Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (16 page)

When Barry was very young, his parents had taken him out of school for a month every other winter and headed for Key West, where his grandparents owned a co-op apartment. With its old conch houses and fluttering palm leaves, the island was a lush and wondrous place to the young Barry, a wild tropical colony about as far away from Defiance as he could get. “Harvey and I had spent a lot of time,” he said, “dreaming up this plan about going down the Mississippi and getting to Key West by way of boat.” They had even stalked the dry docks where old boats sat on blocks down around Cincinnati, and they had found a dark blue cabin cruiser about forty-five feet from the stem back to a beautiful stern that curved upward like an egg. When Barry returned home that summer, he called Tommy in Columbus and told him he wanted to find that old cabin cruiser again and fix it up, just the two of them, like the time they had driven 850 miles to Winter Carnival in the middle of the night. Only this time the adventure was grander, and they didn’t have to come back. They decided to weigh anchor no later than October.

But one thing about Tommy that Barry had learned long ago was that he could focus on his projects so completely he would have no idea what was going on around him. A friend of theirs once said, “You’d go over to Harvey’s house, thinking you were headed out someplace, and two or three hours later you still weren’t ready to go, ’cause he was still doing whatever he was doing.” And since they had first talked about the adventure, Tommy had made a pact with himself to keep involved in the seven-to-fourteen at all times, and he could get so deep into these projects, he didn’t care if he ate or slept.

After his August graduation, Tommy had remained in Columbus, juggling his projects, putting off the adventure. But Barry was ready to go. “My thing was, ‘Look, if we’re gonna do this, let’s start working on a boat,’ but Harvey was in limbo.”

Tommy called Barry from Columbus one night, and the two chatted for a while. The next day, Barry was gone. “I decided to go, and I was so pissed off at him, I didn’t even mention it. I felt bad about not saying anything, but I also thought it was justified, because he’s like that all the time. That’s part of the relationship.”

In his old MGB-GT, Barry crossed the seven-mile bridge into the Florida Keys in October of 1975, landed a job as a dishwasher, and began eating Key West up with a cosmic spoon. He looked like a Latin expatriate: steady, dark brown eyes, heavy beard shadow, thick black mustache, thick black hair; he seemed more the romantic lead in a film about revolution in Central America than the son of an insurance salesman from Ohio. But that’s what was so wonderful about Key West: movie star, famous writer, lost college kid, nobody cared.

Barry had hardly had time to wash a dish when his landlady read in the paper that the
Miami Herald
was looking for a Key West correspondent. Barry got the job, and the
Herald
paid him to explore this den of shrimpers and gays and tourists and writers and actors and drug dealers and treasure hunters all simmering in a mean temperature of seventy-seven degrees. Every morning, he rose and put on his reporter’s uniform—sandals and shorts—and went out to scratch the plump underbelly of the country’s southernmost city.

Here, no one cared if he flunked accounting in business school; and it was okay to be steeped in drama and literature. Here, that had value, and he found it easy to be accepted. He learned to cook Cuban dishes and eventually became fluent in Spanish and Portuguese. He celebrated Thanksgiving with friends and attended Tennessee Williams’s Christmas Eve party, gathered blue crabs and cooked big feasts, and spent weekends hunting for urchins and eating them raw out on the bridges over the keys. After a while, he took a second job as a weekend disc jockey at WKWF, spinning platters by himself on the graveyard shift. He called his show “Schatz in the Dark.”

By the time Tommy arrived in January 1976, Barry had already melted into Key West, his “bohemian savoir faire,” as a fellow reporter called it, gaining him access to the cliques of writers and musicians and the rest of the avant-garde on the island. He had just published a story about the Keys’ most renowned treasure hunter, Mel Fisher. Life was good, and Barry was not happy to see his best friend. He had finally found a toehold in life’s climb, and suddenly there’s Tommy, with all of his projects in a suitcase, about to yank on his lifeline. “You can’t come into the play in Act Two,” thought Barry.

