Long Voyage Back

by Luke Rhinehart

  As Captain Olly neared the end of his working day he was feeling depressed at how tired he felt. After less than four hours work his back ached, and if he didn't stop and lean on his rake handle every five minutes or so he got winded. It embarrassed him, and he knew that even if he tried to pretend to be so fascinated with his own monologues that he couldn't work, Chris could tell he was shirking.

  Ever since Ellen had run off to Florida two years ago with Cap'n Smithers, his life had been downhill. It was the first time since he was fourteen he hadn't had a woman reg'lar and he felt his health was deteriorating fast as a result. The main reason he went oystering with Chris most every day was so he wouldn't be stuck alone in his house watching the TV. A man could go nuts watching those game shows and soaps. Ì don't know, son,' he found himself saying in an effort to cheer himself up, 'seems to me some of these oysters must have meningitis. Seem sorta stunted. We may have to sell 'em to the circus as midgets.' He had deposited a load of oysters and muck on to the deck and was staring at it with exaggerated gloom. 'Though I s'pose midgets ain't in fashion any more even in the circus. People these days want things big: big money, big boats, big tits.

  '

  As he wiped the sweat from his bald top he squinted south at a couple of sailboats sitting like cement monuments in the bay. That'll teach 'em, he thought vaguely, the rich playboy good-for-nothings.

  `They even seem to want their wars bigger these days,' he went on, turning back to his work, `sittin' up there in Moscow and Washington calculatin' how they can build a real big elephant-like-war that'll flatten the earth like a pancake so the gods can use it as a frisbee . .

  As 011y lowered his tongs back into the water, Chris made an unaccustomed halt to his work.

  `There ain't gonna be a war, is there, Pop?' he asked.

  `Well now you know I never predict what the rake'll bring up,' 011y snapped back automatically, 'but I got to say that imagination ain't created the stupid terrible thing which man ain't fool enough to up and do.'

  `They ain't fightin' yet,' Chris commented, pausing to light a fresh cigarette.

  `The way I figure it is the only reason they ain't made a frisbee of Earth before this is that they got a lot of smaller terrible things they want to do first.' 011y spat over the side of the boat into the bay. That's my great hope for mankind, he thought: man's got so many little sins he's got the hots for, he'll never get around to the big one.

  `You think so?' his son asked after, a pause.

  "Course I don't think so,' 011y snapped back irritably, again wiping his sweaty forehead with his thick-veined right arm. 'You know I don't like to do any thinking.' He chuckled. '

  Whenever I think - get a really deep thought, you know? - I always have to take a crap.'

  He paused and glared at his son, his eyes twinkling. 'Standing at the helm alone in a blow I gotta watch my mind like a cat, be sure no deep thoughts come, 'cause taking a crap on a bouncy ship when you're alone at the helm and havin' all you can do just standing much less squatting over a pail on a roller coaster while watching the compass and sail and handling the wheel is a trick I done once but don't hanker to do again.'

  He paused and frowned in concentration.

  `The deep thought I had that time was, "Time will tell." See? Deep thoughts just ain't worth the fuss and bother.'

  As he looked with mock severity at his son, who grinned

  back at him, 011y remembered that sail: in his old

  Chesapeake Bay skipjack that he'd owned and captained,

  dragging for oysters in those days instead of fiddling around with these tiny rakes. But he couldn't afford a skipjack now and couldn't pull his weight as crew so he'd settled for the Lucy Mae. It kept him alive, but barely.

  Shit, he thought, as he had to pause again, I wish to hell I'd just get it over with and croak. Not much sense in living if you can't work and can't fuck. Nowadays whenever he went into restaurants or bars and flirted with the cute little taut-butted waitresses they'd either be shocked at him or treat him like a harmless child. When a man couldn't turn a woman on it was time to cash in his chips. Women used to always be pestering him, first for his cock and then for his deep thoughts; he wished one were pestering him now.

  `Women are always asking what I'm thinkin',' he began saying aloud, watching three seagulls fly noisily around the stern of the Lucy Mae and then plop expectantly in the water. `But after four wives I finally figured how to handle 'em. I always say I'm thinking about the wind and weather and repairing my dinghy and how much I love her ass. Well, every woman I've known will frown and frown and frown until I get to my deep thoughts about her ass and then everything's jolly. A man who limits his deep thoughts to his woman's ass is a sober man, trustworthy and true, and likely to stay out of trouble.'

