see his stepfather, his mother, and the enormous crocodile again.
Not until this moment, staring at the sea, had he thought of the night when he’d seen the crocodile. And not until now, in this low-lying water, had the image of him running returned.
By this time, their workday would be over, it wouldn’t make sense to fish in such low tides. But what they were looking for now was his nephew’s dead body, not fish. They had to make sure the boy hadn’t drowned. And if he had, if he had indeed died that way, they’d have to get rid of him. A drowned fisherman was bad for business.
The sky was patchy. And whenever the sun peeked through the clouds, it shined an odd light on everything, almost artificial. It reminded George of the ones on a football field, or like the bright ones all over the factory, where he now worked. That morning, when he wasn’t grasping the laws of electricity, his boss had said, “Jacques Cousteau, electrical currents are just like the ones in the ocean.” His boss laughed.
Marco had the artificial light on him. His usual stoic expression was back, the one that always made George know that he could step in when the time came. George hoped Marco was still capable. Yet, he knew that the man he had picked to lead was content that he had returned.
“How much time before we head back, jefe?”
George pretended not to hear. Then he said, “Not long.”
“This would never have happened if you were here. Come back and work with us. The boy respects you.”
“It still would’ve happened,” he said, not entirely believing it.
Just then, he decided to keep looking until he found his nephew, which meant there was a chance they would have to sleep along the strange, rocky beaches of the coast. It was a decision he knew Marco would never have made.
“And what if it gets cold? What if there’s a storm?” Marco asked.
George looked up at the daylight moon, clouds darkened rapidly behind it. But there wasn’t a storm coming. The birds would be much noisier. They circled lazily over something in the water.
“Don’t worry,” George said. “We shall find him, brother.”
Marco had a tear in his eye. George squeezed the fisherman for a second or two, then released him. An afterthought.
He picked up speed again, hearing Owie chuckling behind him.
“I know what happened to the boy,” he said. “He was jerking off.” Owie clasped his hands in faux earnestness. “There were models on the beach. They caught him looking, and he ran into the woods. Poison ivy over everything. Over everything, mijo, the frank and the beans.”
“Shut up,” George said.
“You’re an idiot.” Marco rubbed his eyes.
“It’s true. It happened to me once with a cactus in the woods. I tripped… needles went through like a pinche shish kabob.”
The tide now reached about their knees, and George stomped the water hard. It splashed and hit him in the face. He brushed it away, tasted what was left of it on his pinky for signs in the water.
“We’ll keep going till we find him,” George said. “As long as it takes.”
They all shook their heads. “Till we find him,” they said.
He started at 5 a.m., climbing ladders in the big factory, learning which cables did what, which were live, which were dead, and which tools to use for the ones that were alive. The workshops smelled of coffee and detergent, and secretaries walked around in clean pressed skirts.
When he got home, he knew Clara would sense what he would say: he wasn’t going back. “You’re afraid they can’t do it without you. That they’ll get hurt,” she said. He was sitting at the small dining table, removing the company boots that made his feet feel stiff.
Clara pressed his blue uniform for the next day and handed it to him. It smelled of the lemons she put in her teas. Then they sat together on the concrete steps in front of their building, smoking Pall Malls.
It was 2 o’clock; his men would be ending their day, putting away fishing nets after weighing their catch at the port. The sun was still hot, and George wore his straw hat, and sat in the shade watching one of his daughters glide down the hill in skates.
He remembered that a year ago their apartment had been broken into. He’d been on the boat, and Clara had taken the kids to visit her parents. The thieves ransacked their apartment. They stole money, fishing equipment, an iron pot, and all of their food. Rice, lentils, cans of coconut milk. The food in their cabinet would’ve seemed like a lot to anyone in their barrio. But with seven bellies to feed, it was never enough.
George’s equipment hadn’t all been taken; he kept most of it at the port. But Clara missed the things that belonged to her: her good shoes, a dress he’d bought her for Christmas that she’d only worn once.
For days, she wouldn’t smoke cigarettes with him outside, using the time instead to bathe her kids in the communal shower, or knit her doilies. They didn’t have furniture nice enough for doilies. But she knitted dozens of them in preparation for better times.
When George got the job at the electrical company, Clara was thrilled. He’d heard her telling the neighbors that they wouldn’t move far, probably only to the new apartments they had in Santana, the ones with a view of the Canal. They could come visit her whenever they wanted. But in the back of George’s mind, he had other plans. He wanted a bigger boat. He wanted to hire more men. He would work like a dog, be with his guys, and build a fishing empire!
“You look like you owe somebody money,” Clara said.
“I’m not going to worry about them anymore. Que sera, sera,” he told her, trying to clear the troubled look on his face. He stood and took her in his arms. “I’m going to get you out of here. I don’t care what I have to do.”
George looked up and saw the messenger coming. The boy had been paid a loaf of bread and still held it in his hands. He walked the three miles from the port with a message. “One of your fishermen,” he said. “Your nephew, is gone.”
