by Jim Nisbet
A silent VHF scanner abruptly caught the tanker Hercules Perforce announcing its approach, under pilot, to the Golden Gate Bridge. The skipper of a tugboat awaiting the tanker responded by suggesting they switch their communications to Channel 37, and Channel 16 squawked silent.
The three of them succumbed to the spell of these waters in darkness. The city to their left drifted past, a towering spectrality. High above them, on the lower deck of the Bay Bridge, traffic streamed east, demarcated by orange and red lights along the upper edges of truck trailers scattered among five lanes solid with vehicles. As Kreutzer’s Revenge passed beneath the bridge, despite the grumbling of its twin seven-liter diesels, the friction of tens of thousands of tires rolling over asphalt and the clatter of expansion joints two hundred feet above the surface of the water, were clearly audible.
Then they sailed out from under the span, the rumble of traffic receded, and the bay opened before them, the lights of the Ferry Building to port, those of Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill a little further north, and those of Treasure Island to starboard.
“All these years I’ve lived in San Francisco,” Quentin marveled at the windows, “and I’ve never been on the bay at night. It’s beautiful.”
“Yeah,” Red replied absently. “You gotta admit.”
Tipsy agreed. “Why not just do all your sailing right here?”
“Aside from the fact that it’s always cold as hell? Everywhere you go you’ll find that most yachtsman spend their lives doing exactly that,” Red agreed. “They sail strictly local, and not very often. And why should it be otherwise? Most of them slave away seventy percent of their lives at some job so they can barely afford their water toys.”
“Well,” Quentin cleared his throat. “And what do you call this thing?”
Red nodded. “A real big toy. But it’s some rich guy’s toy. Somebody who can afford it. Not to be confused with your average blue-collar chump’s hole in the water.”
Quentin studied the man at the wheel, who appeared to be wearing not a stitch of clothing with less than five years of wear on it. “And who is this rich man?” he asked mildly.
“Beats me,” Red replied easily. “Like I said, it’s chartered.” He fiddled with some switches. “And like all charters, something’s broken on it.” He rapped a knuckle against the glass of a dark screen mounted above the console. “In this case, it’s the radar.”
“Is that bad?” Quentin asked.
A voice broke in on channel 16. “—Inbound—” and broke up. Red fiddled with the squelch knob. “Nah,” Red said. “We’ll get by.”
“So where are we going?” Tipsy asked.
Red pointed forward. “I thought we’d drop the hook and have a couple of drinks behind Angel Island. I’m told it’s a quiet anchorage.” Red was watching their route but, for a moment, his eyes focused narrowly in front of him. “And Charley is a lot to talk about.”
“Where is Charley?” Tipsy frankly inquired.
Red said nothing.
“Come on, Red.” Tipsy repeated. “If anybody knows Charley’s whereabouts, it’s you. Where is he?”
Red looked at her. “Good question.”
“What’s wrong?” Tipsy said.
Red shook his head and returned his attention to his piloting.
Tipsy and Quentin exchanged a glance.
“When’s the last time you saw Charley?” Red asked the windshield.
“A question answered with a question,” Quentin observed.
“Fifteen years and about eight months ago,” Tipsy answered without hesitation, ignoring Quentin. “We spent two days in Phuket.”
“I remember that trip,” Red said. “But he made no mention of a sister.”
“Maybe he was being protective.”
“That’s a long time ago,” Red smiled, stating the obvious. “You were probably under age.”
Quentin rolled his eyes.
“When’s the last time you heard from him?” Red asked.
“I got a letter—when?” She looked at Quentin.
Quentin thought about it. “The last one I saw came at least three months ago.”
She turned to Red. “There was one after that. But it’s been a while.”
Red thought about it. “What’d it say?”
“The usual, mostly about books and sailing.”
Red watched the windshield. After a while he said, “When Charlie was in prison, I sent him a box of books, via my wife, every month. Charley would send me back long letters, via her, all about them. I enjoyed those letters. After he got out, he quit writing to me.” He looked at Tipsy. “That was maybe six years ago.”
“Now he’s working for you again.”
