Blood Tide

by Robert F. Jones

  When she got back to the dock, the tide was drawing strong, black water racing seaward and straining the mooring lines. She ran forward and cast off, then ran back and loosed the mainsheet. The schooner groaned and shivered as the mainsail filled, the stern line grew taut and throbbed. She threw it off the mooring bit and jumped with it into the cockpit, grabbed the wheel, and spun it amidships as the dock dropped astern. Venganza heeled sharply to starboard as the wind caught the full reach of main and jib. The bowsprit bucked and soared to the lift of the first offshore waves, and the wake lined out astern, ghostly white in the evening gloom. She could hear Culdee snoring over the hiss of the sea. The whole ship seemed happy.

  By God, she’d done it! How many daughters ever shanghaied their own father?

  ELEVEN

  Sometimes the water gods smile on even the vilest of sinners. By the time Culdee sobered up, he was well past the point of no return. When he crawled up the companionway ladder that morning and the warm wind struck him flush in the face, he knew they were in the trades. Miranda was asleep in a corner of the cockpit, one bare foot on the lashed wheel. Overhead the mainsail bellied full on the port tack. Her face was sunburned, her cheekbones blistering, and she’d painted her nose with zinc oxide, an odd contrast to the purple half-moons under her eyes. He hauled himself upright on the coaming and stumbled to the leeward taffrail. Dry heaves, his stomach sore and pumping, bile in the back of his nostrils . . .

  Up forward, a flying fish skimmed off the top of the bow wave; another two followed it. When his eyes cleared, Culdee looked at the binnacle: south and a half west. The wind was strong and steady, and he figured they must be turning eight knots or better. He had noticed the logbook on the bulkhead in the saloon, but he didn’t want to read it. He slipped back behind the wheel and unlashed the tie-down. If he jibed her hard over and came about . . . But that would wake Miranda; she’d fight him, and he didn’t have the strength for it anyway. The kick of the king spoke in his hand felt good. He let it pound through him, shaking loose the crud and cobwebs that clogged his body. All the booze he’d drunk all these years must have eaten a tunnel through his brain, earhole to earhole, and he imagined the filth blowing out, trailing like frayed commission pennants from his ear-lobe. He focused hard on the lubber’s line of the compass, trying to hold the helm steady on course. Venganza could fly.

  Miranda’s foot was threatening to slip off the wheel. He lifted it gently and swung it over onto the banquette. She rolled on her side and mumbled something, then curled up tight and dropped back to sleep. He had to laugh, and would have if it didn’t hurt so much. She’d really impressed him, in the seventeenth-century sense of the word. A one-woman press gang. Damn her—but he’d figure a way to escape.

  A flying fish hit the leech of the mainsail and bounced clopping into the cockpit. Culdee scooped it up and brained it on a wheel spoke, then laid it out in the portside shade. When Miranda opened her eyes an hour or so later, he had three of them there, cool and fading and neatly lined up.

  “There’s breakfast,” he said. “If you haven’t eaten yet.”

  She got up, yawned and stretched, checked the binnacle and the telltales, then looked at him warily.

  “You aren’t mad?”

  “What could I do about it if I was?”

  “Okay,” she said. “I’m going forward and set the mizzen. Time’s awastin’, and so’s the wind. Hold her steady. Then I’ll get us some breakfast.”

  They ate in the wash of the wind, fried flying fish, hardtack, marmalade, and steaming black tea. But he was coming around, the molecules of his brain close enough together now to wave and yell “Hi!” In a little while they’d be quarreling, though, and next he knew, throwing punches. That would hurt, and after the pain came the hook rats. What he needed now, before it was too late . . .

  “Maybe a slosh of rum in this tea to choke it down easier?”

  “All gone, Boats. You swallowed the last of it day before yesterday.”

  “Shit.”

  “There it is.”

  “When do we hit port?”

  “A long time from now. Too long for it to make any difference.”

  He started cursing in a low, deep rumble, and Miranda went forward to fake down some lines and trim the headsails. After that she pumped the bilges—anything to keep her busy, out of his range. She didn’t want to resort to the belaying pin, but she would if she had to. It was a dirty trick, all right, and she knew she’d been lucky so far. The worst was yet to come—in a week or so, when the booze had really worn off. Cold turkey was tough meat. She’d eaten it once herself, two weeks of hell in the Pacific—on a little motu off Upolu in Western Samoa, where Effredio found her stash and sixed it.

