I was awfully hungry and I ate it, but I could see why the cat had fits. We couldn’t keep her away from it. She had a funny method of attack. She started with Ho, whose long tail hung below the level of the cockpit seat. She got hold of the end of that stringy bit of fuzz and gave it a nip. The monkey let out a holler and began cussing blue murder. Miss Wong cradled the monkey in her arms and murmured to him in Chinese. Harry, in a tone of disgust, told them both to shut up. And while all that was going on Scotty was well into the Jezebel Special.
Cat or no cat, I cleaned up what was left.
Miss Wong was indignant because of Harry’s lack of sympathy with what had happened to the monkey, and so right after dinner she and Ho disappeared dockside.
Harry stretched out on the cabin top with a cigar that smelled like burned brake bands.
I did the dishes.
There wasn’t much of a view from the galley because a huge white motor yacht called Charisma had come in alongside. She had a professional skipper rigged out like an admiral, and three flunkeys running around on deck. Orders were transmitted from the bridge through a bull horn. It was all, as Harry said, tossing his ashes in the yacht’s direction, “very Gung Ho.”
The owner lounged on the afterdeck in a wicker chair. With him was a very blond lady who looked like a strawberry soda. I mean all that creamy skin and pink sunsuit. The owner wore a blue blazer with some kind of yacht-club emblem on the breast. He looked about thirty pounds overweight and discontented. He was drinking steadily. Whenever his glass got down to the last inch it was automatically refilled by one of the white-coated stewards. When he glanced in our direction he looked as though he had smelled something bad. All the time they sat there I did not see them exchange two words.
But then he suddenly began to sing. His voice was awful. This is what he sang:
Oh I used to work in Chicago in a department store.
Oh I used to work in Chicago but I don’t work there anymore.
But not just once. I mean like forty times, over and over. The blonde gave him a look that could have pinned him to the mast. The more she looked the more he sang. When he finally gave up it was because he was unconscious. I mean he just folded. The glass fell out of his hand, and he slithered out of the chair and down to the deck like a bowl of jello. He began to snore very loudly. The blonde signaled to the bridge, and two of the stewards appeared to haul him away. It reminded me of those pictures you see of mules dragging a dead bull out of the bull ring. They gave you the feeling they had all been through this plenty of times.
As for Harry, he might have been forty miles at sea. He never even looked in their direction. All the same I had the feeling that he was very much aware of that strawberry soda in the pink sunsuit. And she of him. I mean he never looked straight at her but you could sense something between them like with a good quarterback and a receiver working into the end zone.
He tossed away his cigar. It left a nice black mark on the otherwise spotless topsides of the yacht. Then he took a small corncob pipe out of his pocket and filled it out of a little sack of tobacco. While he was at it he looked back at me and winked. What was he up to? I was so interested that I just kind of hung there in the companionway with the dishtowel in my hand.
“Want a puff of this first-rate Mexican grass?” he bellowed at me.
I couldn’t believe my ears.
“Are you deef?” he yelled. “I offered you some of this high class Tia-Jauna Gold. Speak up!”
“N-no, sir.”
“No sir what?”
“I don’t smoke.”
“Spoken like a proper little sea scout,” he said in a namby-pamby voice. “I ought to boot your lard ass over the side right now. We all smoke a little pot on this vessel, Number Three. Even that fucking chimp.”
He was laying it on with a shovel. But why? Then I began to understand. The blonde had been drawn like a fly to honey. She had come to the rail and was staring down at us. Then Harry gave her the business. I mean he looked straight at her for the first time. It was some look. I had the funny feeling that his eyes had gone a sort of milky color and that his red beard actually bristled. He grinned at her and I could swear he had fangs. Even from a distance I could see the goosebumps on her arms.
What was it he reminded me of? Back home somebody kept an old billy goat in a field near the train station. That was a pretty foul goat. You could smell him a quarter of a mile off, and if you ever gave him a shot at your back, you were ass over head right then. The trouble with him was he was so lecherous. It was like he was one big hard-on from stem to stem. I mean he gave off sparks. It was like all the pipes of Pan were playing through Peckinpaugh.