Not having had supper and forgetting his straw hat, George returned to the sea. The tide was out, and he found the three fishermen searching the damp ocean floor: bronze, silent, like hunters in a desert. In one hour, the tide would return, and this would all be covered again, feet upon feet of darkness, and waves.
“That boy,” Marco said, “he doesn’t listen. Never listens.” Before leaving the crew to work at the electrical company, George named Marco its new leader. “He must’ve gone out to catch fish after everyone was done for the day.”
“I told the boy not to do that. Didn’t you tell him not to?”
“I didn’t see him.”
“It’s your job to see everything.”
The thought George had, as he rushed to the port to meet his men, was that his nephew hadn’t made it. He kept thinking this, seeing the young face, a wave washing over it in the sand. Even though the messenger never said that the boy was dead, the image was still there, and it wasn’t going away.
All three men walked on George’s right side, keeping a straight line and breathing in windy air. George set his eyes on the horizon.
“He probably went to see a girl,” Owie said. “He’d been talking about her all day. Some girl that lives downstream.”
This made sense to George. The boy could’ve taken her out when the others weren’t looking and gotten back when it was dark. But the boat was never to be used for that purpose. The boy knew this and wouldn’t have asked.
The farthest from George was a man named Luke. He hadn’t said a word and looked straight ahead at the ocean. Luke was helpful and observant, and had once been a member of a gang in Chorrillo before ever dropping a fishing net in the water. The men all had beards, except George now, but Luke’s beard was the longest and covered his neck. While the others talked constantly, he always worked hard and never said much.
When George set his eyes on him, Luke straightened his back, showing a respectful posture.
“What happened?” George said.
“You know the small hole on the side of the boat? It annoyed the boy. He always said he wanted to fix it.”
Owie laughed. “That’s because Marco keeps sticking his culebra in it.”
“Idiota!” Marco rumbled. “I got confused; I thought it was your mother, pendejo.”
George reached over and put a forearm on Owie’s chest. He wasn’t normally that serious, but nothing was normal now.
“Sorry, jefe.”
The boat had belonged to an old, nearly blind fisherman, who refused to retire. When he died, his family had gifted the boat to George. It had been cruised for years and it had issues. But George always tried to get things fixed: caulking it up, changing the oil, whatever it needed. On the last day with his men, there wasn’t anything wrong with it. But that could change quick in these waters. You had to expect uncertainty and bad luck.
“The boy always wanted to make a name for himself,” Luke said.
“Where did he go to repair it?”
“I don’t know. I never saw him after we were done for the day.”
“None of us saw him,” Owie said. “He was gone. Now we have to waste our time.”
George looked at Owie and stopped walking. The others paused too. Tiny fish flailed in the damp sand. Then George came to the realization fully now: maybe the boy hadn’t died.
He shook his head, keeping his confusion and panic to himself. Then he started yelling.
“None of you saw him? All of you took your eyes off of him?”
The men couldn’t look at George and silently walked on.
They each referred to the missing fisherman as “the boy.” Not because he was underage, but because he was the youngest, and the only one without children. George was six years older than him. But 22 and 28 was a difference. The boy still busied himself with girls and parting his hair and putting on good pants on the weekends to sit in bars and smoke cigarettes. He didn’t know what it was like to be a father. He didn’t know what it was like to buy marbles for the kids and meat on Fridays to make Clara happy—that it was impossible to go missing, that it was important to show up.
“I told you, you didn’t have to come with us,” Marco said. “That we would find him ourselves. You have a fancy job now.”
“Then why would you send for me?”
Marco did not answer.
George still hadn’t decided what he wanted to do about the big company job. After working just one day, he was sure he was going to rejoin the crew. Then Clara pressed his uniform, her way of telling him what she expected.
Now, he knew he would leave it up to chance, like any seaman would: if they found the boy, he’d go back to the factory. But if they didn’t, he would not let them down.
In the distance, the clouds grew red, and birds jumped in and out of the water. George was hungry, but this didn’t bother him. What was on his mind suddenly were the crocodiles. They were known to enter the ocean around this time of day. And men were no match for their experienced hunting.
The crocodiles were enormous and had bumps on their backs that resembled shimmering mountain peaks. Their eyes—little slits of neon—slimed over with a grimy film.
He had only seen them once up close. It was when he was ten years old, in the countryside, where he was raised; it had been when his mother had remarried.
His father had died the year before, and George had been sent to sleep outside in the tall grass in front of their home. He had been careful not to get too close to the outhouse, which stunk like the whole town’s diarrhea, and contained the chicken carcasses his stepfather threw away.
His mother’s new man was no match for his father, always bragging that he worked as a laborer on the Canal, and had skills that far exceeded the ones that George’s father had. But his mother never defended him. Just closed her eyes in order to escape.
His three siblings, all older than him, had moved out, leaving him alone to deal with the miserable new man.
But sleeping outside wasn’t altogether terrible. He didn't have to see his stepfather or mother. And under the luminous night sky, he drifted into unconsciousness somewhat easily.
