After that day, he wouldn't take any more money from me except for gas, oil, and provisions when the two of us went to sea together. "No, Richard," he said when I offered. "Remember when you first come to see me? You said you have sailing in your blood, I said we'll find out. Now we both know. Bone won't take pay from a mon same as him."
We went to the Bar fairly often. And now and then to one of the native cafes for fish chowder or conch fritters or callaloo. Sometimes we talked, sometimes we just sat and drank beer or iced rum. Occasionally he would reveal snippets about himself and his past. He'd been married twice; his first wife had died and he refused to talk about his second, even to speak her name. He had a teenage dalighter, Isola, he visited from time to time in Nassau. He'd attended college for a year before the sea called him. He'd once worked as a deckhand on a Panama-bound tramp steamer, once been approached to smuggle a ketch-load of weapons to a group of Puerto Rican insurgents (he wouldn't say whether he'd actually done it), once spent two years island-hopping his way around the Caribbean.
I envied him his free spirit and his adventures, and part of me wished I could tell him about the one bold, daring adventure in my life. It was just as well that I couldn't. For all his knockabout ways, Bone had a strong moral code to go with his intelligence and his dignity. He might have understood what had led me to do what I'd done, but he'd have thought less of me and probably severed our friendship. Would he have turned me in? No. He wasn't the kind to involve himself with the law. His duty was to himself and those he cared about, not to white or black society.
After a while I was more or less accepted by the Bar regulars, though I wouldn't have wanted to walk in alone after dark. In Bone's company I felt as comfortable there as I did at the Royal Bay Club. I was acquainted with a lot of white people on the island by then, the Verrikers and the Kyles and Jack Scanlon and Dick Marsten and several others, but the only man I considered a friend was a West Indian black sailor with a single name.
Bone.
He was the only real friend I ever had, before or since.
Hurricanes are always a concern when you live in the Caribbean. The hurricane season runs from June through November, but historically more storms—and the worst ones—occur in September than any other month. Most are Category 1 or 2, sustained winds of 74 up to 110 miles per hour, and if any of the islands is in the path of the blow, you can expect relatively minor damage such as flooding and what the official notices refer to as "moderate defoliation of shrubs and trees."
There was a Caribbean hurricane that first year, in early August. Hurricane Allen, I think it was. A monster blow, so intense that it reached Category 5 status—sustained winds of more than 156 m.p.h.—three different times over a period of about five days. Its central pressure was one of the lowest of all time, around twenty-seven inches when it was south of Puerto Pico. For a while it looked as though it might hammer the Virgins, and there were all sorts of storm warnings and preparations. But the eye stayed out over open water, bypassing us and howling up through the Lesser Antilles, where it weakened off Haiti and Jamaica; it didn't cross land until somewhere near Brownsville, Texas. We did get a taste of it, though: high winds and heavy rain for a couple of days.
Annalise was terrified the whole time. Her appetite for danger didn't extend to hurricanes. She'd been through earthquakes, as most native Californians have, but they were a tolerable threat because they came suddenly and were over in a minute or two. With a hurricane, you had plenty of advance warning and dire predictions of how much devastation to expect, and then, when it came howling and screaming like a bombing blitz, you had to ride it out over a long period. She wouldn't leave the villa, or let me take down the storm shutters and open the jalousies, until the day after the winds died down and the rains stopped.
I didn't say anything to her, but I had just the opposite reaction to Hurricane Allen. There is something in the elemental fury and frenzy of a tropical storm that excites a matching wildness in me. Still does to this day. An appeal to the dark side, I suppose. Yes, definitely an appeal to my dark side.
Annalise was jealous of my relationship with Bone. It threatened her somehow, in ways other than the time I spent with him—irrational ways. She hadn't liked him when I first introduced them, a reaction based on nothing I could see that passed between them. He was polite to her, on his dignity, as he was with everybody he met for the first time and especially with whites. And yet all she had to say about him afterward was "God, he's ugly, isn't he?" It occurred to me that she might be prejudiced. I didn't want to believe it and I never spoke to her about it, and she never said anything to me, but now I'm convinced she was. She avoided native Thomians other than service and trades people, and looking back, I can see that there was a kind of condescension in the way she treated blacks.
Once he suggested we take Conch Out on a three-day run to St.Croix, and that night I told Annalise about it and asked her to join us. With Bone's blessing, I said, a poor choice of words.
"His blessing!" she said. "Well, isn't that big of him!"
"He thought you might like to go along. So did I."
"Well, I don't want to. You know how I feel about small boats."
"It's only three days. And the weather forecast—"
"Three days. Lovely. Cozy. Just you and Bone now."
"What does that mean?"
"If I didn't know you so well," she said, "I'd think the two of you were sleeping together."
"For God's sake, Annalise."
"Well? You spend more time with him than you do with me."
"That's not true."
