Richard Laidlaw was more comfortable in a party atmosphere, among strangers, than Jordan Wise had ever been; better able to mix and make small talk. But that doesn't mean that I liked it. Annalise was genuinely at ease, smiling, laughing, charming everyone, enjoying the attention, but a part of me stood off and observed what she and the others did and said and then took cues from them so I could make all the appropriate responses.
Royce Verriker was a few years older than me, tall, lean, with a mop of sun-bleached hair and intense gray eyes. Very suave, very glib: if I hadn't known he was a lawyer, I would have guessed it on the first try. When he and I talked, he asked a lot of questions, not prying, just displaying interest. I gave him all the rehearsed answers—successful Chicago tool-and-die manufacturer, made a bundle in the stock market, decided to sell my business and retire young, moved down here to live the good life in the sun. He smiled and said he envied me. He also said, "I imagine Annalise has told you that my specialty is domestic law. But if you ever need any other kind of legal help or advice, my door is always open." I thanked him and said I'd keep that in mind. Typical lawyer. Cut him open and he would bleed green for money and brown for bullshit.
His wife, Maureen, was a slender, thirtyish redhead, the dark-complected rather than the pale-skinned variety. One of those pretty cameo faces, but with oddly sad eyes. A little reserved until you got to know her, pleasant and gracious. She and Annalise had hit it off from the first and were already friends. She wore a skintight blue dress that night—and low-cut blouses and tight pullovers and skimpy bikinis at other times—that called attention to overlarge breasts. The way she dressed was Verriker's idea, not hers; he was the one, she'd told Annalise, who wanted to show off her boobs.
Gavin and Robin Kyle were both architects pushing forty, owners of their own firm. A study in contrasts, those two. He was short, on the tubby side, with sparse hair the color of ginger ale, and a gossipmonger who liked to hear himself talk; she was six inches taller, skinny, had thick dark hair, and seldom spoke more than two sentences in a row. I liked them both. Despite Gavin's constant chatter, most of what he had to say was interesting and amusing.
The guest I related to best, though, was Jack Scanlon, the middle-aged manager of a cement plant. That was because he was a day sailor, the only person there who had any but a passing interest in sailing. He owned a twenty-four-foot sloop that he kept at the marina adjacent to the West India dock. When I told him I was planning to learn to sail, hoped to buy a boat of my own one day, he invited me to join him on a day cruise after the holidays.
St. Thomas is a small island, just thirty square miles. Annalise had already seen some of it, but we explored it all together, one end to the other, in a handful of day and night excursions.
Some of its attractions appealed to both of us. The views from atop Crown Mountain and the Drake's Seat overlook, of the sixty-odd reefs, islets and islands that ring St. Thomas, and on clear days, of the British Virgins and some of the Puerto Rican archipelago. Coral World, an underwater observation tower where you could see all sorts of exotic marine life and coral formations. Blackbeard's Castle, atop Government Hill—a sprawling, three-hundred-year-old, cannon-guarded fortress that had been turned into a luxury inn and restaurant. Annalise liked it for the cuisine, which was among the best on the island. I liked it for its architecture and its history. Local legend had it that Edward Teach, the pirate known as Blackbeard, used the five-story masonry tower as a lookout post for the merchant ships carrying rum, cotton, and spices he later ambushed. I felt a certain kinship with the old buccaneer, and his supposed use of St. Thomas as a safe haven amused me.
But for the most part, Annalise's and my tastes differed. She preferred Market Square, the remodeled Danish warehouses along Dronningens Gade that dispensed all the duty-free goods, the palm-fringed beaches at Magens Bay, Coki Bay, Secret Harbor, and Sapphire Bay, and the raucous nightlife. I preferred the marina next to the West India dock, with its slips for two hundred luxury yachts, and the working waterfronts at Red Hook and Frenchtown and Sub Base harbor where you could hire charter boats or catch ferries or buy fresh fish and shellfish or watch the pelicans and flamingoes on their fishing rounds. The narrow, winding, old-world streets of Frenchtown. The bluff above Nazareth Bay, where you had the best view of St. John three miles across Pillsbury Sound. The ancient French cemetery on Harwood Highway with its decaying walls and rusted iron gates, its gnarled old trees and peeling whitewashed tombs.
