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"It's a little early for philosophy, don't you think?" Gator cut in.
Hard to tell what time of day it was, given the covered windows and flickering light of the braziers, but Nigel took his point. The food, the song, the warmth in spite of the weather, all of this created a strange cocoon, or perhaps rather, a sweat lodge—a place where people might reveal themselves or discover something beyond themselves. "Right you are, Gator. Perhaps another shanty-song?"
"No," Flick moaned from his place on the floor. "Please, no."
"Speaking of the sea, though," Monty ventured. "Must be a lot of shipwrecks around here. I was thinking about that, after what happened to us."
"You really think the guys want to hear about shipwrecks, Monty?" Gator sighed heavily. "I've been trying to change the mood, and you all keep dragging it down."
"Sorry, man. I just figured we survived, right? Like, I know there were all kinds of pirates and such, because of the Spanish, and there was that big one, oh shoot." He snapped his fingers then pinched his forehead. "Not the Santa Maria, that was Columbus."
A few of the men snickered. "And the wrong ocean," Smitty pointed out.
Betimes they seemed to be friends, only to promptly poke fun at one another like schoolboys. "Santa Anna," Nigel supplied. "She was one of the Manila Galleons. But she didn't wreck, not exactly."
"No? Must be thinking of something else." Monty deflated a little.
"Aren't you always?" Flick pulled the other bottle of wine toward him and plucked out a pocketknife, finding the corkscrew. "If we could get you to focus on your work, maybe the crew'd get further ahead."
Seated beside Monty, Devi studied him in glances. Did she mean to learn more about them, or about him? What harm, really, if she wanted to get to know someone in a more intimate way?
"What is your job?" she prompted.
"I'm the tech. Anything with a computer interface, that's what I handle. Like, when we set up complicated demolitions or if we have to calculate loads for bridges, like that."
"He's crap at fixing laptops, though. Just so you know," Smitty offered.
"Speaking of crap." Flick displayed the bottle he'd been trying to open, the cork floating in bits inside. In the red-gold light, his wrinkled nose made the scar all the more fearsome. "Hey, Arryo. You know anything about tequila? Maybe you can help me pick out a good bottle from the basement. Don't worry, I'll share this time."
The guide nodded and rose, stepping carefully out of his spot. The two of them edged between the other men.
"Give Nigel the worm," said Devi. "He likes that stuff." She rolled her eyes.
"I eat a single scorpion, now she thinks I survive on insects." Nigel spread his hands, playing along.
"Now you tell me! Weren't no bugs in the dinner, though, right?" Smitty said, eying the clean pot.
"Assuredly not. At least, not on purpose." He winked. "They do offer extra protein though. Eating insects is one of the ways we might improve the health of the planet."
"I don't think that would do anything for my health," Gator put in. "Besides, if this is a shipwreck, we oughta be eating the cabin boy, right, Joe?"
"Hey!" Joe sat bolt upright, scowling across the brazier at his leader.
"Never fear. It's a far better course, should one be wrecked, to use one of the corpses as bait to fish for a meal rather than resort to cannibalism."
"Time out, here." Monty planted his palm on top of the raised fingers of his other hand, forming the classic "T." "I want to get back to this galleon. Santa Anna, you said? Didn't exactly wreck, but that implies something bad happened to it."
"Might as well indulge him—he wants to see the bodies. Reads horror stories to go to bed at night." Gator pulled a knife and started hacking slats from old crates into smaller pieces to feed the fires.
"No bodies in this one, at least, not for the Santa Anna. She was pursued by a British privateer, Thomas Cavendish. She was large and heavily laden, while his ships were small and nimble, meant for fighting. He chased her for days, then shot her masts, somewhere north of Cabo San Lucas. They off-loaded the treasure to Cavendish's ships, put the passengers and crew ashore, then lit fire to the Santa Anna, and set sail for England." Nigel leaned toward the fire and lowered his voice, "but only one of Cavendish's ships ever arrived."
Deep, eerie laughter echoed suddenly around the kitchen. Nigel jerked back as one of the crew shouted, "Christ!"
Tyrone sauntered in, wearing a Cheshire cat grin. "Your faces, though."
"I have a knife in my hands, Ty. Somebody could've been hurt." Gator's blade glinted in the firelight.
"Good one, Ty. How long you been standing there?" Smitty gave the other man a high-five that turned into an arm-wrestling hold to tug his friend down next to him. Nigel's own hand remained on his thundering heart, and he could imagine his face had been quite a sight. His lips parted to say something about it, when he noticed Devi's upraised palm, holding the compact camera.
"Don't worry, boss, I got it all." Then she flared her eyes and whipped her hair back with a gasp in imitation of Nigel himself.
Monty snickered. "Yep, that's the look!"
"Wonderful." Since deciding to ingratiated herself with the crew, she'd been adopting some of their own attitudes, even toward him. He presumed she was aware of how closely she now paralleled Gator's own casual cruelties. Thus, it shouldn't sting quite so much as it did. She did it, after all, for them. Or so, at least, he must believe. Unless, of course, the role she assumed in front of these men, her erstwhile compatriots in the armed forces, gave license for her to reveal her true feelings.
Nigel conjured up a smile. "When we post it, I shall get a million likes within the hour. Anyone care for a wager on that?"
"Wow. You have a lot of followers." Joe scooted from his nest of towels and tablecloths to see if his shirt were dry.
"If your work is to take buildings down, and put them back up again, brick by brick and tile by tile, then mine is to build with people, to bring them together into a greater whole."
"You make a YouTube channel sound like a holy mission," Gator said as he added another shard of wood to the fire.
Nigel thought immediately of Santa Isabel, a wholly different sort of mission. "Not holy, save that it suggests some of the duties we owe to one another, duties I might regard as sacred."
"Oh, no, more philosophy!" Gator made as if to hang himself, then scrubbed away whatever Nigel might have said next. "You're a good storyteller though, I can see why all those people follow you. Maybe when we're back to civilization, I should sign on."
With a nod of thanks, Nigel said, "When Erle Stanley Gardner—best known for inventing the fictional lawyer, Perry Mason—visited Baja back in the sixties, he made the point that our definition of civilization is rather narrow. Certainly I've found some of the moments I most treasure to be far from cities and social media."
Monty sighed. "Yeah, that's the truth."
"One thing I don't get," said Flick, "what's the difference between privateers and pirates?"
Nigel shifted his focus from the contemplative Monty to his increasingly intoxicated compatriot. "Privateers are licensed by the crown to prey upon the ships of other nations, typically, English privateers against Spanish vessels, each racing to strip the wealth of the Americas in their quest for world domination."
"So what happened to the lost ship, you think? You must have a theory."
"I'm hardly a treasure hunter, you know, but I'd guess the winds of autumn did her in. Chances are, she never left the Pacific." He raised his mug in salute and drained it off.