Windward Passage

by Jim Nisbet

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  There came a pause.

  “Well don’t just sit there like a wart on a genital,” Tipsy suddenly shouted. “Which goddamn former president of the United States?”

  “That’s another wrinkle,” Red said. “You put your finger exactly on it.”

  “Come on, Red! Which president?”

  “As far as I can tell,” Red said, grinning from ear to ear, “nobody knows which president.”

  Tipsy blinked. “So now what’s the goddamn point?”

  Red raised an eyebrow. “Feeling gobsmacked?”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  “SON OF A BITCH, GIVE ME SOME RUM.”

  “Sure.” Red smiled. “Want some ice?”

  “Yes—I mean no! I mean—just don’t make me watch.”

  Red retrieved ice for two.

  “You’d think a boat like this would have an icemaker,” said Tipsy, through clenched teeth.

  “There’s an icemaker aboard,” Red replied mildly, “and it’s broken.” He swirled the ice in his drink and smiled. “Break out another thousand.”

  Tipsy spent the next few minutes muttering “Son of a bitch” between sips of drink. It sounded quite mechanical, but there was no pattern to the cycle of it, and in fact her mind was thoroughly on the boil.

  “It seems to me,” she finally said, “that we have a clear choice between doing our patriotic duty and not doing it.”

  “How’s that?” Red asked, frankly curious.

  “Well,” Tipsy said. “Don’t you see? What if somebody’s going to use this presidential DNA to build a clone?” She frowned. “Is that even possible?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Well, still, let’s say it is possible.”

  “Sure.”

  “Let’s further guess that since somebody is taking the trouble to smuggle this presidential timber it must be stolen, and if it’s stolen, this somebody intends to build a clone from it.”

  “Okay,” Red said, “but that’s two guesses.”

  “Yes, yes, I understand that part. But what I’m getting at is,” Tipsy leaned over the chart, “what if it’s the wrong president?”

  “The wrong president?” asked Red ingenuously.

  “You know,” Tipsy insisted impatiently. “One of the bad ones.”

  “Hmm,” Red mused. “Should I be naming names?”

  Tipsy narrowed her eyes. “Do we need to name names?”

  Red nodded sagely. “I can see, with a girl like you, this could be some kind of deal breaker.”

  “You got that right, pardner.”

  “Let’s see. Without getting into who we voted for in the last election …”

  “And why wouldn’t we want to do that?” Tipsy inquired icily. “Is there some uncertainty?”

  “Are you suggesting that if it’s the wrong president’s DNA, and if we somehow manage to get our hands on it again, at that point our patriotic duty would be to somehow lose it again?”

  Tipsy nodded. “I should say so.”

  “And if it’s the right president’s DNA,” Red held the palm of his hand up and gently slashed it down and forward, “we should let it go on through?”

  Tipsy nodded gravely.

  “I see.” Red cleared his throat. “Let me help you out here with something, Tipsy.”

  Tipsy waited expectantly.

  Red lowered his voice. “If we don’t find this DNA and deliver it to the next pair of hands down the line in a timely fashion, no matter whose DNA it is?” Red nodded. “You and I are going to be playing three-dimensional chess with your brother in Davy Jones’ locker.” Red jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “And you can probably throw your old friend over the side while you’re at it.”

  Tipsy blinked.

  “Do I make myself clear?”

  Tipsy’s expression hardened.

  Red sat back in his seat. “I, for one, intend to earn my forty thousand dollars and live long enough to spend it. And you, for another, need to confine your political aspirations to the voting booth.” He patted the chart. “Understood?”

  “Yes but—”

  “No,” Red shook his head. “Say ‘Yes, sir.’”

  Tipsy wrinkled her lips. “But—”

  “No buts.”

  “Yes,” she finally said. “Sir,” she added. But she was thinking, but. …

  “In conclusion,” Red concluded, “I propose a sweetener. Charley got out of my office with $12,000, or sixty percent of the twenty thousand he was to earn by merely sailing from one end of the Bahamas to the other. I of course allotted forty large to myself, for management and P&O.”

