Gallatin Canyon

by Thomas McGuane

  “At about two in the morning, the gale was rising and we put a double reef in the main, a real adventure because she had an old-fashioned boom that overhung the transom by ten feet, and getting the bunt tied in all the way to the leech was dangerous.” Again, the thought returned that he was not actually speaking and this was only a dream, but Florence’s gaze seemed to indicate absorption and whether he was thinking or speaking seemed not to matter. In fact, this is how he remembered it was with Florence Ewing. It was what they’d all looked for: the trance she’d cast from her past mysteries.

  “The wind really came up fast, and since it was blowing against the direction of the stream the seas were bad. At first we could see the spreader lights of the other yachts, and then we couldn’t even see that and all around us it was just the black wave faces in our running lights. Without saying anything, I changed places with Raymond and took the wheel. He went below and stayed there for a long time as the seas built and the ketch began to groan under the strain and yaw worse and worse, especially as we came down the faces. Several times I could feel her try to broach, but I was able to head up and keep her on her feet. I later heard the seas had been over twenty feet. Boats were dismasted and Black Magic, a Great Lakes yacht, killed her helmsman in a standing jibe. One of the dope captains on a Stone Horse disappeared entirely, the only boat out there without a self-bailing cockpit. No one ever found the tin cans full of money he’d buried all over Key West, but his girlfriend went around in a haze, carrying her shovel and knocking on doors, trying to get in people’s yards.

  “Raymond came partway up the companionway and I could barely hear him over the storm. He said, ‘The jib’s got to come off before we lose control.’ I knew it was true, but all this time I had been thinking, and I wasn’t sure if I cared whether we controlled the boat or not. As it was, I had trouble. Even twenty-five tons of oak and lead seemed to lose traction in those seas.

  “Typical Raymond, he went forward hand over hand toward the foredeck. I kept her on course until he eased the halyard and the jib started down. I turned her upwind and the jib collapsed, Raymond on top of it lashing it with wild, violent exertions of his arms. I bore off, and as I did so we were lifted on a huge wave. We stayed atop it for a long moment, Raymond facedown on the foredeck, and then we started into the trough, which was just a long, bottomless hole. What had made me change direction? I felt the boat pick up speed as we went down and it had begun to yaw as the sea hissed out behind the keel. It seemed like it yawed harder and harder. The spokes on the wheel just tore at my hands, and either I lacked the strength or I—or I—it got away from me. The wheel got away from me . . . and we broached. The next wave buried us from starboard and the bow went under, beyond the forward hatch, then over the brow of the house. She stayed like that for a long time, and when she came up, the ocean was pouring off the crown of the foredeck. There was no one there.

  “The Cuban came aboard in Havana and read the crew manifest. He said, Where’s the otro hombre? I said I came by myself. He left and came back with another guy in a green uniform with a machine gun. He spoke English. I said there had been a language problem with the first guy. I told him the otro hombre washed overboard on the western edge of the stream where it changed color. He believed me. I don’t think it’s that unusual to Cubans to wash overboard.”

  The gardener came quietly into the room. Errol couldn’t tear his gaze away from Florence, because he felt any second now she might speak. He was hoping she would. She pulled herself up and looked at him intently, all phosphorus gone as her eyes blackened and some beads rolled off the counterpane and tinkled to the floor. Errol could tell she was going to say something.

  “Are you with the termite people?” she asked. Errol didn’t reply and Florence repeated her question, this time with some agitation.

  The gardener pushed past him and leaned over Florence so she would be sure to hear him. “They can’t come without they tent the place,” he said to her. “And they can’t tent the place if you in it, ’cause they pump it full of poison.” She let out a moan. The gardener spoke in a more conciliatory voice. “The exterminator been every week,” he told her, as if he was singing her a song. She seemed crushed at the news.

  “Is he the one with his car all fixed up like a rat?” asked Florence urgently. “Has big ears on it like a rat?”

