Windward Passage

by Jim Nisbet

“How’s it hanging, babe?”

  Silence.

  “Hello?”

  “Red.”

  “Darla?’

  “We no longer have anything to discuss.”

  “Well, hell, babe, I know that.”

  “Then why are you calling me?”

  “Well I—I miss you. Kind of.”

  In her phone’s background, a doorbell rang and a dog barked.

  “Darla?”

  “I’m here, Red.”

  “We had our fun, didn’t we?”

  “Did we?”

  “Sure.”

  “I don’t remember it that way.”

  “You don’t remember it that way? How do you remember it?”

  “It’s simple: I don’t remember it.”

  This stumped Red. After a pause he said, “Is that your little girl?”

  “That’s my little girl.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Nine going on seventeen.”

  “That’s nice. That’s real nice.”

  “Red, look.”

  “Yes, Darla?”

  “I’ve got to sign for a UPS package and rustle up some supper.”

  “Oh.” Pause. “You cook now?”

  “Not only do I cook, I run a catering business.”

  “And you cook at home, too?”

  “Frankly, Red, I can’t get enough of it.”

  “How’s it doing?”

  “We’re barely making it. Every time we sit down to do our taxes we—”

  “Taxes?” Red laughed.

  “Yes,” she said simply.

  I forgot about taxes, Red thought to himself.

  “We wonder,” Darla continued, “where it all goes.”

  “Never enough,” Red concluded.

  “Seems that way.”

  “Well, say …” he began.

  “Don’t even start,” she advised him.

  “You don’t need a little help?”

  “No, thanks. We’ll make it.”

  “You don’t need a dose of … supplemental income?”

  “I’ve got to go, Red. Please don’t call me again.”

  The simplicity of this plea, which so lacked in urgency as to be matter of fact, left him, for the moment, at a loss for words. Finally he said, “Sure. Sure, Darla.”

  “Promise.”

  He nodded without saying anything.

  “Red?”

  “You got it,” he assured her, lending a vocal energy to the response he in no way felt. “This is goodbye.”

  “Thanks.” She hung up.

  It might have been the only emotionally straightforward decision, untinctured by profit motive, he’d made in his adult life.

  Now, years later, this still remained true, and he still wasn’t sure why he’d made it. Was it because Darla had made something of herself? Even if it was something he couldn’t respect? Or had her honesty embarrassed him into acquiescence? Imagine that. If, where he’d spent the last forty years, honesty was a species of respect among thieves, it was despised in all its many other forms. What power could a housewife hold over Red Means?

  Maybe one day, as he occasionally thought, he’d drop by and ask her.

  Her phone number hadn’t been too hard to find. Her address wouldn’t be all that much trouble either. It’s all on the goddamn internet.

  Yet, as the years went by, Red somehow never found the time to make good on—what? Was it a threat? Not a threat, precisely. Well, then, was he afraid of Darla? That wasn’t it, couldn’t be it. But he did understand that crossing the wire of his own life with the wire that was hers could only bring grief to both of them. The truth of this seemed plain. What was he supposed to do, show up just to ruin her life? Just because she’d asked him to butt out?

  This rumination was quite aside from the fact that, if he messed up her life, Darla would hunt him to the farthest ends of the earth and fit him for the Smile Mon shroud, do not doubt it.

  He’d always liked that about her.

  The way around that would be to wipe her out along with her entire family. …

  How nowhere, Red smiled, is that?

  Still, he thought, as he familiarized himself with the console, the memory of Darla arose to nag him occasionally. She had been one of the most capable people he’d ever dealt with. One of the smartest, too. Should he admit that maybe he’d been a little bit in love with her? That it had been lonely without Darla’s steady hand in even the smallest decision?

  Easy now, big boy. Or the old Gotcha Devil-djinn of Squirm is going to be laughing up at you from the dregs at the bottom of the Beaker of Beers Past. …

  He glanced at the analog clock, whose second hand ticked through the bearings of a compass. … I’m left with the obvious, which is that this woman whom I deem so smart took a powder fifteen years ago.

  Check that, check that: make it twenty.