  “P&O?”

  “Profit and Overhead.”

  Tipsy made a face.

  “Hey,” Red touched his breast, “I’m a businessman. You want to do this for free?” He extended the hand. “Next time around, help yourself. This time around,” he nodded, “we’re doing it my way. I thought your brother had no idea about the DNA, by the way. Unfortunately, that turned out not to be the case.”

  “What! How do you know that?”

  “I thought Charley thought he was running a load of blow and it was simple as that. Wrong. Somewhere along the line he figured out what was going on and pulled a switcheroo on his old pal Red, the little bald-headed bastard. And no, I’m not over it. But I took the trouble to visit Arnauld on Rum Cay before I came to California, and I’m fairly convinced that both dope and DNA got aboard Vellela Vellela like they were supposed to. So that leaves Charley as our number one rascal. But what I wanted to say is, Charley only had $2,500 Bahamian aboard when the boat went down, which I took off with the logbook and paperwork.” Red dipped into the briefcase and pulled out a much-abused wad of legal tender. “As of now, that twenty-five hundred is yours.” He handed her the cash. “When, not if, but when we find the rest of the package, I’ll deal you in on Charley’s balance, which is eight thousand dollars. Not only that, I’ll pay you in American,0’cause that’s the kind of guy I am. What say?”

  Tipsy didn’t know what to say.

  “I understand that you’re speechless with gratitude.” Red smiled thinly, drumming his fingers on the chart. “But since you can’t say no, say yes.”

  Tipsy looked at the money.

  “You can leave out the ‘sir,’” Red added.

  “Yes,” Tipsy finally said. She set the money aside. “Let’s go.”

  “We’re off,” Red said. “Damn. Okay. Please begin with the first Rum Cay entry and read through to the end, one more time. Any thought that occurs to you—anything at all?—please share it. I’ve pored over it so many times I’ve got it memorized. I can take my drink up to the captain’s chair and watch the bay for a while. Or, if you like, you can read aloud while I retrace his course. Whichever makes you comfortable. Whatever helps.”

  “Are you kidding? Retrace the course.”

  It was Charley’s handwriting, no doubt about that. Letters small and carefully formed and highly legible, the lines lay straight across the page despite most of them having been written at sea. The writing carried his voice, too, a voice whose audio signature Tipsy barely remembered, but whose tone she recognized from the many documents that had found their way from him to her over continents and seas and years, full of digressions and naive dreaminess which almost always belied the seriousness of whatever Charley was really up to.

  Tipsy had no idea what the navigational notes meant. But Red patiently measured off longitude and latitude, and pricked the chart accordingly, double-checking the plot of Charley’s course as the log recorded it. She quickly learned which data were important to the plotting, read them out as Red needed them, and skipped the rest. Occasionally he would frown and ask if the notation were “true” or “magnetic” or “compass,” or consult the logbook for himself. In less than an hour they’d double-checked the penciled lines from Rum Cay to Albert Town, around the southeasterly tip of the Great Bahama Bank, west by northwest along the coa
st of Cuba, through Old Bahama and Nicholas Channels, and into the Straits of Florida. By the time the log book entries ended, 21 nautical miles north of Havana, Charley’s script showed signs of haste. The charted course ended, too. But the log included Vellela Vellela’s last change of course, 20° True, and Red himself had recorded the wreck’s location, 24°56’30” north latitude, 82°2’ west longitude, 32 miles north of the last change of course, which he now plotted as well.

  “She went down fifty-three miles north of Havana and forty miles south of Key West.”

  “I had no idea Havana and Key West are so close to each other.”

  “Aye,” Red growled. “And in that ninety miles lies many a tale!”

