Apparent Wind

by Dallas Murphy

  FORCE-7

  The Flamingo Tongue skippers and other kibitzers urged Doom and Rosalind to delay departure. Miami marine weather warned of a fast-approaching Arctic Maritime cold front bringing sustained winds of thirty knots and severe localized depressions, miniature hurricanes spawned by unusually warm Gulf Stream water, spinning off the leading edge of the front. Winds in excess of fifty knots had been recorded in the depressions. Twelve-to fifteen-foot seas were expected to follow the front. Even now swirling dark clouds had gathered in the northeast, and the sea had turned an ominous green. Waves broke constantly over the jetties at Bird Cut.

  “Staggerlee can take it,” Doom said.

  “We ain’t worried about the boat,” said Arnie.

  “We’re worried about the crew,” said Bobby.

  But this was precisely the weather Doom and Rosalind had been waiting for. The media were pressing in. Network news was calling for interviews, and camera crews had already begun to gather at Miami International, clogging car-rental desks. The Annes’ denial, scheduled for airing tomorrow night—the Annes had already left for New York—wouldn’t get the press and show-biz sharks off their backs, even if it temporarily deflected the law from the path of justice. Maybe it wouldn’t do that either. It was time to go.

  Rosalind and Lisa Up-the-Grove loaded stores and gear aboard Staggerlee. With help from Bert, Marvis, Sheriff Plotner, and the Flamingo Tongue skippers, Doom inspected sheets and halyards for signs of wear, checked that reefing lines were correctly led and that the hanks on the storm jib were in working order, oiled the stiff ones, and saw to it that the hatches could be effectively closed and dogged. Then they inspected the standing rigging. Bert examined the shroud tangs through binoculars. There was a grim mood around the preparations that morning, as if departure, planned for 1500 hours, might be the last any of them would see of Doom and Rosalind.

  They ran and cleated jack lines, attachment points for safety harnesses, the length of the deck. They unflaked the mainsail and inspected its headboard, its tack, clew, and reefing grommets. They repeated the process on the numbers one and two genoas, the working jib, and the storm trysail. They tugged and yanked on the winches, the leads, and the cleats to test their mountings.

  Helping, the Flamingo Tongue skippers discussed sabotage among themselves, noting that Doom had only one mainsail. All they’d need to do was cut a six-or seven-inch slit along a stress point to render the sail useless, immediate departure untenable, but none of them had the heart to draw a knife. Hell, Doom might just go anyway, even if they holed the boat. He appeared blindly determined to depart come hell or high water, both of which were forecast, and that seemed out of character for him. Rosalind went about her preparations with cold resolve, like a prospective suicide.

  “You got an EPIRB?” Arnie demanded.

  “What’s that?” Doom asked.

  “Emergency position-indicating radio beacon.”

  “Oh, yes, I have one of those.”

  “Let’s see it.”

  Doom pretended he was too distracted to show it to them.

  The Flamingo Tongue skippers cornered Bert. “Look, Bert, what do you think about this voyage?”

  “Bad weather. I think they ought to put it off.”

  “That’s what we’re sayin’.”

  “Guy’s tryin’ to get himself killed.”

  “Rosalind too.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, can’t you do anything? Hell, you’re the captain.”

  “I already tried. What more can I do? Besides, Doom’s the captain now.”

  They stood around in a knot, talking about the state of the sea without moving their lips. You could feel twenty knots of true wind on your face—right down here in the harbor. Imagine what it was gonna be like out there beyond a thousand fathoms.

  “He ain’t got the skills yet,” said Arnie. “Two weeks ago he didn’t know how to take a shit on a boat.”

  “Takes years.”

  “He’s a smart guy, sure, but he ain’t got the skills.”

  “Even if you got the skills you don’t go out in this.”

  “Talk to him, Bert.”

  “I did. I told you.”

  “Look, let’s all go talk to him at once.”

  “Okay, let’s.”

  But it was no use. Doom and Rosalind were adamant.

  A glum group gathered on the dock to see them off. Billy, Bobby, Arnie, and Arnie Jr. felt frustrated, angry that their advice was going unheeded, but that wasn’t their true feeling. They were, frankly, sad to see Doom and Rosalind go and afraid they’d never be seen again. Doom and Rosalind and the rest of them had done some funny business, though no one knew clearly just what. Some people said they had sunk the King Don and killed Donald Sikes, but that was all for the good as far as the Flamingo Tongue skippers were concerned. Sure, there were a lot of suspicious Yankees hanging around, but they could be dealt with. You could always bullshit Yankees, get them so confused they’d go home. Doom and Rosalind didn’t need to bolt in panic like this.

  Dawn and Archie waved white dish cloths.

  Captain Bert, Sheriff Plotner, Longnecker, Holly, Marvis, the professor, and Lisa Up-the-Grove stood silently watching Staggerlee back out of her berth, motor around the breakwater past the sunken hulk of the King Don and into the swift ebb tide blowing through Bird Cut.

  “It’s suicide, goddamnit,” said Arnie. His compatriots concurred.

