The Pirates of Padre Island

everyone knew that laffite and his crew had buried treasure in the dunes—maybe a walking, running-away boat could get there

Do Boys Still Run away from home? Does the old Huckleberry Finn pull still wind tighter inside them like the rubber band in a model airplane until the prop spins free and they sail out buoyant and bold, veering in the fresh currents, to thump to earth after a brief flight?

About the time when my parents were beginning to seem like the greatest misfortune that fate had ever inflicted on a mature young man, another 12-year-old named Paul and I got a really soaring idea for checking out our wings. We would put a centerboard on El Tigre, the huge, battered, iron-bathtub-heavy old skiff, sunken and abandoned, which we had salvaged and calked with tar from a road builder's pot and painted black. We would buy Augie Commiskie's catboat sail for which he had never had a boat and get provisions and sail across the 20 miles of bay to Padre Island on the Gulf, leaving behind all insistent mothers, growling fathers, bullies named Horse and the looming school year.

We would live free as mountain lions (an image we liked) and spend our time fishing, swimming, sailing, smoking, lying in the sand and, best of all, exploring for (and most likely finding) the treasure which everyone knew Laffite the pirate had buried in the great sand dunes out there.

Out there were two islands. One you could see on hot days hanging above the horizon: This was Mustang which was built up, with beer joints and bait stands, dead tarpon and people. But south, separated only by a little channel, was Padre Island, the big one, where no one went because it was too lonely and where the Gulf, sometimes so blue it looked dyed, was marching in combers big as hills to boom against the marvelous white beaches that stretched along forever. Or to Mexico, anyway.

This was down in Corpus Christi, a sleepy, subtropical town on the Texas coast, and back in the Thirties, in the days when a ship thumping down the line of stilted buoys from the Gulf might bear, slapping on the flag astern, the rigid pinwheel of a swastika. Then boys might exclaim "Hotcha!" when they thought of the joys of island living, and personalities flourished independent as jumping tarpon.

Consider old man Ben, sole owner (except for a mule-faced wife) of Ben's Baits Boats. This was a shack, a pier, ten rowboats and two bait boxes where shrimp floated in a misty pinkish jumble. Ben promised Paul and me a set of oars for two days' hard work scraping up fish scales and bailing out boats around his pier, then he reneged. He offered us a boat to row around the harbor for a couple of hours, free.

We decided to pay ourselves at his expense, and declined. One afternoon a few days later Ben emerged from his shack, shooed away an old pelican that stood parked like a forgotten satchel on a pier post, put a shotgun and a case of beer into his favorite skiff and rowed out to the rocks of the harbor breakwater. There he went through his routine. After drinking each beer Ben put the can on a rock and blasted it off with the shotgun. He always drank the same brand—Opal Lager Beer. Opal was his wife's name, too. When the sea gulls and pelicans and terns saw him coming they flew to another section of the breakwater. Sometimes they kept going and flew past the drawbridge all the way into the inner harbor where the freighters were tied to the docks and foreign sailors would lean against the railings and wonder about American birds.

That night Paul and I and my little brother Charley (ten years old and sole crew member serving under the two captains) climbed on top of Ben's shack with a claw hammer, listened to the malt snores from below, then nails screeched in the moonlight as we found out how those metal-and-wood soft drink signs were put together.

The next morning we beached El Tigre bottom up and went to work with borrowed tin snips and hammer and tar. Our new centerboard was pretty fancy, though with its curling white-on-red letters, Coca, it seemed more like some kind of Arabic flag. The boat was relaunched and rigged and anchored with a 20-pound rock in shallow water. To some people the ungainly old thing with the stubby mast stuck in the bow (which for some reason burrowed low in the water) may have resembled a harpooned whale about to sound. To us it was a rakish, piratical craft.

