by Jim Nisbet
“You’re the expert on steeds.” Tipsy angled her own line of sight, up through the passenger window. “Can you see any of the video screens in that thing?”
“Why?”
“I can’t tell you without embarrassing myself.”
“Give me a hint.”
“Wait till the light turns green.”
Quentin glanced at her, then strained further over the dashboard. “Is it the governor?”
“I doubt it.”
Quentin resumed his driving posture. “I’d like to have a word with him about same-sex marriage.” After a moment he twisted both hands on the steering wheel as if it were a pair of motorcycle throttles. “So what’s the big deal?”
“You’ll see.”
“This is the second longest light in town,” Quentin pointed out. “Only that time warp at South Van Ness and Mission is longer.”
The HumVee lurched ahead.
“It’s green.”
“So?”
“So follow him. Aren’t you gonna—?”
The car behind them honked.
“Oh,” said Tipsy. “I get it.”
Two cars back, a driver honked twice. “No, you don’t get it.” Quentin drummed his fingernails on the rim of the steering wheel.
“I do too get it.”
“It’s rush hour, after all,” Quentin observed. “If I get shot by an irate commuter, it’ll be your fault.”
A chamber arrangement of car horns.
“I declare,” said Quentin. “This is worthy of George Antheil.”
“Look, stupid—”
“Stupid, is it. And who is not behind the wheel because she racked up a DUI?”
Tipsy slapped the dashboard. “I try to bring you up to date on pop culture and all you can do is throw my past into my face.” Vehicles streamed past on the right, honking.
“Your past? You got that DUI two months ago.”
Tipsy sat back against her seat and folded her arms. “I should have been a lesbian.”
Despite a prominent pair of No Left Turn signs on the other side of the intersection, Quentin turned on his left hand turn signal. The horns became continuous. “Face it, girlfriend, for one solid year, you’re going to need me like a junky needs laxative.”
“Only ten months remain, and that’s disgusting.”
“I couldn’t agree more.”
“Will you please catch that HumVee?”
“The ultimate transitive verb, used as an adverb.” Quentin floored it, and a plume of blue smoke seemed to propel them forward. “This could be expensive,” he added, glancing at the rearview mirror. “Crankcase oil is up to eight dollars a quart.”
They caught the Hummer at Fifth, just as it was making an illegal left onto the 280 on-ramp. “Follow him,” Tipsy instructed.
With a glance at his rearview mirror, Quentin followed. “We keep this up, we’ll both be walking.”
“Close to about twenty yards and stay behind him.”
Quentin did so.
“Now.” Tipsy pointed with one hand, still clinging to the grab bar with the other. “Note the video display in the back of each headrest?”
“Land sakes alive, it’s a TeeVee in a horseless carriage.”
“It’s been an option for twenty years.”
“So what? There isn’t even anybody in the back to watch it. Clearly, the ostentatious swine has no friends or family.”
“Can you see the program that’s playing?”
The sunlight was at right angles to their direction of travel now, barely topping a thick fog that poured over Twin Peaks, about three miles to their right.
Quentin closed to within ten yards of the HumVee and squinted. “Caramba,” he exclaimed, “it’s a pornographic movie.” He peered over the lenses of his sunglasses. “Tant pis, however, it would appear to involve straight people.”
“There’s a screen in the dashboard, too,” Tipsy noted helpfully, “for a total of three.” At seventy miles an hour, they watched for a moment. “Another page for the book of steeds?”
“Well,” Quentin prevaricated, “perhaps, rather than waste his commute by marinating his brain in sports-talk radio, this Hummer-owning individual is pursuing a close study of heterosexual mating rituals, mores, and techniques in hopes of finishing that long-stalled masters degree in anthropology and entertainment.” A quarter mile elapsed before Quentin added, “Which may well lead to tenure, bulletproof health care, and early retirement at eighty percent of full salary.”
“I’ll bet you a dollar,” Tipsy retorted crisply, “he’s got the sound off on the movie and the sound up on sports-talk radio.”