  Chris was smiling as he worked but Olly's face was as stern as a Baptist preacher. He paused and took a long drink of water from his glass on the deckhouse shelf. He damn well wished he had a lady these days whose ass he could praise, even if the ass were flatter than an ironing board.

  `Gettin' late, Pop,' Chris said to him, making him abruptly aware he was leaning on his rake again.

  `Late?' 011y snapped back. 'We just begun.' But he began to haul in his rake with a sense of relief. 'I been talkin' so much today I'm pooped,' he added. I do love talking, he thought as he emptied his last load into the boat. Especially my own talking. As Chris's mother

  once said, I think it was his mother, could've been someone else's, Òlly I never know'd a man who listened to hisself as good as you do.' He smiled to himself.

  `Cal Markham said this morning the radio makes it sound like war,' Chris said suddenly, as if it had been on his mind much of the day.

  011y looked at him in surprise. 'Son, you got to stop listening to people who babble,' he said firmly. "Course there's gonna be a war. They ain't keepin' all those jets dancing across the sky just for skywriting forever, you know. A gov'ment is a business, and sooner or later the gov'ment is gonna want its money's worth.'

  His son looked at him with youthful seriousness. 'What you gonna do, Pop, when that happens?' he asked.

  011y tossed his empty tongs into the forward cabin with a sense of relief and then stared out across the water. 'I'm gonna run, son,' he said with a sigh. 'That's why I'm gonna take up jogging. I would've taken it up years ago but I ain't learned how to do it on the water yet. Christ knows the Chesapeake's got enough mud in it to support a man three times my weight but somehow I just can't get the hang of it.'

  He wouldn't run, though. He would almost welcome it if it came, especially if the war would just take him and let Chris live to enjoy asses for another forty years as he had done. He'd always hated seeing old geezers sitting around in front of the general store, useless and unneeded. Although he was probaly now a geezer, he wasn't gonna be a sitter.

  No, he wouldn't run - unless he figured there was a live lady up the road aways, or a solid bit of honest work he could do. Then maybe he'd stick around. Take up jogging. Lethargically Jeanne gathered and packed clothing and sleeping bags for the cruise aboard Vagabond. She had no heart for the trip, no heart, really, for anything these days. She was packing only for herself, Lisa and Skip, since Bob had telephoned at three that afternoon to tell her that the Defense Department had asked everyone above the level of clerk to work over the weekend. He couldn't sail with them in the Chesapeake. He would be coming home only to eat and get a change of clothes.

  As she moved around first Skippy's bedroom and then her own, Jeanne was close to tears. It was anger and frustration at the insane way the Americans and Russians were stumbling towards war; frustration at her own incapacity to do anything; anger at Bob's failure even to see what was happening; anger that she was married to him. Normally lithe, catlike, and intense, now she moved dully, her long dark hair hanging limply down her back instead of bouncing as it usually did. She felt she had married the wrong man and was living only half a life. As she closed her suitcase carefully she imagined Bob'
s superior ironic smile at such a cliché about her life. He would assure her that of course she had married the wrong man, everybody did, but that was no reason to be miserable. Lisa came into her bedroom to ask if she could go visit her girlfriend Nancy before dinner and Jeanne had to focus in on her daughter. Framed in the doorway, Lisa held her tall, budding fifteen-year-old body with that strange stiff dignity she'd adopted over the last two years to show she was no longer a child. It irritated Jeanne, reminding her of the worst of the Forester family stuffiness. Compared to Lisa, round, energetic, happy-faced Skippy still seemed, at five spontaneous and free.

  `Have you finished your packing?' she asked.

  Ì did it last night,' Lisa replied. 'But don't forget to pack the lotions and towels you promised.'

  Ì will, I will. But look, honey. I need your help here. We'll be eating as soon as your father gets home, and I'd like you to go downstairs and begin heating the leftover stew. I'

  ll be down soon.'