Night fell. A sinister, scimitar moon was slashing through racing clouds as three bent and burdened figures staggered along the beach and waded out to a dark bulk in the sea. We were victualing ship. Paul carried an imitation Navaho blanket, a fork, a can of coffee, three avocados, a large box of tapioca, a book titled Stalking the Kodiak Bear, four bottles of Dr Pepper, four Hershey bars and a calendar. Charley and I were lugging potatoes, a box of kitchen matches, a sack of yellow chicken-feed candy, an avocado, dried beans and a pair of dime-store Genuine Binoculars Guaranteed 2x. Also a canoe paddle and a broomstick. Already in the boat were a bailing can and an eight-foot Coast Guard oar and oarlock, found drifting, and a toy compass whose quivering needle was willing to point wherever you wanted to go.

The big oar was set in the stern for a rudder, the triangular sail was hoisted, flapped wildly and was hauled taut, the rock anchor hauled aboard and, yawing and pitching, the black craft lurched out to sea.

"We did it! We're really going!" Whose exultant voice was that? It didn't matter. Any of us might have yelled it. Back there, yellow wads of light from houses, street lamps and the tower of the Plaza Hotel kept away the night for ordinary people. All that was safe, reassuring and dull. Ahead the black sea chased itself endlessly and there was only the passing green running light on someone's cruiser headed home and the intermittent, official flashes on the buoys.

Paul was at the tiller, I tended sail and crewman Charley hiked out and absorbed the spray. Trouble was, we weren't going anywhere. For 50 minutes we alternated long reaching tacks and still the shore lights and twisted red neon of Boni's Drive-In seemed close enough to touch.

"We got to row." I put all the command which I hoped to assume into my voice. "Maybe outside the breakwater there's more wind."

We unstepped the mast and took new stations. Paul sat on the port side with the oar, Charley and I were poised to starboard with canoe paddle and broomstick.

"OK, now!"

We dug into the waves, Charley and I stabbing frantically as Paul took one long haul on the monster oar and whirled the boat around. We were headed for shore now. Paul made another sweep and the starboard crew went ape with paddling. This time we spun only half around, the waves caught her broadside and the boat began to broach to.

"Row!" yelled Paul. "Stop goofing off!" Desperately Charley and I plunged broomstick and paddle while Paul waited. When we came about and the bow surged up through a ghostly whitecap Paul leaned into another long pull and around we went again.

Paul bounced on the seat in exasperation. "How about you guys doing some of the work?"

No sound from starboard except gasping and wave flailing. For ten minutes more the boat wallowed in circles, a clumsy sea monster chasing its tail, then we stopped and drifted, thinking.

We put the oar in the stern socket and Paul sculled while Charley and I plied paddle and broomstick and gradually we went to sea. But four arms out of six were shrieking fatigue. It was great to find dead ahead the somber jumble of boulders of the harbor breakwater.

We settled there for the night on a sand bar with the sail for a bed, the New Jersey Navaho blanket for cover and sand fleas for company. Spray flared in pale salty fans against the dark boulders behind us, a shooting star ran a long blue chalk mark down the sky, the long ceaseless rushing crash of sea soothed us. Back there on shore the yellow lights were fewer—most that were going out had done so and the others held steady for the long hours ahead.

A brittle crackling awakened Charley and he stared with rounding eyes at a big crab sidling warily (claws lifted like a boxer's gloves) past his nose. "Wow!" Charley was up and so were we.

We ate a breakfast of avocado and Hershey bars and, glowing pleasantly that no one was there to make us brush our teeth, we dumped our rock anchor in the bow and shoved off.

It was a great day for running away. Cotton-candy clouds were bumping across a shining carrousel sky, the sun was white, high and friendly, the salt air was great, two grinning porpoises curved across our bow, an outbound tanker let go a gruff, hello-world blast as it moved through the Jell-o-green sea and even the gulls wheeling over its garbage screeched their own derisive joy. And the boat was sailing!

The wind had veered, there was an offshore morning breeze and we actually were drawing out, lapping through wavelets out the gap in the breakwater, headed toward the Gulf. The rocks got smaller behind us. A skiff with two fishermen and a growling outboard passed, rocking El Tigre. The men grinned and waved, everybody waved, everybody grinned.

