Windward Passage

by Jim Nisbet

  “Seventy-eight magnetic,” Tipsy repeated, as if in wonder. “From where?” She looked past the hand at him.

  He looked past his hand at her.

  “From the buried chain,” they said in unison.

  Red stood and turned a half circle until he faced in a direction about halfway between the easterly meander of the little stream, on his right, and the beach on his left.

  “But with the so-called boxing of the compass there,” Tipsy said, “how do we find the correct direction?”

  “Easy,” Red said. “You get far enough away from it to establish the back bearing. Like we did with the boat.” He squinted. “Seventy-eight plus one-eighty makes 258. Okay, that’s the back bearing, and now we’re on the north side of the creek. And so the question boils down to, how far do we proceed along this bearing? Or maybe there’s another bearing by which we can establish a cocked hat? How about a star fix?” He turned so as to spit down wind. “Maybe we can look forward to the pleasure of blundering around out here in the dead of night.”

  They cogitated. Red paced down to the tideline and went wading. When he came back he sat down and screwed the butt of his beer bottle into the sand. “Read Charley’s entry one more time.”

  She read it.

  “That’s got to be it,” he said. “You see it?”

  “No,” she said promptly. “See what?”

  “How much rode?”

  “… so much barnacle-encrusted rode,” she read.

  “That’s true,” Red said. “But later. What they buried.”

  She skimmed the script. “‘… 1,352 pounds of BBB five-eighths chain.’ You mean, it’s that many feet?”

  Red shook his head. “I don’t think so. It could be feet, yards, meters, fathoms, even cables. Although,” he added, “that many cables would put us well to the east of Mayaguana Island in about 5,000 fathoms of blue water.”

  “So what are you saying? Thirteen fifty-two is not our number?”

  “But why would it all be five-eighths?” Red inquired of the opposite bank of the creek. “How many anchors did he find?”

  Tipsy glanced at the page. “A dozen?” She looked up. “What difference does that make?”

  “Why would a dozen different anchors all have the same size rode? For that matter, twelve identical anchors wouldn’t necessarily have the same size rode.”

  Tipsy said, annoyed, “I barely know what rode is.”

  “It’s the length of chain or line that keeps your anchor connected to your boat and vice versa,” Red said. “One thousand three hundred and fifty-two pounds. I’m supposed to know the answer to that.”

  “Answer to what?”

  “Weight per length of a given size of chain. It’s occasionally asked on the hundred-ton license exam. Used to be, anyway. Now all they probably ask you is how many stripes are on the American flag.”

  “Thirteen,” Tipsy replied without a thought. “But we’ve already decided that Charley had no way to weigh thousands of pounds of chain and no reason to do so.”

  “The chain is there all right, but he never weighed it, and it doesn’t make any difference. He worked backwards and imposed the number.”

  “Backwards from—?”

  “The distance.”

  “So the actual amount of chain at the bottom of that creek—”

  “—is irrelevant.”

  “Came the dawn,” Tipsy nodded thoughtfully. “The birds of awareness are chirping, and I’m starting to believe you.”

  “I’m supposed to know the answer.” Red studied the scar on the palm of his hand. “I’d hate to row all the way back to the boat just to look it up.”

  “You have a book?”

  “I have books plural, and they’re full of tables. But let me cogitate on it. Hand me a beer.”

  “You’ve got one.”

  “I want a cold one.”

  She handed him a cold one.

  Red opened it with his teeth, spat the cap into the cooler, and took a long pull.

  “Red …”

  “Close the lid, you’re letting calories in, and enjoy the weather.”

  She closed the lid and let the Bahamas envelope her. Breeze. Purling creek. Surf. A seagull banking over the beach. “Twenty-eight ounces a foot,” Red said suddenly. “It’s actually something like one point seven pounds, which is a little less than twenty-eight ounces, but I’ll bet it’s close enough for smuggling.” He looked at her. “You know how I remember that number?”

  “You used to smuggle chain?”

  Red shook his head. “No money in chain. But there’s twenty-eight ounces in eight-tenths of a kilogram of blow.”

  Tipsy stared at him. “If only the rest of reality had such a reasonable explanation,” she finally said.

  “You’re onto something with that one. Prepare to calculate.” He stood up and walked to a flat stretch of freshly smoothed sand. So the tide is falling, Red noted to himself. Aloud he asked, “One thousand three hundred and fifty-two?”

  Tipsy had followed him with the paperwork. “Check.”

  “Feet.” Red dropped to his knees and wrote the number large in the damp sand with his forefinger. “Always put in the units. 1,352 pounds of chain times sixteen ounces per pound …” Sand flew. “… 21,632. And that’s ounces. Now. Divide 21,632 ounces by 28 ounces per foot.” Eight yards along the beach from where he started Red announced, “Seven hundred and seventy-two point five seven. Call it 773. Feet.”

  “Seven seventy-three,” she repeated. “Feet.”

  He sidled left. “Now we divide by three.”