  “Coke is bad stuff,” he’d said.

  “Not if you can handle it,” she’d replied.

  “Nobody can handle it; all they can be is handled.”

  “But you didn’t have to dump it,” she’d said.

  “Fuck I didn’t.”

  “What about the fish? Isn’t it bad for them?”

  “There’s more fish than there is Mirandas,” he’d said.

  “Fuck you,” she’d said. “You’re a fucking Commie.”

  He’d thrown her overboard and kept her swimming around for two hours, fending her off with a boathook every time she tried to come aboard. Finally she swam to the motu and crawled ashore over poisonous coral. She swelled up like an elephantiasis victim, lived on coconut milk and land crabs for the next two weeks, tried to hang herself from a palm tree with her T-shirt, but it ripped, and then all she had was a sore neck and a sprained ankle for her troubles. But Freddie brought her back aboard in the Avon and fed her vitamins and OJ and spent a lot of time just holding her close until she was straight.

  Well, there were no motus around here. No Freddie either.

  The hook rats came in the midwatch. Culdee could hear their scales rattling as they slid down the ladder, the drag of their barbed tails on the risers. He couldn’t go aft and he couldn’t go forward because they’d already set fire to the engine room, and when he tried to yell, Major Bui would tell Puddles on him and the B-52s wouldn’t make it to the checkpoint. Now he could hear them knocking on the stateroom door. Maybe it was just room service, but he knew it wasn’t. He reached for the buzzer to call the nurse, but he couldn’t find it in the dark. The pistol was under his pillow. He grabbed it, but it went soft and sticky, Silly Putty covered with floor hair.

  They were in the room now, snuffling and scratching, hunting him like retrievers through the tules looking for a wounded duck. All he could do was lie quiet, but his sweat would give him away. It didn’t help to scream. That only made them hungrier. But maybe Miranda would hear. She was up there on the deck, at the wheel, singing her songs, oblivious . . .

  One of them found him. He felt it climb up on the rack, scaly nose touching his toes, checking them out. He could smell it, foul as the bilges, then feel it crawling up along the blanket until it reached his chest. Its eyes glowed like Saint Elmo’s fire, tiny at first, piggy, then growing, ballooning until they filled the darkness—like blazing sewer gas. The heavy weight was crushing his chest.

  He screamed.

  Then Miranda was there with a lantern.

  “Get out of here, Rance!” she yelled and swung the lantern at the rat. It lurched off the bunk and pelted through the hatchway. Not a hook rat at all, just a common ship rat. A big one, ugly as sin, but not a hook rat. No barbs, no scales. Culdee couldn’t stop shaking.

  “You gotta get me a drink,” he said.

  “There isn’t any.”

  “That thing’ll be back. He’ll bring the others.”

  “He won’t,” she said. “He’s the only rat aboard. He’s a pet. He just wanted to say hello.”

  “I’ll kill the bastard next time I see him.”

  “No, you won’t. He’s too quick for you. And anyway, he’s my friend. He keeps me company during the night watches.” She lit Culdee’s kerosene l
amp. “He likes my singing, and I tell him sea stories. Now why don’t you read awhile, and maybe you’ll fall asleep. I’ll check on you now and then. There’s nothing to worry about. No hook rats. Rance won’t stand for competition.”

  Each day, at noon and sunset, Miranda broke out her sextant and shot the stars or the sun. Culdee helped her with stopwatch and star tables. Then they bent over the chart table and corrected their dead reckoning track. The wind held strong, twenty to thirty knots during the day, sometimes falling off after sunset. Once they had to run the engine, but only for ten hours. They were reeling off close to two hundred miles a day, a fast passage.

  Rance spent the nights now in Culdee’s cabin, curled up at the foot of the bed. Kind of a guard rat, Miranda said. His presence helped Culdee sleep. The more they fed him, the tamer he got. Finally one day Miranda had him sitting on her shoulder while she steered. The only problem was his dreadful smell, but as he spent more and more time topside, sluiced by the odd wave and washed by the trade wind, the stench began fading. Either that, or Miranda and Culdee were getting used to it.

  One morning Miranda noticed a flock of small white terns working furiously, low over the water ahead of the schooner. They dipped and soared, backed their wings, dipped again. The sea beneath them churned and boiled.

