The Tidewater Tales

by John Barth

  Laborwise, our fleet got to where it was going in good time, though Kath’s contractions had both accelerated and regularized well beyond the norm for so early in the game. No problems with the Simon Silver dropoff (Au revoir, Reprise!) or with Chip’s singlehanding Story up to rendezvous with Katydid IV at the Georgetown bridge. Two transient slips were reserved through next weekend, when whoever is free and in the mood (it will be Hank, Chip, and Bobby Henry) will return the boats to Nopoint Point. An ambulance stood by at the Sassafras Boat Company for Kath and Peter and Doctor Jack; Bobby Henry was on his way in the Sherritts’ saddle-brown Caddy to pick up the other four.

  Weatherwise, however, we were just in time. To west-southwest the sky turned soot-black and copper-green. On Katydid’s radio and the ambulance’s, NOAA Baltimore was issuing a tornado watch and severe thunderstorm alert for that city, the whole upper Bay area, and the Eastern Shore.

  P and K smiled: Blooey! But all were concerned for Reprise, not to mention Rocinante IV. Docklines were rechecked, deck gear doubly secured. Doctor and patient conferred, patient and spouse, doctor and ambulance driver. Out over the Bay they heard the first thunder, and word came in now of considerable destruction in the city: large trees uprooted in Druid Hill Park, in Guilford, in Homeland; a great crane toppled by ninety-knot winds at the Dundalk Marine Terminal, and the whole shebang headed our way. Whistled Peter Ninety knots! He’d never seen wind that strong. Dangerous even to drive, the party agreed. As birth was not imminent, it made most sense to stay put, ambulance and drivers as well, and keep an eye on the boats—indeed, remain aboard—until the squall blew through: an hour at most. Should the ambulance be summoned to direr work, the Sherritt Coupe DeVille (there it came now) could fetch the drama’s principals to Easton Memorial.

  What I hear, announced flush-faced Bobby Henry with a wink at Peter Sagamore, she’s blowing the daylights out of Tolchester and Rock Hall.

  Blooey! Behind Ordinary Point (so the Talbotts will tell us later, who barely reattained in time that familiar shelter), some yachts dragged anchor at the height of the storm—couple of seventy-knot gusts, plenty of fifty-pluses—and made life interesting for those downwind whose anchors held. Simon Silver loved it. Frank and Lee’s main concern, and Carla B Silver’s, was for Marian, somewhere out there in the thick of it with Captain Donald Quicksoat. By 1900 hours, the violent front had passed; ambulance and Cadillac were negotiating tree-limbed highways on their way to Easton in light rain; Reprise weighed anchor and sailed out on the fresh northwesterly, enjoyed a fine clear sunset, and parked for the night in Still Pond Creek, from where the crew ran home today with a stop at Kent Island Narrows to drop off May Jump and Carla and Simon. Through the evening, and all day today, the Talbotts have monitored channel 16 and heard alarums aplenty: reports of two sportfishermen drowned in the storm in small boats off the Patapsco; news of a large cruising ketch blown out of its storage cradle at Rock Hall; word of a helicopter crash off Corsica Neck, names of victims not yet released—Good lord, Frank Talbott says: Do you suppose?—but, thank heaven, no reports of sailboats in real trouble: just the usual chatter of blown-out sails and You-shoulda-seen-its and We’11-be-late-getting-home-hons, better-call-my-office. On the other hand, there’s no response when they try to raise Rocinante IV or radiotelephone Carl&’s Cavern and her apartment upstairs.

  So they’re taking their time, Lee Talbott supposes, hoping she’s right: that the salty old pseudo-Spaniard and her kid sister are getting it on at Rocinante’s mooring in Bowleys Quarters or Frog Mortar Creek.

  She’s wrong.

  TWO AND A HALF TONS MARIJUANA SEIZED FROM BOAT NEAR OCEAN CITY, Scheherazade hears from C.B S. What’s your next chestnut, Mister Sagamore, in need of fetching from the fire? Ah, so: BONAPARTE, she was saying. Breadbasket Inc. The Saint Deniston School for Girls.