  “Three?”

  “Three feet per yard, otherwise known as one manly stride.” He sidled right as the sand flew from his forefinger. “Two fifty-seven point five two. Let’s round down this time. Call it 257 yards.” He drew a circle around the figure and stood up. “Put on your clothes.”

  Halfway back up the creek, Tipsy held the dinghy against the current while Red took a bearing. “Okay.” He chopped the edge of his hand at an angle over the north bank. “That way.”

  One hundred yards further up the creek, the compass spun helplessly. Red tossed the little ten-pound anchor into a fork of exposed casuarinas root on the south bank, then paid out its yellow rode as the dinghy fell off to the north bank. Once ashore, after they’d unloaded tools and gear, Red passed the rode stem to stern under the dinghy’s two thwart seats, bending a clove hitch around the second one, and backed into the bush paying out rode as he went. Arrived at the bitter end of the rode, he arced back and forth, watching the hand compass while Tipsy made sure the dinghy lay above the trove of chain. When Red was satisfied, he drove the pick a mighty blow into the loam, burying its spade blade to the haft, and belayed the bitter end of the polypropylene to it, observing pedantically, “Three points a straight line make.”

  “I get it, I get it,” Tipsy told him.

  “Follow the yellow vector. Don’t interrupt unless you see an anaconda.”

  “You mean they—”

  “No, no, I’m teasing. But, isolated as we are, this might be a good place to see an iguana. They get pretty big, two and even three feet. But they’re herbivores, so only vegetarians need to worry about them. In fact, they like to eat this plant right here,” he pointed. “Black torch, it’s called. They like to eat these blolly leaves, too. But people and pigs and dogs like to eat iguanas, so they’re getting pretty rare. Keep an eye peeled anyway, because they’re cool to see. What was the total yardage?”

  “Two fifty-seven.”

  “Yards. Two fifty-seven less forty for the propylene leaves two seventeen. What was the back bearing?”

  “Two fifty-eight.”

  “Oh yeah. No wonder you can remember it. Excellent. I didn’t even notice. Okay, you go on ahead. When you get about fifty yards past the end of the rode, come about and sight me with the compass until you get a bearing of 258 degrees. Be accurate because one or two bearings from now, rode and dinghy will be out of sight. When you make the bear
ing, I’ll pace it off, and don’t you move till I get there.”

  The terrain was sand featuring all kinds of trees, brush, plants, and ants. At one point they had to stop so Red could extract a sand spur from his instep with the needle-nose pliers of his multitool. By the time they got two hundred and seventeen yards along the sevently-eight degree bearing, it was hot as hell, and the colonization of Tipsy’s tan by noseeums felt like an early case of poison oak. A trail of sandy footprints disappeared into the trees behind them, and there remained no trace of the dinghy or its yellow rode.

  Five bearing transfers from the creek, Red numbered aloud his three final strides and stopped fifteen yards short of her.

  They stood stock still and looked at each other. Then, without moving, each began to look around. All anybody could see was the undifferentiated flora of the Bahamas archipelago.

  “At least there’s some shade in here,” Tipsy said at last.

  Red stabbed the twin blades of the posthole digger into the sand in front of him. “Spiral an outwards clockwise trail concentric to these handles. I’ll go counterclockwise.”

  “What are we looking for?”

  “I have no idea. Anything unusual. A beer bottle. Recently disturbed ground—although that won’t help much.” He pointed. “There are wild hogs all over these islands, and they root up the place something fierce.”

  She sidestepped certain prickly-looking plants, then tried to correct the curve of her path, always keeping the posthole digger to her right. The sand recorded their tell-tale footprints. The sun bore down. Avifauna scolded. Forty-five minutes passed.

  Red was out of sight when he called her name. When she reached him, about sixty yards northwest of their starting point, the hole was already two feet deep.

  “Beach morning glory.” He nodded toward a desiccated plant lying upside down a few feet from the hole. “It’d have a real pretty flower if Charley hadn’t cut off its roots before he replanted it.” He dumped a shovelful of sand beside the hole. “And if it had that flower, we might have spent the rest of the year looking for it.” He forced the blade of the shovel into the bottom of the hole with his foot. “Maybe two years.” A couple of shovelfuls later, Tipsy realized that she’d been holding her breath. Five or six shovelfuls more, and the blade struck metal.

  Tipsy fell to her knees and attempted to clear sand from the bottom of the hole. Red retrieved the dinghy’s bailing scoop from the canvas bag and handed it to her. This was a half-gallon plastic milk jug with its top cut away such that its D-handle remained intact; good for water, good for sand.

  Within a couple of minutes she had exposed the square, red and blue top of a large biscuit tin. She dug around its perimeter until a few inches of its sides were exposed sufficient to get a purchase, but the box wouldn’t budge. Red knelt to the task, and together they rocked it back and forth and lifted handfuls of sand. The tin began to grudgingly rise, until, with a final heave, Tipsy fell backwards with it top down in her lap.

