Some of the models she sold, now and then, along with the surplus fish she caught, to augment their small income. Any cash left over after their meager expenses were taken care of went into a bank account she kept for some undisclosed purpose. The old sailor, as dead to matters of finance as he was to most other things, never asked her about it.
He spent his days in a captain’s chair at the prow of the shiplike house, drinking cup after cup of coffee and watching the movements of the sea. Often—too often—the coffee was spiked with rum. When Miranda came into view, he watched her with the same dispassion he spent on the waves. She was a tall, green-eyed girl with a strong face, broken nose, and dark hair that hung clear down to her shoulders, and in the early morning, before the wild dogs appeared to feed along the sea wrack, she danced on the rocks at the base of the headland, with the sea crashing around her. She danced to some music shaped by the waves thudding and rasping on the shingle, odd rhythms of hissing sand, breaking shells, melting mud, and the cries of seabirds overhead. The fulmar fling. The gannet gavotte. The waltz of the terns and petrels. She wore a white nightgown that swirled around her as she spun and swayed, her hair swinging a beat or two behind.
Culdee watched her strong, bare feet grab the rock, thrust from it, grab again, and spin, sure on the wet, black granite. Sometimes she sang as she danced, old chanteys delved from her ancient sea books:
Heisa, heisa
vorsa, vorsa
wow, wow
one long draft
more might, more might
young bluid, young bluid
more mude, more mude
false flesh
lie aback, lie aback
long swack, long swack
that, that, that, that
there, there, there, there
yellow hair, yellow hair
hips bare, hips bare
tell ’em all, tell ’em all
gallows birds all, gallows birds all
great and small, great and small
one an’ all, one an’ all
heist all, heist all . . .
Down on the beach, the dogs were eating something large and gray. The old sailor did not care any more what it was. He turned his chair from the sea. The fog in his mouth tasted of sea coal.
TWO
Only at sea could Culdee come really alive. The first clank of the anchor chain through the pawls of the wildcat set his heart to singing. He loved it up on the forepeak then, hosing down the ground tackle as it came aboard, sluicing great gray globs of harbor mud off the links and flukes of the anchor and watching them fall in awkward, heavy splashes that clouded the water. He loved to hear the engine bells ringing from the bridge, a profane Angelus of the sea. The Captain’s crisp, dispassionate commands, the helmsman swinging the wheel, the first bite of the rudder when he had the wheel watch—all of these were Culdee’s sacraments. It was like taking a cathedral to sea.
The whole ship shuddered as the wake boiled out behind them—bobbing buoys and winking lighthouses, the slowly sinking hotels and banks and spires of the receding shore, wind over the bridge, gulls wheeling and screaming, all hands to quarters for leaving port, harbor seals gaping from the stone of the breakwater and the first taste of salt as a wave blasted the prow, spray sheeting high over the gunwales, as high as the wheelhouse, wetting even the flag bags on the signal bridge, the seawall behind them falling back, sinking like the city into the sea, and only the empty ocean dead ahead . . .
Another cup of coffee gone cold. He sipped it anyway and watched the waves slide ashore through the fog.
Once they had run independently from Japan back to San Francisco, in fog the whole way. A great circle route that took them up to the Aleutians, then back down in a slow arc past Alaska along the Pacific coast. Only once had they seen land—a brief glimpse of Mount Logan, shining pale and solid through the seasmoke; most of the way you couldn’t see half a mile from the bridge. They passed no other ships, but in midocean whales sometimes broached and blew close at hand, the rotten-fish reek of their breath drifting through on cool, damp air. Porpoises rode the bow wave, and the ship settled into her working routine as if the fog would never break: they might be steaming in one spot forever. All day the sound of paint scrapers rasped from the steel decks, and the smell of fresh red lead washed back into the fabric of the fog. On the messdecks, they ate as though every dawn brought holiday routine—steak and eggs for breakfast (it was Kōbe beef, tender and juicy, hand-massaged by pretty little Japo farm girls with night soil between their toes; the eggs stayed fresh the whole way across). There wasn’t a single fight on deck or in the crew quarters. Not one man was haled to captain’s mast—not even tough little baby-faced Reibald, whose father had been a “chopper in the woods” in Oregon and once got his throat cut in a fight over a girl on the Pike in Long Beach but made it back to the ship so the pharmacist’s mates could stitch him up and he wouldn’t miss movement for WestPac. Even little Reibald, the signalman striker who looked like a choirboy convicted of murder, was full of the milk of human kindness on this cruise. Ed Krueger, the chief electrician and the hairiest man in the navy (except for his bald head; from his lower eyelids down, he was as shaggy as a black bear), raced up the ladder to the bridge one day, spread his arms wide, the fog misting his rimless glasses, and yelled for all to hear, “Every day in the navy’s just like Sunday on the farm!”
