Mark the Spot
Standing on the beach again, I couldn’t remember who’d come up the idea of burying the “treasure”—the bottle of rum, the can of pineapple juice and the coconut. (As if coconuts were hard to come by on the island.)
Was it Sean, the elfin man with the Elmer Fudd voice who swore he’d cured his cancer with a mushroom diet? Or Michelle, the pretty potter? Or Frank, the nice guy I’d slept with the night before? The four of us and the rest of the boatload of tourists had come to the island to learn to scuba. To swim with the sharks—and clown fish and eels. Exploring what seemed a new planet. Weightless astronauts, gliding through liquid space.
And, evidently, we’d also come to get drunk. There’d been at least as much rum as there had been scuba.
Then I remembered: It had been my idea! On the verge of blacking out or throwing up, it was a way to stop the drinking without ruining the fun. I swore to them I would come back for the rum the next year, if we buried it and made a map. It was our last night. A bottle and a half into the rum, I was stumbling drunk.
“Over there,” Frank said, gesturing out at a spot I couldn’t see in the darkness. “We’ll bury it there!”
“Shhhhhhh,” Michelle yelled. “They’ll hear us.”
Michelle was sure the island staff would find our buried treasure if we weren’t quiet. We weren’t quiet. Sean started warbling out, “What can you do with a drunken sailor?” He didn’t know many more of the lyrics, so repetition was heavily involved in his rendition. Frank found a stick and stumbled off to dig a hole.
“We need to make the map,” I kept saying, sitting on the sand, doing nothing about it. “A map,” I called out again, and Michelle shushed me again before pulling a small notebook and pen out of her pocket and handing it to me. Sean helped me get to my feet—not an easy maneuver given my drunken state and his diminutive size. Once standing, I towered over him unsteadily.
“Here, you draw it,” I said, tossing the notebook and pen back down to Michelle. Frank was still digging, not seeming to make much progress with his stick. Sean and I decided the map would start at the palm tree closest to his cabana. We paced off steps to our next landmark, a sign near the water. We came up with two different counts—was it 20 or 23 paces from the tree? We argued about the distance until Michelle announced she would use my count, since I was the one coming back. We mapped a couple more palms and a big rock in our zigzag path to Frank’s hole.
***
Frank was not my type. That is, if I had a type. He was too short, for one thing. I was more than a little self-conscious about my height. And my weight. He was too thin, as well. But last night’s rum had been enough to wash away my self-consciousness. Not so drunk I didn’t know what I was doing in his cabana, but drunk enough not to care.
Frank was a good guy. Again, not my usual engagement partner. It’s not that I was self-destructive, and I didn’t go for misogyny. I simply preferred to be with men I knew I wouldn’t miss when they went missing.
***
I had never been scuba diving before. Frank had, but a long time ago. He wanted to get re-certified. I worried that this would be just another thing I wasn’t good at. Frank must have sensed my anxiety that first day, and he made a point of sitting near me and turning to smile in my direction several times during our first lecture.
On the eve of our first dive, he sought me out after dinner.
“I’ve seen you snorkeling. You’re at home in the water. You’ve got this,” he said to me.
“I’m not sleeping with you,” I told him.
His laugh was contagious—and, curiously, not insulting. (I had a habit, then, of collecting insults.)
“Just remember to breath naturally. Slow and steady. The people who get in trouble, start breathing too fast and sucking in too much oxygen. Your tank will run out too quickly that way and you won’t enjoy the dive.”
He demonstrated slow and steady breathing. It was curiously calming. I felt my anxiety slipping away as he nodded his head in time to each breath. It attracted Sean’s attention, then Michelle’s. And we all breathed along to Frank’s slow and steady cadence. We were a foursome from then on—eating meals together, signing up for the same dives, taking turns paying too much for rum at the island commissary.
***
By the time Sean and I paced our way to Frank, he’d actually dug a hole. Deep and wide. When we looked surprised, he picked up a broken coconut shell from the sand—his shovel.
“Well done, mate,” Sean said, half-missing and half-slapping Frank on the shoulder.
I flopped onto the ground and scooped a few handfuls of sand out of the hole, watching the sand slip between my fingers each time I raised my hand. It seemed too clearly a metaphor. Then next day we would all go our separate ways. Would we see one another again? I was, after all, the only one who had sworn to come back to this tiny spit of land in the middle of the Atlantic.
Before I could descend into my own personal darkness, Michelle marched over with the rum and pineapple juice. She plopped down by my side.
“One more nip?” she asked me. Without waiting for a response, she cracked the seal on the bottle and screwed off the cap.
Sean stamped his foot.
“How’s it going to last?” he asked. “Won’t it evaporate now?”
Frank dropped down beside us.
“No worries, man. We’ll screw that top on so tight, it will never know it was opened.”
He took the bottle from Michelle and tipped it to drink. Then handed it to me. We’d been in the habit of mixing the rum with pineapple juice and coconut milk. It was better straight.
***
I was exploring a coral formation, mesmerized by the constant ebb and flow of a rainbow of fish ducking in and out of crevices. Neon Blue Chromis. Yellow and purple Fairy Basslet. Black and white Coralfish. We learned the creatures over a week of twice-daily dives in Mexico Rocks and Pescador Canyons. I was looking down at a pair of spiny lobsters scrabbling along when a shadow came across them. I looked up into the belly of a shark. Behind it, were others. White bellied, slowly undulating, tails gently waving.
Adrenaline pumping, I had to swallow my panic and force myself to inventory the profiles of sharks we’d seen in the classroom. It was a nurse shark. Harmless unless you forced it otherwise. I was in its territory, swimming along the bottom of this shallow section of the cay. Slowly, serenely, the school of sharks passed by me. I caught myself panting into my regulator. I channeled Frank, and slowed my breathing, even as an eel cast me a menacing look.
***
I went back, as promised. By then, I’d been on dives in Mexico, Panama and the Keys. Though I had paddled alongside massive tortoises, watched the ballet of schools of fish and poked at my share of sea anemones in those other seas—none of them could measure up to what I’d first discovered in Belize. I wasn’t there to learn the ropes this time. I was there to dive and experience the transformative power of awe.
And I was there to dig up treasure. Sean was dead; the mushrooms didn’t save him, after all. Michelle had moved in with him when the cancer came back. She said they had a few good months together, and she wished she’d gone sooner. We’d stayed in touch, and she was cheering on my trip from afar. None of us had heard from Frank after we left the island. That still hurt.
It was my second night on the island when I pulled out the treasure map I’d tucked away in my pack. Armed with a flask of rum and a penlight, I found the starting point, Sean’s palm tree. I checked the map and paced the path between palm and sign, sign and palm, palm and rock, rock and palm. It all came back: Sean singing the drunken sailor song, Frank digging, Michelle drawing the map.
Though I dug far and wide, I did not find the rum or pineapple juice. I imagine they weren’t there 24 hours after we’d buried them, with all the commotion we’d raised. I took a nip out of my flask and toasted the anonymous staff member who had dug up our treasure. The rum was warm going down—vanilla and smoke and earth. Things don’t have to be buried to be treasure, that’s what I wished I had someone there beside me to tell.
Jody Lannen Brady has ghost-written articles for engineers, penned countless press releases, freelanced travel articles, hyped postal products, catalogued carousels and old hardware stores…and published a couple dozen short stories. She is a graduate of George Mason University’s MFA program. Her story, “Mark the Spot,” originated from a Cocktail Therapy workshop. So, yes, there was a lot of rum consumed in the creation of this story.