  Òh, Mother,' Lisa replied. 'Can't you do that?' `Go,' said Jeanne. And she went, with a promptness that never ceased to amaze Jeanne - was that Bob's doing? A moment later she was alone again with her two suitcases and sleeping bag. Living with Bob wasn't working any more and she knew why: the war thing had grown too big and was too important to both of them. The whole world was divided into two groups, those desperately trying to avoid a war and those desperately preparing to see that their side won it. She and Bob were on opposite sides and the tension between them was becoming too much.

  The tension often tempted her just to give up. The cause she worked for seemed so hopeless. For close to three years she'd been active in a Washington-based group called SMN, Stop the Madness Now, an eclectic collection of feminists, political radicals, pacifists, scientists, doctors and even a few former high-ranking military officers, all of whom agreed on only one issue: the necessity of taking drastic actions to reverse the momentum towards nuclear war. She'd begun as a volunteer, in effect an unpaid secretary, but a year ago had been put on the part-time staff as a fundraiser and occasional speechwriter and editor for one of the retired admirals. But her promotion had, in the last six months, only made her increasingly depressed. The admiral spoke to the same audiences; the fundraising events raised the same piddly amounts of money - their yearly total budget would barely finance a single jet fighter; their letters got published in the Washington Post and New Toth Times and sank out of sight like pebbles in the sea; the marches got marched - and forgotten; and the great masses of Americans, vaguely worried about war, remained quite precisely and strongly worried about how they were going to meet their mortgage payments or feed their children. The prolonged worldwide economic crisis, which was so exacerbating the international tensions, also made reducing nuclear armaments or creating a United Nations superforce very low items on most people's agenda. The United States and Soviet Union argued and manoeuvred for power; Bob and she argued and manoeuvred for - for what she didn't know - and both sets of sides became increasingly alienated. Bob came home at six, gave a big hug to Skippy, a dignified kiss to Lisa, several words and caresses to their terrier Banjo, and a cheerful 'Hi, honey' to her. He went straight upstairs to change his clothes and pack an overnight bag. Ten minutes later they were all having dinner together.

  Jeanne's scruffy jeans and open-necked cotton blouse and long dark hair falling wildly about her face and shoulders contrasted sharply with her husband's neat three-piece suit, neatly combed dark hair and chiselled good looks, but she sensed that their moods were aligned: they were both subdued and anxious, hoping to control their conflict. They sat at opposite ends of the table with Lisa on Jeanne's left and Skip, propped up on two cushions, on her right. Lisa, with her erect posture and adult-sounding precise speech patterns, looked to Jeanne that evening like a young governess in some Victorian melodrama. Her husband was the villain. And she . . . ?

  Jeanne certainly no longer felt like a heroine. Now that her sporadic idealistic efforts to promote disarmament and peace were so clearly ineffective she felt as weak and foolish as Bob had always accused her of being. Yet as she watched him so meticulously eating his dinner and talking with such total seriousness with Lisa about the clothing she planned to wear in the Chesapeake, she could feel herself becoming angry. It was her anxiety being transmuted into anger, anger at those who were causing her fear: the Russians and the Pentagon and people like Bob who could so coolly calculate and contemplate the probabilities of various world catastrophes. Ànd what are you going to be doing, Daddy?' Jeanne heard Lisa say, and saw Bob start in surprise that the forbidden subject had been broached.

  `Just playing with Mars,' he replied with a soft smile. He poured himself more wine and awkwardly signalled with the bottle to ask her if she wanted some more. She shook her head.

  Ìs that all you ever do?' Lisa asked a little impatiently.

  Ì suppose so,' he replied. 'But the situation these days has been changing so fast we have to feed our monster new food five times a day instead of once or twice a week.' She noticed his eyes flash as he said this.

  Ìt still sounds boring,' said Lisa.

  `Calculating the probability of various war scenarios is many things, some of which your mother has strong feelings about,' Bob told Lisa, 'but one thing it never is is boring.'

  `You enjoy this crisis, don't you?' Jeanne said quietly as she leaned forward to wipe some spilled gravy from Skip's shirt. 'I suppose for you it's like playing in the Superbowl.'