Now, dead at heart in the captain’s chair, Culdee realized it had been the Sunday of his life. But that was long ago.
Now even his tattoos were fading.
THREE
In the end it was the land that killed him, a ratty, mangrove-tangled stretch of it on the beach somewhere north of the Ben Hai River. Culdee had his own command then—a fast, hard-hitting, throaty little Swift boat that could turn thirty knots with her twin diesels two-blocked. Their job, part of Operation Market Time, was to patrol the Vietnamese coast near the DMZ, watching for junks and sampans that might be carrying enemy troops or ammo south. When they found one, it usually meant a fight. But the Swift had twin .50s mounted atop the pilothouse, another machine gun and an 81-mm mortar tube aft, and plenty of maneuverability along with her speed. She looked like a cross between an old World War II PT boat and a pilot boat, and she drew only three feet of water.
That came in handy when they ran SEAL teams into North Vietnam, usually in the dead of night and dark of the moon. In a way, though, it was the boat’s shallow draft that lured Culdee to his death. They were running north at dusk, above Quang Tri, just idling along the ten-fathom curve and watching the coastline a thousand yards off the port beam. They were under strict radio silence, and they didn’t have to extract the SEALs until dawn the next day. There had been reports of enemy movement along the coast—maybe some NVA units infiltrating toward Con Thien was the word.
“Something’s happening in there, Chief,” the lookout said. “Back in the mangroves. Could be Charlie.”
Culdee looked through his glasses—they were Leitz 9 × 35s, clear and crisp. He’d won them off a West German news photographer in a poker game at Cam Ranh Bay. He focused them and saw the dusty green mangrove leaves snap sharp. There was movement beyond the web of twisted branches—darkness and light; black cloth, pale skin—like a priest dimly glimpsed through the screen of a confessional. The light was fading fast, though, and Culdee saw a string of cormorants angling along just above the tops of the mangroves and the last light shining golden-green on the coconut palms back of the beach. He spun the wheel to port and pointed the bow toward the movement.
Drake, the gunner’s mate, was already hunkered behind the twin .50s. Culdee heard him work the retracting handle back; he heard a click, then the second pull to seat the round. He looked astern. Earhart, the young engineman, was at the aft gun mount. The diesels grumbled and farted at low revs, and small waves slapped the fifty-foot hull. They were heading straight into the last of the sunset, and the light on the water couldn’t be worse. There was coral all along the coast
that could tear your heart out. Culdee kept a sharp eye out for the quick, shy swirls that broke over reefs and niggerheads. The water was shoaling fast.
Then he saw something awash, right in close to the mangroves. At first it looked like the body of a man. Then it looked a lot bigger.
“Could be a crate or something,” the lookout said. He was using the twelve-power glasses. “Maybe wrapped in a tarp?” he added.
There was no more movement in the trees, but that didn’t mean anything. They were about three hundred yards off the beach now, and it was getting dark fast. There is no twilight in the tropics.
“Hey, Guns,” Culdee yelled topside. “Cut me down some of them mangroves.”
“Aye, sir!”
The .50s slammed; great white flocks of egrets lurched screaming into the dusk. Leaves flew, big chunks of purple and white wood went soaring off crazily, whole stands of trees slowly toppled. There was no answering fire.
“Maybe it was just water buffalo,” the lookout said doubtfully. But buffalo would have run, or at least bellowed.
