The Deep

Embarrassed, Gail started to say something, but Coffin cut her off.

“When he was a lad, he raised his share of hell on Bermuda. No more than most boys, I guess, but his hell-raising seemed to have a direction, as if he was trying to say something. He never shoplifted or robbed anything from common folks. Everything he did was against authority-the police or the British. I remember, the British tried to confiscate some common land on St. David’s to build an installation of some kind. The Islanders got all hot about it, claiming the land was theirs by rights. ’Course, the British took it anyway, but they had the devil’s own time building anything. Treece and his cronies tore things down as fast as they were built, sugared the gas tanks of all the construction equipment, things like that.

“Anyway, when he was about twenty-three, he met a British girl, Priscilla. I forget her last name. She was here on holiday, and she met Treece in St. David’s, pretty much by accident. Lordy, she was a gorgeous girl! And nice. A kinder, sweeter lass never drew breath. Treece taught her how to dive, how to look for wrecks-Christ, how to do everything but talk to fish. She taught him how to handle people, how to handle himself. Calmed him down like an oil slick on a wave. She went home to England but came back the next summer and took a job in Hamilton “working with kids. A year after that, Treece and her got married-that must have been about 1958, thereabouts. The proper Brits on Bermuda didn’t take kindly to the marriage. They never did know what to make of St. David’s people. Sometimes they called ’em red niggers; most often they pretended St. David’s didn’t exist. But once Priscilla moved in with Treece on St. David’s—rather than the other way around, bringing him out into civilization where he could embarrass someone-they forgot about it. She kept her job in Hamilton, and he stayed on the island.

“It was like Treece was all of a sudden a new person. There was no more anger in him, no room for it. There was too much happiness.

“For two, maybe three years, everything was fine. They raised wrecks together. To keep the larder full, Treece did salvage work. His father was still alive then, so he didn’t have the job with the light. One spring in the early sixties, Treece found his first treasure wreck, the Trinidad. It didn’t yield much as treasures go—a gold bar, an emerald ring, a few other things—but it was enough to give him a fair poke. Right away, Priscilla got pregnant. Nobody knew it at the time; it didn’t come out till after. But they should’ve known: she had the glow of life about her. She wore that emerald ring so proud, and she was near bursting with love and… well, I guess goodness is about the only word.

“Like I said, she worked with kids, troubled kids, the ones who hadn’t done enough to merit a stay in the brig but who couldn’t quite handle everything society said they should handle. She loved those kids like they was her own.

“This was around the time the drug thing was just getting big in the States. Not here; it’s never amounted to much here. But there was talk about Bermuda being used as a halfway station for smugglers. A ship arriving in Florida or Norfolk with a European cargo raises eyebrows, especially if it’s stopped at, say, Haiti or the other islands on the way. But sailboats on a round trip from the States to Bermuda, or businessmen down here for long weekends-nobody paid them no mind.

“One day, one of Priscilla’s kids got loose-lipped and spilled something about a schooner due from down south with a load of drugs. She thought it was just talk, but she mentioned it to Treece. Treasure-divers are wired into everywhere, every bar and fish market. They have to be, to pick up clues: so-and-so saw a pile of egg-rock ballast here; somebody else spotted a strange timber there; ‘Hey, look at the coin I found off Spanish Rock.’ That kind of thing. So it wasn’t hard for Treece to check the rumor, and it was true. A private yacht was due into St. George’s with ten kilos of heroin. Part of it would be moved aboard a cruise ship in loaves of bread; the rest would be stowed here and taken up north little by little by “businessmen.”

“In those days, Treece still had some trust in the government. Priscilla had taught him that all authority wasn’t necessarily out to get him. So they went to the government, right to the top, and told what they knew. Well, the government didn’t believe them, and, to be fair, there wasn’t much evidence for them to believe-fair, that is, considering that they were pigheaded about Treece from the start. They didn’t have any idea how much he knew. As far as they were concerned, this was all rumor started by a kid.