“Did he tell you that?”
“He wrote me that. Yes.”
Red pursed his lips. “That was supposed to be on the q.t.”
“Not to worry,” Tipsy said, with a glance at Quentin. “Who’s to tell?”
Red nodded. “Good question.”
“So he’s still working for you,” she persisted. “Right?”
“Not any more,” Red said. “Charley quit me.”
This took Tipsy aback. She looked from Red to Quentin and back to Red again. “Well if he’s not working for you, who is he working for?”
“Funny.” Red glanced at her, then went back to watching the windshield. “That’s what I was going to ask you.”
“Me?” Tipsy frowned. “When’s the last time you heard from him?”
Red didn’t hesitate. “Assuming that letter took its time getting here, about two months before you last heard from him.”
“Is that the so-called news you’ve got for me? That you haven’t heard from my brother since five months before I last heard from him?”
Red lifted two empty hands. “And how was I supposed to know that?”
“He has a point,” Quentin observed.
“Thank you,” Red said over his shoulder.
“Yeah.” Tipsy expelled an exasperated sigh. “Thanks.”
As they cleared the northeastern tip of the city, just east of Pier 39, the ochre lights of the Golden Gate Bridge hove into view, three miles to port.
Red pointed out a mass of bright lights, floating in a fog bank below the bridge. “Freighter.”
“Don’t change the subject,” Tipsy insisted, ignoring the view.
“I thought we’d try to put two and two together,” Red said simply. “See what we could figure out.”
Tipsy stared at Red. “Every time that son of a bitch gets my hopes up,” Tipsy abruptly declared, through clenched teeth and to nobody in particular, “he dashes them.”
“That’s what family is for,” Quentin suggested, “if you’re asking me.”
“This conversation isn’t one,” Tipsy announced. “What’s a girl gotta do to get a drink around here?”
“Step into the saloon and help yourself,” Red said. “There’s ice in the countertop reefer.” He readjusted the squelch on the VHF. “She looks like a freighter,” he added, “which means she’s probably headed for Oakland.” He moved his chin over his shoulder. “You guys got a big container terminal over there.”
“Oh,” said Quentin.
Red touched a GPS display in front of him. “So she’ll probably nip between Alcatraz Island, here, and the city front.” Quentin pretended to be interested. “In the meantime, we’ll dodge behind Alcatraz, across this stretch of open water, here, to the back side of Angel Island.” He touched up the throttles.
Tipsy paused at the companionway. “Anybody else?”
“I’ll wait,” Red replied.
“I’ll have a soda water,” Quentin said. “With lime.”
Tipsy disappeared aft.
“What’ll she be drinking?” Red asked Quentin after a moment. “Will she be able to think straight an hour from now?”
“It depends. Usually she just drinks beer.”
“Beer, we have.”
“Occasionally, she likes to back it up with a tequila
.”
“Tequila, we have.”
“In the pinch, she’ll go for whatever’s around.”
“Is she a lush?”
Quentin shrugged. “She’s one of those smart people who drink too much. If she had a purpose in life, she’d put it down and blow away the competition.”
“She doesn’t have a purpose in life?”
“Not since she escaped her family.”
“When the hell was that?”
“About twenty-five years ago.”
“Christ.”
“A long time,” Quentin agreed.
The sound of a glass rattling against a bottle reached them from the galley.
“I’d best get us to where we’re going while everybody’s still thinking straight.” Red trimmed the wheel and gave her a little more throttle. “You can’t believe how fast these big ships go,” he said after a moment. “Sixteen, eighteen, twenty knots, more. They can’t stop, they can’t turn, and these channels are barely big enough to contain them. Us little guys need to steer clear.”
“You call this thing a little guy?”
“Hey,” Tipsy called from the galley, in between the opening and closing of drawers. “Do we have a knife?”
“Sure,” Red said absently. “Look around.” Alcatraz Island now lay directly between Kreutzer’s Revenge and the bridge, obscuring the latter. The old prison, now strictly for tourists, was closed for the night, but remained sufficiently illuminated to render legible the largest of the historical graffiti.
