Just Add Salt (2) Read Free Page A

moved ashore. The plan was to rid the vessel of every last rat before re-boarding  the ship and resuming their journey to Acapulco.
    The rat slaughter aboard San Carlos went on for days, while the hunt for game onshore replenished their provisions. Isabel Comacho, and others like her beyond recovery, died in spite of renewed rations and water. Enough crew still survived, however, to sail San Carlos to San Lucas once the rats were eradicated, and their water jugs refilled with cave and caught water.
    It was on the morning of their third week ashore that they noticed San Carlos listing to starboard. Alarmed, Comacho and his sailors searched the ship high and low, finally discovering that a great store of silver coins, fashioned in the Far East for use in Mexico, had spilled and shifted to one side of the ship during the storm. With hands and spades, the men worked frantically to balance the load, but the ship continued to lean further as more water poured in from a breach in the hull. The bilges were filling and if nothing was done, the ship would roll on her side.
    In a Herculean effort to save their ship, every man, woman and child who could still stand, kedged, rowed, and maneuvered San Carlos into a position where, at high tide, she only had a fathom below her round bottom. Planning to start repairs at low tide when her keel settled to the bottom, their hopes were once again dashed. A fierce offshore wind howled down on them, the ship slipped anchor and floated toward the middle of the bay.
    The crew on board fought valiantly to re-anchor their ship, but as the waves topped her decks and she listed further and further, San Carlos ’s hold flooded and she went down.
    From shore, Comacho watched helplessly as his fortune, and therefore his future, slid beneath several fathoms of seawater. For years the fifty survivors would occasionally snag, with very long lines, a piece of ship or even a small cache of coins, but for the most part San Carlos and her vast treasure, were out of reach.
    Two years after the sinking of the ship, as Comacho sat watching a huge pod of whales spouting inside the bay, he spotted the billowing sails of three ships outside the entrance. They were Spanish, he could tell, and they sailed northward. He briefly considered building a signal fire on a tall dune, but then he looked around his little village of San Carlos and counted his many blessings.
    His eyes fell on his new wife, Delores. She had been a sailmaker on her way to a galleon maintenance facility in Mexico when San Carlos went down. The two survivors had forged a new life. Watching her bathe their baby boy while his daughters played nearby with a couple of little Yees, he daydreamed of the two families uniting some day. As his friendship with Yee grew, they soon forgot that one was a former employee. What did it matter anymore? The lost fortune was all that had kept Comacho from being just another peasant in Acapulco and Manila, and Yee’s skills as a jewelry maker were no longer of any importance. They were just two men who had survived a terrible ordeal to find unexpected contentment.
    “Manila Man,” Yee said as they watched the sails disappear to the north, “should we try a signal next time?” He spoke in Spanish, their common language.
    “ Pienso no , Chino. I think not.”
    “I agree. Look at what we have attained. Not riches, but then, where would we spend them? Here we are safe and healthy. Our children do not know the stigma of class. We have fat babies and young wives and we never have to worry about our next meal.”
    They sat in silence for a moment and then Comacho chuckled. “And to think, Yee, we owe it all to rats.”

Chapter 1
     
    “Rats, rats, rats!”
    Jan squinted at me over our laptop screens and tilted her blonde head to one side, giving her a curious cocker spaniel look. “Rats? What’s wrong, Hetta?”
    “E-mail from that rat, Jenks Jenkins. Your boyfriend is stealing my boyfriend.”
    Jan giggled.