by Jim Nisbet
He carefully worked the point of the boning knife out of the teak, keeping the centipede skewered, and flipped the corpse through a steep arc, over the side. The creature landed with a barely discernible plash about ten yards abeam of Vellela Vellela, only to be, much to Charley’s astonishment, immediately disappeared from below by a first rate shark’s maw. A really big one. The deed could not have been accomplished more greedily or efficiently, that is to say, it was a perfection of ergonomic gluttony. The profusion of teeth was followed to the surface by a single eye that unmistakably took in the scene afloat, glowering as if resenting the paucity of the immediate sacrifice, yet without restraint in its Precambrian delectation of the menu to come. This assay was followed by a sinuous presentation of a dorsal fin, a starboard fluke, a tapering anterior, and a deltoid tail, until all revolved again into the bottomless repository of briny prodigy that is the unlimited sea.
The genoa slacked and cracked taut. The tiller creaked. I’m slated to be unnerved in the end regardless, Charley reflected. He tried the point of the knife against his naked chest, below the left nipple, just where he imagined his heart to … lurk? Wrong word. Cower, more like it. Come on, lad, Charley urged himself, take your medicine. …
It was a thin, sharp blade which would no doubt do its job efficiently. He flattened the point against his breast. And as he did so his eyes unfocused from the dimple indented by the knife point, just below the Pectorallis major … and refocused on a translucent amber bottle, bobbing in the twenty inches of seawater now in the cockpit. For, congruent to Charley’s circumstance, Vellela Vellela was no longer holding her own. Slowly but surely she was going down. No more than three feet of airspace remained between the surface of the water in the cabin and the cabin’s top. Even as he tabulated this progress, a bleach bottle bobbed to the surface within the submerged galley, and its blue cap dinged the brass bowl of the chart table lamp.
Perhaps Cedric Osada hadn’t raided the oxycodone after all.
Charley sheathed the knife at the small of his back and plucked the canister from the brine. After some to-do, not all of it unattributable to his nerves, he managed the canister’s childproof cap. Its interior had remained dry. Among fat pastilles of Vitamin C, stress doses of Vitamin B, still-redolent echanasia, golden seal, pseudoephedrine (to open the sinuses for scuba diving), Dexamil (for alert passage-making), aspirin, ibuprofen, penicillin, and streptomycin—four bright blue 80 milligram doses of oxycodone asserted themselves amongst their more salubrious ilk like interbred queens in a termite’s nest. He coaxed them onto the palm of his hand and threw the bottle over the side.
Oxycodone is synthetic morphine. A quarter of merely one of those blue pills would sled a normal person straight to oblivion. Taken all at once and chewed to obviate their time-release function, Charley figured, certainly four of them should comprise a thorough overdose.
As he computed these matters, Vellela Vellela lurched. Charley pitched backwards but managed to turn, too. His left shoulder impacted the back of the house, on the starboard side of the companionway. He contrived to roll his momentum through the cockpit water, making a fist around the pills as he rotated. He wound up on his back, head underwater, pills held aloft. The pain was sufficient to take his breath away, but not so much that he couldn’t roar as he surfaced. He rose to his knees in two feet of brine and looked forward. The bow and the foot of the genoa were awash. Still the breeze was sufficient to fill the sail, yet insufficient to drive her under, or lay her on her side, not yet anyway, and Charley momentarily entertained the strange idea that Vellela Vellela might sail on despite her hull and the entire rig being submerged.
The logic wasn’t something he wanted to hang around to witness. Dream logic.
Now the useless left arm depended from his shoulder like a long sock full of saturated sand. He opened his right hand. The pills were wet. Bits of them clung to his palm. One, two. Three? Okay. Four. He clapped his palm to his mouth.
Five.
The pills lay on his tongue, bitter and insidious.
Six.
He began to chew.
Seven, eight, nine …
He crushed the acrid pills between his molars, licked the palm, then washed it all down with two hastily cupped handfuls of sea water. The whole tasted like a vile cocktail of kelp and battery acid, but the deed was done. He resisted gagging. He blinked. Yes it was done. As he tried to think what he thought, the following swell attempted to accelerate Vellela Vellela’s waterlogged stern past her awash bow. The genoa flapped and the tiller creaked and one of its bungees snapped but the swell carried on and the jury-rig returned her to a broad reach, more or less. But a little puff, a capful of wind, a mere teenaged sprite might lay her over, and that, no doubt, would be the end.
Sitting on the cockpit sole, chest deep in water, Charley ran his tongue over his gums, probing the several gaps among his few good teeth for orts of medicine. The tip of a dorsal fin, gliding close aboard, had an inch or two more altitude, above the surface of the sea, than his own head.
It won’t be long now. I might yet experience those teeth. What to do? And in the calm afforded by the first glimmerings of the narcotic haze, sure to eventually overwhelm him, if only he could mine the time in order for his metabolism to do its work, he recollected a length of chain and two padlocks he kept with the dock lines in the port cockpit locker. Quickly, or so he thought, he undid the fastening and lifted the lid. On his knees, up to his ribs in seawater, a rummage among fenders and lines and life vests turned up twenty feet of 5/8” case-hardened BBB chain. He smiled a strange smile. He dragged the chain out of the locker with no regard to the damage its links inflicted on the wood. With the chain came not one but two padlocks, each of the pair of keys threaded onto the locked hasp of the opposite lock. Many’s the time Charley had used this rig to securely iron Vellela Vellela to a dock or buoy ball in a strange or dicey harbor. Now he would use it to iron himself.