His father had been a great fisherman, revered in their small West Indian village for hauling glorious catches that fed people for days. He was prolific, as George had heard the villagers say. That word stuck with him like a shiny medal. And when his father walked into town to sell his fish, people went out of their way to say hello. Good evening, Mr. Jones. Good day, Mr. Jones. What have you caught today? King fish? I wan a good blue fish to bring home for Jayne to mek. And his father would smile, holding the gallery of fish over his shoulders so that it wouldn’t touch the ground.
The ocean brought his father great joy, but he’d come home sometimes, telling George of the men who’d gotten cut or hurt at sea. Men who were caught in storms and died. George didn’t want his father hurt. “But Papa, why do you fish, so dangerous?” It boggled his mind that someone would put themselves in that position. And his father, being a great storyteller, would say, “You really want to know? I’m going to tell you, but you won’t ever believe me.” Then he blurted out, “For the gold. There’s gold everywhere, hijo!”
“Really?” George was astonished. And his father began to tell him more.
For centuries pirates stole gold from South America then sailed up north to Panama. And there were many shipwrecks, dozens of them at the bottom of the sea.
“Have you ever seen one, a pirate ship?”
“Sure, all the time. You have to be careful, though. When you dive, you could get blinded by the gold.”
“Have you been blinded, Papa?”
“No.”
“Have you seen gold?”
His father looked at him very seriously and widened his eyes.
“I haven’t seen any yet. But one day, I’ll find some and we can take a vacation.”
“But what if you get hurt? What if you get hurt before then and you’d have to stop fishing?”
George’s father held him by the wrists. His forearms weighed a ton, and he felt his father’s tremendous strength and invincibility.
“Hey, if you ever hear about me going away, just know I went looking for the gold and I’ll be back.”
His father’s stories about fishing, bad storms, and near-death adventures were what made him so great. But this new bar frequenter his mother was with, this slide-in man, didn’t even know how to swim.
Once, after the slide-in had badly beat him, George found his beloved bottle of rum and dumped it out near a tree in the backyard. Then he filled the bottle with his urine and some water to mask the taste.
It was all he could do to get back at him, make him drink his salty pee, guzzle it down, like an ocean of piss. His stepfather would taste all of the particles in it, even the tears George shed from losing so much. And later, what a sight it was to witness the slide-in take a swig, and immediately spit it out.
He wondered if his father would appear before him one day, as Charles the obeah man had said. Before he died, his father frequently visited the obeah man. And now whenever George saw Charles in town, he would say, “Like a vision of Christ, lad. He’s coming to you like a vision of Christ.”
But George didn’t want to see a vision, even if it would be as majestic as witnessing Christ himself. He wanted something he could touch. That when he embraced his father, their heads would rub against each other as they always had before. And he would feel his father’s warm, damp cheek.
One night, in the tall grass, he opened his eyes and what was staring at him was the face of a crocodile: long, massive, still as a corpse. Its nose was an inch or two from George’s mouth, and he could tell that the thing was smelling his breath.
George tried not to move and he remembered the chicken carcasses in the outhouse. He wished that the crocodile was just on his way to eat them.
The sound of crickets intensified, and the countryside whirled as if George was on a fast-moving wheel; tiny stars streaked by like millions of shiny planes in the night. He wanted to vomit. He wanted to scream. He prayed for his mother, but he didn't call her for fear that the slide-in would put his hands around her neck.
Then the crocodile’s claws dug into the ground and the mountain peaks on its back rose like white tides in the ocean. And when George saw this, he got up and ran toward the house.
But he knew he didn’t belong there. Instead, he ran for miles, and when he saw the ocean, he jumped right in it. Never would he see his stepfather, his mother, and the enormous crocodile again.
Not until this moment, staring at the sea, had he thought of the night when he’d seen the crocodile. And not until now, in this low-lying water, had the image of him running returned.
By this time, their workday would be over, it wouldn’t make sense to fish in such low tides. But what they were looking for now was his nephew’s dead body, not fish. They had to make sure the boy hadn’t drowned. And if he had, if he had indeed died that way, they’d have to get rid of him. A drowned fisherman was bad for business.
The sky was patchy. And whenever the sun peeked through the clouds, it shined an odd light on everything, almost artificial. It reminded George of the ones on a football field, or like the bright ones all over the factory, where he now worked. That morning, when he wasn’t grasping the laws of electricity, his boss had said, “Jacques Cousteau, electrical currents are just like the ones in the ocean.” His boss laughed.
Marco had the artificial light on him. His usual stoic expression was back, the one that always made George know that he could step in when the time came. George hoped Marco was still capable. Yet, he knew that the man he had picked to lead was content that he had returned.
“How much time before we head back, jefe?”
George pretended not to hear. Then he said, “Not long.”
“This would never have happened if you were here. Come back and work with us. The boy respects you.”
“It still would’ve happened,” he said, not entirely believing it.