  —Okay, she quit the business twenty years ago. So what. And why did she quit the business? Because she’s smart, that’s why. Look at what happened to Alice, for example.

  Oh, please. Alice was a drug addict. What did you expect? It was Alice’s habit that did her in. Not me.

  Drug addict? Before she took up with you, Alice was good-looking, smart, and an accomplished musician with a working band and boyfriends coast to coast.

  Sure, Red agreed. But it’s not like I forced her to throw it all away for dope.

  Nevertheless, in the end she died friendless and alone in a Tampa motel with a needle in her arm.

  And in between, pal, she did what, three and a half years? Hard time, at any rate, from which she emerged a changed woman.

  She went in at about the same time as Charley, as Red recollected. A completely different bust. Just driving a car load of weed up to New York. Christ, she didn’t even get out of Florida. …

  All because she wouldn’t give you up to the cops.

  Him, too. Neither of them would dime me to the cops.

  You know, Red said to himself, as he reached for the cellphone, Charley used to tell me how he got this character going in his head while he was in the joint. He called him the Bosun.

  The Gotcha Devil-djinn of Squirm knows the Bosun. They attend the same lectures together. Topics like Stellar Navigation, Oppositional Defiant Disorder, and The Blue Hole in Lucayan Culture. Serious stuff.

  Red selected a number from his phone’s memory. Is talking to yourself a sign of maturation?

  Hell, Red admonished himself, as he listened to the phone ring, it’s a sign of being alive. The Gotcha Devil-djinn of Squirm …

  “Red Spot, Junior.”

  … Author of all Chaos …

  “I’m calling for Tipsy Powell.”

  “Hang on.”

  Bar noise.

  “This is Tipsy.”

  “This is Red Means.”

  Bar noise.

  “You got my note?”

  Bar noise.

  “Hello?”

  “I have it right here. I just didn’t know it was you.”

  “Well?”

  “Is this really Red Means?”

  “Look out the window.”

  Bar noise.

  “I’m looking.”

  “See the big yacht behind the sloop?”

  “I see it.”

  “I’m aboard.”

  Bar noise.

  “I want to bring a friend.”

  He might have known, but Red said, “Sure,” without the least hesitation. “I would, too.”

  Bar noise.

  “We’re on the way.”

  She hung up.

  Red hung up.

  “You got that right,” he said to the windshield.

  TWENTY-TWO

  THE DOCK WAS A BADLY MAINTAINED AFFAIR THAT CREAKED WITH EVERY passing ripple and wavelet, never mind a real swell and the stumbling footfalls of a pair of landlubbers. Quentin had known practically from birth that he had not the adaptable quality sailors call sea legs, but he also knew that a boat would have to
be having a rough time of it, indeed, before its decks heaved and yawed with the likes of this ramshackle dock.

  Kreutzer’s Revenge was a big motor yacht whose twin V8s, even at idle, burbled puissance. No tuna tower, stabilizers or harness chair gave the least hint that it might be a fishing vessel. The boat was a sleek VIP lounge dedicated to a version of comfort and coddling not often witnessed by mere mortals. Amenities included multiple staterooms with private baths, satellite television, central heating, hot tub, sauna, dining for eight, a tender that cost more than a Hummer, a saloon that converted into a movie theater at the touch of a button, a wine cellar, etc etc. Not a book in sight, if you didn’t count the chart room, but if you did include the latter, every chart was electronic, no paper data aboard, stupid but why not, for if her power should fail, no chart minted could prevent this boat from instant transubstantiation into a very expensive piece of driftwood.

  Red greeted them amidships, at a set of gleaming teak stairs suspended over the side. “Tipsy.”

  “Red.”

  He offered a hand. “We meet at last.”

  Quentin watched for Tipsy’s visible reaction, but none was forthcoming. The man greeting them was a burly devolution of what surely had been a hale and vigorous youth. Framed by the tendrils of a sun-blazed tonsure once golden red and now cinnamon, the face bore the permanently scalded look of a complexion peculiar to a northern gene pool not bred to the sun, but deliberately and relentlessly exposed to it for years on end, its intelligent eyes surmounted by devil’s horn eyebrows. The man had the labored breathing of someone who had perhaps used tobacco for years or been exposed to mustard gas or an electrical fire or too many pipes of crack.