He crawled out from under the makeshift awning, forward to the mast, dragging the chain after him. There, he figured, the extant rigging might afford him some little protection from the predation of the ocean, a sort of shark cage within which he might stall for time. He sat against the foot of the mast, facing aft. He passed the chain around both his waist and the mast below the gooseneck. He keyed open a padlock, cinched the loop of chain tight, passed the loop of the hasp through two links, and snapped it shut. He wriggled to test the rig and decided, if he were sufficiently desperate or panicked, he might actually make himself thin enough to escape. He reopened the padlock.
As he did so the second tiller bungee snapped, the bow sloughed around, the genoa backed across the bow to starboard, and the chainplate retaining the single remaining shroud came away with a moist crunch. The wire tore out of the grip of the mangled boom as the mast snapped a few feet above Charley’s head, and with a sigh of canvas and a clatter of turnbuckles and blocks, the entire rig lay down to starboard.
Without the pull of the sail, and with the new drag of the rigging, the little vessel slowly set about presenting its starboard side to the following sea.
Charley retrieved the knife and parked it between his teeth.
Though gear settled all over the deck, not a line touched him. The makeshift bimini had parted like a tissue. He didn’t even turn around to assess the damage. Quickly Charley improvised a five-point safety harness, of the sort commonly found in a race car, a loop behind the mast and under the gooseneck, the ends down between the thighs, up and X-ing behind the mast again, over the gooseneck, over the shoulders, X-ing over the chest, down and criss-crossing behind the mast again, to meet over his sternum where, the oxycodone allowing increasingly painless gymnastics, he snapped closed a padlock hasp just as Vellela Vellela began to side-slip under the surface in an apparent attempt to follow her rig. A swell washed over the boat, carried away the rest of the awning, and wetted Charley to his chin.
Charley’s legs and lower left arm surfaced just as a pair of jaws closed ar
ound the wire and turnbuckles snarled around the starboard chain plates, two feet away from him. The metal rent the monster’s mouth bloody as its impact staggered the entire vessel. The beast’s exhalation reeked of a presidential pardon. Momentarily awed, Charley snatched the blade from his teeth without noticing the nick he inflicted on the corner of his mouth and slashed at the beast. But it slid away untouched. So the cage of rigging worked, Charley noted, with no great satisfaction, as he replaced the knife between his teeth. At perhaps twice its usual rate his nerve-wracked heart broadcast narcotized erythrocytes through his vascular civilization like so many monsoon-driven propaganda leaflets among a credulous population. Nor was he unaware of how preposterous this assessment might have sounded to an impartial bystander. On the contrary. Let him apostrophize unambiguously: Woo-eeeee, he extolled, this drug be skankin’ strong! And he pitched the padlock keys over his debilitated shoulder as if they were salt for luck.
And then, as if the impulse were continuous, Charley wrest the waterproof satchel from under his belt at the small of his back, using his bad arm at that. He opened it, removed the manuscript of his incomplete novel, and launched thicknesses of unbound pages over his shoulder with no more deliberation than he’d given to the impalement of the centipede hours earlier. The pages bloomed on the wind into a pixelated plume, a white and very modest white cumulus tumbling like a reflection over the translucent green of the swell far beneath the cerulean sky. And then it was as if the sea, by some sleight of hand not visible to even an attentive onlooker, reached up and captured each and every rectangle of it, by ones and threes and tens until, altogether, the whole thing was as drowned as so much erratic linoleum uselessly tiling the unpavable. Just like the keys, just like a pinch of salt, just like the possibility of luck, yet another streamer on the maypole of reality, 276 pages settled to leeward like rain-driven leaves, like rectilinear puffs of an ephemeral smoke, the paltry sum of a whimsical concession to fortune.
Not that Charley saw it. How strange, he thought, still facing aft with a knife between his teeth, how strange that I feel liberated. Holding it above the surface he zipped the waterproof satchel and replaced it between his belt and the small of his back, now at least eighteen inches underwater. To protect the ship’s papers, her log, a chart, a few empty envelopes pre-addressed to his sister, which he’d stashed there just to keep them dry, his passport and wallet—this was mere habit. With his bad arm, now but for a dim metabolic peep nearly freed from pain, afloat like a stalled log line, he thought to himself, that was the most satisfying thing I’ve done in a long time. What else can I get rid of? Except for writing letters. Even with only the one correspondent, I like the writing of them. But to get rid of those pages! ¡Adiós! He watched the swell for a full minute without really seeing it, thinking of little else than how very queer that deliquescing satisfaction had tasted. Perhaps in death, Charley fancied with a marvelous, mad detachment, I shall crack the nut that was—is—the novel.