An hour later nobody grinned. The wind had died, the boat rocked on hot swells, the sun glared. The sail hung limp and gray as an old dishcloth. A million needlepoints of light pricked our eyes. We drank all the Dr Pepper. We rocked for another hour, sweating, the boat drawing slowly back toward the breakwater, then a thick breeze pushed from dead ahead and the boat heeled and refused any seaward tack. It just wouldn't point.

Paul and I looked at each other and out the bay to invisible Padre Island. (continued on page 198)Pirates of Padre Island(continued from page 92) "What do you think, Mike?" he asked. I could think of nothing to think.

"So what? Who cares?" Charley was standing, holding onto the mast with one hand and waving off to port with the other. "Let's go over there! That looks wild."

Over there was Nueces (Spanish for nuts) Bay, a shallow, brackish stretch of muddy water, some 10 by 20 miles of tide and river where no one would go unless he was forced to sail before the wind.

Great causes have bent before lesser necessities. By noon we were approaching the causeway that separated Nueces and Corpus Christi bays. Ahead was the single gap of a small, Van Gogh–style drawbridge. Braying our best imitation of a liner's hoarse whistle we indicated to the gatekeeper that a seagoing vessel was approaching. A saturnine old wreck of a beer-bottle-faced lounger grunted and suggested a thing or two we could do with the mast, if we really wanted to get under the bridge.

We replied with a certain lack of respect and were unstepping the mast when a gust of wind caught the sail and knocked me and mast into the water. I came up sputtering, swimming easily, but Paul jumped in, too, to lend a hand and because the water looked cool.

We were porpoising back to the boat when a touristy-looking man in a red and white shirt leaned over the railing and yelled, "Hey, let's see you dive for this!" He tossed a quarter.

An odd thing happened. The coin plipped into the water a couple of inches from Paul's nose. He dove under. He was down so long that I began to get panicky and was about to dive for him when he shot straight out of the water with his right fist clenched above his head. The arm was cocked. He threw and the coin went shining past the gaping man.

"You dive for it!" shouted Paul. He swam to the boat, clambered in and gave me a hand and soon we were scudding away from the bridge. I looked back at the little figures along the railing and asked, "Why did you do that? He didn't mean any harm."

Paul's face, dark and shining as an eggplant, had a curious expression. (Did I mention that he was Negro and could speak a rapid, Haitian French which fascinated Charley and me?) When he spoke his voice was slow and very clear: "I don't want anything that gets thrown at me."

Charley—he was sprawled across the forward thwart—called back, "Don't look so mean at Mike. He's not going to throw you any money!"

It broke us up, we yapped like coyotes and were left feeling jubilant about everything. Now we were sailing smooth and easy before the wind. It was chocolate-batter water and the boat cleaved it with the creamy elegance of a mixing spoon through all the long descending afternoon. The shadow of the sail led flapping over the waves dark as a manta ray while we lolled and ate a lunch of chicken-feed candy and avocado and considered the possibilities of life on the mainland. We figured it would be like Padre Island only with trees and wild animals, and maybe the Indians had buried some treasure, too.

A point of land had for hours been growing ahead, stretching a long cupping forearm to catch the boat, and by dusk it was clear that we had a choice of landfall there or of continuing on to explore the headwaters of the Nueces River which emptied into the bay. Rivers without crocodiles seemed dull, so we headed in for a soggy landing among marsh weeds on the point.

In the last light we explored and found dusty cornstalks growing in raggedy patches over the hill, but the farm had been long abandoned. Out of its wrecked barn an owl came flapping like an emptying wastepaper basket. But there was a rusty iron pump in the weedy yard which gave us rusty water for cooking dinner, a mixture of tapioca and potatoes boiled together in our only pan.