  She cast her eyes over the chart, fascinated by names she’d read in Charley’s letters but had never bothered to envision, let alone research. She blushed to admit she’d never taken the trouble to pull out an atlas or purchase a chart in order to study her brother’s career—or his geography at least. The shape of Cuba—an island, after all—charmed her. Names exotic, foreign, colonial, and just plain piratical flowed along either side of his course. Double Headed Shot Cays, Lavanderas, Hurricane Flats, Cayo Coco, Bahía, La Gloria, Larks Nest, Guantánamo … Way points, lights, rocks, cays, islands, shoals, soundings, reefs—these salients teemed in variety and such detail as to practically demand curiosity. As she expressed interest in one or another location, Red went from the big chart to Reed’s and looked it up, there to find virtually microscopic detail, right down to important punctilios such as whether or not one might find a bar on even the merest rock to have lifted its snout out of the sea.

  “It sounds,” she said finally, “as if bar-hopping would be a great way to waste two or three years in the Caribbean.”

  “Hey.” Red affected a blank look. “You think so?”

  “Don’t make fun of me. Is that what Charley was doing? Drinking his way from port to port?”

  “No. Your brother drinks, of course, drank that is. But he’d rather sail over the horizon than eat, let alone spend money in bars. Let alone socialize at all. Charley kept to himself. The one and only thing he preferred over sailing was reading. And that narrowly. Your brother taught me everything I know about books.” Red tilted his head. “Did you know he was a writer?”

  “Well, sure. He wrote me letters all the time.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “You mean, a writer-writer? As in journalism?”

  “Novels.”

  Tipsy’s eyes enlarged. Yet another fundamental of his life Charley had never bothered to mention? “A published writer?”

  “Never published, so far as I know. Quite the opposite. Once when I was drinking with him I watched him feed a manuscript into a wood stove. He said it was a novel. It certainly looked thick enough to be one. Like this.” Red held thumb and forefinger about an inch and a half apart.

  “I had no idea. He never said a word to me about it.”

  “He never sent you anything? A story, a sample chapter, an outline, a character study?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I’ll be damned. Not that I ever read any of what he wrote either, but, all the years I knew him, Charley always owned a typewriter.” Red held a forefinger aloft. “A manual typewriter.”

  “Of all the letters he sent, not one was typed.” Tipsy smiled, but she felt distressed. How could Charley have kept this ambition from her?

  “He always kept a notebook, too. Even at sea, even in the tropics, with lots of rain and few if any clothes on, there were always pen and paper within reach. He’d find a solitary lagoon somewhere and anchor out for weeks, reading, typing, writing. He told me he’d tried at one time or another to write everything but screenplays because, he claimed, screenplays aren’t really writing.”

  “That would be Charley. Why aim for real money when there is so much non-money lying around all over the place?”

  “Charley always maintained that whatever amount of money you make, no matter how you make it, sooner or later you’re going to earn it.”

  “What are you saying? That Charley is now his own best paradigm?”

  “True story. His prior example, however, was a Miami guy who sold his very first screenplay for something like sixty grand.”

  “That sounds like real money.”

  “Really?” Red shrugged. “Anyway, next this guy spends two years rewriting the thing, after which there was nothing left but the title. By then the coked-up producer who called him at all hours of the day and night for 24 months could no longer be found, the sixty grand was long gone, he sold his new car for half what he paid for it and blew all the money at the dog track, and finally he got evicted by his own mother. Charley never heard about him again. Point being …”

  “There’s no free lunch.”

  “Not even close.”

  “Quentin has a similar philosophy.” She cocked an ear aft.

  “Quentin’s okay,” Red assured her. “But, truly,” he resumed, “Charley never sent you any fiction?”

  “None. He’s sent me a hundred and fifty, maybe two hundred letters and postcards. But no novels.”

  “You counted them?”

  “No, but I still have every one of them.”

  “How’d you manage that?”

  She smiled. “I keep them in a box that floats, as it turns out.”

  “You dropped it overboard?”

  “I lived on a boat. It sank.”

  “At sea?”

  “Dockside.”

  “Oh, well,” Red said, losing interest. “When was that?”

  “Oh, about the time a certain party sent me five thousand dollars.”

  “Yeah?” he brightened. “How timely.”

  “By the way,” she straightened up a little. “Thanks.” She offered her hand.