  Okay: The Russkies get half the extra acreage they wanted, but none of the extra privacy. The Agency people brought in unknowingly by The Deniston School as construction supervisors to relocate a horse barn from the property involved are able to plant (in a few cases literally) additional surveillance devices on or near the grounds, not all of which the KGB debuggers routinely locate and either destroy or make use of to leak disinformation. Not even Scheherazade will tell what, in their dirty, demoralizing, and stupendously expensive business, such snoopers learn and mislearn from one another. When her keyhole omniscope picks up such dreck, she dismisses it from our story.

  The blooeying of Easton Air Freight’s helicopter virtually into the Soviets’ Corsica Neck compound will prove to be everybody’s good fortune except its pilot’s and his passengers’. The president of Sherbald Enterprises had postponed that scheduled noon rendezvous with his new partners in Breadbasket Incorporated at the old Back Creek granary not because the chopper was down for servicing, as he’d reported to Henry Sherritt, but because his longtime friend and Sherbald cofounder, ex-Congressman Porter “Poonie” Baldwin, Jr., wanted to come along and couldn’t get to the Queenstown office until four. It turns out Poonie’s heart had been oddly touched by that accidental encounter (on Wye Island, Day 10, outside the gate of Natural Recycling Research) with his childhood sweetheart and first wife, so immensely pregnant now by her handsome and—so Poon understood, though he had not gotten ‘round to reading any of Peter Sagamore’s fiction—somewhat famous current husband. He bore Katherine Sherritt no grudge for the so implacable grudge she bore him, which he mildly wished could be placated. It occurred to him to follow up that amusing and after all nonhostile encounter with another—festive, unannounced, and short, in the company of her family and family friends at the little granary ceremony—where, by comporting himself with self-effacing dignity, he might lead her to see him in a less unsympathetic light. He would like that, Poonie would, for he remembered warmly, if wincingly, his first and only real heterosexual love, dating back to Heather Foulke-Stoughton’s gazebo and beyond.

  Katherine aside, he and Willy had other business that Sunday: Sherbald Enterprises had employed a Baltimore acquaintance of Willy’s to coordinate the interests of Natural Recycling Research and the New Jersey waste-disposal firms with which NRR expected to do an increasing business as Breadbasket Inc. expanded its feed-grain acreage on the Eastern Shore. The fellow also had connections with an oil-recycling firm in Baltimore that Sherbald Enterprises hoped to acquire: The American Recovery Company, which specialized in dumping benzene, xylene, toluene, chromium, lead, copper, and cadmium wastes into Chesapeake Bay under the camouflage of its oil-recovering facility. He was, finally, a handsome devil, this new chap: a Rumanian-American, whom Poonie thought might be induced to work two sides of the sexual street, as he had worked some others.

  The plan, then, was for the four of them—himself, Willy, the pilot, and Lascar Lupescu—to go on from the Sassafras ceremony up to Atlantic City on the Sunday evening to confer with one of their business associates there, and then today to stop at Bridgeport and Price’s Pit, both in New Jersey, to have a look at a particularly successful operation Lupescu had heard of: bribing city garbagemen to spray toxic wastes on ordinary trash before composting it for illegal disposal at the municipal landfill. On then to New York City, to see whether American Recovery could effectively imitate the mob’s waste-recycling firms there, which lace nearly half the heating oil sold in that city with toxins that ordinary oil burners spout uncombusted into the sky. A bit of sport Monday night in the Big Apple, chacun à son goût, and back home to Maryland tomorrow.