And the sunsets.
Christ, the sunsets.
They impressed me more than anything else. Annalise was alleady starting to take them for granted by the time I got there, but I never have. They still stir me, even after twenty-seven years. Bright gold, dark gold, burnished copper, old rose, fiery orange, lavender and pink and saffron and deep purple . . . all the colors and some gradations and combinations you can't imagine until you see them. Plus thousands of intricate cloud shapes and formations to reflect the colors and the dying light. Most travelers will tell you that Caribbean sunsets are the most spectacular in the world; I don't see how anybody can dispute it. Doesn't matter where you watch one—backyard terrace, restaurant patio, mountaintop, deck of a boat at sea, even through an open-air window in a back-island cafe like Jocko's. Each is unique, and nearly all of them are magnificent.
Our different tastes weren't a problem in those early days. We'd come down here to enjoy ourselves, do whatever made us happy. It wasn't necessary to agree on all our pleasures, to share them in lockstep. There was plenty for us to do as a couple. So why shouldn't we each have time to ourselves, some private space of our own?
Annalise was thrilled and a little overwhelmed by her present on Christmas morning. She cried when I slipped the diamond wedding band on her finger, the first of the two times I ever saw her shed a tear.
I seemed to have passed muster with the Verrikers. They invited us to a New Year's Eve dance at the Royal Bay Club, one of the members-only, whites-only places that they and the Kyles belonged to. It took up a full block down near the marina. The old, whitewashed main building housed a bar lounge with leather chairs and card and chess tables and a private library, and a ballroom large enough for a five-piece orchestra and a ring of tables around the dance floor. A smaller building at the rear contained handball courts, men's and women's saunas, and locker room facilities. Outside there were tennis and badminton courts.
At one point during the evening, while the women were in the ladies' room, Verriker asked me if I played handball. I said no, nor tennis or golf, explaining it by saying I'd been too busy making a living to get involved in sports.
"Great game, handball," he said. "Keeps you fit. I could teach you the basics in one session, if you're interested."
I wasn't, but I said, "Sure, I'd like that."
"Members have unlimited use of the courts whenever they're free. All the other facilities, too. How would you and Annalise like to join?"
I pretended to be flattered and asked casually what becoming members entailed, if there was some sort of screening process. No, he said, the club wasn't that exclusive. Strictly social. There were no hard and fast rules for membership; financial status and background were of no importance. As long as you were able to pay the yearly dues of $500, and had the sponsorship of a member, your acceptance was pretty much a given. And he'd be glad to sponsor us.
So I accepted with a show of gratitude. The more firmly entrenched we became in island society, the less likely our new identities would ever be questioned or breached.
I went sailing three times with Jack Scanlon on his little sloop, Manjack. Annalise came along the first time. The sea was calm that morning, when we left the harbor, but a strong wind kicked up later in the day as we were tacking out of Caneel Bay on St. John, and it got a little rough. She was seasick and shaky by the time we docked. Never again, she said afterward. I thought that once I had my own boat, something larger and made for smoother sailing like a ketch or yawl, I might be able to change h
er mind. But until then I wouldn't try. You can't force somebody to love the things you love, any more than you can force them to love you.
That first sailing experience had just the opposite effect on me. I took to it immediately, as I'd been sure I would. Had my sea legs from the start. From my reading I'd already internalized much of the basic information and language of the sea. I knew that sloops and catamarans had a single mast, ketches and yawls two masts, and that most modern sailboats were Marconi rigged. That's a triangular rigging with the sails spread by two spars, with a lower boom that extends past the mast and a second that runs at an angle from the forward end of the boom to the masthead; Depression-era sailors gave it the Marconi name because the stays and shrouds holding up the mast reminded them of the first radio towers set up by the Italian inventor. I knew the names of all the sails, the meaning of such terms as luff and kedge and reef points, and I could define jibstay, lapstrake, burgee, spinnaker, genoa, freeboard, lubber line. I knew that a boat will sail in three basic ways—before the wind on a run, with the wind abeam on a reach, and close-hauled or toward the wind; that the wind fills the sails from both sides, on either a starboard tack or a port tack. I knew a lot of facts about sailing, or thought I did, but I didn't know a damn thing until I learned the working application of those terms and principles.