Now the hull of Vellela Vellela, the boat that Charley had worked two years to refit and refloat, and had lived aboard for one of those years and three more of cruising, ebbed to starboard, flooded to port, she settled deeper with each iteration, a foundering, dismasted wreck. Her genoa billowed in the water, surrounded by detritus, like the saturated bodice of Ophelia’s frock.
The shark didn’t reappear. But as Charley slipped beneath the surface entirely, a shadow wicked through his peripheral vision. I’ve almost made it, he thought. But I must brace myself for multiple incisions. He plucked the knife from his teeth. But what if I were to approach the novel as if I were writing a letter to a friend? Better to inhale, stupid, inhale, or get shredded to chum. Where’s the bosun? But his spirit wouldn’t voluntarily surrender its lease on his body. On the contrary, his larynx battened its little apartment against the landlord. Plus, he had this idea about The Novel. Which was? Write it like a letter. Why hadn’t this idea occurred to him before? Maybe writing has something to do with dopamine? The chain prevented him clawing back to the surface in order to write a novel. He moved the point of the knife through the water in front of him as if fencing with it. To live? To write? To research the effects of alkaloids on the central nervous system? So, but London had been right. The organism will strive for tone. Don’t laugh or you’ll drown. You meant life. Strive for life. What difference does it make? That’s its job. I’m telling you. London told you. It ain’t about you. It’s about getting your genetic material into the next generation. That’s the last piece of advice I’m givin’ ya, declared the bosun, because, believe it or not, bein’ underwater and all, I’m evaporatin’. Huh? Charley laughed until his eyes began to bulge. Well, we blew that mission! Hello? Hello—. Multiple incisions. Hyah, thrust, hyah! But as the shadow descended in the water before him, his eyes discerned vestiges of non-shark technology. Black fins with … chartreuse highlights? A sheath knife strapped to a hirsute shin. Brown fabric billowing. Unbuttoned pocket flap, pocket inside out. Gray weights on a yellow belt. The black bib of a farmer john. A fat watch. Hoses and bubbles. Around the yellow rostrum of a face mask, auburn locks swirled. A living wreath of cinnamon sea snakes, was what it occurred to Charley to compare it to. Charming simile. But you can’t fool me, boy-o, this is the Caribbean, Charley remonstrated, feeling immensely canny, sea snakes are a scourge specific to the Pacific. It’s the sharky-warkies you got to worry about in these wa-wa-waters. …
In his left hand the scuba diver held what looked for all the world like a pneumatic impact wrench. A yellow hose spiraled from a bib on its pistol grip, up and out of sight, toward the surface. Memory of surface. A hammerhead shark appeared at the diver’s elbow, half again the diver’s length. Look out, Charley yelled, expelling air. The diver turned and without hesitation touched the chuck of the wrench to the center of the creature’s head and pulled the trigger. A plume of bubbles rose from the tool’s pneumatic vents. The shark vanished.
That sounded exactly, Charley marveled, like somebody changing a tire underwater.
With his free hand the scuba diver drew his knife. One entire edge of the stainless blade’s considerable length was serrated like a limb saw.
Sheeit, man, said Charley, laughing the ultimate paucity of his oxygen into the brine, don’t you know you can’t cut no five-eighths chain with no dive knife?
Ah hahahahahaha …
II
THE WEEVIL OF HABITUDE
EIGHT
CEDRIC OSAWA ENTERED MIAMI INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT WITH A SEA BAG labeled 150% Genoa, a brand-new copy of The Rivers Ran East by Leonard Clark, and a knackered windbreaker. He checked the bag and was on line, happily digesting an excellent Cuban lunch, when Miami Homeland Security confiscated his marlinspike knife, given him on his fifteenth birthday by the first skipper he’d sailed under, and which, unlike everything else in his life, he’d managed to hang on to for thirty-five years.
There was some discussion about arresting him for attempting to board a commercial aircraft with a weapon, but when the security supervisor became convinced that not only had Cedric not been on a stateside airplane for fifteen years, but also that he intended to stick to the claim that he’d only ever heard of the Chilean version of September 11, itself heretofore unknown to the interrogating supervisor, he told Cedric to put on his shoes and get back in line with the rest of the weary travelers. Instead, Cedric put out his hand and asked for his knife back.
“You don’t want to go there—” one of the two security guards hastened to suggest.
His supervisor cut him off with a gesture. “We’re talking Homeland Security, here, Mr. Osawa. Which of those two words don’t you understand?”
Cedric pointed to the knife, marooned on a tray on a stainless steel counter flanked by the two lesser functionaries. “That’s a tool of my trade,” he said simply, “and I’ve owned it all my adult life.”
Thusly Cedric won himself a trip through a nearby unmarked windowless door.
“Mere sentiment withers before the
necessity of a secure homeland, Mr. Osawa.” The supervisor showed him a book, fat and tattered, with the limber morocco covers of a Bible, except they were red, white and blue. “The Patriot Act says as much.”
“I need my knife,” Cedric insisted quietly.
The supervisor cast a frustrated glance at the disputed object. “How much could it cost to replace?” he asked reasonably.
“How much you got?” Cedric replied.
The supervisor declined to consider this.
“Point being,” Cedric elucidated, “it’s not enough.”