“INDIAN COUNTRY,” Red read aloud. “Imagine that.”
“You don’t remember when the Indians took over Alcatraz?”
“No. And if it’s got to do with prisons, I don’t want to know about it.”
They exchanged a glance.
“I guess you had to have been here,” Quentin said. “It was pretty exciting.”
Red returned his attention forward. “There should be a green light flashing every five seconds over there somewhere.” He pointed. “It’s called Point Blunt.”
“I spent an entire day on Angel Island once. It’s a park.” Quentin blinked. “I think it was in 1978.” He couldn’t make out the flashing green light. As he searched for it, what sounded like glassware crashed to the saloon deck. “Oops,” Quentin said.
A scream pierced the air.
“What—” Quentin started.
Red closed a meaty fist around Quentin’s thin arm without a word. “Let’s let her deal with it,” he suggested mildly.
“Tipsy is screaming,” Quentin said. “Deal with what?”
“Is she saying anything?”
“No,” Quentin answered, struggling. “She’s screaming no, over and over.”
“That’s not going to do her any good,” Red said.
“Tipsy!” Quentin shouted. “Tipsy—!” He lurched toward the companionway, but Red held the arm. “See here, Mr. Means!” He squirmed and twisted, but he was frail and Red’s grip was irresistible. “What—? Unhand me! What’s going on?” Quentin looked at Red’s fist, which entirely encapsulated Quentin’s reedy biceps. He looked at Red. Red steered Kreutzer’s Revenge and ignored him. Just beyond the spume-lofting rocks at the northern tip of Alcatraz, the advancing bulb of Hercules Perforce appeared and steamed across the bow of Kreutzer’s Revenge, not a hundred yards away. “What’s happening?” Quentin screeched, as the monster’s bow wave lifted the bow of Kreutzer’s Revenge.
“That sonofabitch is a tanker, and she’s bound for Richmond,” Red said calmly. “No wonder we can’t see Point Blunt.” He backed the throttle. The enormous, rust-streaked hull of the eastbound Hercules Perforce, now a mere seventy-five yards away, filled the forward windows. As the bow of Kreutzer’s Revenge dropped into the trough, Run spun the wheel. Glassware crashed in galley, and Tipsy’s moans were no longer heard. “To hell with these damned boats,” Quentin screeched. “What’s happened to Tipsy?”
Red’s hips swung to the motion of the deck as if they were gimbaled. “I can make an informed guess,” he told the windshield, wheel in one hand and Quentin’s arm in the other.
Quentin, staggering on the same deck, looked at Red as if he were mad. And now he gripped Red’s shoulder with his free hand and shook it. “You can? Well? Let’s have it, man!”
Unmoved, Red nodded. “She found her brother’s head.”
TWENTY-THREE
SHE CAME UP THE COMPANIONWAY WITH A CARVING KNIFE. IN THE OTHER hand she wielded an unopened bottle of beer by its neck as if it were a chisel mallet.
Throwing the wheel over, Red Means neatly rolled Quentin Asche over his hip and launched him at Tipsy, who turned her back in order to avoid impaling the featherweight. Before she could repurpose, Red boxed her ears and kicked her down the companionway. She landed face down on the saloon deck, knife and bottle clattering down the teak steps in her wake, her head ringing like a steeple the day Pushkin died.
In the countertop of the cabinet at her shoulder yawned the teak lid of a top-loading refrigerator, which contained the severed head of her brother. Tipsy had recoiled without closing the lid. She didn’t want to stand up because she didn’t want to look at it again, and she knew that if she did stand up she wouldn’t be able to not look at it again. In any case she was so stunned she probably couldn’t stand up anyway. But if she didn’t stand up she might never see her brother again. Or what was left of him. Suddenly she understood the idea behind the open casket funeral. In this case the casket could be a hatbox. If she’d had a gun she could shoot Red. Or herself. She started to cry.
