by Jim Nisbet
He was probably in non-visual non-command of several thousand square miles of deserted ocean. If he set off the EPRB he had a chance of getting rescued within a day or two, if the boat lasted. But if he were rescued there would be uncomfortable questions, and, no matter how vague or evasive he managed to be, there would inevitably be uncomfortable answers. Answers would lead to more questions, he’d have to stop being vague or evasive or cooperative at all, there would be a gathering of evidence, a public defender, a trial, and prison—hard time and no way around it. Back to school way up the river, a very tough school indeed, a silted-up river at that, and no paddles. If he were lucky it would be a federal joint, probably in Florida, where one of the chief rigors to be endured would be a perpetual onslaught of American television. If not—his mind cast a glance to the southeast—you’re talking scorpions and lice. Cuban fauna. Ever felt a spider walking over your face in the dark? Well it’s sinusoidal cascades of hirsute tootsies, mon vieux, in parallel syncopation and, leaving out what it does to your imagination, that’s all there is to it. Nice, commented the bosun, who added, rhetorically—and how does that stack up against deliberately cultivating cataracts and deafness in order to shield oneself from the ablating rays of American television?
He noticed he’d been digging the point of the knife into the foredeck. His own or anybody’s foredeck, this was a big breach of etiquette. A real no-no. Not Bristol. Besides which, it dulls the knife.
He refrained from throwing the knife at the sea.
The bow dipped and the genoa flapped and more water came aboard, wetting his legs. Because sunburn was becoming an issue the moisture felt good, short term; long term, its salinity would exacerbate the problem. It boded ominous. The sheet slacked and the tiller creaked. The sail filled and the sheet tautened. The vessel wallowed on.
Inflated below deck with no means of freeing itself, that damned raft might stand in for a water-tight bulkhead and keep Vellela Vellela afloat indefinitely. A serendipitously ironic fuckup, one might say, were it not for the fact that, by keeping the vessel afloat indefinitely, it would also be indefinitely prolonging the agony, not to mention preserving the evidence and effectively marooning the perpetrator aboard his own perpetration. Drifting around out here with no more wherewithal than a cockroach on a tongue depressor. Not my tongue, the bosun gleefully pounced. How about a cricket on a popsicle stick? Charley almost smiled. Shucks. What’s a bosun for, if not to cheer a man up? Okay, Charley conceded, let’s call it an ironically fucked-up serendipity.
The facts were flying in Charley’s head, and it was getting a little confusing, but not for nothing was he a single-handed sailor. While he liked the call of the wild well enough, he was of course and above all an inveterate misanthrope. He was used to puzzling out dilemmas on his own, he enjoyed the independence afforded by his near-exclusive reliance on his own blunders or cleverness, and so he took the time to suss things out, when he had the time to do so, or he made a snap decision when he didn’t. So now Charley just lay on the foredeck, watched the world go by, and brooded.
And sure enough, about two hours later, Vellela Vellela seemed to have come to some sort of accommodation with her circumstances. The hull had settled evenly, with about six inches of freeboard. The water level in the cockpit had evened out with the sea surrounding it. With the boat holding so much water the genoa was pulling much more of a load than it was used to, the stasis couldn’t last. But so long as the breeze held mild the standing rigging might continue to stand. Charley tidied some of the debris left behind by the accidental jibe, shortened and cut away and hanked various lines and sheets. He stood on the vang track, which had bent double to port, until it more or less lay down on top of itself. He rigged the collapsed mainsail into a sort of ragged awning over the house, to afford himself some shelter from the sun; for the SPF 30-plus UV-protection sun block, along with the food and water, charts, navigational instruments, bolt cutters and other gear, remained trapped below.
And this stasis defined the terms of the dilemma Charley staved off all through the forenoon, while he busied himself with topside tidiness. No food, no water, no sun block, not much of a boat, and he didn’t want to be found, either. There was one person, particularly, by whom Charley would not be able to withstand discovery. He was called Red Means and he was Charley’s employer of the moment; he was an old friend, and he was also a pirate. Old school, shiver me timbers, you fuck me up, mate, I fuck you up. Why not work for the best?
