Cross Current

by Christine Kling

  My mother had often talked about this trip. She brought it up several times when she was arguing with Red over something, and she’d asked him why he didn’t go into the yacht delivery business because he had made so much money on that Nighthawk trip. I had no memory of his leaving—I was only three years old in 1973—but I seemed to remember hearing that he had been gone for two or three months.

  The way I’d heard it, he had been just over halfway through the building of Gorda. I’d seen photos of the aluminum hull, deck, and deckhouse all taking shape over time amid the sheds and changing backdrop of boats at Summerfield Boatworks. He eventually got to the point of nearly finishing, but he still needed to power his new boat. He was out of money and in danger of never finishing, of having to go to work for somebody else. He had thought his pension from the Navy would stretch further than it did. That was when he got this offer to go down to Colombia and help a friend deliver a schooner back to Fort Lauderdale. When he got back, he’d made enough money to buy the engine and finish off the boat. Gorda was launched in early 1974.

  When Joe said he and Red had worked together, why hadn’t he mentioned this adventure?

  “You know that guy?”

  “Huh?” I looked up and blinked, tried to focus on B.J.’s face. The last of the light was leaving the room; I would need to turn on a light soon.

  “You’re staring at that picture as if you know that guy.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s pretty weird. The guy in this picture is Mike’s buddy. You know, the guy from yesterday who was on the Outta the Blue, who’d been out fishing with Mike all night? Mike tried to make out like the dead battery was this guy’s fault. He said the guy wanted to turn on every light on the boat.” Mike had made it sound like Joe didn’t know much about boats. Had that been Mike’s way of shifting the blame? Joe knew a hell of a lot more than Mike if he was on a delivery crew back in the seventies.

  B.J. leaned in close to examine the photo. “Odd coincidence, huh?”

  “I’ll say. But it gets weirder. I ran into him again this morning down on the beach. He told me that he knew Red, but he didn’t mention that they’d been on this.” I pointed to the photo. “He said back when he was with the DEA, when they used to impound drug boats, he’d hire Red to move them around.”

  B.J. picked up the photos that had scattered when the rubber band broke, and he was leafing through them. “He’s in quite a few of these other photos, but there aren’t any more of the two of them together.” He straightened the photos into a neat pile and handed them to me. “Do you think this Joe guy was with the DEA back when these photos were taken?”

  “How should I know? He was pretty young then.”

  “I don’t mean to belabor the obvious, Seychelle, but think about it—DEA, Cartagena, Colombia, you know. What do you know about this trip your dad was on?”

  My mind was still trying to comprehend that Joe and my father had been more than just client and captain. It took me several seconds to get what B.J. was hinting at. “B.J., you are out of your mind! You knew Red. Just a minute ago you were calling him a hero. Do you think for one minute that he would get involved with something like that?”

  “Money makes people do the unexpected. You know that.” I dropped the photos back in the trunk and slammed the top closed. “We’re not going to talk about this any longer.” I stood up and looked at the clock on the wall over the kitchen stove. “It’s almost nine o’clock already. Where the hell is Pit?”

  B.J. came up behind me and placed his hands on my shoulders. “I didn’t mean to offend you, Sey.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I said, jerking my shoulders and walking away, out of his reach. “I’m tired, B.J. I just want to go to bed.” I opened the front door for him. “Tomorrow I’ve got to start looking for this kid’s father, and I don’t even know where or how to start.”

  He stopped in the doorway and turned to face me, our bodies less than a foot apart. “Seychelle, please. Don’t push me away.” I looked past him at the trunks of the oak trees barely visible in the starlight. I knew if our eyes connected, something inside me would start to collapse, to go soft and cave in.

  “B.J., don’t. Not tonight.”

  “You know, Seychelle,” he said as he reached out and tucked a strand of my wayward hair behind my ear, “what’s happened between us these past few months has been extraordinary. You’re feeling it, too, and it scares you. I can see that. That’s why you wanted to step back for a little while. You need to breathe. You are a very independent woman. That’s a large part of what I find so attractive about you, and I want you to know, I’m not trying to change you. It’s just that I’ve known many beautiful and amazing women in my life, but not one of them has ever felt like family. Everything’s different with you. When we are together, I feel like I am home.”