Just then, he decided to keep looking until he found his nephew, which meant there was a chance they would have to sleep along the strange, rocky beaches of the coast. It was a decision he knew Marco would never have made.
“And what if it gets cold? What if there’s a storm?” Marco asked.
George looked up at the daylight moon, clouds darkened rapidly behind it. But there wasn’t a storm coming. The birds would be much noisier. They circled lazily over something in the water.
“Don’t worry,” George said. “We shall find him, brother.”
Marco had a tear in his eye. George squeezed the fisherman for a second or two, then released him. An afterthought.
He picked up speed again, hearing Owie chuckling behind him.
“I know what happened to the boy,” he said. “He was jerking off.” Owie clasped his hands in faux earnestness. “There were models on the beach. They caught him looking, and he ran into the woods. Poison ivy over everything. Over everything, mijo, the frank and the beans.”
“Shut up,” George said.
“You’re an idiot.” Marco rubbed his eyes.
“It’s true. It happened to me once with a cactus in the woods. I tripped… needles went through like a pinche shish kabob.”
The tide now reached about their knees, and George stomped the water hard. It splashed and hit him in the face. He brushed it away, tasted what was left of it on his pinky for signs in the water.
“We’ll keep going till we find him,” George said. “As long as it takes.”
They all shook their heads. “Till we find him,” they said.
*
George wondered, now that they were in water to their chest, if they could still go further. At times, the tides could surprise him. Some parts were deep as this was, but if he kept going, he would see that it had only been a short dip in the ocean bed. Now, it was too dark to tell, and the other men were watching him as they occasionally treaded water.
“Ok,” he said, finally, “to the coast.” He felt a sour, ulcerative pain in his stomach, on the left side. And it tightened as he kicked.
To propel himself, he touched the ocean floor, doing a kind of jump or bob against it. He tried to move quickly, ignoring the pain. The other men stayed with him.
“We failed the boy,” Luke said. “I don’t want to fail.”
The tightening in George’s side intensified.
“Exactly,” Marco said. “But he’s the one who left. We can’t take all of the blame. That will give us a headache.”
“I know he’s somewhere close,” Owie said. “I could smell him. And it’s not just his bad breath.”
The men kept up with George, laughing as the coast was in view. George held his breath. He didn’t find any of this funny.
The four fishermen set up camp on an obscure part of the ocean coast, about ten miles from where they lived. To get home, it would be a half day of walking through dense vegetation at night, and none had brought their shoes. But going back wasn’t on George’s mind. If they found the boy drowned, he’d have to lie to his sister, tell her that they still couldn’t find him, and hope that the villagers eventually made up a story about the boy running away up north.
The wind was different here, less humid than in town, ten or so degrees cooler at night. As they searched for wood along the start of the dense forest, they stepped on sandy soil and sank deep within it. Pine needles broke beneath their soles; dead leaves oozed fluids trapped in the ground.
They built a fire with the little dry wood that they found. Exhausted, they sat together, kneeling, and huddling close. Their still damp shoulders touching for warmth.
“Boy, what I would give for a cigarette now,” Marco said.
“Yes, a cigarette would be nice. I’d smoke it like it was going out of style.” Owie looked up at the sky that was clear but dark now.
“Just pretend,” Marco said, putting two fingers to his lips and blowing.
They all laughed.
“I’m going to pretend you’re my puta and fuck you in the ass,” Owie said.
“If you fuck me in the ass, you better make me pregnant, ahuevado.”
A Pall Mall would be nice, George thought.
“What if the boy’s home already and we’re out here searching for nothing?”
“He’s home in front of the TV in his shorts.”
“Son of a bitch. It’d be just like him to do that. Just like the fucking boy.”
“Hey, you men don’t want to sleep?” an angry voice yelled. It was George, trying to close his eyes. “You can talk, but you don’t have to be so loud. I might have to work tomorrow.”
“Maybe when we go to sleep,” Marco said, “he’ll see the fire and come toward it.”
The thought was wishful, naïve even, but it was all they could think about.
As the fire burned, the flames produced a vivid light that brightened their dark bodies. Owie and Marco fell asleep, and Luke was lying awake on the sand. Seemingly restless and cold, he crawled closer to the fire, facing away from it to heat his back. Then he rocked side to side on a flat piece of wood.
Though he was shorter than George, Luke was lean and muscular. His back was covered in kinky black hair. Where there were stab marks–just beneath both shoulders–the hair was sparse. Long, straight lines were visible where the flesh had once been cut.
George could see Luke’s tattoos illuminated by the orange glow: strange words, numbers, and symbols, like someone took a pen and scribbled them in a toilet. George didn’t have any tattoos, but he was familiar with some of the markings. There were many in his barrio that had them. Whenever he saw this, he went out of his way to whistle at his kids.
“Let me ask you something,” he said to Luke. “Where did you see a hole in the boat?” Luke slowly turned around. He removed himself from the piece of wood, sliding even closer to the flame. He had the appearance of a primitive man. His face and beard had almost dried and his teeth, small and white, shimmered in the light of the fire.