In fact, Charley’s below-decks cargo, carefully secreted in a small compartment in Vellela Vellela’s keel, belonged to Red Means, and only to Red Means, until such time as Charley managed to off-load it in a tiny lagoon on a two-acre uninhabited islet just northwest of the back side of Boca Chica Key.
And if Charley failed? Well, even the best reason wouldn’t be good enough. Was a collision with a submerged shipping container a better than best reason? Probably not. Not to mention, besides, that Charley had been asleep at impact. And if he’d been awake would he have seen it in time? Didn’t the previous 72 hours of incident-free discontinuous wakefulness count for something? Charley rolled his eyes skyward, tracing the curve of the inverted cobalt bowl interloped by the odd westbound pod of cumulus.
One look from Red’s red eyes and Charley would give up the truth with the inevitability of a bog regurgitating a mummy. The fact was that Charley was too honest, insufficiently ruthless, and maybe not even smart in the way that “smart” applies to the ins and outs of dope smuggling. He’d noticed this on his very first run, many years before. He just didn’t have the nerve for it. The truth was that he was plenty smart in other ways, and a good sailor, too. But guns? The Coast Guard? Years of stir? Alcohol- and drug-fueled orgies? The excuse to not work for a year based on three weeks of adrenalized insomnia? Whatever happened to Calvinism, for chrissakes, work for work’s sake? And what about the ennobling virtue of abiding by the law? Not to mention the salvation of the elect by God’s will alone, so why play it any way at all? Had he gone wrong by being Charley instead of Elect? Or had he gone wrong by being Charley instead of Red? We’d best discuss that later, in the bar, cautioned the bosun. It’s not going to do us any good out here; besides which, it makes you sound like you’re crazy. But seriously, Charley persisted, does a mere temperamental unsuitability for any normal vocation, coupled with a love for all things maritime, necessarily lead to the criminal life?
In your case, the bosun stated, obviously.
It was true. Eleven years before, about eighty nautical miles off St. Simon’s Island, Georgia, the Coast Guard had nailed Charley with 250 kilograms of Colombian marijuana. It was the same modus operandi, too: single-handing a modest sailboat with all the accoutrements of the carefree cruiser—solar panels on a hard dodger, barbecue hanging off the after rail, surfboard and a kayak lashed amidships—loafing along with wind and current, enjoying the freedom of the ocean. Charley didn’t care for the toys, but he liked the show-business aspect. There he’d been, of a chilly Gulf Stream morning, all bundled up, tiller lashed, cup of tea in one hand and a wedge of Christmas fruitcake in the other, when the 102-foot Coast Guard cutter Ineluctable—white hull, orange diagonal stripe amidships, .50 caliber machine guns bow and stern, three radar masts rotating at the top of its house, and a double row of jagged green cannabis leaves painted along the base of its stack, each pentafoil representing a significant maritime interdiction—materialized out of the mist about two hundred yards aft of Xanadu Caprice. Charley was having such a nice time, with his dreamy thoughts amid the magnificent environment, a mere twenty hours or so from offloading his cargo and onloading his very own suitcase full of cash, that he didn’t even notice the authorities until they hailed via loudspeaker, which, at 125 decibels, nearly started him overboard. Certainly the tea scalded the fingers of his left hand. The Coasties politely requested permission to board, he politely granted it, and they found the marijuana right away. There was so much pot aboard he’d been using the bricks as furniture.<
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It was the old days. Each kilo came with a gram of cocaine embedded in it. The feds never even noticed. After carefully weighing and photographing the bricks as evidence, they just went ahead and burned the lot. If they’d noticed the blow, things undoubtedly would have gone much harder with Charley. What you might call a bitch-slap of fate, the bosun never tired of reminding him.
On the foredeck of Vellela Vellela, Charley exhibited the rueful smile of a man taking a moment out of a busy day to indulge a reverie.