Tommy moved in anyhow and seemed not to notice the inconvenience. “He didn’t know what he wanted to do,” Barry said later. “He was trying all these wild schemes, trying to make something, but he didn’t really know how to do it. I felt like he was dumping bricks into my wheelbarrow, and I was having a hard enough time pushing my own load.” After a week, Barry asked Tommy to leave, but during the time he was there, Tommy heard the name Mel Fisher for the second time.

M
EL
F
ISHER WAS
a nearsighted chicken farmer from Indiana and perhaps the most colorful of all the characters in Key West. He had an obsession with diving and a lust for Spanish treasure, and for seven years he had been chasing an elusive galleon called the
Nuestra Señora de Atocha
, which sank off the Keys in a hurricane in 1622. Every day of those seven years, Fisher had pumped up his divers with the motto “Today’s the day!” and it hadn’t been the day yet. His divers had uncovered muskets, swords, and religious artifacts, plus 4,000 silver coins, 3 silver bars, a few gold chains, a long gold bar, a large gold disk, and 2 gold coins. But the
Atocha
had carried 901 silver bars, 15 tons of ingot copper, 250,000 newly minted silver coins, and 161 pieces of gold bullion, plus myriad other rare artifacts and finely smithed jewelry and ornamental pieces. The rest of that treasure still lay somewhere on the bottom of the sea, and Fisher was still looking for it.

The high point of Fisher’s search had come the previous summer when Fisher’s son Dirk had found nine bronze, three-thousand-pound cannons in thirty-nine feet of water. The numbers on the cannons matched entries on the
Atocha
’s armament registry in Seville, Spain. “There was no doubt in anybody’s mind at that point,” said one diver,
“that we had finally, after all these years, found the
Atocha
.” Then five days later, their dive ship, a rusty old tug at anchor off the Marquesas, had lurched in the darkness of early morning, and in seconds she was heeled over too far to right herself, and three stories of superstructure had crashed onto the surface of the sea and rolled underwater, flipping anchors, line, air tanks, buoys, dive gear, and some of the divers into the black ocean. Eight of the divers made it back up safely, but the incoming water had trapped and drowned Dirk Fisher and his wife and another young diver. Since then the divers had found nothing but a silver candlestick.

Fisher operated out of an old galleon, a replica down at the Key West dock with a sign on the bow that read “Pirates’ Treasure Ship.” The
Atocha
had nothing to do with pirates, but the gimmick attracted tourists at $1.50 a head, which sometimes was the only cash Fisher had to buy food for his divers.

When Tommy boarded the galleon in early 1976, he wasn’t so much interested in being a diver as he was in talking to Fisher about “technology transfers,” things that perhaps engineers in the oil industry or some other industry were doing that Fisher might be able to use in searching for shipwrecks. Fisher would give an audience to anyone who thought he could help him find the
Atocha
mother lode. He had talked to people who could communicate with dolphins, who could find gold with an underwater divining rod, who could speak to the spirits of the long-lost Spanish souls aboard the
Atocha
when it went down in 1622. One of the divers’ favorite suggestions was from a guy they called “Mr. Bubbles,” who wanted to electrify the entire work site to find the silver. So it was not unusual for some kid just out of engineering school to drop by the pirate ship to discuss technology transfers and have Fisher’s ear. Tommy suggested that maybe new technology would make the search easier, and Fisher listened to Tommy’s ideas, but his operation was in one of its frequent downturns and he had no money to hire anyone.

For the next six months, Tommy visited Fisher occasionally, while he pursued the seven-to-fourteen from Miami and Key West. He didn’t care about making a living or having a roof over his head; he wanted to learn something. “The main thing was having enough resources to make
phone calls,” he said. That was the phenomenon he had discovered that would become his link to what was happening in technology all over the world: Scientists like to talk about their work, especially the arcane twists; he had learned that back in high school when he called Linus Pauling. He could get on the telephone and connect with experts in almost any field. “I just found out who knew the most about which fields I was interested in,” said Tommy. But first he would analyze the papers the scientist had written, then develop questions around what was missing.

To save money for phone calls, Tommy sometimes slept in his car in the lot near the cemetery, where the graves sat above ground and everyone assumed that at night witch doctors performed voodoo. Not that Tommy’s ’63 Mercedes in any way detracted from the pins-through-theragdoll atmosphere of the place. The Mercedes had reached what Tommy called “stabilization.” All the rocker panels had rusted out, all the places up under the fender where the water used to catch and sit and start to rust now had large holes in them.