Afterward we rolled Bull Durham cigarettes and leaned back against a mesquite tree and smoked awhile. It was our last moment of ease. The night was an impossible jumble of turnings and groans, of sticks poking ribs, of alarms over imaginary things (Gila monsters, tarantulas?) creeping over us and of a hot, wet wind that brought us up at dawn coughing, nervous and hollow-eyed.

At the campfire site we put coffee into the pan (first wiping out potato and tapioca scum with a finger), poured in rusty water and struggled to light a fire under it. No go. The mesquite wood wouldn't burn and the weeds for kindling were too damp. Finally, after an hour, a wicked flickering untrustworthy little rat of a fire began to lick and retreat around the bottom of the pan and the water started to steam a little. We piled on sticks and hunkered around it, a brown foam began to buzz furiously in the pan, boiled over, Paul yelled and grabbed the side of the pan, shrieked, the whole thing spilled and the fire was out.

Glumly we settled for raw potato and the last of the chicken-feed candy. The whole day went like breakfast. As the sun warmed extravagantly, billions of mosquitoes zizzed from nowhere and bit us half crazy. In midmorning they were driven away by a short, vicious rainstorm which left us drenched, our matches soaked and coffee ruined. The storm went rattling off, leaving the air with a hot and puffy feeling. It was like breathing marshmallow. The sun burned down big and brassy and mean. By noon we were ravenous.

I spotted a wild dove and went howling after it, throwing rocks, tripped and sprained my ankle. Paul had been beating the bushes over the hill seeking wild berries and managed to find a patch of poison oak, though he didn't know this till later. But Charley did best. Intent on a mission he never revealed, he managed to wedge himself between the twin trunks of a scrub oak tree. Paul and I, busy with our own problems, didn't notice the tree with waggling arms and legs until it began to howl, "Get me out!"

That took some abrasive doing. A leaky orange balloon of a sun was skidding down the sky before we fell on our backs in the dusty weeds and wondered if any of us would ever get out. Bruised and hungry (starving!), reduced to tapioca—our beans had mysteriously disappeared, the last potatoes had been hurled at an astonished mallard paddling in the bay—we rolled over and stared down at the nasty, hard, white little pellets in the pan. They would never power us for the long trek back to the causeway.

We looked down the slope to the boat, locked in the muddy water as though cased in concrete. That would never sail us back down the bay against the wind or even across it. Over there the last long poles of light were poking into trees which from here seemed tiny dark green bolls of cotton. Behind those trees were railroad tracks, a highway, houses, people and hot dog stands.

We thought about walking across and then thought about getting pooped in the middle in all that mud and standing out there, stuck like storks, until we fell over and drowned.

"Doomed." The word popped into my mind and popped out. It hung there a long time, right above our heads.

That night Paul found a dry match and managed to start a little fire to boil the last of the tapioca and drive most of the worms out of the stunted, rockkerneled corn we found up at the abandoned farm. We munched carefully around the more obvious holes, smoked some of the Bull Durham for dessert and fell asleep to dream of being home in bed dreaming of running away.

A copper pot was fitted to our heads and a blowtorch roared against the top. The pot grew hot, began to glow, to melt, and drops of copper ran down our faces. We awoke sweating to a real hot-pot day—and the answer to getting out of there.

Down at the boat we rigged the sail for shade, untied the line from the rock anchor (an anchor being the last thing we were going to need), splashed to our stations port, starboard and aft, yelled "Heave ho!" while getting the bow turned and started pushing El Tigre out into this pool of hot chocolate stretching across Texas.

Within five minutes everybody knew we had made a horrible mistake, but when each looked to see what the others were thinking he figured the others were checking him for signs of chickening out, so no one said anything. The bottom was like warm mush and at each step we sank to our knees in goo. At least Paul and I did. Charley was only a row of fingers along the stern.

Grunting, splashing, slipping and groaning, we pushed. After what seemed hours we stopped to rest. We looked back. We could see plainly the campfire ashes with the empty coffee can gleaming in the sun and what looked like a tarantula crawling around the rim. We howled. We turned around and began pushing.