  The old house on Fleming was the obvious choice, as long as they had a room with a tub available. He stopped first at Tres Hermanos for some supplies. The front door was wide open to the air, and a desk had been set up in the front hall. Here sat the clerk reading the newspaper, his treated blond hair swept forward from a single spot. Without looking up, he asked how he could help and Errol told him he wanted a room with a tub.

  “No can do.”

  “No rooms?”

  “Not with a tub.”

  “There’s a tub in the last room on the second floor.”

  “That’s a suite. You said you wanted a room.”

  “I’ll take the suite.”

  “It’s not the same price as a room.”

  “I understand.”

  The clerk looked up finally. He regarded the paper bag from the Cuban tienda. “Is that all you have to your name?”

  “Yes.”

  “Usually, when we rent the suite, it’s to someone with a suitcase.”

  “I’ll bet that’s right.” The clerk had no idea what a problem lay before him.

  Despite all the heavy, almost operatic furniture and tasseled drapery, the room was recognizable. He remembered its old bare wooden bones, the sparse secondhand furnishings of that time, the Toulouse-Lautrec poster and its rusty thumbtacks. The names were streaming at him. The gardener had told him he was wasting all that noise on Miss Ewing; he declared that Miss Florence Ewing had upped and cleared out during a previous administration and wouldn’t know him from Adam.

  The water made a deep sound in the old tub. Errol pulled a chair next to it and placed the bag where he could reach it. He filled the tub, calculating how deep it could be without the mass of his body overflowing it. The water looked so still, so clear, with light steam arising. He undressed and got in, sliding down until the water was as high as his throat. Errol remembered taking bread scraps to the birds in the small town where he grew up; and when he reached toward the chair next to the tub, he saw the birds again, how they rose in a cloud. He was alert enough to enjoy this slide into oblivion, to picture a million oranges rotting on trees as his mestizos dispersed into Florida barrios, and at first he confused the shouts he heard with those of his boss, the cracker, the juice king of Arcadia and citrus oligarch who made his life so wearisome. A cloud of blackbirds rose from the rotting oranges around a small man shouting in the grove. . . .

  It was the desk clerk and two police officers, but the desk clerk alone, soaking wet, was doing all the shouting. “He ruined my beautiful hotel!”

  One of the officers, a small portly Cuban, asked, “You call this a hotel?”

  “Get him out of here! Pump his stomach, do something!”

  To the skeptics in the emergency room, Errol said, “Must be some kind of bug.”

  Grisly days at Keys Memorial passed slowly. The nurses knew what he had done and several considered it a mortal sin, a view that produced grudging service and solitude beside otherwise busy corridors. At checkout, the accounting office having assumed indigence expressed surprise at his Blue Cross. He started to explain but all that came out was citrus. He was too numb to speak and wondered whether he had done himself permanent harm. Perhaps I am now feeble-minded, he thought. But really his heart was lighter for having survived the outcome of a long obsession.

  He spent the rest of the morning buying provisions. The yawl was just as he had left it, but for a light coating of ash from the island’s heroic burning dump. A fishing boat was being swabbed down by two Cubans in khakis and white T-shirts who from time to time tossed a fish from the scuppers to a pelican waiting modestly on the transom. The tide had dropped,
leaving a wide band of barnacles around the pilings, and Errol moved his spring lines until the boat stood away from them. Provisions were stowed in the galley; the water he had acquired on the mainland was still in good supply. He washed the deck down with seawater, sweeping the ash over the stern, and checked his watch. The bars had just opened. He stepped off the boat and headed uptown, stopping at a phone booth to call his employer, the owner of the groves and juice plant. He told him he’d gotten a much-needed rest and would be back among the oranges in no time flat. He’d left the Latino crew detailed instructions sure to see them through every waking moment. “I’ll just bet,” the grove owner said, adding, “You’re the damnedest feller I ever met.”

  “Anyway, you said you’d go along with me on this,” said Errol.

