Outside's Go Magazine - Travel and Style for Men

A Last Rave at the Bucket of Blood

I went back to the Bucket of Blood the next afternoon for hydration and more of Mr. Clifford’s story telling, but he hadn’t been around all day. Later, I was hanging around Patricia Munoz’s tienda next door to my room at the Seaview chatting with the church ladies when the call came in. Patricia, ninety if a day, sat down heavily after replacing the receiver. "They just found Mr. Clifford up in the bush," she said quietly. "Someone cut his throat."

At Sea Breakers the night of the murder I ran into Tom, the cleanest cut of the Pirate Crew. He and Karns, another Floridian, were in the Bucket of Blood that morning having a pick me up when Clifford Jr., Mr. Clifford’s 10 year old son by his second marriage, told them his father was late coming back from his farm plot. They went to have a look. "It was his son who found him," said Tom. "He’d been stabbed in the legs and had his throat cut. His pants were yanked down to his knees to get at his money belt. They tossed his body in the bush like a sack of garbage. I’ve seen murdered men before, but whoever did this was having a time of it."

The next morning I sat with Mr. Bodden, my landlord, and several other local men on the Main street curb in front of the police station. Mr. Bodden told me they’d brought in Mr. Clifford’s hired man. "First the man say he didn’t go to work that day, but other men say they saw Mr. Clifford tell him yesterday to go up to the field and get to work. Then he say, ‘oh, yeah, that’s right, but Mr. Clifford never got there’. Now, he’s in there with a couple detectives from the mainland and two of Mr. Clifford’s sons."

Mr. Jackson, in a Chi Chi Rodriguez rig, leaned across Mr. Bodden. "They going to use the needles, mon. These Spanish men, they don’t fuck around. They heat those needles up. It’s a rare mon last more than two fingers. This mon gonna remember the truth after one."

A few minutes later a procession emerged from the police station. Two of Mr. Clifford’s sons, Morris and Aaron, emerged, followed by a thin, shackled man, two plainclothes mainland detectives and the two uniformed Honudranos who constitute the island police force. Mr. Clifford’s sons were big, grim looking men and they scarcely acknowledged the waves and murmurs of condolence among their friends at the curb. The prisoner looked in his forties, maybe older, and couldn’t have weighed 120lbs. He was so scared he was almost doubled up on himself.

The procession headed up the hill. "They going to the murder scene, let the Woods boys take turns on that mon," speculated Mr. Boddin. "Get the truth themselves."

"No, mon," grinned Mr. Jackson. "They gonna show him the Bob McField mango tree. That’s all. They just going to show it to him."

An hour and a half later the men returned. The prisoner looked better. "That mon confessed to somethin’," Mr. Jackson said sagely. "He walkin’ with a lighter soul."

The hired man, known around the island as Jorge or Jose (no one, even the police, seemed to be sure of his real name), was released later that afternoon. Morris Woods, a powerful man with wide shoulders who looks as if he can snap 2x4s with one hand, was satisfied that Jorge was not involved. "We took him to the place he said he was working when my father was killed," he said. Morris had flown over from his home on Rhoatan an hour after he’d heard the news and seemed dazed, as if the reality had not yet caught up to him. "It was too far from where my father died for him to have gotten from one place to another. Also, a number of people, island people, saw him working there around the time...so I don’t think he’s involved."

Mr. Clifford was buried that evening. The wind had died and the temperature was up to 33 C. With the wind gone, the sand flies were voracious and every tourist on the island was doing the St. Vitus Scratch dance. On the islands, the deceased don’t lie in state. You get them in the ground as fast you can.

Mr. Clifford’s wood casket was painted marine grey like a little ship. In lieu of handles, his sons and grandsons slipped white bed sheets under it and the six big men carried to the truck from the Methodist church. Once the church emptied, the truck led the 200 mourners up the hill to the Methodist cemetary. Neighbors came out of their houses and leaned on their railings, nodding to their friends and relations. Nearly 100 people followed the casket up the hill.

The sun was nearly set when Mr. Clifford was laid down. While the red clay was shoveled onto Mr. Clifford, Mrs. Jackson, from the Methodist choir, sang his favorite hymn, "Amazing Grace". It was a magnificent sunset that evening; red and orange streaks against a dark blue, then purple sky. The Reverend Joan Glover, a florid middle-aged Englishwoman remarked that "We often think of Utila as a paradise, and those who come here call it a paradise, but there is no paradise on earth without righteousness. All other paradise is just an illusion, a trick of the devil."

Tom and I walked back down the hill together. He was the only one of the Pirate Crew to show. "I was the only one with a clean shirt. Shit, I’m the only one with a shirt." When we reached Main Street, we turned to go in opposite directions. "I loved the old man and it breaks my heart," he lamented. "Not only for Mr. Clifford, but for the island. Something like this happens and suddenly you feel all the beauty and good vibe sucked out into a black hole. You feel like it’s changed and it ain’t never going back."