  Much bigger stuff, all this, than slipping your Lester Treadways twenty a week to dump a few drums in various Queen Annes County landfills, or tipping your Bobby Henrys extra not to ask what’s in the ones they drop overboard after dark from time to time in the deep spot off Bloody Point Light, or mixing a shooter of PCBs with the pesticides sprayed by air on Breadbasket’s golden waves of grain, which only dumb animals are going to eat anyhow, right? She cannot swat this chopper out of the sky, Scheherazade declares, before wondering on
e last time, with Peter Sagamore and Katherine Sherritt, what such fellows as Willy and Poonie really think of themselves and their doings. Compared to the Pentagon and the Kremlin, these Doomsday Factors in our own backyards are no mortal threat, individually, to the world at large. But daily and knowingly, Will Sherritt befouls his own nest and ours, with the same bluff indifference wherewith he passed along his herpes simplex even unto his wife, and Poon his crab lice unto Katherine. He fishes in these waters, goddamn it, says Willy, and he eats his catch. He’s a dues-paying member of Ducks Unlimited, and sure, the ducks are scarcer than they used to be, and the rockfish have their ups and downs, mostly downs, but he bets there’s more Canada geese on the flyway than when the Injuns were around. And there are scores of Willys and Poonies all about us.

  Blooey! Baldwin and Lupescu had a couple of scotches in the car en route across the Bay to Queenstown and were late arriving. Willy (we’ve heard from Molly already) had been coming through the rye before he left home, and prevailed upon the chopper pilot to have one with him in the Queenstown office while they waited. Just as Poonie and Lascar arrived, Molly Sherritt telephoned with the news of Katherine’s labor and the cancellation of the granary ceremonies. Disappointed, the three passengers (but not the pilot) nevertheless drank a toast to Willy’s sister and Poonie’s ex. and decided to fly directly to their business in Atlantic City. How could an experienced pilot be induced to take off, on no urgent mission, in the face of so darkly oncoming a squall? Not even Scheherazade can say, though time and again, from Story’s anchorages, we’ve seen light aircraft overhead in such situations. But lift off they did at 1745, from the pad behind the Sherbald offices, even as Blooey’s leading edge swept across Kent Island. They were airborne for less than ten minutes, flying north at a few hundred feet over Queenstown Creek, various Breadbasket corn lots, stands of pine and mixed hardwoods, Reed and Grove Creeks, The Deniston School for Girls. At the height of the storm, they plunged into the Corsica between Red Nun 2 and the Soviet dock at Corsica Neck.

  The crash was witnessed by several yachtsfolk anchored in the large bight nearby, which includes part of Deniston’s waterfront; but those witnesses had their hands full coping with the squall, and their accounts differ. One says the helicopter was blammed by a massive downdraft and hit the water with its engine running full-throttle; another swears the engine stalled and the craft flipped over; a third (U.S. Navy, retired) swears that a Russian with a walkie-talkie was on the pier at the time and pointed up at the chopper while speaking into his transceiver just before the crash. He does not doubt (this gentleman will write to the editors of the Baltimore Sun) that the Soviet vacation compound is equipped with devices to stall the engines of low-overflying aircraft, along with electronic hardware for snooping on our National Security Agency snoopery at Fort Meade and the eighty Pentagon facilities on Chesapeake Bay. A few far-right-wingers will mount a halfhearted effort to beatify their fallen ex-darling, who was perhaps on a highly classified mission of which the Soviets were aware. One of Baldwin’s companions will be rumored to have been a present or former CIA agent, perhaps a KGB double agent. . . .

  The Soviet embassy will make no comment, though the incident no doubt helped justify their measures to increase security at Corsica Neck. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency will deny—truthfully, as it happens, in this instance—any present connection with Lascar Lupescu, but only the naive will credit that denial. The KGB, were it given to comment upon such allegations, would make a similar denial, likewise truthful in this instance, and likewise to be ignored, as ought to be all such public statements by all such agencies and the governments they serve, for they lie and lie and lie and lie.

  The little fuss soon dies down. Autopsies disclose that Willy Sherritt and the pilot, seated forward in the helicopter, were crushed on impact; that datum suggests a nosedive, though the machine settled finally upright on its skids in ten feet of tidewater. Ex-Congressman Baldwin and ex-CIA/KGB low-level operative Lascar Lupescu, strapped into the rear seats, drowned. Poon’s second wife’s lawyer (she’d given up Standing By Her Husband) will be obliged to recast her divorce-suit claims into claims upon the estate of the deceased. No great matter.