“I don’t know, Jefe. I think it was on the right side near the back, where the engine is.”
“I’ve never seen it before. I’ve been using the boat for years now, and I’ve never seen it.”
“It’s new,” Luke said.
“I was just on the boat two days ago. How big is it?” George repeated himself when Luke didn’t answer. Louder this time, in case the fisherman was dozing off.
Luke pulled at his black woolly beard. Then set his hands apart to show George the size of the hole. His raised arms casted a shadow on the sand.
“About that big,” he said.
“That’s big. That’s about eight inches. I would’ve seen that.”
“No, it’s about a foot,” Luke said. “Maybe it just missed your sight. You sit in the front. I sit in the back. I’m always in the back. I’ve been with you the longest, and I still sit in the back. Marco sits next to you in the front. The boy joined just a few months ago, and you put him in front of me. Why?”
“It slipped my mind.”
“It didn’t slip my mind. Somebody like me, I see everything.”
George got up and walked over to Luke. The sand there was very hot, but he still stood in it.
Luke was silent and didn’t look at George.
“You think I’m scared of you?” George said. “You don’t forget who the boss is around here, you hear me?”
Luke got up and stood next to George, who was taller than him. There was sweat on his forehead, and as wild dogs howled in the jungle, the two men looked in each other’s eyes.
“I didn't do anything to the boy,” Luke said.
“You better sit your ass down.”
“I didn’t do anything!”
The two men’s faces were very close. A strange thought passed through George’s mind. He could bite Luke’s lip and blood would run down the front of his black beard. But it was George’s neck, clean, bare, that Luke grabbed and squeezed.
The two men landed on the hot sand, burning wood seized and erupted. In the distance, booming waves rose and pounded the beach. “I didn’t do anything,” Luke said.
George’s face was close to the fire. He could smell the wood. Ashes and sand stuck to the side of his face, as he tried to pull Luke’s hands from him.
“I didn’t do anything.”
George looked up and saw the stars, faint and white. He saw shadows, smoke. Under the long, dark beard of the fisherman, he fought beneath the weight and was not released.
Back in George’s old fishing village in the countryside, a man was eaten by a crocodile. Some say he shouldn’t have had any contact with the reptiles because he didn’t live in town. He was only visiting from the city. The odds of this happening to an engineer who worked in a factory would have been very slim, nearly impossible. But when they finally captured the creature, the body was identified by a baseball cap that had the name of the factory on it. This was how they were able to tell.
George imagined them taking a knife or a machete and cutting the crocodile open to find a person who was already dead. It seemed disgusting.
George still remembered the name of the factory and the logo, a stark black and white with a comical looking bolt of electricity running through it: Panama Gold, it read. He didn’t know how to read that well, but the name stuck to him. It was how people remembered that guy.
If the boy had drowned at sea, the odds of finding anything that belonged to him would have been slim. The currents would’ve made sure of that.
A good swimmer like George could survive an hour or two, maybe even a half day in the currents. But George wasn’t sure about the boy. Maybe his tattered shorts would show up on the sand and they’d know, finally. And he could at least store them as a keepsake, a reminder of how fleeting life was. But then again, he didn’t remember exactly what the boy’s shorts looked like. And he was certain that his pride would win out. That he would bury it, getting rid of any evidence.
The next day, waking up with the morning sun, the buzzing of birds and insects insidious in their ears, the fishermen decided to walk home through the forest. There, they might have a better chance of spotting the boy or spotting a person that had seen a fisherman whose boat may have capsized.
They could wait until the tide went out and walk comfortably on the damp ocean floor. But through the forest, though it would be cumbersome, they would have exhausted all options.
George’s neck still throbbed from the fisherman’s tattooed fingers on it the night before. Everyone had an Achilles’ heel. And for Luke, it was his beard.
Under the fisherman’s mountainous grip, George had grabbed hold of a burning piece of wood and put it to Luke’s face. Luke let go immediately when he smelled the hair on his chin starting to burn. The beard meant something. And George now knew that if he still had his, Luke would have never tried anything.
They pulled some leaves and wrapped them tightly around their feet and began walking.
At the campsite, the sun had started to warm them, and it felt good on George’s face. But now in the woods, it was much cooler and darker, as if there wasn’t a sun bursting over everything just a few feet away. Soon, even the forest would be very hot, and sweat would drip between their thighs.
“It’s quiet here,” Luke said.
George could still smell the man’s beard, and oddly regretted it.
“Very,” George agreed.
“These jungles are filled with you know what?”
“Gold,” George said.
“Gold?”
“These waters were a haven for pirates.”
“Pirates?”
“Yes, haven’t I told you?”
There was a look on Luke’s face, doubtful, perplexed. And his pimply, black nostrils flared with confusion.
“The pirates stole gold and brought it up here from South America. Then they walked it across the Isthmus to get it to the Caribbean Sea, where they would sail home to Europe. That was their plan. But what would be waiting for them here were Indians, Panamanian Indians, ready to steal the gold from them.”