  “To a point,” said the cracker. “There’s a limit to everything.” All he remembered was walking through the door of the Bull and Whistle Saloon and not much of that. He had sufficiently conquered disgust to realize he was in the Gulf Stream, the sun just rising, and he felt a bleak pride that he could manage the yawl in his present condition. He sank and rose among the ultramarine troughs and saw golden strands of sargasso weed at eye level. Flying fish skittered off breaking wave edges, and the three that landed on deck he gutted and laid in the sink. By the end of the ten days promised him by the cracker, the mestizos would be gone and jobless. The oranges would fall and fruit wasps would rise in a cloud. He couldn’t let that happen. He couldn’t let himself put words to his dismal pride in belonging to the manager class, but he clung to it nonetheless.

  Wherever it was going, the little yawl was sailing well. Errol stood on the deck hanging onto the backstay and looked down into the Gulf Stream and the almost purplish depths. The rudder made a long trailing seam at the surface; he could see all the way to the end of the blade as it vibrated under the force of the boat’s progress. The sun had dried the decks, and only the leeward side remained dark with sea spray.

  Errol started to search out details of the previous night but nothing came. He had a good many of these blanks now, trailing into the past. Sometimes they unexpectedly came to life, filled with detail. He called them “sleeping beauties” in an attempt to assign some value amid what he realized was simple creeping oblivion. He even knew that his current behavior—indifference to where he might be headed—was customary following a blackout, and not unrelated to his frivolous attempt to do away with himself; the feeling would soon give way to extreme concern for his situation and all-round fearfulness. As strength returned he would be amused by these comical swings, even a bit jubilant, and the cycle would begin again, its force undiminished by familiarity. His excuse was that life was repetitious anyway, without quite realizing that the source of despair’s enduring power was that it was always brand-spanking-new.

  The yawl climbed each swell toward its breaking crest with steady progress, its thin wake like a crack in glass, until a moment when the view from the helm was blue sky and the whitest sea clouds; then hissing down the back slope into the trough to begin the climb again. In one ascent, he saw in the thinnest part of the rising wave a big iridescent fish that vanished as the sea swelled around it.

  He merely wondered where he was going.

  By afternoon, he more than wondered. The pleasant breeze from the southeast had gone round to the southwest and picked up considerably. Moreover, his spirits had sunk and he began to picture his restive mestizos, the towering cracker unfurling from his Mercedes to shout dismay at the ground covered with rotting oranges. But there was still time before all that happened, before the mestizos dispersed to the work camps at Okeechobee and their cramped prospects. He hadn’t really been their friend but he spoke their language and they shared his whiskey, and that was enough, relatively speaking.

  The blue of the sea was still reflected by the clouds, but instead of gliding down the backs of waves, the yawl seemed now to push its way down them, the wind driving the bow deeper and deeper until only inches remained before seawater came aboard. It was time to reef.

  Errol turned the yawl into the wind and she stopped, wallowing in the rolling ocean, the boom jumping from side to side until he sheeted the mizzen in and she held quietly, nose to wind. With eagerness and relief, Errol went from thinking to doing this work: releasing the main halyard to lower the mainsail, securing the first reef at the luff cringle, and then drawing down the leech until the sail was a third smaller. By tying in each of the fifteen reef points, he secured the loose stretch of decommissioned sail hanging below the boom in a tight, efficient bunt. The main halyard was raised until it hardened; he eased the mizzen, trimmed the jib and main, and the yawl resumed her course for an unknown destination, once again gliding down the waves with her nose up and her decks dry.

  Back at the tiller, he regarded the sweat pouring off his body as a result of his exertions and knew it carried poison away. He first thought it behooved him never to land, but awareness of his limited stores made him reject this foolishness. As misery approached, the romance of annihilation seemed to recede, and he wondered why his bouts of self-destruction always occurred on a rising tide of self-love. He knew that the worse he felt the harder he would try to get somewhere and survive. First he had to find out where he was. He had missed his chance at a noon shot of the sun with the sextant and would have to wait for the stars.