  Tipsy accepted the hand and stepped aboard. “We meet at last,” she repeated.

  Red beamed. “Charley never told me his sister was a babe.”

  “You got birds roosting in those eyebrows?” Tipsy sniped.

  “Mere squabs,” Red replied easily. “They show up every year, right around mating season.”

  Tipsy laughed.

  Red laughed.

  Tipsy laughed a little louder. A gay laugh.

  Red shook his head. “I’ll be damned.”

  They both laughed.

  I’ll be doubly damned, Quentin surmised. If these two were gay and this were a cruise ship, nobody would see hide nor hair of either one of them until it docked in Hawaii.

  “This is Quentin Asche,” Tipsy said, abruptly remembering him.

  Means proffered the hand. “Welcome aboard.”

  Quentin affected a frosty hauteur. What’s the matter with you, Quentin, he admonished himself. It’s not like you sleep with her.

  “Watch your step.” Red solicitously took Quentin’s elbow. “You don’t want to fall into the wrong drink. Make yourselves comfortable in the saloon. Is it always this cold in San Francisco?”

  “Always,” Tipsy assured him.

  “We’ll organize a toddy as soon as we’re under way.” He dropped a rail of hinged teak across the gap and touched a button. An electric motor flattened the stairs against the side of the boat.

  “I’ve got a great toddy recipe,” Tipsy chirped.

  “Under way?” Quentin said uncertainly. He looked from Means to Tipsy and back.

  “Quentin gets seasick,” Tipsy advised the skipper.

  “Who said anything about going to sea?” Red opened the after door into the saloon. “Watch the threshold.”

  “You did.”

  “Nah.” Red shook his head. “We’re just going for a little cruise on the bay. Aboard a barky of this tonnage, you won’t even know you left the dock. Well,” he corrected, “you might know you left this dock.” As if to answer this slur, the dock buckled with a loud thump. “Besides,” Red added, “there’s nothing like a little nocturnal cruise with a drink in your hand to ease the flow of talk.”

  The saloon was lots of teak, discrete lighting, and polished brass.

  “Kreutzer’s Revenge,” Quentin observed. “Interesting name for a boat.”

  “How’s that?” Red paused at the door.

  “You don’t know?”

  “It’s a charter,” Red explained.

  “‘The Kreutzer Sonata’ is a Tolstoy story. As she is dying Kreutzer’s wife tells him, and I quote, ‘You have your way now; you have killed me.’ She just had to get in that parting shot. But, if the story were a little more modern, perhaps the day after he buried his wife our widower might have gone straight to the yacht broker, paid cash for this baby, and christened her Kreutzer’s Revenge.”

  “Well,” Red asked. “Did he kill her?”

  “Yes. He stabbed her.”

  “Quentin,” Tipsy said, “that’s a marvelous story. Our new friend, here, will now need to be dissuaded from the opinion that you’re morose.”

  “Hey,” Quentin pointed out, “I didn’t name the damn boat.”

  Privately, of course, Quentin was thinking that there appeared to be quite a deal of Russian this that and the other about the town lately.

  “Quite the contrary,” Red told them. “Thank you, Quentin. I had no idea. And, as you can already see, cruising the peerless San Francisco Bay with interesting people is eminently conducive to conversation. Not to mention carousing. I don’t think, Quentin, that you’ll be seasick. We’ll be motoring strictly upon the gentle breast of the Bay.”

  Tipsy told Quentin it was entirely up to him.

  “God forbid I should be so seduced by present company as to impair my judgment, Tipsy, darling, but we don’t even know this man.”

  “Quentin’s not impugning your hospitality,” Tipsy hastily intervened. “But he has a point.”

  “Then let me put it this way,” Red said simply, with an unctuous smile. “If you want to have a conversation about your brother, it’s going to be out of earshot from the rest of the world. The way to ensure that privacy is to conduct the conversation aboard this yacht in the middle of the bay. So what’s it going to be?”

  Tipsy didn’t hesitate. “I’m game.”