  My heart had just gone from zero to sixty in under ten seconds, and I felt light-headed. Family! That meant a mommy, a daddy, and one point two children. I didn’t fit in that picture. What kind of mother could I possibly be? I didn’t even know what to do for a ten-year-old girl, much less an infant. And when it came to mothering, what kind of chance did I have? Look at the role model I’d had.

  He was going to outwait me. Silence had never bothered B.J. He was just going to stand there, waiting for me to say something. I inhaled the smell of his sweat, his coconut soap, and the faint lingering odor of the Japanese food. Damn him. More than anything I wanted to mold my body against his, take him into my room, rip off his clothes, and lose myself in our lovemaking. And I knew if I did, it would mean I had made a decision I was not yet ready to make.

  “B.J., just go. Okay? This is not a good night for this. Tonight, I just need to rest. I can’t—” I couldn’t what? Look at his eyes? “Night,” I said.

  I closed the door and leaned back against it, and when I heard the gate close behind him, I wondered if I would ever have a really good night again.

  XII

  About the time I figured out that the ringing sound was the phone, and I realized I had better pull myself out of the depths of sleep to answer it, the answering machine clicked on, and I heard myself saying, “I’m either not home or out on the boat, so call me on channel sixteen or leave a message here. Bye.”

  After the beep, I heard Perry Greene’s voice. “Seychelle, get your butt out of bed, honey. I know you’re there.”

  I wanted to bury my head under the pillow and make him go away, but since the only reason Perry would be calling me at home at that hour would be for some kind of work, I reached over and lifted the phone on my nightstand.

  “Shit, Perry, what time is it?”

  “There’s my darlin’. It’s what, five-thirty? Hell, the sun’ll be up any minute now. I knew I could call you ’cuz I bet a foxy chick like you is up at the gym every morning making your hard little body even harder.”

  “Perry, this little body of mine is two inches taller and about the same weight as your scrawny ass. What do you want?”

  “I’m offering you an employment opportunity, sugar.”

  As much as I detested the thought of working with this sleaze, I couldn’t afford to turn down a job. That Miss Agnes job had been my only work in the past week. “When, where, and how much?”

  “I got a job moving some eighty-foot Eye-talian motor yacht from Port Everglades up to River Bend. This is an important dude. We’re talking future jobs here. It’s gonna need boats bow and stem. My cousin Leroy was gonna handle the aft end with his launch, but I just found out he got into a little trouble at Flossie’s last night.”

  I sat up and swung my legs over the side of the bed. The size of the boat told me the paycheck would be enough to make working with Perry worth it. “A little trouble?”

  “Well, Leroy didn’t know the guy had a knife! Anyways, it’s not so bad ’cording to my auntie, just a few slashes. He’s over at Broward General now, but we’re coming up on slack high water at nine this morning.”

  “I’ll only do it
if you’ll go fifty-fifty.”

  “Damn, girl. It’s my job.”

  “And you need me. Take it or leave it, Perry.”

  He barely paused a beat. “All right. The boat’s called O Solo Mio, and she’s berthed between cruise ships right on the commercial dock. You can’t miss her. Be there by eight.”

  He’d given in too easily. That could only mean he was hiding something.

  I was famished after last night’s sushi, but I didn’t feel like driving anywhere. I had no fresh milk for cereal and no bread for toast. When all else fails, I turn to a supply of toaster waffles I keep in the freezer. I knocked the clumps of frost off a couple of waffles by slamming them into the side of the sink half a dozen times, then dropped them into the toaster. With the coffee water heating and the waffles sizzling, I walked over and lifted the lid to Red’s trunk and took out the stack of photos. While I ate the waffles with my fingers, licking off the syrup and washing it down with two cups of coffee, I sorted through all the photos in the trunk, dividing them into two piles—those taken on the yacht delivery trip, and all the rest. If I’d had more time, I might have been interested in some of the old pictures of my parents hanging out together before they became my parents, or the photos of Red with his Navy buddies, but right now, I just wanted to learn what I could about that trip back in the spring of 1973.