  Guilt-smitten Molly Barnes Sherritt truly grieves. What on earth for? wonders Katherine, who, though shocked, can muster only regret, not deep grief, for her brother’s death. Oh, for having briefly trafficked behind Willy’s back with Douglas Townshend in Operation BONAPARTE, for her husband’s own good, as she’d thought, and maybe the country’s. For having not after all been able to conceive a child by Willy, though there toward the end, on the strength of his one-eighty, she’d truly believed she had. The thing in her womb is something else. For a season she’ll find some comfort in widowhood, honoring Willy’s memory; then she’ll be overtaken by the great project of dying stoically of metastasized cervical cancer. In the absence of immediate heirs, she’ll bequeath the bulk of her considerable estate to The St. Deniston School for Girls, as the institution will have been named by the time she rejoins her husband in the Sherritt family graveplot.

  Scheherazade’s position is that what’s to be regretted in this matter is that such as Willy Sherritt and Porter Baldwin, Jr., become what they become, in despite of extraordinary privilege and loving parents of good character. It should not be supposed that they were wholly vicious fellows, without any redeeming qualities, incapable of becoming slightly better human beings. But as they turned out to be mainly bad, and not likely much to improve, their surely accidental death need not be greatly mourned nor take up even one additional sentence in this Ending.

  Says sleepy Shahryar Hmp. Wrap up that Captain Whatsisname, why don’t you: the old fellow with the new young concubine.

  With goodly gree, say K & P. Supposedly en route across the Bay from Ordinary Point to Rocinante’s Middle River mooring and thence to Baltimore and Carla’s Cavern, Captain Donald Quicksoat detoured late yesterday morning down to Still Pond Creek to park for lunch and, you know, a swim; after which just enough of a breeze sprang up to seduce him into trying to sail instead of motoring, despite the threatening forecast and Rocinante’s sluggishness in light air. There’s a sailor for you. Topless Marian soon grew bored: The heat was woozy-making; there wasn’t even a portable radio aboard for her entertainment; and her new lover had proved short on staying power. The afternoon was well advanced before the skipper packed it in and went back to motoring, leaving his main and mizzen sails up in hope of eventual better wind. But the aged diesel turned balky—sounded to Capn Don like fouled fuel injectors—and when the sky ahead went dark, and the first cool breeze came from the northwest, and it was time to shirt up and take precautionary measures, Rocinante’s main halyard jammed at the mast truck with the sail not even down to its first reef points. A serious matter, but not yet alarming to a veteran solo passagemaker. He dropped the mizzen and limped into the lee of Pooles Island—exposed from every direction except west and northwest, but the nearest shelter available. There he anchored and bid Marian go below and put on a life vest while he made his way up the mast to either free or cut the fouled halyard before the storm hit. She saw him climb ratlines to the main spreaders, rig the free jib halyard into an improvised bosun’s sling, and, with an open clasp knife between his teeth, begin half shinnying, half hauling himself up the rest of the mast, wedging one bare foot at a time between the slack sailsides like a rock-climber on a tricky face. Frightened then by the black sky and water and the rising wind, she went below per orders as Blooey struck.

  It cannot have been just another thundersquall, even for C.D.Q. For Mim Silver it was as terrifying an hour as any since the conception of her son. One blast laid Rocinante right over on her beam ends; loose gear flew across the cabin, as did the hapless passenger; only the life jacket spared her more than one broken rib and an even more impressive array of contusions than she has. The ketch righted itself, but pitched and yawed violently on its anchor rode. The rigging shrieked; bolts of lightning exploded a
ll about; rain backlashed into the open companionway and soaked everything inside; the whole world seemed to roar. Marian trembled on the cabin sole, covered with loose settee-cushions, vomiting with terror and motion sickness, certain that the boat was going down but too frightened to leave the cabin even if she had believed she could manage to. Atheist on principle, she nevertheless found herself praying from time to time to someone: not that she and the ship and its skipper survive, but that her sister please please please please please be pregnant.