We wondered if it could possibly be as hot as it felt. The sun seemed to have gone crazy. At any moment we expected the water to start boiling.

We pushed.

After years the shadow of the mast grew short and we stopped for lunch. This time we flopped into the boat and didn't bother to look back. For a long time we lay there wheezing, each wondering what he was doing among such morons.

"Hey!" Charley called, peering back to shore. "We're really a long way out now."

It was true. The point of land had receded into the general shore line, the smudge of our campfire site was lost in the greenish brown of the hillside. We settled back for lunch. All we had was tapioca paste which we smeared over the last ear of roasted corn and passed around. It was like eating teeth with toothpaste. Afterward we lay in the shade of the sail dreading the moment when some jerk would say, "Guess we better start pushing." We were so busy keeping our mouths shut that we could hardly stand it. Finally, with a spontaneous shriek, we sprang up and jumped into the water, locked our hands on the gunnels, leaned our heads on our arms and pushed.

That afternoon stretched on like the rest of our lives. We leaned against that hull of wood heavy as iron and splashed and floundered and heaved without thought or hope. Everything blurred. It began to seem that we were not moving at all, that the boat's keel ran down to the core of the earth, that we were only slogging like squirrels on a muddy treadmill and if we ever made the boat move, it would split the world. But we pushed on.

The bay lay around us flat, heavy and glaring as a mirror floating on oil and we were three bugs crawling across its surface, except that the bugs weren't going anywhere.

Paul discovered this. The potholes he kept slipping into began to seem awfully familiar, so he waded off to one side and watched critically while Charley and I slogged onward.

"Hold it!" he cried. "This old whore is stuck."

Numbly we looked around and released our grips. To prove what he said Paul plunged the broomstick into the water even with the bow, then we all pushed as hard as we could. The boat didn't move an inch past the stick. If anything, the broomstick drew ahead. We tried rocking El Tigre. Nothing happened. We banged it with water-swollen fists, even tried kicking it (very difficult under water), but no go. The boat was really, completely and, as far as we could tell, permanently stuck.

As the idea sank in, a kind of frenzy swept us and we jumped around the thing hooting and screeching like Indians around a mired buffalo. Charley, still howling, hopped up and flung one leg over the side to scramble into the boat. A wad of mud from his foot smacked Paul in the face. Paul grabbed his leg, turned him around and landed a slap on the side of his head, hard. Charley cried out. Paul flipped into the boat, why I didn't know, but I scrambled in and grabbed his arm from behind in a hammer lock. Paul kicked me. Charley let fly the pan of tapioca. It caught me on the nose. I screamed and tapioca sprayed them both. Charley slugged me, Paul slugged me. I slugged them. Everybody slugged everybody. Mud slimy, tapioca smeared, bodies purple and wrinkled from immersion, we raged and fought like demented trolls.

Fatigue got the better of madness and we collapsed and lay in the bottom of the boat like gaffed sea bass, mouths gaping.

We knew it was the end. We would never leave this boat. For years it would remain stuck in the middle of this dirty bay while our bodies (wasn't the stiffness we felt just the beginning of rigor mortis?) turned into skeletons. The people back home would wonder whatever happened to those boys, at school they would have to take our names off the roll, the Frenchman Paul's father paid to tutor Paul would have to go back to France, and that bully Horse would be sorry he chased us through Artesian Park and caused me to drop my orange, and ate it. Three fine boys (we could almost hear them saying it now: "Those sure were three fine boys") were about to leave this world.

Lying there listening to the few, muted sounds of our last resting place—dry fluff of rope against canvas, purl and mutter of water around the keel, a gull's lost cry, an occasional sniffle, the far-off homing drone of an airplane—we felt a molasses-sweet, melancholy sympathy for ourselves and one another. Good old Paul. Good old Charley. Good old Mike. We dozed a little, comforted. But something was nibbling at the edges of our minds.

"Listen." Paul was up, kneeling, looking into the sky. "That airplane is coming closer. We can wave!"