"Oh, isn't it? Sure seems that way."
"You know how much sailing means to me—"
"And what about the things that are important to me? Like visiting other parts of the world. Like trying to get a foot in the door of the fashion industry. I haven't given up on that idea, even if you think I have . . ."
There was more in the same vein. And it was no use arguing or trying to reason with her when she was in one of those moods. I'd had a few stings from her sharp tongue in Chicago, and a few more that were even more barbed down here. It gave her a hard, nasty edge that I didn't like at all.
If she'd used that tongue on me regularly, I'd've confronted her about it. But she didn't. She seemed to sense how often and how much she could provoke me, and she never went beyond the limits of my tolerance. Most of the time she was the same soft, sexy, loving woman she'd been that year in San Francisco and the first several months on St. Thomas. It was only Bone and the time I spent with him, and not getting her way when she had her heart set on something, that brought out the bitch in her.
In February of '81 I had a call from Dick Marsten. I'd told him I was interested in buying a boat of my own, and he had one in the yard, he said, that I might want to take a look at. A twenty-five-year-old yawl, thirty-four feet at the waterline, that had just come over from St. John. You don't see many yawls down here anymore, but there were still a few around in those days. This one had been built in Connecticut, run for a time on Long Island Sound, then sailed down in the fifties. Her owner had been ill for some time and she'd been neglected as a result, but she was still a sound vessel. The owner had died recently and his heirs were looking for a quick sale. So the price was right—not exactly a steal at $16,000, but still something of a bargain.
I'd been counting on a ketch, but that was because it was the type of sailboat I was familiar with; the only difference between the two is that the mizzen is smaller on a yawl, and stepped behind the wheel. So I said I'd come down, and when I went I took Bone with me. The yawl was out of the water for scraping, and she looked old and frowsy sitting there in the hot sun. There were a lot of things wrong with her. Her hull and deckhouse needed painting, the spars and brightwork sanding down and varnishing; the halyards would have to be replaced, the tracks and slides overhauled, a new bilge pump put in, and any number of smaller repairs made above- and belowdecks. But she had nice lines, a plumb stem and broad beam,
a clean-running stern without too much overhang, and lifelines that had been rigged in heavy bolted stanchions.
When I asked Bone what he thought of her, he said, "Good salty sea boat. Built strong, caulked tight. Hull's solid. Engine got to have an overhaul, but it should be okay. Tell you better when I hear it run."
"How long to put her back in shape?"
"Hard to say. Lot of work to be done."
"Six months?"
"Maybe longer."
"Is she worth the asking price?"
"Seems so to me. You want her?"
An odd feeling had come over me as we examined the yawl. The same sort of feeling I'd had for Annalise in the beginning, without the sexual element—an intense possessive need that I now understood was the first stirrings of love.
"Yes," I said, "I want her."
"Then you better buy her," Bone said. Then, as if he'd intuited what I was thinking, "Right boat for a mon like the right woman. Grab her quick before somebody else take her away."
"Will you help me with the repairs?"
His two gold teeth flashed in one of his rare smiles. "Nothing Bone likes better than shining up a good salty sea boat."
The $16,000 price was firm, but I wouldn't have tried to haggle anyway. We signed the papers that same day, in Marsten's office. When I told Annalise that night, she wasn't pleased I'd gone ahead with the deal without talking to her first, but she didn't turn bitchy about it. Not then. I took her out to dinner and Bamboushay to celebrate.
The next day I went to the harbormaster's office, reregistered the yawl in Richard Laidlaw's name, and arranged for slip space not far from Bone's at the Sub Base harbor marina. Once she was barnacle-free and had been relaunched, Bone and I ran her over to Sub Base harbor under power. The auxiliary diesel labored somewhat, but he was satisfied with its durability. The first thing we did after we got her there was to paint a new name over the old one on the transom. She'd been Moonlight Lady; now she was Annalise.
I thought Annalise would be pleased when I brought her down to show off the yawl. Wrong. Her reaction was distaste, scorn. The bitch coming out in her then, as if it were the end product of a long brood since I'd told her about the purchase.
"This is what you named after me?" she said. "This is what you spent sixteen thousand dollars on?"
"She's rough around the edges," I admitted, "but Bone says she—"
"Bone says. Bone says."
"She needs work, that's all. A lot of hard work."
"So you'll be spending even more time down here."
"It's going to take some time, yes."
"You and Bone."
"I asked him to help me. What's wrong with that?"
"Oh, nothing. Nothing at all." Heavy sigh. "I suppose now you'll never take me to Paris. Or even to New York."
Paris again, New York again. She'd been pestering me about a long trip to both cities, and I kept putting her off. The FBI wouldn't have forgotten about Jordan Wise after only two and a half years; there was still a risk in traveling on the mainland and in Europe. But it was a small risk, I couldn't deny that. And now that I had what I'd always wanted, and the way she was reacting to it...