  And it was, in a sense.

  Doom and Rosalind were shocked by the state of the sea outside the Cut, even though they knew it would be bad. Great green hulkers in endless ranks broke spectacularly against the north jetty. Spray, sometimes solid water, flew clear across the Cut onto the south jetty. Between the jetties, visibility was nil. Outside the jetties chaos reigned.

  In full foul-weather gear, Doom sat at the wheel with his back to weather. There was a smile on his face. They were going to sea together. They were going to die together. There was a wonderful kind of intimacy in that. Rosalind moved from the relative shelter under the canvas dodger and came aft to sit beside Doom. He put his arm around her, but he quickly removed it when he found he was unable to maintain control with one hand on the wheel.

  When they presented their beam to the wind, waves broke over it. Doom turned his bow quarter to weather. Rosalind took the helm while Doom crawled forward to the mast, clipped his safety harness to the spinnaker pole fitting, and set the trysail. He then went forward to the bow to set the number three jib. It was bulletproof, but Doom decided it was too big, so he hauled it aft and set the storm jib instead. He had never been on the bow of a boat in these conditions. Things were different up there.

  Extreme motion is most violent in the ends of a boat. When the bow dropped off the backs of the waves, Doom found himself momentarily airborne, following the bow down to where it disappeared underwater. It took him twenty minutes to set the jib, attach the tack and halyard, and tie on the sheets, a task which in fair weather he could have done in five. He spent most of the time hanging on.

  Rosalind, tight-lipped, fought the wheel. Doom came aft to help. He clipped Rosalind’s safety harness around the steering pedestal, and then his own. He had never seen the Florida sky look so bellicose before. The darkness in the northeast obliterated the horizon as if that part of the ocean and the sky had joined forces, become one, and attacked.

  The sullen bon voyage party climbed up to the road where, shielding their eyes against driven sand, they watched Staggerlee diminish into the spindrift. They could see the tip of her mast snapping back and forth, spray exploding around her bows.

  “Goners,” pronounced Arnie with a slow shake of his head.

  They watched until Staggerlee vanished, then Archie said, “Well, come on back to the Tongue. I’ll close up, and we’ll all have a stiff drink.”

  The storm blew all night. Passing over the Middle Keys, it eroded beaches, blew down palm trees, wrecked several boats at a marina on Upper Matacumbe Key, and
lifted the roof off a grade school on Vaca Key. Up and down the string of islands, wherever salty locals gathered to discuss fish, boats, and the ocean, old men said that short of a hurricane, they’d never seen a storm so prolonged and violent. “Rough as a cob out there.” Back up at Bird Cut, a tourist family of three from Manitoba, ignorant of the power of the sea, was swept from the south jetty and never seen again.

  The next morning, winds down to the high teens, seas still wild and confused, Bert, Marvis, Longnecker, and Holly walked the beach. That’s when they came upon the wreckage of Staggerlee. They carried her remains back to the Flamingo Tongue, since that was the nearest phone from which to call the Coast Guard at Miami. They piled the wreckage on a table near the door. Silently, the skippers, Archie, and Dawn gathered around as if it were the corpse of a drowned friend.

  Dawn began to cry. Holly held her.

  There was the horseshoe life ring with her name on the yellow cover, the broken man-overboard pole, some plastic drinking glasses also bearing Staggerlee’s name, her number one genoa in its torn and sodden bag.

  Arnie Jr. began to weep silently.

  Archie phoned the Coast Guard. He put Bert on the phone to describe the boat more precisely. Bert felt guilty talking to the officer, but it had to be done. He just hoped none of their people got hurt in the search.

  There were also cockpit seat cushions and a dropleaf from Staggerlee’s table. There was the wooden frame of a hatch cover and the cracked toilet seat from her head.

  The skippers sadly shook their heads. Billy wiped a tear from his cheek with a paper napkin and pretended he had something in his eye.

  “Who’s gonna tell Mrs. Up-the-Grove?” Dawn wondered.

  A giggling tourist family from Moline, Illinois, wandered in, but Archie told them he was closed, sorry.

  Holly and Longnecker, Bert and Marvis, Professor Goode and Sheriff Plotner all felt guilty.

  “Wait a minute,” said Arnie, “I got a question. How come you all happened to find this wreckage, and how come you found it all in one place? You know what I mean? I mean, don’t that seem a little unusual from what we know about shipwrecks?”

  “Yeah,” said Bobby, “now you mention it.”

  “Yeah. And how come nobody else found any wreckage?”

  The conspirators looked at each other, hesitated. They simply had to tell these good people the truth about their friends’ death.

  SEA STRUCK

  Doom liked to go deep. He liked that hit of nitrogen narcosis and its accompanying feeling of fluidity, of tranquillity. Something happens to air under pressure. Its component gases mutate. Beyond 250 feet our friend oxygen turns toxic. At much lesser depths, nitrogen takes on narcotic qualities. Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Emile Gagnan, and Frederic Dumas “discovered” nitrogen narcosis in the pioneering days, called it “rapture of the deep” and described the wild, deadly antics of a pixillated diver who thought he didn’t really need all that air and genially offered his mouthpiece to a passing grouper. Doom had never experienced anything that extreme, and when he asked Rosalind if she had, she hesitated, then said only, “Claudius liked to go deep, too.”