Still dazed, Charley and I jumped up craning to see it, wagging our arms and yelling, "Over here! Over here!"

The noisy, constant shattering of the air of an airplane motor was getting louder, its vibrations began rattling the tapioca pan against a cleat, the uproar set sky and water shuddering and suddenly right across our bow skimmed a spraddle-legged contraption on pontoons with a strutted platform where two men sat waving and a pusher airplane motor mounted behind, its propeller whirling like a furious white wheel. Black letters along the side said: Superior No. 3.

The racket lessened, the propeller slowed to swinging silver knives (tantalizing the eye trying, and always failing, to follow) and the swamp buggy settled, skidding, in its own wake. One of the men stood up, stretched an arm toward us and pointed his index finger questioningly toward the bottom of the bay. We scrambled over one another to get into the act, nodding and jabbing downward like maniac two-finger typists. He nodded, pointed to us, to himself and held up a coil of Manila line. Securing the line on his end, he heaved the coil which came uncurling like the world's longest and laziest cobra.

Paul caught it, Charley fell into the bay, so I insisted on the right to tie the knot. We finally settled for a three-boy bowline around the forward thwart and braced ourselves amidships and astern, as the man indicated.

The other man, looking over his shoulder, maneuvered the contraption deftly until the glistening line just parted water in the long slow curve of a suspension bridge—hundreds of droplets falling to make the verticals. Then the deep throat of that machine power opened, the ticking propeller vanished in a flashing blur, the line tightened straight as a steel rod and the boat shuddered, something went schlook and we were free, slipping through the water.

The first man seemed to wave a query. We waved back exultantly "OK!" and the detonating uproar expanded, became incredible, our boat shot ahead with the bow cocked up like a speedboat's, a hurricane wind flattened the flesh on our cheekbones, filled our mouths, squeezed our eyes into slits and stitched us relentlessly with needles of spray. The sail was flung back like arunning dog's ear, little fountains of water spurted up from the floor boards and we screamed a glee we could never have imagined. This was Superior Number One!

El Tigre slammed across Nueces Bay at speeds no sailboat had achieved since man first learned the wind could move things. Before we knew it we were headed straight for a grove of royal palms, veered and roared on down the bay past jumping fish, past flurries of cynical gulls, past fishermen dropping their poles, past people pointing from shore, past buoys, past boats, past markers and floats. We were really going somewhere!

Then a thought cold as a frozen Popsicle dropped inside our shirts and hit us in the stomachs. It was no accident those men up ahead had found us. Our folks must have gone to the police and they sent out an alarm. We saw a vision of ourselves on a chain gang, dressed in zebra suits, crushing rocks with those heavy sledge hammers while everybody we knew sat in a drugstore drinking Cokes and pointing.

We squinted out and saw a dock and of the too-many cars parked on it one looked horribly like my father's green Plymouth and on a black sedan was the star of the Texas Rangers.

Superior No. 3 began curving in, slowing, its din diminishing, the propeller became a pinwheel of four visible blades, the motor gave a last expiring bang and the swamp buggy fetched up nicely against the side of the dock.

But when our speed slowed, the little fountains in the bottom of El Tigre turned to gushing springs, became a rising pond filling the inside, the boat stopped and descended with ponderous dignity to the bottom of the bay with the three of us still sitting erect, rigid with fear of prison, deaf in the ringing silence.

The brown water swirled no higher than the gunnels, so we just sat and thought, like judges in a bathtub, watching all the people running around on the dock waving and moving their jaws. Two big Rangers were leaning against their patrol car and laughing like fools (at least, their mouths were open that way) while a newsreel camera tilted and peered amid an erratic sparkle of photographic flashbulbs. Then we saw Paul's father and our father and sat tighter than ever, even though we saw our mothers, too, looking at us so glad we could hardly stand it.

Then we saw our fathers taking off their shoes and socks and rolling up their pants legs and we climbed out and started wading ashore, towing the mast with its scrap of sail. For, after all, when things quieted down again, if they ever did, we just might have use for it.