Scanlon was a fairly good small-craft sailor, though he'd only been at it about four years, and those day cruises were more exhilarating than anything I'd done except for the Amthor crime and making love with Annalise. Standing on Manjack's deck, hanging onto one of the stays while she ran with the wind, the sea creaming up around the bow and back along the hull, the wind singing in the sails . . . I'd had no other experience quite like it.
I learned a few rudimentary lessons from watching Scanlon and following his instructions. The first time he let me trim the jib, I did it without hesitation or mistake. But he wasn't much of a teacher overall because he was still learning himself, and because he was a day sailor and a twenty-four-foot sloop was all he ever aspired to own and operate. He wasn't offended when I asked him if he could recommend someone more knowledgeable and more experienced I could pay for private lessons.
I discovered Arundel Cane Rum at a rum tasting in early January. The hosts were a British couple, the Potters, rum connoisseurs and historians who lived out on the West End and delighted in throwing this kind of shindig for newcomers to the island. The invitation came through the Kyles, who were both rum drinkers, and we went with them. There were a dozen or so others there in addition to the Potters, among them another recent arrival, a London banker named Horler.
You think of rum as being light or dark, with varying degrees of alcohol content, and mainly as an ingredient in mixed drinks. I did, anyway, until that day. But there are a lot of different varieties, each with characteristics as distinctive as those separating single-malt Scotches. Rum has been made in the Caribbean since the seventeenth century, from fermented molasses, cane syrup, or fresh sugar-cane juice derived from a multitude of species and hybrids of cane. Originally it was distilled in clay pots, then in single-pot stills that look like teakettles with long spouts, and finally in single-, double-, and mutiple-column continuous stills. Some blends are rich and heavy, others carbon filtered to produce a clear spirit; some are aged for up to four years, others not aged at all. The taste of each depends on the raw ingredients, the bottled strength, its barrel time or lack of it, the distillation purity and the length of fermentation. A rum drinker's preference is highly individualistic. There are no universal standards or measures for judgment.
The Potters gave a little lecture that included this information (and later I did some studying of the subject on my own) and then proceeded to demonstrate. They had more than sixty varieties arranged on sideboards around their big living room. From Puerto Rico, the British Virgins, Martinique, Barbados, St. Lucia, Marie-Galante. Well-known labels such as Bacardi and Pusser's, and obscure brands like Buccaneer, Blackbeard's Five-Star, Cockspur, Jack Iron, and Rhum Vieux du Pere Labat. Various potencies, light and dark, from Mount Gay Eclipse's 154-proof, 80 percent alcohol rocket fuel down to the milder 80-proof, 40 percent alcohol content types. There was water and ice and cane syrup, as most distilleries provided in their tasting rooms, but we were encouraged to try at least a few of the rums straight for a better evaluation of the flavor.
We were also encouraged to follow a little ritual on each tasting. Read the label first, to determine how strong the rum was and how long it had been aged and what it was distilled from. Pour a little into a glass and hold the glass up to the light so as to judge the color or clearness. Swirl the rum in the bottom of the glass. Take a deep breath, exhale, then lift the glass to the nose to assess the delicate flavors in the aroma. Repeat the process if you liked what you smelled the first time; if you didn't like it, you probably wouldn't care for the taste, so just move on to the next. Sip a little and roll it on the tongue, then savor it and mentally compare your impression of the taste with the aroma.