  “Ahi birds,” she yelled and raced below, emerging moments later with a heavy, twelve-foot bamboo pole. It was rigged with an equal length of thick monofilament, and she quickly tied on a mother-of-pearl lure she’d cut and finished from an abalone shell. The lure had tufts of white mono projecting on each side like the wings of a flying fish. “Yellowfin tuna,” she told Culdee. “They’re moving from right to left. Try and run down through the school, and steer to stay with it if they don’t sound. Sashimi time!”

  The school was dead ahead now, and Culdee could see the baitfish breaking and jumping, the flash of heavier bodies beneath them. The water glittered with hundreds of tiny loose scales. Miranda slung the lure into the boil, skittering it over the surface with the rod butt braced hard against her hip. Something big flashed green and gold, and the bamboo bent nearly in half. Miranda heaved and swung the fish aboard. It thumped heavily on the cockpit deck, drumming spray from its tail. The barbless hook fell free, and she flipped it overboard again.

  “Coldcock that sucker with a belaying pin,” she yelled over her shoulder to Culdee. “Don’t worry about blood.” Culdee whacked it twice, three times. Then Miranda swung another aboard. Then a third and a fourth. The school sounded.

  “Ahi,” she said, breathing hard. “Small ones, thank God. Twenty, thirty pounds. They run up to two or three hundred. But this is plenty for us. Ahi means “wall of fire” in Hawaiian. Taka said they call it that because in the old days the Kanakas used to handline them from their canoes. They’d bend the line over the gunwale to brake it, and the yellowfin would pull so hard that the wood started smoking. The wall of the canoe caught fire.”

  She filleted one of the fish, skinned it, and sliced a fillet into thin, long strips. From the galley she brought up two roots. “Wasabi and shōnzu,” she said, grating them into a dish. Then she poured dark soy sauce over the shavings. “Horseradish and fresh ginger. Dig in.”

  The dark red meat was cold as the sea, fiery with the bite of the sauce. Miranda found some cold rice in the evaporator cooler she’d rigged from coarse-woven canvas and kept wet with seawater in the wind and shade. “Now we’re in my part of the world,” she said.

  Two weeks out they raised Mauna Kea. At first it was just another cloud mass on the western horizon, but the clouds hung steady. An hour later, through the binoculars, Miranda could make out the purple of solid rock, and as the day wore on, the big island of Hawaii slowly heaved itself out of the sea. There was traffic now, liners, tankers, another schooner—the first ships they’d met since California—and half a dozen times they saw jet contrails creeping across the sky. Culdee was acting uneasy. He wouldn’t look her in the eye, hardly talked all afternoon. She heard him rummaging around in his cabin, muttering to himself. Then he came topside.

  “Where’s that checkbook you gave me?” he asked. “We’re going to need it once we get ashore. I can’t find it in my clothes or anywhere.”

  “I don’t know,” Miranda lied. “But don’t worry. I’ll write the bank for more, and I’ve still got enough cash to top off the fuel tanks and buy any supplies we need. We’ll anchor out so there won’t be any docking fees, and I’m bound to find some people I know in Honolulu. I’m good for a touch with them.”

  The checkbook was hidden up forward in the lazaret. She knew he was thinking about giving her the slip and hightailing it to the airport. Tough luck.

  They shot through the Alenuihaha Channel on a broad reach with the big island to port and Maui sliding abeam to starboard, its beaches and slopes studded with condos. Then Kahoolawe on the starboard bow, bare and pockmarked from the megatons of explosives that had pounded it since the navy took over the island in 1953 as a gunfire and bombing range. Culdee remembered how it smelled, the drift of burned powder over the water mixing with the aroma of flowers on the offshore breeze from Maui, cruisers and cans puffing perfect smoke rings as they heeled to their broadsides, plumes of fire and dust where the shells slammed the island. He liked it best when the LSMRs went into their act—a column of the little rocket ships scuffling past like empty gray combat boots inshore of the heavies. When they unloaded, they disappeared in a hissing white cloud. Instant sea smoke. The whole battered, knobby island jumped upward as the five-inch rockets hit, and the roar of the explosion shivered signal flags a mile to seaward . . .

  No more LSMRs in the navy now, and he’d read somewhere that native Hawaiian activists wanted the island back. They’d found rock drawings, fishing shrines, and even a temple—what they called a heiau—on Kahoolawe, and the navy was shaking up the ghosts of their ancestors. That would be some war, Culdee thought, the ghosts of the old time Kanakas against a ghost squadron of rocket ships. No telling who might win.