Culdee dropped the engines into neutral. The crate, or whatever it was, still lay sloshing in the shallows.
“Put a couple of rounds into that thing,” Culdee told the lookout.
There was an M16 racked on the port wing of the bridge. The lookout snapped the selector lever to semi and popped the crate twice, then a third time for good measure. Nothing screamed. Nothing blew up.
“Okay,” Culdee said. “I’m going to bring her in so you can grab that thing with the boat hook. Use the handle like a sounding pole, up there in the bow, and yell the depth back to me. Remember, we draw three feet.”
The hell of it was they had only the old French charts to go by up here in the North. Even the most recent of them was fourteen years old, and some dated back to the 1930s. A lot of typhoons had blown through since then, a lot of sand had shifted from one spot to another. In waters like these, whole reefs could die and be born again in a new place while your back was turned. It was worse in the delta. Down there, where the alligator navy lived, each monsoon season laid a new grid of channels and shoals over the mouth of the Mekong. They ran PBRs in the delta that drew only a foot and a half of water. Glass-hulled thirty-two-footers that could go like stink once they got up on the step. But they ran on those damned jet motors—Jacuzzis, the white hats called them—and the impellers were constantly jamming with water hyacinth. Up here, at least, the water was clean and clear. In good light you could read a beer-can label on the bottom in ten fathoms. Count your blessings . . .
But Culdee knew he was evading the main issue. He smelled a rat, and the rat’s name was Charlie. It could be a setup. Sucker you in to check out whatever Charlie had left in the water, then cut loose with everything they’ve got. On the other hand, maybe the Swift’s appearance had interrupted a resupply mission. Maybe there was a sampan, courtesy of Uncle Ho, tucked away behind the mangroves, in one of the thousands of invisible inlets that notched the coast. He had his orders. If he didn’t go in and check it out, he’d be facing the green banana for sure. It he did go in and it was a setup, the only banana he’d face would be the one Charlie’d left for him to skid on. After that, he wouldn’t have to face anything.
They eased up toward the shore. The only sounds were the burble of the exhaust, rising now and then to a peevish blat, the croak of a night heron on the hunt, and the whine of mosquitoes, piercing as a dentist’s drill. The light was becoming subaquatic.
“Almost four feet,” the lookout said. The bottom of the boat-hook pole looked black in the dusk, like a dipstick pulled from a sump of dirty oil.
“Three and a half.
Nothing moved in the mangroves. All the birds seemed to have flown.
“A touch over three . . . I think I can reach it now.”
He extended the pole, leaning far out over the bow. A silver comma winked in the gloom—the hook.
“Got it.”
As he pulled back on the pole, the crate rolled slightly, sucking in the easy wash. Then the hook slipped. There was something dangling over it—pallid, snaky, angling back into the mangrove roots. Det cord . . .
Oh, fuck! In his mind’s eye, Culdee saw Charlie hunkered back in the swamp, the ends of the wires scraped bare, one in each hand. Charlie brought the ends together . . .
“Hey!” the lookout yelled, his voice cracking like a teenager’s. “It’s a fucking wi—”
Flash.
Culdee was in the water, warm as blood, red as blood. It was blood, blood full of twitching meat. A severed hand sunk through it. A tattoo on the back of the hand—Culdee checked numbly: he still had both of his. The tattoo, he suddenly saw, was a tiger head, fangs dripping blood. Underneath the blood, VUNG TAU ’66. The hand turned over as it sank; small fish darted and ripped at the flanges that fanned from the wrist. Drake’s hand—he had a tattoo like that . . .
The Swift was down by the bow. There was no bow. Big chunks of it continued to splatter down all around Culdee when he lay in the water far away. No, quite close, actually. No, pretty far away. Lights winked in the mangroves like giant fireflies. It was gunfire, but Culdee couldn’t hear it. The roar in his ears was too loud. The stern of the Swift was cocked high against the sky. Culdee saw the muzzle flash of the aft .50 caliber still pumping strings of fire into the mangroves—Earhart. But then the .50 went dark, too. They got him.