  There were six photos of the trip, and I counted four recognizable characters. Besides Red and Joe, there was a young woman and another man with a big black walrus mustache and one of those awful boxy seventies hairdos. There was something odd about his face, as though it weren’t quite symmetrical, but I couldn’t really identify what was off. He was shorter than Red and bowlegged. He looked a good deal like that character in the cartoons—Yosemite Sam. He seemed to be the head honcho. Maybe he was the hired captain of the boat, maybe the owner. I doubted that last, though. He didn’t look much older than thirty, and even back in 1973, a schooner like the Nighthawk was very expensive to buy and even more to maintain. Trying to keep a wooden hull in that kind of shape in the tropics was like fighting a constant war against marine borers, termites, dry rot, the tropical sun, and electrolysis. Classic boats were beautiful to look at, but I sure as hell was glad that there were other people out there working on them, not me.

  One of the photos showed a close-up of Yosemite Sam’s face, and I noticed that a wide scar cut through his left eyebrow and the two halves of the eyebrow didn’t align quite right. Whoever had stitched him up had left him with a zigzag look. His nose had been broken as well, and the skin of his face was deeply pockmarked, probably from acne.

  I slid the photos into my shoulder bag with the idea that, at some point in the day, I would head over to Mike’s and ask him what he knew about his buddy Joe. Then I dug around in my bag for the Post-it that Collazo had given me with the name of the Haitian translator. The number was for the radio station where the police translator, Martine Gohin, worked. When I dialed it, an answering machine picked up. I left a message explaining to Ms. Gohin that Collazo had given me her name and that I wanted to ask her some questions about Solange.

  Perry’s boat, Little Bitt, was already tied up astern of the Italian mega-yacht when I throttled Gorda down in the Port Everglades turning basin. Perry was on the bow of O Solo Mio, readying the towlines. As I knew he would, he motioned me to tie up off the bow. This meant I would end up the head boat, and what had started as Perry’s job was now mine. Not a problem. Gorda had more power than Little Bitt, and I had more experience than Perry at this type of work.

  The tricky part of towing yachts this size up a narrow river is that boats get steerage only from moving at a certain speed through the water. If there is no water flowing past her rudders, a boat cannot turn. With the help of twin screws and bow thrusters, some boats are able to spin in their own lengths, but a boat like O Solo Mio still did not have brakes. The regulations required that vessels of a certain length and draft be assisted by a tug when going upriver. So, with five drawbridges standing between Port Everglades and the upriver boatyard facilities, as well as riverbanks that were lined with millions of dollars’ worth of yachts and properties, there was always plenty of business for Gorda.

  For three to four miles inland, the river remained tidal so that it reversed its flow with each change of the tide. When towing a vessel, it was always preferable to tow against the current so that Gorda and her tow could be moving at five knots through the water, but actually only be moving at three knots over the bottom and past the riverbanks. I also had to be concerned about depth because there were spots where the river shallowed up to six or seven feet at low water. The trick was to tow upriver just after high tide while the water was still deep but the current was flowing downriver.

  After I tied up Gorda, I went to check Perry’s work with the towing harness. Not that I didn’t want to trust him, but, well, I couldn’t afford to trust him. With every job, I put the name and reputation of Sullivan Towing and Salvage on the line. I could get away with an occasional screw-up in many other aspects of my life, but when it came to towing somebody’s multimillion-dollar vessel, that’s where I became a perfectionist. And my insurance agent appreciated it.

  Up on O Solo Mio's bridge, I introduced myself to the yacht’s captain. An Italian in his mid-forties, he had the classic good looks—strong chin and alert eyes—of many yacht captains. I swear they must ask for photos when they advertise for these positions. I’d never seen an ugly one. Apparently, if you are going to drive the yachts of the rich and famous, you must be one of the beautiful people yourself.