“Plus, he’s on the phone,” Quentin noted.
“If he’s masturbating with the spare hand,” Tipsy reasoned, “who’s driving?”
“Cruise control,” Quentin suggested. “Hey, a close-up.”
After a moment of silence: “That’s one big dick,” Tipsy observed reverently.
“Oh,” Quentin responded mildly, centering the frame of his sunglasses on the bridge of his nose with the tip of a forefinger, “I don’t know about that.”
Tipsy shot him an annoyed look. “What do you mean, you don’t know? You could kill somebody with that thing.”
“People are lining up to get killed by such things,” Quentin reminded her. “They call it phallicide.”
“They have a name for—Look out!” Tipsy hands converted into talons, the better to reassert their purchase on the dashboard grab bar.
Quentin abruptly corrected the wheel. The tires on the Mercedes protested with a screech, but a looming guardrail receded.
“Whew.” Tipsy relaxed her grip. “Until today, I never believed that pornography could kill.”
Quentin allowed the two-seater to slow a bit. “So,” he said, with a glance at their surroundings, “You brought us all the way out here to Portrero Hill to show me a guy with a porn tape on every screen in his HumVee?”
A black BMW dropped into the slot opened by the difference in speed between the HumVee and the Mercedes. “Is all you can think about,” Tipsy said to the windshield, “you you you? What if some kid saw that? What’s he or she supposed to think? Wait. If it were a little boy, I know what he would think. But what if it were a little girl? What if it was your little girl, Quentin, strapped into the back seat of your Volvo?”
“I don’t do breeding,” Quentin held up a hand, “and I don’t do Volvos.”
“Countenance the theoretical. You’ve purchased an adorable little girl from some catalog and you’re driving her to daycare. She’s in the passenger seat, right where I’m sitting, in her pinafore and saddle shoes, holding her book bag and lunch box—”
“What are we in, here, a Billy Collins poem?”
“—and she can see exactly what I’m seeing. What would you do? Huh? I’ll tell you. You’d sit there and take it and take it and take it, just like everybody else in this shipwrecked culture.” She slapped the dash. “That’s what you’d do! This is a question of moral rigor,” she added savagely, her mouth mere inches from Quentin’s right ear.
Quentin cringed against the driver’s door on his left. “Don’t let that seat harness dent your mammillae.” He checked his side mirror. “I hear what you’re saying. You think that setup has a remote control?”
“I would think it mandatory.”
“In that case, let us come to the rescue of my little girl’s delicate sensibilities.” Quentin accelerated into the left lane, passed the black Beemer, drew even with the HumVee, and matched the latter’s speed. “Let’s see if this works.” He fingered a button on a lipstick-sized canister among the keys dangling from the ignition switch. “Patience.”
Tipsy frowned. “Huh?”
“It’s scanning frequencies.”
Abruptly, every LCD screen in the HumVee went dark.
This cheered Tipsy immensely. “Wow. Am I a cheap date, or what?” She laughed girlishly and slapped the dash. “How’d you do that?”
Q
uentin flicked a forefinger at the little canister. “It’s called The Quietus, and it’s tuned for the frequencies specific to television remotes. Fourteen ninety-five, double-A battery extra. It’s great for restaurants with loud televisions, it works on modern jukeboxes, and for all I know it disarms IEDs, too.”
The black BMW abruptly accelerated past them in the fast lane.
“No reason for tailgating now,” Tipsy observed.
The HumVee driver looked up from his phone conversation and glared at the darkened display in his dashboard. He touched its screen, touched it again with greater authority, then slapped it. He leaned back in order to view the screen on the back of the headrest of the passenger seat, but couldn’t see it. He leaned over the center console and, with some stretching, released the lock on the passenger seat with his phone hand, leaving the phone clenched between his shoulder and ear, talking the while, and driving too. The seat tilted forward and he could see that its video display, built into the headrest, had also gone dark.
The driver mouthed, “I’ll call you back,” closed his phone, and began pushing buttons on the dashboard. The three displays flickered alight, and the sexual activity resumed.