  Lanai and Molokai fell astern, and Oahu rose dead ahead. A million memories. By midafternoon Culdee could make out the spume from the Halona Blowhole, under Makapuu Point on the east end of the island. Looking closely through the glasses, he thought he could make out the steep stairway that led down from the highway to Halona Cove. He’d snorkeled there often in the old days. They’d rent masks, fins, and girls in town, buy a bottle of rum and a can of pineapple juice, then take a cab out to Halona. You had to stop to buy ice in Hawaii Kai, because if you brought it all the way from Pearl, it would be melted by the time you got to the beach. Cabs weren’t air-conditioned in those days. You would take the girls out in the water to boff them if there was a crowd on the beach. He remembered one afternoon—right after Korea it must have been—when he took a hot little hapa-Portagee out there on the reef, and he looked down and saw her foot near a sea urchin. He yelled something and grabbed her away, and she nearly climbed up on his head.

  “Did you step on it? Did you step on it?” he yelled.

  “What? What?”

  She was squirming all over his chin.

  “The urchin.”

  “Oh,” she said, and slid back down into the water. “I thought you said shark.”

  Miranda shortened sail as they neared Honolulu, and Culdee unhoused the anchor. Helicopters scuttled back and forth against the Pali, shiny as tropical bugs. They whiffed the land smell as the wind bounced back from the island—sweet and heavy, blossom and mud. As the harbor opened up, Miranda took bearings—Diamond Head, Fort DeRussy, the Aloha Tower—and shouted course corrections to Culdee at the wheel. By the time she lowered the sails and anchored off Ala Moana, the sun was down.

  “I’ll take the dinghy ashore and handle things,” she said, walking aft. “Harbor master, stores, and I want to see if any of my old shipmates are in town. If not, I’ll try to hire some kid for an extra hand. Watch and watch is a killer.”

  “Mmmnh.”

  They swayed the dinghy
over the side, and Culdee watched her row toward the yacht basin. Lights glowed along Waikiki, and the land breeze brought him the sound of honky-tonks. In it he imagined he could smell whiskey, women, and fresh blood. Damn her! He brought a book and a lantern up from the saloon and tried to read. From the yachts anchored nearby he could hear laughter and the clink of cocktail glasses. He got up and went forward to check the anchor. They weren’t dragging. He’d known it before he’d gone. He grabbed a hunk of small stuff and threw some knots, but it didn’t help.

  He’d never once missed a liberty in Wahoo, even if he had to swap a month of midwatches for a standby from one of the choirboys in the crew. It was a great liberty port, one of the greatest in the whole wide watery world. Back in the whaling days they’d called the red-light district Cape Horn, because the old-time white hats hung their consciences on the horn when they came around her. With Cape Stiff behind them and two or three years on the offshore grounds to look forward to, they had their work cut out for them in Honolulu. When the missionaries went to translate the Ten Commandments into Hawaiian, they got stuck on “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” There was no such word in the Polynesian language. The best the long necks could come up with was “Thou shalt not commit mischievous sleeping.” But that was the best kind.

  Over on the beach Culdee heard the whoop and howl of men raising hell.

  Okay.

  Liberty call.

  He stripped off his shoes and clothes, rolled them into a bundle, and was about to slip over the side when he remembered his hand. He ran below and came back with a long Ace bandage and a roll of tape. Then he swam breaststroke to the yacht basin with his clothes bundle belted to his head. He dressed quickly and wrapped the bandage tight over his many-times-broken right hand (a souvenir of too many drunken liberties), taped it down, then hiked west along Ala Moana toward Chinatown. Fuck Waikiki—too rich for his blood, with its tourists and gay bars and hundred-dollar hookers. Hotel Street was home. He could find it blindfolded just from the smell of Chinese herbs, rotting vegetables behind the open-air markets, dried shark fins and sea-slugs and sailor puke. He turned maiku—“toward the mountains”—up Nuuanu Avenue, crossed King Street, with the Iolani Palace and the gold statue of King Kamehameha lighted up to starboard and the reek of Nuuanu Stream to port, and there it was, just like he’d left it—scuzzy, shopworn, dimly lighted except for the neon of the dirty book stores and “hostess bars” lining both sides as far as the eye could see.