  Bob put down his fork and took a sip of wine. 'People are rather interested these days in our calculations,' he• said, smiling nervously. 'I'm human enough to enjoy using my capabilities to the fullest and knowing I'm needed.'

  `That's fine,' Jeanne said slowly. 'But are you also human enough to be scared?'

  He looked startled, then laughed.

  Às a matter of fact, yes,' he replied. 'The world is in a

  measurably dangerous situation. I'm rather proud that our department, probably more than any other, is responsible for determining just how dangerous.'

  `Why "proud"?' she asked quietly. Whenever they began to argue, their voices would get softer and softer, a trait that she realized she had adopted from him. Their civility went with the French Provincial dining-room furniture, but she once told him that if he ever really got mad at her, his voice would get so low no one could hear it.

  `Because it is we who can warn the President which of his policy decisions are most dangerous,' Bob answered. 'Without us he might do something that we could have predicted would provoke the Soviets into attacking.'

  Jeanne took a last spoonful of the stew and wiped her mouth. 'And does your computer tell you what happens if they do attack?' she asked next.

  `No, Jupiter does,' Bob replied, absently pushing Skippy's hand away from the plate of chocolate chip cookies. 'Jupiter calculates who will probably win once a war starts. We on Mars just calculate the chances of a war starting.'

  Ànd what are the chances?' she asked with a coolness she didn't feel. 'Pretty high, aren't they?'

  He looked at her sombrely and shook his head. 'You know better than that,' he replied. '

  Obviously to one definitely knows, not even Mars, and if it did, I wouldn't tell you.'

  `Thanks,' she said.

  `But if I thought I knew, I'd bundle you and the kids off to the South Pacific. I certainly wouldn't be chatting with you ten miles from the White House with a glass of wine in my hand.'

  Ìnstead you send me off to the Chesapeake,' she countered, feeling even as she spoke that it was a childish rebuttal.

  Ì do want you to go, Jeanne,' he said to her with unusual seriousness.

  `Why?' she answered, frowning. 'You know I'm not fond

  of being on the water, and it's no safer there than any place else.'

  `Because I want you and the children to get away and have a good time,' he replied. 'Lisa'

  s always had a crush on Jimmy,' he went on, smiling at his daughter, 'and Neil Loken's a hunk,
if you like the type.'

  `Give me back my cookie!' Skippy said abruptly.

  `What's the type?' Jeanne asked, remembering that the previous summer Bob had described the captain as officious and remote.

  `You've had enough,' announced Lisa.

  `Horatio Hornblower,' Bob replied. 'The quiet he-man always standing tall on the poopdeck and squinting into the salt spray letting everyone know he's in command.'

  Ì have not,' Skippy whispered in his squeaky voice. 'I've had six, same as you.'

  `Well, we've had enough.'

  `You make him sound like a pain in the neck,' said Jeanne.

  Ì have not,' Skippy said firmly. 'Give me . .

  `Let go!' Lisa hissed as Skippy's little body sprawled across the tablecloth, lunging for the plate of cookies.

  Òuch! You shit!' said Skippy.

  `Skip!' Bob Forester exclaimed. 'Don't swear like that, and sit down!'

  `She pinched me.'

  `Lisa, leave the punishment of Skippy to us,' Jeanne said wearily.

  `He was stealing a cookie,' Lisa insisted with dignity. Ì was not!' Skippy exclaimed. Bob erupted finally from his chair and pulled his son firmly back into his seat, striking him twice sharply on the hand, Jeanne wincing with each slap. As the boy pouted and fought back tears, Bob resumed his seat and looked selfconsciously back at Lisa and Jeanne.

  `Yes, now, where were we?' he said.

  Àt sea,' said Jeanne ironically.

  Òh, yes, Neil,' Bob went on, adjusting his cloth napkin in his lap, his narrow eyes scowling. 'He's too quiet to be a pain in the neck.' His eyes crinkled into a smile. 'You have to be aware of his loud quietness in order to be annoyed. Some people like him. Women, I imagine, would find him attractive.'

  `Not if he never leaves the poopdeck,' Jeanne commented.

  Bob glanced at his watch and stood up, smiling awkwardly. Òh, Frank tells me he's perfectly willing to come down to .