  At depth Doom generally experienced a happy sense of unity with the ocean and its animals. They ignored him, but sometimes Doom felt he and Rosalind could live a blissful life among the indigo hamlets, harlequin bass, fairy basslets, glassy sweepers, mutton snappers, schoolmasters, tomtates, sailors choice, French anglefish, threespot damselfish, beaugregorys, Creole wrasse, slippery dicks, and puddingwives. Intellectually, of course, he knew they could not. He wasn’t besotted with the nitrogen. He was besotted with Rosalind.

  Here at Doom and Rosalind’s newly discovered favorite site an enormous rock plate, a piece of the continent’s underpinnings the size of a small shopping center parking lot, had undergone titanic fracturing and uplift. The rock had cracked evenly in half as the outer edges folded upward, perhaps during Jurassic times, to form a steep-walled canyon with a narrow sandy channel at the bottom. Now the nearly vertical rock faces were decorated with soft corals, sponges, plumrose anemones, feather stars, Christmas tree worms, purple sea fans, and other crynoids and gorgonians.

  Staggerlee had not gone to sea in the strict sense of the term. Doom and Rosalind had sailed east out into the fringe of the storm where seas towered and the wind clawed at Doom and Rosalind’s weak points. They agreed that conditions in the brunt of the storm must have been terrifying, far beyond their experience and perhaps beyond their ability to survive. It was easy to understand how even seaworthy boats like Staggerlee could be enveloped by those breakers, broached or pitch-poled, and dismasted. Perhaps even overwhelmed and driven under. But Doom and Rosalind turned south and ran before the blow. The apparent wind dropped radically, but still it had been a wild, white-knuckled ride.

  They ducked into Meridian Passage Bay through Farewell Pass below Cormorant Key. In the lee of the islands, where the seas were short and steep, Staggerlee sailed fast all night and most of the following day when, near dusk, they found a quiet anchorage between Stirrup and Russel keys. They set a Danforth anchor and a big CQR, both with heavy chain and hundred-foot rodes, and they lay low for two days while the storm died.

  During that time they painted out the name Staggerlee on the stern. Staggerlee had ceased to exist.

  They couldn’t stay long in one place. They bounced from anchorage to anchorage, heading southwest as far as Big Pine Key. There were problems. For instance, what were they going to do now? They talked about crossing to remote parts of the Bahamas, then dismissed the idea because they couldn’t clear customs without proper boat papers. The authorities by now would have given up the search for Staggerlee, but someone would remember her name. They could repaint the boat, rename her, but she’d still have Staggerlee’s papers. So they decided to stay in American waters. But where would they be safe from persistent members of the FBI, the media, and the major studios? Where could they remain obscure, nameless? And how long would it take before the heat was off, before they were forgotten? Everyone dead is forgotten eventually.

  Rosalind joined Doom at the bottom of the canyon. Doom could tell she was being a diving instructor, peering deeply into his eyes. Were they spinning like slot machine cherries? Was he about to eschew air? He gave her the okay sign, and she seemed to relax. He reached up and squeezed her left breast under her stretchy suit. Coyly, she knocked his hand aside.

  Doom and Rosalind disturbed an eagle ray, an old one with a five-foot wingspan, grazing for mollusks in the sand. After an initial blast of escape speed, the eagle ray slowed and flew languidly along the canyon, banking and jinking like Hollywood’s notion of a spacecraft, and then glided softly to a landing on the sand, where it continued to graze. Doom envied the creature its several million years of adaptation to the ocean environment. This was an animal that fit in. That was the trouble with mankind. Mankind controlled the earth, but he never fit in. His gifts allowed him, finally forced him, to stand apart and envy the peace that must accompany perfect adaptation to a specific environment, while he remained anxious, frightened, maladjusted, and, therefore, destructive.

  Was that a profound thought? Doom wondered. Naw, probably just the nitrogen talking. The reality of the ocean is depth, and Doom wondered what the nitrogen would say beyond 200 feet. Would it be the source of profound insight at that pressure, or would it render one a helpless gob of stupidity with the mental acuity of a gooseneck barnacle? Finally, Doom supposed, it would render one a drowning victim, and as one’s body sank, the weight of the water above would crush it like a Dixie cup. Was that the ocean’s means of protection from mankind? But then, Doom and Rosalind had already died at sea, and that wasn’t too bad. Wet, cold, rough, but nothing one couldn’t survive.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  DALLAS MURPHY is the author of Lover Man, a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year (1987), which was also selected as one of the Year’s Best by Publishers Weekly and nominated for a coveted Edgar Award. His sec
ond novel, Apparent Wind, was hailed by The New York Times Book Review as “a flamboyant comic nightmare…There is fun here, but also real fury in Mr. Murphy’s raging imagination.” Dallas Murphy grew up in south Florida and now lives in New York City.