That fiasco turned into two and a half years in FCI Marianna, however, and that stretch only happened after a year and a half in the court system, during which, under the onus of astronomical bail, he cooled his heels in the Coast Guard’s Savannah brig. Charley was a first offender, Marianna is a so-called country club, but prison is still prison. He almost certainly would have been sentenced to time served if he’d coughed up some names and testified against them. The feds told him so, and the feds are trustworthy—yes? No? They offered to build him a new identity too; reconstitute his essence as, say, a diesel mechanic at a 24-hour truckstop in Buffalo, Wyoming.
Jeez, moaned the bosun, you’re making it sound worse than it was.
No or yes, they got nothing from Charley. Charley just sat there in chains while they ran their case, won it, and a judge sentenced him to prison. Well, he never talked about it, and this helped him to not think about it too very often. When he got off the subsequent two years of parole and could leave Florida and the country, Red got him a job in a little boatyard on Guadeloupe. After all, it was on account of Charley’s keeping his mouth shut that several people had been privileged to spend the intervening years continuing not to work. Charley had never been the only iron in their fire, but they remembered him. These friends staked him to some considerable cash when he got out, another reason to park him offshore, and another reason Charley was able to efficiently refit the hulk that became Vellela Vellela.
He’d splashed her three years ago.
And now?
Well, here he was again, it seemed, close aboard square one. Although, as a one-time loser, the arithmetic really added up to less than square one. Less than square zero, in fact. For a second offense under mandatory sentencing, any judge would have to slam him for ten to twenty. Or was it fifteen to life? He didn’t really know. He hadn’t been keeping up with the legislation. Maybe he should have researched it, oh, say, a couple of months ago?
Back in the shade of the jury-rigged dodger he alternately studied the sea and the orange thing stuffed into the companionway and puzzled it all out. Various elements of the scenario began to assume the intractability he’d foreseen, and after a while the looser pieces fell into place. First, the authorities were not an option. He never wanted to see the inside of a jail again. Period. And despite the elevated stakes, he still would rat out exactly nobody. After all—irony curled his lip—he had a reputation to protect. Besides which, fuck the authorities. Doesn’t misanthropy start with authority? And then, no matter how things worked out, the load and his boat were lost. More irony, they were supposed to be lost. Just not yet. Just not like this.
Plus he was hungry, thirsty, fifty-three years old, sunfried, childless, which has been mentioned once already today, and—but for the minor exception of a sister seen but once in twenty-something years—so how important could she be?—he was unattached.
From the recumbent slouch of the single-handed sailor, mesmerized by the bubbles trailing his transom, Charley sprang into a crouch, let out a roar, and knifed the life raft like it was the belly of a grizzly bear that stood between him and the exit. The upturned edge of the blade unzipped the miracle fabric from the threshold of the companionway all the way up to the hatch, with a stroke sufficiently convincing to gouge a two-inch splinter of teak out of the slide.
The CO2 took but a second to escape, a harsh exhale of stale gas that, but for his fascination, almost made Charley turn his head. But then, engorged by the seawater pent up behind it, the companionway puked the entire raft inside out, a limp cascade of space-age fabric, followed by worldly goods. The level of water inside the cabin equalized with that in the cockpit and submerged the sill of the companionway.
Along with the raft came a plastic food container and a bottle of water, a sneaker, a hank of 1/4” polypropylene line, a hollow-handled Torx screwdriver, a can of yams, a dive mask with snorkel, a sodden t-shirt, and a few volunteers from the ship’s library—Sterling Hayden’s Wanderer, Harry Pidgeon’s Around the World Single-Handed, Bernard Moitessier’s The Long Way, Felix Reisenberg’s Cape Horn, H. G. Creel’s Chinese Thought, Vito Dumas’ Alone Through The Roaring Forties, an out-of-date Caribbean edition of Reed’s Nautical Almanac, Richard Henderson’s Singlehanded Sailing, Homer’s Odyssey, Jack London’s Martin Eden, and The Virginian by Owen Wister.
He had always carried too many books.
Along with the sodden smalltime chattel sluiced the biggest centipede Charley had ever seen. A good eight inches long and an inch in breadth, not including the reach of its forcipules and many feet, the creature writhed and twisted in the cockpit brine as if caught by an invisible hand.