Quentin’s head, having struck the finial of the upper end of the companionway handrail, now lay, still attached to the rest of him, on the wheelhouse deck, bleeding and unconscious. Not three steps away, Red held the wheel as Kreutzer’s Revenge churned through a second three hundred and sixty degree turn. Fifty yards away, a magnificent view of the lights of Sausalito was occluded entirely by the stern quarter of Hercules Perforce, itself three hundred yards long and a hundred feet high, steaming at twelve knots against an ebb tide, bound for Southampton Channel, there to dock and spend the night mainlining petroleum into the long arm of Chevron.
Fifty yards between a vessel a mere twenty feet high and one at least ten times that looks like a near miss, and five panicked blasts from the Hercules Perforce air horn—meaning Ahoy, pissant vessel, change your course immediately or die—confirmed this impression. The sight of its bow wave alone, flashing over the tanker’s keel bulb, had filled the windscreen of the smaller boat and rocked her beam end to beam end. The loose beer bottle careened back and forth over the saloon deck, as did the senseless Quentin Asche on the command deck. Even in her grief, Tipsy clung to the pedestal of the chart table. Red had the wheel to hold onto, and his sea legs to keep him vertical.
The wave passed. Red got Kreutzer’s Revenge straightened out and heading north, passing aft of the stern lights of a tractor tug which steered the tanker by means of a taut wire hawser that stretched from a winch on the bow of the former to an after bitt on the stern of the latter.
At a steady six knots Red brought the cruiser across from Alcatraz, well astern of the tug, until the Point Blunt light, flashing green every five seconds, bore directly to port, about half a mile away. This placed Kreutzer’s Revenge midstream of the dredged shipping channel, which suited Means just fine. Outside of the paper chart on the chart table, which he had purchased himself and taken an hour to study, and a splendid full-color GPS display on a stalk screwed to the overhead, which refreshed itself every few seconds, he had little idea of local conditions.
Such local knowledge as Red did have he’d picked up over the last few days in a tour of waterfront bars along Fisherman’s Wharf, where he’d found knowledge of the San Francisco Bay a paucity indeed. He’d been more likely to receive uninvited a discourse on hotel conditions in Anaheim, should he care to visit Disneyland during his tour of the West Coast. He did find a chandlery, and therein his chart and a tide table. All else was tourism—Alcatra
z sweatshirts, cotton candy, hamburger and crab restaurants, mimes and street musicians; there was even a western-wear store, the only one left in San Francisco. But fishermen? So far as Red could tell, Fisherman’s Wharf was all wharf and no fishermen.
The boats were there, all right. But, in chatting up the skipper of one, who was handing out flyers advertising his gaily painted trawler as a handy vehicle for a sight-seeing trip to the Golden Gate Bridge and back, at $25 per pair of touristic eyeballs, Red discovered that the man hadn’t pursued a fish in some years; on the contrary, he’d converted his boat to tourism at the behest of, and with some financial aid from, the City and County of San Francisco. “Local color,” the skipper told him, as Red handed back the folded brochure. “There’s no more fish to catch. They’re all gone.”
The fisherman-turned-tour-guide told Red that, since Red seemed interested in bare-boating overnight with his wife and kids on San Francisco Bay, the backside of Angel Island between Quarry Point, to the south, and Point Simpton, to the north, formed a lovely protected anchorage. There he would find shelter from our famously freezing thirty-knot westerlies and our Hawaiian and Alaskan rainstorms as well, both of which almost invariably blow out of the southwest. There’s good holding ground, too, if one steers clear of cables and a wreck, both charted, that will surely foul an anchor. Best to buoy an anchor with a trip line anyway, just to be sure. If you lose the anchor the charter company will charge you twice what it’s worth. Anyway, point being, if a man sails out there Monday through Friday it’s a near certainty he will have the little cove to himself.
Red stood aside so that each member of a passing family, fresh from Disneyland, judging by the branding on their five identical sweatshirts, could take a copy of the ex-fisherman’s brochure.
“They just want something with San Francisco printed on it,” the ex-fisherman lamented, as they watched the five tourists jaywalk across Jefferson Street. “And they want it for free.”
Behind the dark mass of Angel Island—a national park with no public lighting—all would be snugly private. If there were any screams to be heard, there would be nobody to hear them.