The next few days there was a steady exodus of tourists, their bodies covered with red sand fly welts. Few arrived to take their place and the island fell into a sad, over-heated lethargy. I met Roger Brooks, a New York City policeman who was one of Mr. Clifford’s grandsons. He’d been on his way to Nicaragua to visit his father’s family when he heard about his grandfather. "I hadn’t seen him since I was small, but people always say how much we were alike. Independent, a little mean, tough. I know the way my grandfather did things. It probably didn’t win him a lot of friends. But for all his faults, he was a hardworking man, a true Utilan and lived life on his own terms. He didn’t deserve to die like that."

It was three days later that some facts of the case began to emerge. A man named Ramiro Inestiosa had been living on the island for about a year and a half. He came from a well-known criminal family from Olancho on the mainland. He’d had some trouble with the law, but maintained to his acquaintances that he wanted to go straight and a life on the island was his best bet to stay beyond the reach of bad influences. He never found steady work on the island, but made friends with Mr. Clifford and often played a game of dominos with him in the afternoons at the Bucket of Blood. I’d seen him in the bar several times. He was a thin, hard man with a large moustache and a habit of looking at the floor.

For a week before Mr. Clifford’s murder, he’d been asking the old man for some money to get back to the mainland. He was suspected of some petty thefts around the island and couldn’t get work. Mr. Clifford, of course, flatly refused. I could imagine the contempt in Mr. Clifford’s refusal. "Silencio, Ramiro! Vamos! Necessito los empties! " The morning of the murder Ramiro had walked with Mr. Clifford to the vegetable patch in the bush where he went every morning before the bar opened. Everyone knew Mr. Clifford always carried the bar’s receipts in a plastic bag inside his pants next to his gun. There were no signs of a protracted struggle, so Ramiro had probably already made up his mind about how he was going to get the money when they went to the bush. Ramiro had stabbed Mr. Clifford several times in the side and legs before the old man dropped. He then stripped him to get at the money bag. Before leaving he slit the old man’s throat and then picked up the small body and tossed it into the dense underbrush. Splattered with blood he ran into town and bought the last seat on the afternoon plane to La Cieba. He’d used every cent he’d stolen to buy the ticket. $24.

"My father was a friend to that man Ramiro, probably one of the few people on the island friendly to him...and this was how he repaid that friendship," Morris told me later. "I know now that it’s a good thing my brothers and I did not find Ramiro on the island when we got there. We were raised to be good Christians and that means killing a man is the worst sin of all in the sight of God. But if we’d found Ramiro, he would’ve never left Utila."

It was Friday night when I decided to leave, only ten days since the last rave at the Bucket of Blood. It’d been time enough for one mass of backpackers and economy divers to exit and another to come and take their place. I met a couple Dutch girls out at the Blue Bayou, one of the only decent beaches on the island, and was vainly hoping their light hearts would rub off. But it was no use. I needed to get to the Pacific where the water gets rough. I wanted to buy a cheap, used board and sit out beyond the break for a week.

I went back to my room at the Seaview, poured a stiff rum and sat out on the jetty. I watched the colors and thought of Mr. Clifford. I thought about the stories he’d shared: of Jimmy Jackson’s final swim and Bob McField’s fancy playing and Elsa Thompson’s desperate run through the alligator swamp; of Henry Morgan’s lost treasure and haunted Water Cay where the ghosts of Indians annihilated by progress are trapped in limbo. I thought about how it was not only places, but people, who are crushed by change. By my third rum all I could think about was the waste; the stupid fucking waste.

It took me all of ten minutes the next morning to stuff my pack and set out for the twenty minutes walk to airport. Something was nagging at me, something that made me feel like I had unfinished business on the island. I couldn’t shake it.

I stood at the crossroads, unwilling to let go without some final word, to not just listen, but take part in the embroidery of stories which contained Mr. Clifford’s stories and those of Utila. I felt someone tug at my pack. I turned and found Myron grinning at me.

"Don’t go, Mon. Party tonight."

"I think I have to. I don’t know. Why? What party? It’s not Tuesday."

"No, mon, but those Brit boys, the technos don’t you know. They paid Morris to open the Bucket of Blood for them to have a rave," he laughed. "With that techno shit. We gonna shut it down. A few of the local bruddahs, yah. Havoc, chaos, mon, chase them down the street. Then we put on the island sound."

"Myron, you seriously want me to miss my plane just to mess with some techno weenies?"

"No, mon, it’s not like that. It’s for Mr. Clifford. His honor, yah? A last rave. Then, at the end, we pick up them empties and put them back just so."