“He likes it on,” breathed Tipsy, “I like it off.”
“Don’t stare or he’ll know it’s us,” Quentin said, somewhat huffily. “If he’s capable of buying a Hummer, he’s capable of anything.”
“What are you talking about? A guy with a pink Mohawk and a red and yellow pineapple shirt driving a burnt-orange HumVee with pornography on at least three video screens is going to get paranoid about people staring at him? Is that what you’re saying?”
Quentin touched The Quietus. “You have a point.” The screens in the HumVee winked out.
“Oh, look,” Tipsy said, “he’s pounding the dashboard with his phone.”
“It can take it,” said Quentin, with a glance at the passenger-side rearview mirror. “That car’s built by and for Americans.” A part flew off the phone. “On the other hand, his communications device appears to be an offshore production.”
“Maybe it’s still under warranty.”
“It should be. People hit things with cellphones all the time. Each other, too.”
Quentin let the Hummer pull ahead. It was followed by an F-250 Ford pickup, whose cab contained two rows of sleepy sheetrock tapers. A jumble of cardboard boxes, five-gallon buckets, and light trees heaped the bed, the whole ensemble bespattered with hardened joint compound. Quentin dropped into the lane behind the truck and took the Cesar Chavez off-ramp.
At the stoplight he said, “Well, what are we doing? Back to Townsend and Second during rush hour? How bad do you need that chart?”
“They close at 5:30,” Tipsy said. “Feel like a beer?”
Quentin frowned.
“Yes,” Tipsy said, anticipating his thought, “I am a bad sister.”
“You sure?”
“Just one. Then, if you could …”
“Drop you at your DUI class?”
“You’re sweet.”
“In Diamond Heights.”
“You’ve memorized the way!”
“You’re buying. We’ll get the chart tomorrow.”
“Not tomorrow. Tomorrow I’ve got to get started on another essay for the DUI class. The one I’m turning in tonight took me two days to write. Writing, I must say, is not my fortay.”
“Fort,” Quentin corrected. “They really make you work that hard for a new license?”
“Are you kidding? They’re serious up there. The assignment was to go to a party and not have a single drink the whole time I was there. Can you believe it?”
“How interesting,” Quentin lied. “So you had plenty of time to write.”
“First thing I noticed? Getting high and coming down take way more time than writing an essay.”
“Not to mention concentration.”
“That’s what parties are for—no?”
“I’ve always wondered why anybody would waste a good high on a party.”
“Well, to get laid, for one thing.”
“Really?”
“And to dance. What’s that quote you always quote?”
“‘Dancing is the lowest form of social intercourse’?”
“That’s the one.”
“G.K. Chesterton.”
“What a jerk.”
“Takes one to know one.”
“Takes one to memorize one.”
“We were speaking of your essay.”
“So I went to a party and didn’t drink and had a great time. Danced, got laid, didn’t spend any money, and there was no hangover.”
“So what’s the point? You can live a full life without drinking?”
“It seems like a stretch, doesn’t it.”
“Is that a question?”
“No.”
“So?”
“So what?”
“So was it fun anyway?”
“No, it wasn’t fun anyway. Do you have any idea how hard it is to find somebody you want to fuck when you’re not drunk?”
“Well, no. I have the opposite problem.”
Tipsy stared straight ahead.
“That dick,” she said, after two blocks, “was really big.”
THREE
ONE OF THE REASONS YOU WENT TO SEA, THE BOSUN REMINDED CHARLEY, is shoddenfreude, the pleasure to be derived from the fact that other people have to go about their business wearing shoes, while you don’t.
Charley nodded. No wonder I’m slipping.
Ha ha …
Ah ha ha …
Ah HA HAAA …
As Charley rose to his knees, the boat lurched. Instinctively, his hips remained beneath his center of gravity. But the genoa flogged, the correcting bungees allowed the tiller to bang his left arm, and pain shot through his shoulder. A knot was rising on the back of his head. He was getting dehydrated. Funny, he thought, as he rubbed the knot with the heel of his right hand, I used to fancy myself a pretty good sailorman.
