may have taught me to fish the flats, but it was Ix-Nay who would show me the road to Xibalba.
Mr. Twain was quite happy in his bamboo corral, and things couldn’t have been better. But that was all about to change.
8
One Man’s Cathedral
Flats fishermen are an odd bunch. They have to be because the location of their catch is so remote. Fishing to most folks is as simple as a can of worms and a pole, or dropping a baited hook over the side of a bridge, but to the flats fanatic, it usually means traveling. The creatures they seek are difficult to catch because they live in such hard-to-find places. One of our customers, a very successful businessman from the Midwest who owns a major-league baseball team and an airplane-manufacturing plant in Kansas, summed it up. “Tully,” he told me, “when I was younger, I would travel like Indiana Jones to find fishing spots. I lived in sleeping bags, ate lizards, drank Skin-So-Soft, and would wade into a pool of sulfuric acid if you told me bonefish were in it. Now, when I go fishing, I don’t want to be more than an hour away from lemon veal, and I want to sleep on cotton sheets in an air-conditioned room. That’s why I came to Lost Boys.”
Bucky understood the idea of marketing creature comforts in the boondocks better than anyone, and that is why Lost Boys was an instant success. In addition to offering four-star-caliber lodging and food, Bucky taught Ix-Nay and me that our job was not only to train our guides as mere guides but also to turn them into teachers and pals.
It didn’t take long for the story of the Lost Boys lodge to go spinning off the Yucatán Coast like an advancing hurricane. It churned its way quickly and effectively through the marinas, cocktail parties, boardrooms, and tackle shops of the world of saltwater anglers. That first winter, not only was the lodge full, but guests began arriving on large yachts and in private planes and helicopters.
Mr. Twain had to start sharing his favorite little open grazing pasture with a makeshift landing pad in the barley field. So it didn’t come as that much of a shock when Bucky informed us that a party of fishermen from Birmingham, Alabama, would be arriving by seaplane. What was odd was that they had booked the entire lodge for a full week, and there were just three anglers. So, at five p.m. on the appointed arrival date, I was perched in the tree house with my binoculars, scanning the horizon. I heard the distant rumble of engines and pointed my lenses in the direction of the sound.
At first, I couldn’t believe my eyes. The seaplane was pink. The color immediately reminded me of Thelma Barston and her pink poodle assault on the Wild West, but it wasn’t like Thelma to announce her arrival in such a manner. If she was still after me, she would come in the night when I was least expecting it.
The closer the plane got, the more clearly I could make out the fuselage. The bright coloring was in fact a painting of a giant flamingo running the entire length of the fuselage and spreading out on the underside of the wings.
If you choose to fly in a pink plane, you are either crazy or have a deep-seated desire to be noticed. The plane was now clearly visible to the staff of the camp, and they were all headed to the dock with cameras. As pink as she was, it was still remarkably graceful when the craft glided to a landing in the channel, framed in the rays of the sun over Crocodile Rock. It reminded me of one of those old travel posters that I had seen in a shop in Key West.
As the plane idled over to the dock, I scurried down from the tree house and joined the crowd. Ix-Nay was trying out his new Nikon camera to capture this Kodak moment.
“What do you know about these people?” I asked Bucky as we stood by to grab the lines and aid with the docking of the seaplane.
“There are three guests and two pilots. They registered under the name Smith, and they wired a cashier’s check from a New York bank and paid in advance for a full week for the whole lodge.”
“Maybe they’re movie stars,” Ix-Nay said.
“Pot dealers are more likely to be flats fanatics than movie stars,” I told him. “Do