  The erasure of the previous night left him with no information about his departure; all he knew for certain was that he was in the Gulf Stream, heading for either Cuba or the Bahamas. At this rate, he would reach one or the other during the night, and he really ought to find out which one it was.

  He lashed the tiller and went below to cook the flying fish on the alcohol stove, frying them until they were crunchy and taking them back to the cockpit on a tin plate, where he watched the white top of each wave racing along a blue edge before turning into white spume and blowing away. Terns hunted fish overhead and sometimes rained down onto baitfish pushed to the surface by predators beneath, mostly unseen but sometimes showing a dark fin slicing through the turbulence.

  Lying back, Errol watched the mast move against the sky, a repeated crossed loop, the infinity sign. He had begun to feel sick. It started as pain just behind his forehead and spread down his spine; as the pain moved into his limbs over the next several hours he began to tremble. By sundown his entire body was shaking and he began dragging things from the cabin—sail bags, an army blanket, the canvas cockpit cover—covering himself with these to the height of the coaming so that only his face showed and the arm that connected him to the tiller. These too were shaking, and unless he kept them locked his teeth rattled audibly. His course was taking him to some part of the vast world of rum and his mind traced a path between this universe and a wallet still fat with banknotes. This wallet, pressed uncomfortably against his buttock, could have been left in the cabin, but the prospect of misplacing it on arrival in the land of rum was such that he wished to verify its whereabouts continuously by the discomfort it produced. Sunken-eyed and desolate, he watched the stars rise from the sea, and he knew he was meant to find out where he was. But the sextant in the far end of the cabin with the sight tables might as well have been on the moon; he knew he couldn’t hold it steady enough to take a fix. Instead, he made a crude estimate in his mind of where he might be. The wind was in the first part of the southwest shift; hence the building seas after the quiet of the prevailing southeasterly. He knew he sailed on a starboard tack perhaps ten or fifteen degrees east of the wind, which meant only that he was headed for islands of various sizes, histories, and languages and not the open Atlantic. Beyond that he couldn’t say how far he’d gone since he’d departed from a hole in time somewhere behind him.

  He vomited the flying fish onto the sole of the cockpit and moaned as malodorous drool poured from the corner of his mouth. His hand on the tiller was a claw by now and the shaking had grown sufficiently violent that he heard himself thump against the cockpit seat, where he stretched out under the heap of t
hings he’d brought from the cabin. He recognized that he wouldn’t be able to steer much longer and wished that, while he’d had the strength, he’d heaved to and stopped the boat until a better hour. It was too late now. He lashed the tiller in place and let the wind pick his course out of a hat. The one advantage of this much misery was that he could quit caring, a welcome detachment from his suffering, suffering that would end in the Isles of Rum. At this point, he heard a bitter laugh fly from his mouth, a raspy bray that produced another just like it, then another as they fed off each other, and finally a picture of himself braying at a colossal rum bottle, which inspired bleak masturbation on the cockpit floor. After that, he could only hold his head up by resting his teeth on the seat.

  A calming spell of defeat overtook him as he lay on his back looking up at the sail as it passed the stars. Though he recognized them all, he was somewhat absorbed as they flowed in one side of the sail and out the other with a purpose—though not his, of course; he had no purpose. He was not purpose, he was pulp. He cast about for consolation, grimly congratulating himself for being childless. But he remembered that his mestizos trusted him. Of course, they were grateful to anyone who learned their language in this coldhearted nation. But more. He worked beside them, made sure they were paid, while the cracker often inclined to contrive withholdings. The mestizos knew Errol was not so devious, and a working alcoholic appealed to their sense of shared desperation and defensible self-destruction. Indeed, they shook their heads in sympathy when he came to the groves sick, picked things up when he dropped them, carried his ladder. In the depths of his misery, this was all Errol could find, but under the circumstances it seemed quite a lot. Perhaps he was beginning to turn the corner, but first there was more vomiting to be done and the last of the flying fish went over the side. Miguel, Delfin, Juan, Machado, Estevez, Antonio, were their names. Good men.