“Oh, I see,” Marco whispered, overhearing. “Gold. You ok? You seem…”
“What?”
“It just seems like you’ve been far away this whole time. Don’t give up, we can still find him.”
“Just thinking a lot,” George said. “How we’ve been fishing almost twenty years, and we’ve never seen gold. A man can fish his whole life in these waters and never smell a penny.” The men looked at George. His eyes were filled with tears. Owie and Marco were silent, stoic. Luke had his eyes fixed on something in the distance.
“I wasn’t talking about gold,” Luke said. “Over there,” he pointed.
If George hadn’t been asked to look, he would’ve thought it was a downed tree or a shadow. It took up twenty feet of forest, and it remained very still, making no sound.
“Be quiet,” Marco said. “It doesn’t see us.”
The crocodile lay in a part of the forest where the sunlight came in through a break in the trees. As it warmed itself, steam released from its back and climbed into the sunny air.
George couldn’t help himself and started to laugh. This is what he would remember one day, the blue steam coming from the green crocodile. He could even smell it, like leaves rotting in mud. The other men motioned to him to be quiet, pressed their index fingers to their mouths. But George laughed even louder, like a man on peyote.
Then, he took off toward the crocodile. And when it finally noticed him, the beast rapidly turned away, sprinting into the dark and bright spots in the forest. Then it slowed down, visibly exhausted.
Through the dense brambles, the men watched George. There were plenty of birds chirping and monkeys barked wildly. The jungle wasn’t used to this. But somehow, George and the crocodile were now on the narrow, ocean coast, panting. The sun was full and bright, and warm.
What George will remember in the months and years to come is how he was able to get close to the crocodile. It was a miraculous thing, but it was no miracle that he wasn’t eaten alive; the crocodile was already full. George’s men didn’t approach for fear of the obvious. But they could not see, as George saw, the muddy arm, sticking out of the crocodile’s pointy mouth, the tattered shorts, its round lumpy belly signaling a delectable digestion.
When they got back in town, they told everyone what happened, that they found the boy in the mouth of a crocodile. But in the back of George’s mind there was still doubt, because he had not seen the boy’s face. George would never forgive himself for what happened to his nephew, but it was this doubt that appeared whenever he remembered their desperate search.
For many years, the town spoke his nephew’s name, Juan. And a legend went through the streets that the boy had fought a crocodile. He became a town hero, and it avoided anyone thinking he had drowned like a novice.
All these years, it had not been the company logo on the hat that made the engineer a legend. It was how he died that did. It was the fact that a crocodile had eaten him that left a stir in the village, which reverberated like an earth tremor that never went away.
The day after they saw the crocodile, George went back to his job at the lighting company. He sucked it up because currents in an electrical field were not like the currents in the ocean. They were safer and paid more, and when he finally learned how to harness them, he had more skills than any man he’d ever known because he also had the skills he’d learned from the ocean.
But what about the gold? There was still time for that in the evenings, when he was home and the kids gathered around him, as he told them about his adventures in the sea. About men dying in it, and risking their lives, and wading in waters with hungry crocs. It was gold he felt inside when he told them, to see their faces asking for more, as he himself had, years prior with his own father, who had died.
“Ok,” he said, finally, “to the coast.” He felt a sour, ulcerative pain in his stomach, on the left side. And it tightened as he kicked.
To propel himself, he touched the ocean floor, doing a kind of jump or bob against it. He tried to move quickly, ignoring the pain. The other men stayed with him.
“We failed the boy,” Luke said. “I don’t want to fail.”
The tightening in George’s side intensified.
“Exactly,” Marco said. “But he’s the one who left. We can’t take all of the blame. That will give us a headache.”
“I know he’s somewhere close,” Owie said. “I could smell him. And it’s not just his bad breath.”
The men kept up with George, laughing as the coast was in view. George held his breath. He didn’t find any of this funny.
The four fishermen set up camp on an obscure part of the ocean coast, about ten miles from where they lived. To get home, it would be a half day of walking through dense vegetation at night, and none had brought their shoes. But going back wasn’t on George’s mind. If they found the boy drowned, he’d have to lie to his sister, tell her that they still couldn’t find him, and hope that the villagers eventually made up a story about the boy running away up north.
The wind was different here, less humid than in town, ten or so degrees cooler at night. As they searched for wood along the start of the dense forest, they stepped on sandy soil and sank deep within it. Pine needles broke beneath their soles; dead leaves oozed fluids trapped in the ground.
They built a fire with the little dry wood that they found. Exhausted, they sat together, kneeling, and huddling close. Their still damp shoulders touching for warmth.
“Boy, what I would give for a cigarette now,” Marco said.
“Yes, a cigarette would be nice. I’d smoke it like it was going out of style.” Owie looked up at the sky that was clear but dark now.
“Just pretend,” Marco said, putting two fingers to his lips and blowing.