I'd drunk rum before that day, but it wasn't until I began sampling and comparing that I began to really appreciate it. It was all good, but I preferred the mature, dark types. Most of the women were partial to the light and clear. And most of the men, predictably, preferred the 151-proof Cruzan and 154-proof Mount Gay Eclipse. I agreed with them, more or less, though I had yet to find one I really liked until I came to the bottle of Arundel Cane Rum.
The label said it was distilled from pure cane juice and aged in oak casks. That it had been distilled and blended by the Callwood family in the Caribbean's oldest continuously operating pot distillery in Cane Garden Bay, Tortola. The first sniff hooked me; two more confirmed its character. The taste was as close to ambrosial as anything I'd ever had. Nobody else seemed to find it as special as I did, which proved the dictum about personal preference.
Potter told me Arundel Estate had been in operation for four hundred years, the last two hundred in the hands of the Callwood family. It was the only distiliery still operating on Tortola, the only licensed one in the eastern Caribbean that used a single-pot still, and one of the few that made rum directly from sugar-cane juice from locally grown green cane. They manufactured both white and dark, the light kind mainly for local islanders. The thick, rich dark was what I'd tasted.
The next day I went to one of the larger liquor stores in Charlotte Amalie and bought six bottles of dark Arundel Cane, all they had in stock.
From the day of the Potters' tasting in 1979, I've never willingly drunk any other kind of rum. Iced usually, straight or with a little water occasionally. And never, never in punches or Collinses or any other concoction that would dilute and spoil the flavor.
The first private sailing lessons I took were from an acquaintance of Jack Scanlon's who skippered a private yacht for a local government official and kept a schooner of his own at Red Hook. After half a dozen sessions, I moved on to a grizzled ex-navy, ex-charter fisherman and working drunk who claimed to've sailed the Caribbean for more than forty years. Less than a month of him was all I could stand.
I felt I'd learned pretty well what little seamanship I'd been given, but I wasn't satisfied with the quality or content of the instruction. Practical enough, but dry and basic, lacking in detail and lore—skimpy value for the money I laid out. They paid Up service to my ability to absorb information and put it to use, but not for a moment did either of them act as though I had the makings of an equal. They treated me with the disdain, the thinly concealed contempt commercial boatmen have for the idle rich. Deaf ears when I tried to tell them I had no interest in racing cutters or sport cats or any other kind of craft, or in being a day sailor like Jack Scanlon or one of the aimlessly cruising weekend yacht owners more interested in partying than seamanship. Mocking little smiles when I said I wanted to be more than a hobby sailor, to eventually single hand my own ketch or yawl. And eyes that looked through me most of the time we were together, the way people had once looked through Jordan Wise.
/> So I went looking for someone reliable who'd teach me as I wanted to be taught. I'd been to a couple of the boatyards in the Red Hook area, to soak up the atmosphere and to look at the boats they had for sale, and the owner of Marsten Marine, Dick Marsten, had been friendly and unpatronizing. I solight him out. He didn't hesitate when I asked him for a recommendation.
"Bone's the man you want," he said.
"Who's he?"
"Fellow who works for me now and then. Does odd jobs, takes on day charters and gives lessons when the mood suits him."
'' Temperamental?
"Too strong a word," Marsten said. "He's his own man, marches to his own drummer. And there's no better sailor in this part of the world."
"Where can I find him?"
"He rents a slip at the Sub Base harbor marina. Ask anybody over there. They all know him."
"Bone," I said. "His last name?"
"His only name, far as I know. Just Bone."
The Sub Base harbor area, west of Frenchtown and named for the submarine base that had operated there during the Second World War, wasn't half as picturesque as the Charlotte Amalie or Frenchtown harbors. The Water Island ferry was located there, but for the most part what you saw were tramp steamers and charter fishing boats and sloops and schooners and ketches of various sizes and condition. Bone's boat was a forty-foot gaff-rigged ketch, old but well-maintained, humorlessly named Conch Out. C-o-n-c-h, like the shellfish. That was where I found him, on his ketch, giving the deck a coat of gray nonskid paint.
The Crimes of Jordan Wise Page 9