"All right," I said.
"All right?"
"We'll go to New York. We'll go to Paris."
"When?"
"This summer. June or July."
Fast change. The bitch vanished; she was soft and sweet again. "Richard! You mean it?"
"Yes."
"Promise? You won't try to back out?"
"No. We'll start making arrangements right away. But you have to promise me something in return. When the repair work is finished and the Annalise is ready for a shakedown cruise, you'll come along. No fuss, no argument."
"When will that be?"
"At least six months. Maybe not until the end of the year."
"Just the two of us?"
"Well, maybe. Bone might have to join us."
"Why, for God's sake?"
"I don't know when I'll be ready to sail a boat this size by myself. It could be another year or two before I can singlehand. If Bone does come along, he won't bother us. You'll hardly even know he's there."
"So you say."
"Will you promise?"
"Yes, I promise," she said. Then she said, "New York, Paris. Monte Carlo, too? I've always wanted to go to Monte Carlo. And London? Oh, God, I can't wait!"
Jack Scanlon came down to see the yawl. So did another boat owner I'd met, and the Kyles. Royce Verriker wasn't interested. "I hear you bought yourself a boat," he said when I saw him at the Royal Bay Club. "A fixer-upper that's taking up a lot of your time."
"I wouldn't describe her as a fixer-upper," I said. "She's got a good pedigree. She just hasn't been taken care of."
"Well, everybody needs a hobby."
"It's more to me than a hobby."
"Sure, I understand. Every man needs a vice, too." He winked at me. "Mine's making money."
The repair work went slowly. Among other tasks, the spars had to be sanded down to the wood; that meant hoisting up in a bosun's chair, and I've never been fond of heights. I put in two and sometimes three days a week, much of that time by myself. Bone helped when he wasn't working on Conch Out, or at Marsten Marine or taking out a day charter, or when he hadn't been seized by the need to be alone at sea for an extended period. I offered to pay him longshoremen's day wages to work on Annalise on a regular basis, but he still wouldn't take money from me. He didn't make friends any more easily than I did and he had his own ideas, stubborn and prideful, about what was acceptable in a friendship and what wasn't.
At the rate the repairs were progressing, and with the off-island trip with Annalise coming up, there wasn't much chance the yawl would be ready for cruising until the end of the year. And maybe not even then.
We flew to New York via Miami the first week in June. We were away a total of three weeks. Five days in Manhattan: museums, restaurants, a couple of Broadway shows. I would've liked to hear a performance of the New York Philharmonic, but they were dark for the season. Annalise took one entire day to make the rounds of large fashion houses like Gloria Vanderbilt and Calvin Klein, as well as a couple of the smaller ones, lugging a portfolio of her designs and trying to wangle an audience with one of the head designers. I thought she was being naive, that she wouldn't get past the receptionist in any of the houses, and I was right. But the turnaways didn't dampen her enthusiasm. She left designs at two or three places, and held on to the belief that they were good enough to generate interest somewhere.
Six days in Paris, three in Monte Carlo, five in London. Annalise loved them all. For me the whole trip was an exhausting and uncomfortable experience. The cities were interesting enough, but not to my taste. Too many people, too many eyes. Every time we went through passport and customs checks, I felt exposed and vulnerable. I imagined policemen were watching me, thinking that I looked familiar. Ordinary citizens, too. In London a tourist pointed a camera in my direction, and I ducked and turned away before I realized it wasn't me but one of the double-decker buses behind me that he was interested in. If Annalise noticed my discomfort, she ignored it because she was having such a good time.
I was relieved to get back to St. Thomas. The island was my safe harbor, the Caribbean my comfort zone. An illusion, sure; I could've been recognized there just as easily as in New York or London or Europe. But everybody has a place where he feels secure, a lifestyle that suits him perfectly, and this was mine. More of a home, after only two and a half years, than Los Alegres or San Francisco had ever been.
I slept for fourteen hours and then went down to the harbor and talked Bone into a day sail on Conch Out. I needed time on a boat on the open sea to unwind and resettle.
It wasn't long after our return that things began to deteriorate rapidly between Annalise and me.
She was still on a high from the trip and she started lobbying for us to move to New York—"not immediately, in a year or two." I told her it wasn't going to
happen, and why it wasn't going to happen. At first she pouted. Then, when the high faded and sank into a low, she turned broody and distant.
One set of the designs she'd distributed in New York came back stuffed in a envelope with no note and postage due. The others were never returned. This depressed her, started her drinking more than she had before. And the drinking brought out the bitch again.
"I'm never going to get anywhere with my designs living down here. If we were in New York I could talk to people, meet somebody who'd look at them and see the potential and give me a chance. Or I could enroll in Pratt Institute and eventually get a referral from them."
The Crimes of Jordan Wise Page 11
