Billy K.

The third coast and its inhabitants gauge their existences by hurricane season, by hot and hotter by the tides rising and falling around oyster encrusted pilings holding up forlorn and ancient docks reticent with neglect, against which rusting shrimp boats lay, relics of another more prosperous era. They lay tied to the dock with umbilical cords of bleached and frayed three strand line wound in neglected figure eights around cleats thick with powdery corrosion, and no life pulses through the processing plants or the umbilical cords connected to boats and docks. The people of the third coast hurry and scurry like the Sally-lightfoot crabs that live under the ancient docks reticent with neglect, hurrying and scurrying to the shade, from piling to piling.

The people and the tourists on the third coast seek refuge from the relentless sun, ducking into ancient seafood and ancient Mexican food restaurants where humid air conditioning belches out of veiled vents, condensing the vapid air on windowpanes and the sunglasses of the tourists who scurry back outside to another destination of artificial shade and comfort, to palapa bars or bayside bars where they drink Corona beers and piss away their vacations on the third coast, or to the white sand beach where Gulf waters lap the shoreline and mullet swim in great schools between the legs of surf fishermen and children playing with bright plastic toys in the calm of the first sandbar.

There are no trees on the third coast capable of providing any respite from the relentless sun except for a few scraggly mesquite and tepegujues, and the omnipresent nopal which provides only enough shade for the rattlesnakes and tarantulas to escape the relentless sun, concealed in near lifeless torpor, until the relentless sun finally gives up her stranglehold on the third coasts’ southern latitude and the night wind begins to pick up, signaling the time to slither and crawl from ectothermic reptile and insect siestas in search of a midnight snack before the relentless sun makes its appearance again in a hurrying and scurrying few hours, in a unisonous and endless cycle like the tides, like hot and hotter, like the annual ebb and flow of hurricane season.

The National Weather Service calls it tropical cyclone development and they send in airplanes and instruments to measure, predict and verify, but the people of the third coast know it in their bones, in their psyches, and they suffer from June through October when the Gulf heats up like a bowl of Caldo Mariscos, and swirling bands of clouds converge to rotate in a counterclockwise dervish of convection, traveling over open ocean till for reasons that may never be understood by mere mortal, they join the shoreline in a rush of energy that the Mexicans call Chubaso, La tormenta, pounding la tierra with powerful winds and torrential rains before exhausting themselves over perennial coastal desert and monte ruled by the relentless sun, leaving behind a wake of carnage and cleansing.

Billy K. is a tall stooped man about sixty five years old with the countenance of forlorn beagle. The entire world is out to get him.

Perennial residents like Billy K. become the human counterpart to the perennial hurricane. Billy has lived in Port Isabel all of his adult life, working first as a commercial diver, salvaging valuables from the myriad of shipwrecks from the past, recovering gold, silver and other treasures, only to have the State of Texas claim their rightful share of the plunder, which Billy doesn’t think they have any right to. So he tried to hide the bulk of the take from one particularly well endowed Spanish galleon, but the State found out, and took the whole thing plus more since Billy tried to keep it all. They never did found the remainder of the stash though, and Billy invested a good deal of that into a Marine Salvage operation, where he has made a fortune over the years recovering the largesse from named and unnamed tropical tormentas and hurricanes.

He has a salvage yard full of treasures that savvy wharf-rats know are worth as much as their weight in the gold and silver salvaged from long sunken Spanish galleons. Brass portlights, lifeboats, life preservers, engines and deck machinery, everything from sailboat rigging, blocks and fairleads to fishing winches, trawl doors and nets.

Billy K. owns a giant rusting hulk, bleeding long trails of iron oxide down it’s sides to its barnacle encrusted waterline, a British built ferry boat he obtained through some back alley deal, lying against one of his docks, tucked in there between filthy tugs and abandoned shrimpers.

Billy contracted a couple of guys from up the valley, out west in the desert area to sandblast the hull, get it ready to paint so that he could sell it to some unsuspecting soul.

So they hauled and drydocked the boat there on his property, and began to sandblast it, letting the paint, rust and sand fall into the open channel, and onto the drydock where it could be washed into the channel at the end of the day with high pressure washers.

…..But since this ain’t the wild west nomore, pretty soon his jerry-rigged operation came up on the feds radar screen……The Coast Guard, and the environmental police showed up and shut Billy K. down. “Hell” he claimed, “It’s not my fault, they’re just picking on me”. “If I hire a company to do work for me, than how could it be my fault”? “If you hire somebody to paint your car, and they wash the unused paint down the drain, would it be your fault that they violated the law?”

Later Billy K. got a contract from Mr. Z who owns about half of the town, to put in some decorative pilings and cement rip-rap out in front of Mr. Z’s’ new waterfront eatery, the Pelican Station. Give it a real rundown coastal look. A perfect opportunity to use up some of that old trash lying around the salvage yard, out of sight, out of mind. When the feds caught up with him again, for not having the proper permits to place fill in the water, threatening to fine him fifty thousand dollars a day for illegally filling coastal waters, Billy moaned; “they’re just picking on me, they’re always picking on me, why me?”….”how was I supposed to know that there weren’t any permits to do that?”…. “I can’t be responsible for this!”….

Billy K. owns a restaurant over on the island, the Palm Street Pier. An open air joint on the bay, the Palm Street pier is classically furnished with salvaged bits and pieces from Billy K’s. Marine Salvage Yard. Fresnel lights and ships’ wheels, cabin furnishings dating back to the 1950’s all held together by turquoise paint over its weathered lumber.

Billy K’s. neighbor to the South, Tequila Frogs, own the property that Billy uses for a parking lot out in front of Palm Street Pier, and recently decided for reasons not clear to anyone except he and Billy K. that the parking lot property was now off-limits to customers of the Palm Street Pier, so in the middle of a busy Saturday night crowd, the island constabulary came bursting in (well, came bursting on to palapa covered restaurant and grill), announcing that the patrons would immediately have to move their cars to the parking lot that was included in the lease when Billy K. originally leased the property several years prior, a parking lot located two blocks distant.

There hasn’t been much business at the Palm Street Pier since that happened. Billy K. swears it isn’t his fault. Hell, everyone’s always picking on him.