FOUR
IN THE BOATYARD QUENTIN PARKED AMONG A FOREST OF JACKSTANDS AND dunnage in the corner of chain link fence closest to the street, and he wasn’t half out of the car before two men approached. One wore shades and a Forty-niners jacket, the other wore shades and a flannel shirt, and both wore moustaches.
“Tell me,” Tipsy dared them over the roof of the Mercedes, “that you’re not cops.”
“Ms. Powell?” asked the one in the Forty-niner jacket.
“Who’s asking?”
“Keep your hands where I can see them, buddy,” the other said to Quentin.
“Huh?” Quentin said. “I’m rolling up the window.”
“Button it.”
The first guy pulled his jacket aside and showed a blue patch of nylon with a badge pinned to it. “SFPD.”
“ I paid all my fines,” Tipsy protested. “And I signed up for the class. We’ve met four times already.”
“What class?” the cop said.
“The DUI class.”
The cop in the team jacket looked at his partner, then back at Tipsy. “So you are Teresa Powell.”
“Everybody calls me Tipsy.”
“Even in the DUI class?”
She shook her head pseudo-lugubriously. “Some guy called Tipsy registered before I did.”
“There goes your identity,” the cop lamented. “Did you quit drinking?” he asked, with unexpected sympathy.
Tipsy lied to the officer’s face. “Absolutely.”
Quentin rolled his eyes.
The cop’s mouth tightened. “Too bad,” he said. “You get through with us, or vice versa?” He nodded. “You’re going to need a drink.”
In the headquarters of the San Francisco Police Department, on Bryant at Fifth Street, they had a room to themselves. Quentin and Tipsy sat across a steel table from the two cops, also seated. There was no other furniture in the room, but there were two security-type cameras affixed to the ceiling, each trained on opposite sides of the table. The distinctive odors of burnt coffee and gastro-intestinal distress vied with that of the mildew peculiar to old mops.
“Ever heard of the Cavalcade of Wonders?”
They looked at each other. They looked at Officer Protone, they looked at Officer Few. “It sounds like a church,” Quentin ventured. “Or a traveling circus,” Tipsy submitted.
“Negative,” Officer Protone said aloud. He touched a few buttons on a cassette recorder and set it on the table between them.
“Wow,” Tipsy said. “I haven’t seen a cassette recorder in a long time.”
“My whole career is on cassette,” Few replied. “I’m trying to be technologically consistent.”
Quentin reiterated his skepticism. “This can’t be important enough to record.”
“It’s being recorded for accuracy and mutual protection,” Few stated
perfunctorily. “So you’ve never heard of the Cavalcade of Wonders, one of which wonders is genetic predetermination shaped by nurture.” Blank looks.
“Genetic determination?” Tipsy made a face. “Shaped by nurture?”
“Genetics is a crap shoot,” Quentin said. “The progeny could come up, oh, I don’t know, queer, let’s say.”
Tipsy smiled and shook her head.
“I more or less agree,” Few said, “but they don’t think so, and, in any case, it seems to be a risk they’re willing to take.” He indicated his partner. “Protone can explain it better than I can.”
This guy Few is one nervous cop, Tipsy observed to herself.
Protone cleared his throat. “The Cavalcade of Wonders is an organization dedicated to the manipulation of the course of world history via that of American democracy. The so-called direction of so-called progress,” he added ominously, “based on the bedrock principle that democracy is too important to be left in the hands of the people, and that maybe a line of genetically-designed and strictly educated royalty, disguised as elected officials, might be a better way to go.”
Gobsmacked, Tipsy and Quentin remained silent.
“Well,” Few finally said.
“Where were they,” Tipsy asked, “during the three Bush administrations?”
“That certainly might have been the germ of the idea,” Protone said.
Tipsy whistled.
“In other words,” Quentin frowned, “it’s a fascist or a nationalist organization?”
“Right in two. If you’re really interested in the subject, you might check out this book.” He produced it from his briefcase and laid it on the table. “Wackos, Flacks and Apparatchiks” Quentin read aloud. “Sundown on American Polity. J. J. Wadsworth.” The dust jacket illustration featured a shot-raddled American flag flying over a half-toned mob of people bearing illegible placards, screaming and shaking their fists at the reader.