“There weren’t any more places that could catch water,” he said, “so it quit rusting, the way I figured. It looked like hell though.”

The Mercedes was part of a project, one of the seven-to-fourteen. Tommy had bought the car to experiment with alternative fuels: Instead of burning diesel to make the car run, he wanted to fill the tank with french fry oil from McDonald’s. A professor at Ohio State had tinkered with the idea, and Tommy had tinkered with him. They discovered that with proper filtering and a little heating before the oil went into the injectors, they could burn the same stuff that browned and crispied all those precut, frozen fries. The Mercedes got about forty miles to the gallon, and Tommy planned on hauling two fifty-five-gallon drums full of french fry oil behind the car. He figured he could make it coast to coast on one fill-up, and with the french fry oil selling for about a nickel a gallon, the whole trip would cost no more than five or six bucks. It wouldn’t be as convenient as pulling in to a gas station, and he would have to talk to the people behind the fast-food counter, but he was sure they had vats of the stuff sitting out back. The only real problem was that the Mercedes smelled like skillet smoke and Tommy like a short-order cook.

That summer Tommy was visiting with Fisher one afternoon when he overheard Fisher say he needed someone to man the theodolite tower,
a lifeguardlike structure that stuck up out of a reef near the quicksands. Someone had to sit on the tower and squint through a surveyor’s tool and talk on the radio to keep Fisher’s boat on course as it towed a magnetometer back and forth. The divers called the guys who manned the tower “fry boys,” because sitting on the tower was about the same to them as crackling in skillet grease was to a chicken. The tower was constructed of scrap iron and offered not even a thumbnail’s worth of shade, the sun hitting twice, once through the atmosphere, and again by ricocheting off the water. For eighteen miles around, that tower was the only spot for a bird to sit and rest a spell, so it was covered with guano that squished between the toes and sometimes dropped into the water, where it started its own little ecosystem, which ran all the way up the food chain to schools of barracuda. And the twice-baking sun simmered the guano just below boil, so that the whole thing smelled like an aviary dung heap. When Tommy heard Fisher say he needed to find someone to man the tower, Tommy told him, “I’ll do it,” and for the rest of the summer he worked for Mel Fisher.

After Fisher’s son had found the cannons in the quicksands, Fisher had towed a former Coast Guard buoy tender called the
Arbutus
out to the site for a dive platform and a place for the divers to eat and sleep. Half a dozen young men lived out there for two to three weeks at a time, diving all day, blowing sand away with a big impeller, and searching with their face masks a foot from the bottom. At the end of the day, somebody cooked something, or they ate baloney sandwiches, and talked out under the stars.

On such nights, Tommy would discourse on the effects of calcium overdosing, or laser technology, or the latest in herd psychology, or the holistic approach to something or other, and crew captain Pat Clyne said it was like listening to someone tripping on LSD, how they start explaining their perception of things that to them makes a lot of sense but makes not one lick of sense to anyone listening. Clyne couldn’t tell if Tommy was “off the wall” or “ingenious.”

“I remember sitting out on the deck with him at night and talking for endless hours about everything and nothing,” said Clyne. “He was a very personable guy, had a good sense of humor, and his stories were so colorful, his discoveries or things he was thinking about. That’s what
made him so likable. He could perfectly well have been on top of something, but we’d just kinda smile and shake our head.”

The other crew captain, Tom Ford, couldn’t figure him out either. There was something strange about him, not a bad strange, a good strange, a guy off marching to his own little drummer, but Ford could never figure out where he was headed. “He was always testing something,” laughed Ford.

Since Tommy had a degree in engineering, Ford put him in charge of the new hydroflow, the pump and propeller housed inside fifteen feet of irrigation pipe they used to blow sand, and the first thing Tommy did was put on his gear, jump into the water, press his body up against the grating, ease on the throttle, and crank it up as it sucked him tighter and tighter against the grating, his flesh undulating, until the suction ripped the mask from his face and tore the mouthpiece out of his mouth.