Harry was more like that damn goat than anybody you ever saw.
The Charisma blonde stared at him popeyed as if the devil had suddenly appeared before her. It was like she didn’t know whether to run off screaming or jump straight into his arms. In any case, I don’t think the decision was hers. It was like she was already hypnotized. A moth to the flame. I mean her wings were already singed.
Then he spoke to her, and she stood listening with her head cocked to one side as if it was far-off music she heard. Whatever it was, it was between them; I couldn’t catch a word. He spoke to her again, very softly, and she moved closer. She shook her head once or twice but he kept on with it. Finally she gave a little nod and moved off to the gangway and down onto the pier. She walked off into the fringe of pines without looking back.
Harry puffed a little more on his pipe and then got up and knocked the ashes out against the Charisma’s side.
“Keep an eye on the ship, Number Three.”
“Yessir.”
He stepped ashore with the air of an admiral reviewing the fleet. I felt like saluting him as he went off down the pier.
Now how had he done that? It was practically like he had just snapped his fingers and she had obeyed. What I couldn’t understand about it was that he was so ugly. I mean he was hairy and naked and not very clean. Maybe it was that stuff he was smoking. Maybe she had gotten one whiff of that and gone off stoned.
He had left the can on deck. It looked like a regular tobacco can and was labeled Sir Walter Raleigh. But of course he would keep it in something like that; I mean who would suspect it. I looked all around to see if anybody was watching before I opened the can. It looked like plain old tobacco. I sniffed at it and it smelled like tobacco. I tasted it. It was tobacco.
I decided he must be some kind of genius.
When Miss Wong came back from her walk she didn’t even comment on Harry’s absence. She had a graceful, smooth way of moving and it was a pleasure to watch her. She fixed a little bed for the monkey and tied him to the mainmast so that he could not sneak out to get at the cat. He cussed for a while but then shut up.
She came back to the cockpit and smiled at me. “You look tired, Clay.”
I had been on the road since dawn and I was about the most tired guy in the world.
“Not especially,” I said.
“Why don’t you go to bed?”
“Harry told me to keep an eye on things.” I didn’t know if it was all right to mention that he was gone, but she could see that anyway.
“I’ll keep an eye out for you.” Her eyes had a nice way of crinkling when she smiled. Being on a slant and all made them especially charming. Maybe she just wanted to be alone with him when he got back.
“I might just stretch out for a bit,” I said.
She nodded.
I crawled into my sack behind the engine. The pillow wasn’t too clean, but it had a nice smell of some kind of perfume. There were two bobby pins on the mattress. I wondered which one of the girls I had seen in the picture had bunked there. It might have been the tall dark one with her hand on Harry’s shoulder—the one with the tight shorts and the almost invisible bra.
During the night I thought I heard people hollering at each other but I was too tired to care.
CHAPTER 5
IN THE MO
RNING I WAS PROMOTED TO CHIEF Engineer. Harry said he didn’t know a spark plug from a rectal thermometer and didn’t want to. He said if I was any kind of a good, healthy, clean-cut American boy, I would know how to get the old one-lunger percolating. I swung the big flywheel and found about as much compression as you would look for in a cigarette lighter. It looked kind of hopeless but I thought that maybe with a dose of STP for the burned bearings and a new set of points, I might yet get her going.
The trouble was he had no tools except a pair of rusty pliers and a screwdriver with a broken handle. How had he gotten this far? Lots of luck, I decided. Or faith.
I took the engine serial number off the block and then went ashore to see if I could find the points and maybe a carburetor kit. There was an engine repair shop a couple of blocks away, and they looked up the number for me and told me the Palmer company had stopped building that particular clunker back in 1934. I was encouraged because I figured it was probably 1834.