Culdee floated. He couldn’t move enough even to dog-paddle away into the dark. Something eased out of the solid wall of mangrove roots—a sampan. Low voices chattered in dink. Guys were poling at the high-curved stern. There was a glint of weapons—AKs. A dink up on the bow was leaning on a long, skinny pole . . . with a hook at the end.
At first Culdee thought it was the lookout’s boat hook, blown back into the mangroves by the blast of C4 that blew off the bow of the Swift, and the men along with it. But it was a gaff. Culdee’d seen them on the fishing boats he’d interdicted—hand-forged, rusty, spangled with scales and encrusted with dry fish slime, but honed to a bright point at the recurved tip. He thrashed weakly, like a played-out pompano.
The dink leaned over through the darkness and gaffed him through the shoulder.
FOUR
That was the end of the good life. For the next six years, like it or not, Culdee pulled shore duty. And he hated shore duty. It was the essence of that quarter of the planet called the Beach—stability, salutes, red tape, mortgages, shopping malls, cars, banks, credit cards, telephones, restaurants. It was shore duty, among other things, that had led to and finally disrupted his marriage. Culdee was stationed at Key West then, soon after Korea wound down. The girl worked in a bank on Duval Street. Her name was Vivian, and she was lovely—dark-haired, blue-eyed, with a wide, white-flashing smile that seemed, in those days at least, as fresh as the sea breeze on Mallory Dock.
Weekends he borrowed a boat from the naval base—a heavy carvel-built double-ender—and they sailed out to the Marquesas, sometimes even as far as the Dry Tortugas. She’d grown up in the Keys and knew boats. They fished for permit and mutton snapper over the wreck at the west end of The Quicksands—“Mutton’s better ’n nuttin’,” Viv always said. They trolled over Isaac and Rebecca shoals on their way out to the Tortugas. If there were boats tied up at the wharves on Garden Key, they angled over to Bird Key and dropped the hook there. From a distance, wreathed in terns, Fort Jefferson looked as final as the sunset—solid, fierce, its red brick walls the ultimate meaning of shore duty.
But it was in the fresh wash of sunrise, on the parapets of one of those broken walls, that Culdee asked Viv to marry him. They had climbed the rotting stairways in the dark, bringing a blanket and a thermos of orange juice spiked with Cuban rum, to watch the dawn break.
“Keep your eyes peeled for the flash of red,” Culdee told the girl.
“The what?”
“You’ve heard of the green flash at sundown—hell, you’ve seen it, from Mallory Dock. But there’s a sunrise flash, too.”
“Sure. The green one’s the ocean’s starboard running light. The red one’s on the port side.”
She looked down at the cutter, where it rolled at its moorings beside the wharf.
“That means the sea runs south,” she said. “And the sun at noon is the masthead light.”
“You’ve got it,” he said. They laughed, and he kissed her. Terns circled overhead as they made love, watching curiously with bright black eyes. Viv saw the terns. Culdee, looking down from the parapet, saw a barracuda chasing baitfish in the shallows. Then he proposed to her.
Sadly, for both of them, she accepted.
The joy soon faded. Viv hated being a “dependant”—the official navy designation for wives and children. Still dutiful, though, still loving, she followed him from home port to home port—Norfolk, Boston, Virginia Beach, San Diego, Newport, Long Beach, Treasure Island, even Vallejo, when one of his ships was in the yard at Mare Island. There were no jobs for her in these towns—at least none that counted for anything. No one wanted to hire a navy wife. Her husband might be transferred any minute. She longed to be back at the bank in Key West. Any bank. Any decent job with a chance for advancement, where she was treated as a human being, not a “dependant.”
“Why don’t they just call us appendages and be done with it?” she said.
She took to badgering him, cautiously, obliquely at first, to quit the navy, or least to change his rating to something that would justify more shore duty—he was smart enough to learn electronics, say, or perhaps become an Airdale; he was maybe even smart enough to enter OCS and become a supply designator. That way they could be together more, rather than him being off at sea half the time, three quarters of the time! And if he learned electronics, he could cut loose from the navy and get something that paid real money—maybe his own TV repair business—some day, at least.
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