"I can't leave much sooner than October," Hatter warns, his eyes swollen slits and his hair a wire mesh, "I've got things to do before then. It takes about two weeks to Columbia at a good pace, you could make Panama in less."

"There's plenty I want to do to my boat as well," I concede, "it's just good to know there are people headed out that direction. I'd prefer to go with a group if it's possible, you know?"

"I'd like to round up some girls," says Hatter with his wheezing voice, one hand controlling the smoking outboard on his swamped fiberglass dinghy.

The dinghy is full to the brim with old parts of outboard motors, woven hats and garbage. Mad Hatter, or just Hatter as I call him, spends his days bumbling purposefully through town collecting young palm fronds and weaving hats to sell to tourists. If you believe everything he tells you you'd know that he owns a thousand acres of mountainous dope-growing land in Columbia, that his sixty-foot boat was confiscated by the sheriff's department a few years back, and that now he's living on a smaller thirty-foot craft saving the dough necessary to return to his tropical paradise.

Hatter's covered in pink, sun-flaking skin and gray, washed out hair that protects his head just like barbed wire strung around a condemned building. One of his legs is in a cast; his small eyes are yellow and mean. The outboard hisses ludicrously like a Hollywood serpent. Thick, whiter than white smoke creeps away from it in heavy clouds that crowd low over the water. The dinghy we're in is beat up good and sinking at a manageable pace. Hatter bails us out continuously while casting suspicious glances at the outboard.

"I'd like to round up some girls," he repeats, "to sell whenever I get over there."

"Sell?"

"Yep."

"You mean, like American girls?"

"Yeah. You know, these little street babies. Wanna get out a here. Wanna new life or whatever."

"Sell them? Like to drug-lords or what?" My composure is unflinching. I smile and nod like I'm copying down instructions to bake a pineapple upside-down cake.

"Yeah. I'll need a little dough, you know, to get started. Just bring 'em on down, we all get picked up by a limo at the dock, head over to some tough guy's house to party. Champaign, cocaine, you name it. I leave with a case of money, she stays where she's at."

"They'll use them for whores or what?"

"Pretty much. They're all strung out crack-whores to begin with. All mixed up, you know? Sure, I'm not doing 'em any favors, but they get themselves into it more or less."

"Right."

Hatter scratches a flake of skin off his arm, tosses it into the water. He looks around with his head low and his eyes half closed in eternal suspicion. I point out my boat that's just in front of us and the dinghy slowly curves towards it, whining with a high, smoky pitch.

I've talked about it before, but I hardly believe anything anyone says. Maybe that's a problem, who knows.

Hatter's dinghy comes alongside my boat, garbage frothing over its gunwales like the head on a freshly poured stout. The motor cuts and we drift quietly towards Jordan's Ghost. I step out onto the dinghy's little bow and pull us close, careful to keep a safe buffer zone between the two vessels. Hatter looks with glazed eyes between me and my boat, bailing out green muck from his little skiff mechanically with a halved bleach bottle. His cellphone rings and now both his hands are full.

In a moment, my bags are up in Jordan's Ghost. The trip to Mobile, Alabama was great, and Mark and Anna were a blast. This, though, this is what I like. Boat rides from dethroned kings in the land of lost dreams. A place where leprous Mad Hatters wander the streets scraping together a living, where a dinghy ride to your boat in death's own carriage runs a cool $5.

"That's a pretty little boat," rasps Hatter, hanging up his cellphone and taking the few dollars I hand him for the twenty-five minute ride.

"Thanks," I reply smiling, "I like it. Take it easy, Hatter, I'll see ya."

He's clawing at the pull-start and the outboard is coughing up that white, low-lying smoke. Hatter props his broken leg up on a swollen garbage bag, and the dinghy loops around slow then bobs off into the heat of the day.