They all laughed.
“I’m going to pretend you’re my puta and fuck you in the ass,” Owie said.
“If you fuck me in the ass, you better make me pregnant, ahuevado.”
A Pall Mall would be nice, George thought.
“What if the boy’s home already and we’re out here searching for nothing?”
“He’s home in front of the TV in his shorts.”
“Son of a bitch. It’d be just like him to do that. Just like the fucking boy.”
“Hey, you men don’t want to sleep?” an angry voice yelled. It was George, trying to close his eyes. “You can talk, but you don’t have to be so loud. I might have to work tomorrow.”
“Maybe when we go to sleep,” Marco said, “he’ll see the fire and come toward it.”
The thought was wishful, naïve even, but it was all they could think about.
As the fire burned, the flames produced a vivid light that brightened their dark bodies. Owie and Marco fell asleep, and Luke was lying awake on the sand. Seemingly restless and cold, he crawled closer to the fire, facing away from it to heat his back. Then he rocked side to side on a flat piece of wood.
Though he was shorter than George, Luke was lean and muscular. His back was covered in kinky black hair. Where there were stab marks–just beneath both shoulders–the hair was sparse. Long, straight lines were visible where the flesh had once been cut.
George could see Luke’s tattoos illuminated by the orange glow: strange words, numbers, and symbols, like someone took a pen and scribbled them in a toilet. George didn’t have any tattoos, but he was familiar with some of the markings. There were many in his barrio that had them. Whenever he saw this, he went out of his way to whistle at his kids.
“Let me ask you something,” he said to Luke. “Where did you see a hole in the boat?” Luke slowly turned around. He removed himself from the piece of wood, sliding even closer to the flame. He had the appearance of a primitive man. His face and beard had almost dried and his teeth, small and white, shimmered in the light of the fire.
“I don’t know, Jefe. I think it was on the right side near the back, where the engine is.”
“I’ve never seen it before. I’ve been using the boat for years now, and I’ve never seen it.”
“It’s new,” Luke said.
“I was just on the boat two days ago. How big is it?” George repeated himself when Luke didn’t answer. Louder this time, in case the fisherman was dozing off.
Luke pulled at his black woolly beard. Then set his hands apart to show George the size of the hole. His raised arms casted a shadow on the sand.
“About that big,” he said.
“That’s big. That’s about eight inches. I would’ve seen that.”
“No, it’s about a foot,” Luke said. “Maybe it just missed your sight. You sit in the front. I sit in the back. I’m always in the back. I’ve been with you the longest, and I still sit in the back. Marco sits next to you in the front. The boy joined just a few months ago, and you put him in front of me. Why?”
“It slipped my mind.”
“It didn’t slip my mind. Somebody like me, I see everything.”
George got up and walked over to Luke. The sand there was very hot, but he still stood in it.
Luke was silent and didn’t look at George.
“You think I’m scared of you?” George said. “You don’t forget who the boss is around here, you hear me?”
Luke got up and stood next to George, who was taller than him. There was sweat on his forehead, and as wild dogs howled in the jungle, the two men looked in each other’s eyes.
“I didn't do anything to the boy,” Luke said.
“You better sit your ass down.”
“I didn’t do anything!”
The two men’s faces were very close. A strange thought passed through George’s mind. He could bite Luke’s lip and blood would run down the front of his black beard. But it was George’s neck, clean, bare, that Luke grabbed and squeezed.
The two men landed on the hot sand, burning wood seized and erupted. In the distance, booming waves rose and pounded the beach. “I didn’t do anything,” Luke said.
George’s face was close to the fire. He could smell the wood. Ashes and sand stuck to the side of his face, as he tried to pull Luke’s hands from him.
“I didn’t do anything.”
George looked up and saw the stars, faint and white. He saw shadows, smoke. Under the long, dark beard of the fisherman, he fought beneath the weight and was not released.
Back in George’s old fishing village in the countryside, a man was eaten by a crocodile. Some say he shouldn’t have had any contact with the reptiles because he didn’t live in town. He was only visiting from the city. The odds of this happening to an engineer who worked in a factory would have been very slim, nearly impossible. But when they finally captured the creature, the body was identified by a baseball cap that had the name of the factory on it. This was how they were able to tell.
George imagined them taking a knife or a machete and cutting the crocodile open to find a person who was already dead. It seemed disgusting.
George still remembered the name of the factory and the logo, a stark black and white with a comical looking bolt of electricity running through it: Panama Gold, it read. He didn’t know how to read that well, but the name stuck to him. It was how people remembered that guy.
If the boy had drowned at sea, the odds of finding anything that belonged to him would have been slim. The currents would’ve made sure of that.
A good swimmer like George could survive an hour or two, maybe even a half day in the currents. But George wasn’t sure about the boy. Maybe his tattered shorts would show up on the sand and they’d know, finally. And he could at least store them as a keepsake, a reminder of how fleeting life was. But then again, he didn’t remember exactly what the boy’s shorts looked like. And he was certain that his pride would win out. That he would bury it, getting rid of any evidence.