So I stayed with it and finally came up lucky in a junkyard. When I got back I found that Mr. Burger, the owner of Charisma, had tried to shoot Harry. You all know Hamilton Burger—owner of the famous Bigger Burger drive-in restaurants that are like on every street corner in America. I had passed maybe a hundred of them hitchhiking down. Hamilton Burger. With a name like that I guess it was inevitable.
Anyway he had come after Harry with a Smith & Wesson and had let go one shot before Miss Wong skulled him with the iron frying pan.
The way I got the story he had jumped down onto the deck of the Jezebel, spotted Harry in his bunk, and tried to pot him through one of the cabin ports. He was either the world’s worst shot or still polluted from all that booze, because he had not only missed Harry but almost the whole damn boat. He was lucky he didn’t shoot his foot off, because the slug had gone through the deck right where he was standing. It had torn up two inches of solid pine like cardboard. While he was standing there looking at the hole, Miss Wong came on with the frying pan. Although she never seems to move fast, there must still be some Genghis Khan in her blood.
If Harry was shaken up by that little fracas, he didn’t show it.
When I got there he was puffing on his pipe and looking down at Mr. Burger, who was stretched out on the bunk with a towel around his head. He wasn’t exactly unconscious, just lying there with his eyes shut and the tears running down his cheeks and dripping off his chin. He smelled like a brewery.
Harry looked uneasy, kind of embarrassed.
“Now look here, old man…” he said. “I say, Burger old boy…”
Burger gave a combination groan and hiccup and unleashed another batch of tears.
“You don’t want to take on like that over a little friendly chavering,” Harry said.
Burger opened his eyes. They looked like rainy sunsets.
“What are you talking about?” he said in a voice that might have been his last breath.
Harry rubbed his pipe on his nose and scratched his beard. “Well… you know.”
“What’s all this chavering?”
Harry shuffled his feet. “You get the idea.”
“The idea I got,” cried Burger, “is that while I was below sleeping you laid my wife. Did you or didn’t you?”
“Is that what she told you?”
“You know damn well she did.”
“I wonder why?”
“You wonder why you screwed her, you sonofabitch?”
“I wonder why she bothered to tell you.”
“Then you admit it?”
“Well, of course.”
Burger snatched away the towel and tried to sit up, but in so doing banged his head on the deck beam and collapsed again. Another flood of tears soaked the pillow.
“You’re taking a very emotional approach,” Harry said. “Why not think of it as nice healthy physical exercise. Like deck tennis. Don’t you ever play deck tennis on that bloody great tub?”
Burger sat up again, more cautiously this time. He used the towel to mop his cheeks. His watery blue eyes looked like they were swimming in blood. I guess when he was fixed up and reasonably sober, he wasn’t a bad-looking man, but now he was a mess. He was wearing bermuda shorts, and his legs looked like kind of hairy asparagus.
“You’re a lunatic,” he said with conviction. “Deck tennis. Chavering. A madman. Crazy as a bedbug. You should be put away.”
“Sure thing,” Harry said.
“Why I’m glad now I didn’t kill you, you poor nut.”
Harry looked thoughtful. “The trouble with you, Burger, is you’re not getting much fun out of life. And neither is your chick. You’ve got all that dough, but you’re so smashed all the time you don’t know what day it is. You’ve got to loosen up a little, Burger boy. Now I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll work a little deal with you. Pass Mrs. B. down here for a while, and I’ll lend you Miss Wong up there.”
Burger calmed down at once. A crafty gleam penetrated his bloodshot eyes. He mopped his cheeks. “Well now, Hook…” he began.
But Miss Wong was having none of it. Her face was as sweet as ever, but her eyes were black ice cubes. “Not on your motherfucking life,” she said.
Harry shrugged. “I tried, Burger, but you see how it is. You’re just too godawful. Nobody will touch you with a barge pole. But don’t give up, man. Never give up. Shades of John Paul Jones and all that. Now for one thing, you ought to swear off the sauce; and for another, you ought to get rid of that mothering boat.”