Ah, reiterated the bosun, shoeless and incompetent.
Only the sea laughed. Only the sea, as it slipped past the hull, pausing here and there to lap at the combing, to toss a cupful over the gunwale to test, always to test, for weakness. Vellela Vellela bucked and wallowed and took a little more water over her bow. The genoa flapped and the jury rig creaked. A little wall of brine an inch or so high trickled along the deck between the genoa track and the cabin trunk, spilled past the back of the house, ran out the after scuppers, and dropped but a foot, back into the sea.
Warm Caribbean brine.
Charley squinted east, toward the sun. He made the time for nine o’clock on what had already been a long day. The energy expended left a need, a vacuum, a void, an ache. Two aches. Three. Tea would be nice. Or hot oatmeal laced with salt, golden raisins, brown sugar and Haitian rum. Charley looked at the companionway, now entirely filled with the bright orange distensions of some miracle fabric, striped here and there by silver reflective tape. Beyond it lay trapped all the victuals, every one of them, including fresh water.
He pulled himself erect and worked his way backwards toward the bow, along the starboard side, using his right hand on the grab rail atop that side of the house. Each porthole he passed—there were three—showed orange. At the foredeck he assessed the bow. It was riding pretty low. Sickeningly, it did not properly resist his weight. He looked aloft at the big sail. With a fresh breeze the genoa might actually drive her under. Was it worth cutting the sail to ribbons? Or setting it on fire? With what? The load was working the standing rigging by the minute. The three intact starboard shrouds were taut; they would hum if he plucked them. The single port shroud slacked as the bow lowered, tightened as it rose, and there labored a weakness that couldn’t last.
He knelt at the skylight. It was secured from below but he might be able to breach it if need be. Might not, though, as it was half an inch thick. Tropical ultraviolet and years of sand-bearing saline spray had rendered the thick
plexiglass nearly opaque. Charley leaned so that his right eye beetled six inches above it, then one inch. He thought he could see nothing, or perhaps he was seeing the heap of chain, a gleam in the gray gloom, and then the bow dipped. The thickness of the plexiglass seemed to ripple to its perimeter, then slowly contract to a point, which then slid off to the low side of the boat, to port, and disappeared.
Seawater.
Seawater had lifted up to the underside of the skylight.
Well then …
Charley sat back on his heels.
Well then.
A fin surfaced to port and, proceeding bow to stern, the shark’s fuselage abraded the hull, making a sound as it passed fit to scrape paint off hulls and myelin off nerves. Charley watched the gliding fin as if enthralled. It must have been two feet high, and Vellela Vellela no longer had even a foot of freeboard on her port side. Then he snatched the boning knife from its sheath at the small of his back and slashed at the fin twice, nicking it the first time. The fin disappeared with surprising alacrity, leaving behind a little boat afloat an empty sea. More or less afloat; less and less afloat. And a sea not so damned empty.
Charley looked at his ten-dollar knife and recalled a line from Melville describing Ahab’s intense bigotry of purpose. He turned the blade so that it glinted.
Best get bigoted, big boy.
He took a look over the side just to confirm the obvious. And there he could see the parallel lines of sprung planks that numbered below the boat’s migrating waterline, a foot or so of them visible through the clear water as they laddered down the tumblehome and out of sight to the single strake, stove between frames. He lay back on his elbows and stretched his legs aft but the injured shoulder wouldn’t let him relax into the pose.He turned onto his right forearm and gazed between the stanchions upon the liquid expanse, thinking that the scene must much favor “Waterspout,” the Winslow Homer painting. He knew the tables—and in fact had expended an idle hour on understanding the calculation—which told that, if one’s head were five feet above calm waters, one would be able to see no more than about two and a half miles in any given direction, for a total scope of five miles. This gives a visual command of pi times the square of 2.5 miles equals nearly a twenty square mile circle of open sea. A mere patch under visual command. Interesting term. It smacks of the theoretical.