  He told me to call him Salvatore instead of Captain Lucca, and he asked me if I wanted a tour of the boat. That is one of the best parts of my job—getting to see how the other half lives. Through the main salon with the sleek, mirrored, and brushed-stainless built-in furnishings—including wet bar, stereo, and large-screen TV—he took me through to the owner’s stateroom. I half expected a sound track of jungle animal noises to be playing. The whole room was decorated in exotic animal prints, and in the middle of the cabin was a perfectly round bed that sported a mosquito net draped from above. On the walls were dozens of pictures of the owner and his friends. I was admiring the photos—one with former president Nixon, another with Frank Sinatra. Then I recognized a face.

  “Salvatore, who owns this boat?”

  In the photo I was examining, a group of ten men, all smiling for the camera, sat around a table in a brick-walled restaurant. One face stood out. I recognized the big handlebar mustache, the zigzag eyebrow. An older version, by maybe ten years, of Yosemite Sam from the Nighthawk photos.

  “He is a businessman in New York City.”

  “What does he do?”

  “I’ve been with him for eighteen years—precisely because I don’t ask exactly what he does.”

  He was smiling at me, a twinkle of humor and flirtation in his eyes. I was beginning to understand what Perry hadn’t told me about this job.

  “I see.”

  “I believe you have been on the water long enough,” he said, “to know exactly what I am talking about.”

  Perry’s face appeared in the stateroom’s doorway. “What are you guys doing farting around down here?”

  “Captain Lucca here was just showing me around the boat. We were talking about the owner.”

  “Hell of a guy,” Perry said, and he gave me an exaggerated wink. “I hear he’s an importer.”

  Behind Perry, I saw Salvatore frown. Obviously, Perry did not share his discretion. But he had kept the yacht owner’s affiliations secret from me long enough to get me on the job. Perry knew I usually chose not to work on these yachts.

  Perry came up behind me and peered at the photo I had been examining. “Hey, I know that guy.” He pointed to the man with the handlebar mustache. “That’s Gil.” Then he snorted and pulled at the crotch of his pants. “Man, he was just as ugly back then.”

  “How do you know him?” I asked.

  “Huh?”
r />   Perry had a habit of spacing out in the middle of a conversation. Though he generally wasn’t under the influence when he was working, even when he wasn’t high, Perry wasn’t all that coherent.

  “The guy in the picture,” I said. “How do you know him?”

  “Oh, yeah, me’n him done some drinking in Flossie’s a time or two. That’s all. Was nothin’.” There was clearly more to that story. Perry was a lousy liar.

  “Do you know his last name?”

  “Nah, just Gil. Dude’s been around forever.”

  I turned to the captain and asked him if he knew the man in the photo.

  He shook his head. “No, that photo was from many years ago. Before I came aboard.”

  Perry pulled at the front of his pants again. I was about to ask him if he had to go to the bathroom, the way my brother Maddy always asked his son, Freddy, before getting into the car, but then Perry said, “We gotta get going, you guys. Tide’s turnin’.”

  He was right.

  After a quick peek into the engine room and a check on deck, Perry, Salvatore, and I met to go over the plan. The deckhand was given his instructions. We all decided to monitor VHF channel 72, and then we got underway. Red had taught me that the trick to maintaining control of a large yacht was in using two short towlines or hawsers. Gorda had port and starboard towing bitts located in each corner of her stem. With the short hawsers that ran from those bitts up through the chocks on either side of the bow of the Italian yacht, I could quickly and efficiently turn the ship as we made our way upriver. As we negotiated each bend of the river with Gorda's Caterpillar engine revved up, pulling the more than fifty tons of aluminum, and Little Bitt pulling the yacht’s stem around, I went through the motions on mental autopilot, all the while thinking about a trip down island back in 1973. Whoever this Gil character was, he clearly had connections with some serious New York wise guys.