The next day, waking up with the morning sun, the buzzing of birds and insects insidious in their ears, the fishermen decided to walk home through the forest. There, they might have a better chance of spotting the boy or spotting a person that had seen a fisherman whose boat may have capsized.
They could wait until the tide went out and walk comfortably on the damp ocean floor. But through the forest, though it would be cumbersome, they would have exhausted all options.
George’s neck still throbbed from the fisherman’s tattooed fingers on it the night before. Everyone had an Achilles’ heel. And for Luke, it was his beard.
Under the fisherman’s mountainous grip, George had grabbed hold of a burning piece of wood and put it to Luke’s face. Luke let go immediately when he smelled the hair on his chin starting to burn. The beard meant something. And George now knew that if he still had his, Luke would have never tried anything.
They pulled some leaves and wrapped them tightly around their feet and began walking.
At the campsite, the sun had started to warm them, and it felt good on George’s face. But now in the woods, it was much cooler and darker, as if there wasn’t a sun bursting over everything just a few feet away. Soon, even the forest would be very hot, and sweat would drip between their thighs.
“It’s quiet here,” Luke said.
George could still smell the man’s beard, and oddly regretted it.
“Very,” George agreed.
“These jungles are filled with you know what?”
“Gold,” George said.
“Gold?”
“These waters were a haven for pirates.”
“Pirates?”
“Yes, haven’t I told you?”
There was a look on Luke’s face, doubtful, perplexed. And his pimply, black nostrils flared with confusion.
“The pirates stole gold and brought it up here from South America. Then they walked it across the Isthmus to get it to the Caribbean Sea, where they would sail home to Europe. That was their plan. But what would be waiting for them here were Indians, Panamanian Indians, ready to steal the gold from them.”
“Oh, I see,” Marco whispered, overhearing. “Gold. You ok? You seem…”
“What?”
“It just seems like you’ve been far away this whole time. Don’t give up, we can still find him.”
“Just thinking a lot,” George said. “How we’ve been fishing almost twenty years, and we’ve never seen gold. A man can fish his whole life in these waters and never smell a penny.” The men looked at George. His eyes were filled with tears. Owie and Marco were silent, stoic. Luke had his eyes fixed on something in the distance.
“I wasn’t talking about gold,” Luke said. “Over there,” he pointed.
If George hadn’t been asked to look, he would’ve thought it was a downed tree or a shadow. It took up twenty feet of forest, and it remained very still, making no sound.
“Be quiet,” Marco said. “It doesn’t see us.”
The crocodile lay in a part of the forest where the sunlight came in through a break in the trees. As it warmed itself, steam released from its back and climbed into the sunny air.
George couldn’t help himself and started to laugh. This is what he would remember one day, the blue steam coming from the green crocodile. He could even smell it, like leaves rotting in mud. The other men motioned to him to be quiet, pressed their index fingers to their mouths. But George laughed even louder, like a man on peyote.
Then, he took off toward the crocodile. And when it finally noticed him, the beast rapidly turned away, sprinting into the dark and bright spots in the forest. Then it slowed down, visibly exhausted.
Through the dense brambles, the men watched George. There were plenty of birds chirping and monkeys barked wildly. The jungle wasn’t used to this. But somehow, George and the crocodile were now on the narrow, ocean coast, panting. The sun was full and bright, and warm.
What George will remember in the months and years to come is how he was able to get close to the crocodile. It was a miraculous thing, but it was no miracle that he wasn’t eaten alive; the crocodile was already full. George’s men didn’t approach for fear of the obvious. But they could not see, as George saw, the muddy arm, sticking out of the crocodile’s pointy mouth, the tattered shorts, its round lumpy belly signaling a delectable digestion.
When they got back in town, they told everyone what happened, that they found the boy in the mouth of a crocodile. But in the back of George’s mind there was still doubt, because he had not seen the boy’s face. George would never forgive himself for what happened to his nephew, but it was this doubt that appeared whenever he remembered their desperate search.
For many years, the town spoke his nephew’s name, Juan. And a legend went through the streets that the boy had fought a crocodile. He became a town hero, and it avoided anyone thinking he had drowned like a novice.
All these years, it had not been the company logo on the hat that made the engineer a legend. It was how he died that did. It was the fact that a crocodile had eaten him that left a stir in the village, which reverberated like an earth tremor that never went away.
The day after they saw the crocodile, George went back to his job at the lighting company. He sucked it up because currents in an electrical field were not like the currents in the ocean. They were safer and paid more, and when he finally learned how to harness them, he had more skills than any man he’d ever known because he also had the skills he’d learned from the ocean.
But what about the gold? There was still time for that in the evenings, when he was home and the kids gathered around him, as he told them about his adventures in the sea. About men dying in it, and risking their lives, and wading in waters with hungry crocs. It was gold he felt inside when he told them, to see their faces asking for more, as he himself had, years prior with his own father, who had died.