  “Well …” Quentin looked from Tipsy to Red. “Do you have a passable soda water aboard? Is that the term? Aboard? And a lime?”

  “A man after my own heart!” Red slapped Quentin on the back, which precipitated a brief fit of coughing. “Step up to the wheelhouse while I cast off.”

  Only the colored lights of a hundred thousand dollars worth of electronics illuminated the wheelhouse. Beyond a pair of awning windows and one story below them, Red coiled a line, hanked it over the pulpit railing, and scampered aft to deal with the line astern. Fifty or sixty yards forward of the bow, framed by the window in the door beyond the little porch, Faulkner leaned on the counter, talking with a customer. Three or four miles west, beyond the roof of the bar, a dense fog followed the contours of darkened inland vales and ridges of the coast range, snuffing lights as it advanced, breaking and tumbling like an immense, slow-motion wave, plunging the east-facing foothills into such obscurity that not so much as a single gleam penetrated to the outer world.

  Tipsy shivered.

  “Maybe this tub’s got a locker full of sweaters,” Quentin quipped, “with Kreutzer’s Revenge stenciled mammilla to mammilla.” As he spoke, a pair of vents in the bulkhead below the console began to puff warm air at them. “I’ll be damned,” Quentin said. “Central heating.”

  Lost in thought, Tipsy made no response. After a moment of silence, Quentin asked her why she trusted their host.

  She shrugged. “Charley trusts him.”

  “No,” Quentin corrected her, “Charley works for him.”

  “So what?” she replied stubbornly. “If he has news of Charley, I want to hear it.”

  The back door of the saloon opened and closed. “Someday,” Quentin said, changing the subject as Red mounted the companionway ladder, “we’re going to kick back in the old folks home and re-examine every line of dialogue we ever uttered.”

  “The ones we can remember, at least,” Tipsy agreed.

&nbs
p; “No problem. Your grandchildren will remember them for you. Especially the embarrassing ones.”

  “Grandchildren?”

  “Dialogues.”

  Red put one hand on the helm, another on the throttles, and eyed the recalcitrant dock. “Good thing this beast has a bow thruster.”

  “In any case,” Quentin continued, “I’ll bet that not a damned line of such dialogue as can be recalled will turn out to mean what we thought it meant. Irony will have expired at last.”

  “You really think anybody will be able to remember anything at that juncture?” Tipsy wondered. “Or, perhaps more to the point, that anything will be worth remembering?”

  “I’ve got a good memory,” Red assured them, as he reversed both engines. “Ask me anything.”

  “All right,” Quentin nodded, “who was Konstantin Paustovsky?”

  Tipsy shot Quentin a look. Quentin watched Red.

  “One of Charley’s favorite writers,” Red replied, without a scintilla of hesitation.

  Quentin’s eyes widened. He looked at Tipsy.

  “You see?” she nodded. “The important stuff never goes away.”

  “How ironic,” Quentin added, with a little frown.

  “Was it him who wrote about this guy Kreutzer?” Red asked, giving the engines a little more throttle.

  “That was Tolstoy,” Quentin said.

  “This thing,” Tipsy said after a pause, “sounds like six trucks.”

  “That’s about what’s back there,” Red confirmed.

  Kreutzer’s Revenge rocked back through her own prop wash until her bow cleared the end of the heaving dock, at which point Red spun the wheel to starboard and gave her a little port thrust. The bow swung to starboard. He re-centered the helm, shifted both throttles to forward, and eased her away from the various dinghies arrayed along the ends of the rickety piers flanking the empty slip.

  Red soon had the vessel heading for the Bay Bridge at a modest and comfortable four knots. Nothing showy, nothing excessive, no strain on the passengers or demands upon the lusty V8s.

  Lights along the eastern waterfront streamed lazily past—the vast biotechnology complex, the Lefty O’Doul drawbridge, the three-story high skeleton of a soda bottle fronting the baseball stadium, the myriad masts of the South Beach marina. To starboard, across the bay, a haze above the water diffused the powerful illumination rising from the cranes of the Oakland container terminal. Beyond the bow, black water sinuously reflected the southern string of illuminated bulbs that traced the western catenary of the Bay Bridge.