  “Don’t mention it,” Red said. They shook hands. The clasp lingered through an awkward pause. “You know,” Red finally said, “I took care of Charley like he was my own brother.”

  She took her hand away. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I don’t know. Nothing? What do you think it’s supposed to mean?”

  “Did you ever write back to him?” she responded defensively.

  “No,” Red said simply. “Did you?”

  “I—I never knew where to write to him. Then,” she added truthfully, “there was the question of motivation. I’d get a letter off to him every year … or three. It might have been three years,” she finished lamely.

  “I see,” Red said, displaying little sympathy. “Anyway, for me to write to him would have been stupid. But every month, my wife sent him a box of books. She picked them out, I paid for them, and the postage, too.” Red shrugged. “She and Charley shared an interest in novels. And history.” He nodded. “Everybody in the joint read every one of them.” Red gave her a frankly appraising look. “You don’t know anything about me.”

  “True. Well? Now who’s ungrateful?”

  Pause.

  “What was the name of the book he burned?”

  “Windward Passage.”

  Tipsy brightened. “That’s a perfect title for a movie.”

  Red laughed.

  “Did he tell you what it was about?”

  “A prison novel. A sailing novel. Or maybe it was about a novel about the sea written in prison, or a novel about prison written at sea.” Red shrugged. “He was always going at it from a different angle. After he burned it, in fact, he just started over. Or maybe he just kept on typing.”

  Tipsy’s lips formed a quizzical smile. “How thick?”

  Red raised the thumb and forefinger. “Maybe three hundred pages, typed, double-spaced, and single-sided.”

  “He fed all that into a stove?”

  “We were drunk. I happened to mention it was chilly. Next thing I knew …” Red opened a hand. “He said it wasn’t good enough, it wasn’t going anywhere, he was sick of thinking about it, he felt trapped by it. Maybe it was that simple.” He close
d the hand. “It kept us warm for about half an hour.”

  Tipsy said nothing.

  “Charley was working on a new version when he died.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I saw it.”

  “Where?”

  “All over the Gulf Stream. Pages and pages of it. If we’d been some place with deciduous trees, it could have been fall. Leaves everywhere.”

  Tipsy frowned. “That’s quite an if.”

  “Anyway, Charley submitted his novel to the House of Neptune, and Neptune accepted it. I was busy trying to save everything else.” He indicated the taped-up brick, the water-stained logbook, and the refrigerator. Then he turned to the briefcase and retrieved three or four business envelopes. “These are addressed to you care of Red Spot, Jr. It’s how I found you. There were seven of them.” He fanned them.

  “They look just like the last four or five I received from him. Only the stamps varied.”

  “There you go.”

  “He kept them pre-addressed?”

  “By the dozen, I guess. However many come in a box from the stationery store. In the tropics,” he added, “you have to buy these envelopes with the pull-off tape covering the adhesive. Otherwise, the humidity will seal them. Same problem with stamps. Either that, or you have to keep them in a refrigerator.” He added the clutch of envelopes to the pile of effects. “Charley had no reefer on Vellela Vellela. …”

  Tipsy glanced behind her, thought better of it. She lifted her glass and thought better of that, too. Instead of taking a sip of rum, she set the glass on the chart, north of a compass rose in the Gulf of Mexico.

  Red watched her.

  “Okay,” she said quietly. She raised her eyes and looked at him. “Tell me the story.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  “IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN A STRAIGHT-AHEAD JOB. YOU NEVER KNOW, OF course. Charley had been out of action for a long time. I thought he liked it that way. But when he learned he could make twenty grand in two or three weeks from this deal, he wanted it.”

  “Did you ask him why?”

  “He told me he wanted enough money to go visit his sister in California.”

  Tipsy chewed her lip.

  “Red, I naturally asked myself, why now? Well, I answered myself, it’s not your business. Maybe Charley is feeling mortal? Maybe he’s had a portent or a sign, maybe he’s pissing blood, say, or something has shaken him sufficient to make him go up against his fear of a bad result versus the imminence of mortality? Maybe an albatross flew over his bow from port to starboard.”