“I didn’t think he saw me do it,” Macovich said.
Eight
Dr. Faux was tied up in a chair and blindfolded by a bandanna that smelled like brackish water. Not especially frightened, he was mostly irritated and terribly inconvenienced. As time passed, his hopes for a speedy release and fifty thousand dollars cash were beginning to fade. He was no longer sure what the Islanders’ intentions were, but they were not known for being violent.
In fact, as far as he knew, the biggest crime in the history of the island was the theft of a safe from Sallie Landon’s house several years back. She had had her life’s savings in it, and everybody on the island had chipped in so she wouldn’t have to depend solely on the original recipes she sold in the little box she had nailed to a telephone pole near the post office. The crime was never solved.
Dr. Faux’s captors had moved him out of the examination room and into an unknown location inside the clinic where he could hear bicycles rattle past an open window that allowed a constant flow of humid air to circulate flies and mosquitoes. It would do no good for him to call out for help because the entire population was in on the conspiracy and seemed to have turned on him. For the first time in the better part of half a century, Dr. Faux had time to reflect upon his life. He sighed as he pondered lost opportunities and his unwillingness to become a missionary to what was then the Congo. God had called Sherman Faux, and little Shermie had basically hung up on the Great Creator and then refused to answer at all anymore. At last, God was punishing Dr. Faux, more than likely. Here the dentist was imprisoned on a tiny, remote island out in the middle of nowhere, and unless he came up with a clever plan, his Medicaid scamming days might very well be over.
“I’m sorry,” Dr. Faux told God. “I had it coming. Kind of like Jonah saying he wasn’t going to Nineveh, so you said ‘Guess again’ and had that big whale swallow him up and spit him out on Nineveh, after all. I ask you not to make me wake up and find myself in the Congo, God. Or Zaire, as it was called last I heard. It’s bad enough to be where I am right this minute.”
Fonny Boy was sitting on the floor, leaning against a wall inside the medical supply room. He was hot and itchy from insect bites and already weary of guard duty, but when the dentist had started praying out loud, clearly oblivious to Fonny Boy’s presence, he had slowly lifted anchor and puttered away from his favorite fantasy of pulling in a crab pot and finding a treasure chest in it that was filled with gold and jewels. His obsession with sunken ships was probably the only reason he could force himself out of bed every summer, holiday, and weekend morning at two o’clock when his father woke him up and they headed off to the docks in the golf cart.
As Fonny Boy ate a fried oyster or crab breakfast sandwich, he would imagine himself hauling up a crab pot and finding it was snagged on a sunken picaroon ship, or maybe one of the crabs would be holding on to a gold coin or a diamond.
There were several self-published legends of the island that most of the gift shops sold, and Fonny Boy had read them all because of his interest in maritime history and salvage. His favorite story was of an incident that occurred in February of 1926 when strange winds and tides lowered the shallow waters of the bay just offshore and revealed the hulk of an old rotting ship, a picaroon ship, Fonny Boy was sure, because a battle-ax was found along with fine china and other artifacts that the watermen quickly sold to a visiting antique dealer from New York.
Unfortunately, the waters rose rapidly and the ship was never seen again. Fonny Boy had done the math. If the picaroon ship had survived several centuries in the bay, then certainly another quarter of a century or so wouldn’t have made that much difference. It was still out there somewhere, but unfortunately, no one remembered exactly where it was sighted during that long-ago cold winter.