Burger was suddenly defensive. “What do you mean mothering boat? Why that’s one of the most beautiful boats in the world. That boat was designed by Alden in Boston and built by Abeking & Rasmussen in Bremerhaven.”
“Shit,” said Harry. “All that air conditioning and television and wall-to-wall carpeting. All those captains and stewards and deckhands and prattboys. Why I’d be smashed all the time too if I was on a boat like that. The trouble with you, Burger, is you’re bored to death. And that goes for your sweet little lady too. Get with it, man.”
“Why the Charisma has been written up twice in Yachting…”
“Never mind fucking Yachting and never mind your fucking boat. I’ve tried to give you a little friendly advice, but you’re too goddamn hardheaded to take it.”
“I suppose you think this filthy wreck is better.”
“You may know something about hamburgers or sausage or whatever that garbage is you sell, but you don’t know a bloody thing about boats. Why of course she’s better and ten times as beautiful. Consider her courageous sheerline, her saucy fantail, the rake of her spars.”
“You’re insane! Absolutely insane.”
Harry nodded. “Maybe I am. But I’m living, which is more than we can say for you. Now get back to that fucking Taj Mahal and take this with you.” He extended the pistol.
Burger stared at the weapon in bewilderment, as if he had never seen it before. “What do I want that thing for?”
“You might want to shoot yourself,” Harry said.
CHAPTER 6
THE OLD PALMER FARTED AND THEN CAUGHT. It died once and caught again.
“Good enough,” Harry said. “Prepare to shove off. Stand by to let go lines.”
Two of the ragged dock lines had already parted by themselves, so all I had to do was take in the ends. We edged out into the river.
“Take the wheel, Number Three.”
“Where are we going?”
“The Strait of Juan de Fuca. Around the Horn. Guadeloupe. What the hell do you care?”
“Well, I mean which way do I steer?”
“Down the cruddy river.”
Miss Wong lay in the sun on the foredeck in her orange bikini. The monkey had gone up the mast and sat there eating peanuts and spitting the shells down on our heads. Harry put on his big straw hat. The cat slept in his lap.
There were twelve bridges that had to open for us. Harry handed me an old brass foghorn on a leather lanyard. I had to blow three short blasts before each bridge. The horn ma
de a noise like a sick cow, and every time I blew it Ho threw more peanut shells.
Harry looked up at the monkey and said, “Next thing he’ll piss on you.”
I reached behind me to where the foul weather gear was hanging and brought up the rubber hat.
Threading those bridges was no fun. I mean our horn seemed to infuriate the bridge keepers. The big classy boats with air horns went through like a dream, but not us. We had to fiddle around in mid-stream and I kept waiting for that asthmatic hunk of rusty iron he called an engine to quit altogether, then for us to slide into the bridge, the masts to come down on our heads, and all of us to be killed.
If Harry was perturbed, he didn’t show it. When we were about halfway down the river and I was blowing my guts out without getting anywhere, he gave me a lesson on the art of playing the foghorn.
“The thing is,” he said, “you’ve got to understand the bridge-keeper’s temperament. You’ve got to blow a tune that will sing to him, that will make him want to open that fucking bridge.”
“You said three short blasts so that’s what I’m giving him.”
“Of course I said three short blasts, but it’s how you blow them that counts. What I mean is each one of them up there in those boxes is an individual, and each one marches to a different drummer, if you know what I mean.”
“I don’t.”
He sighed. “Number Three, you have no feeling for your fellow man. But we’ll be charitable and simply attribute it to the arrogance of youth. Now suppose you were up there in that cage. You sit there all day watching them come and go. I mean beautiful yachts with gorgeous chicks going God knows where. And there you are getting older and balder and fatter and going nowhere except maybe home to some lousy furnished room with a wife who probably has bad breath. Do you dig me, son?”
Harry & the Bikini Bandits Page 2