  Tipsy stood, handed Red the tin, and brushed away ants and sand with both hands. “Tante Marie’s Extra Fine Tea Biscuits,” he read aloud. “Don’t Take Tea Without Tante Marie.” The container was a foot high and maybe eight inches on a side. Its top had been sealed with duct tape. “Charley liked his tea,” Red smiled faintly, “and he was never abroad without a roll of duct tape.” He retrieved the multitool from its holster, turned out the knife blade, and offered it to Tipsy handle first, along with the biscuit tin. She accepted them, sat on her heels, lay the tin on its side, and went to work.

  It took a little time to slit the tape along all four edges, but when it was done the lid came away easily. Inside the tin, nestled among a number of sheets of paper and several desiccant packages, of the sort to be found in bags of potato chips, lay a small amber vial. Its screw cap, of black plastic, had been sealed with a strip of duct tape half an inch wide.

  “The pages missing from the log,” she said.

  “If so, there should be ten of them,” Red remembered. She titled the mouth of the tin so he could see into it. “And they seem to have a lot to say.”

  Tipsy handed the vial to Red, withdrew the pages and counted ten of them. Indeed, each was covered front and back with Charley’s careful script.

  Red held the vial to the sunlight that filtered down through the branches overhead. “We meet again, you son of a bitch.” He handed the vial to Tipsy, who, after some study, frowned. “Is this a lock of hair?”

  “Presidential hair,” Red reminded her.

  “My brother died for a lock of hair,” she said bitterly, “and it didn’t even belong to a woman.”

  “This ain’t no Ivanhoe,” Red reminded her.

  She returned the vial. Red tucked it into the multitool’s belt holster and secured its Velcro flap.

  For no particular reason, Tipsy dropped the empty tin into the hole. “Well,” she said, nudging the lid into the hole with her shoe, “I don’t know what to say.”

  “There’s nothing to say.” Red was suddenly very tired. He scrubbed three days worth of whiskers with the scarred palm. “Not a goddamn thing.” This exchange was followed by a long and thoughtful pause, during which each of them became quite conscious of the silence that had fallen between them. Finally, Tipsy folded the knife blade into the multitool and offered it to Red. “Put it in the tote,” he suggested. She drew the canvas bag to her side and set the tool on the bottom of it alongside the GPS, the bottles, Vellela Vellela’s paperwork, and her pistol. She looked up. “Would you like a beer?”

  Red blinked. “Hell, yes. Let’s have a beer.”

  Tipsy handed Red two bottles, one by one, and one by one he snapped off their caps with his teeth and spat the caps at the biscuit tin. One hit its open mouth, the other glanced off its side. He handed her the first bottle and raised his own. “Cheers.”

  “Cheers,” Tipsy agreed faintly. She watched Red take a long pull. “So,” she said after he’d lowered the bottle from his lips, “what now?”

  “What now?” Red repeated.

  She nodded, watching him.

  He seemed reluctant to address the question. “What now. …” He spread his arms. There might have been a little regret in his tone. Tenderness, even. There might have been a little humor in it, too.

  “Now,” Red said finally, “I am supposed to kill you.”

  FORTY-TWO

  MY DEAREST SISTER,

  Well I finally wrote one. And what’s it turn out to be?

  A mystery.

  Pretty funny.

  Of course, a novel’s not a mystery unless it gets solved. Or is it? Come on, let’s tell the truth: mystery novels mostly get solved, big mysteries occasionally get solved, and some mysteries never get solved—right?

  Take relativity, for example. Relativity got solved. Although, in fact, there’s a case to be made that relativity is an excellent example of a solution in search of a mystery, a riddle that got solved before anybody knew it was a riddle, a solved mystery that posed—and continues to pose—way more questions than it purported to answer.

  But we mere mortals don’t have to quibble over such things. Let guys like Schopenhauer—and I don’t know why that asshole’s name just popped into my head—pose impossible solutions to unanswerable questions. Altogether one prefers Einsteinian-type mysteries. With Einstein at least you can pitch in and figure out some stuff, like the Schwarzschild Radius, for one modest example. Einstein’s solution is the solution that keeps on giving. Schopenhauer’s solution to the mystery, to put it simply, and why get complicated, is that it will only spoil your morning coffee to realize that the will to live is the only reality, and that this will, which necessitates constant strife, is insatiable, the only sure-fire interest-bearing return to which is constant suffering. Well, suffering, sure, Sic passim. There’s a Buddhist aspect to this. Buddhists say that suffering is inseparable from existence but that inward extinction of the self and of worldly desire culminates in a state of spiritual enlightenment beyond b
oth suffering and existence. So there. I’m cribbing from various mildewed tomes here, pages flapping in the winds of my mind despite their and its dampness. But I think that (a) “extinction of the inner self ” inflicts more suffering than almost anything you can do on earth (short of “pre-emptive warfare”), (b) pre-emptive suffering is not really what the Buddha was talking about, and (c) I’m not a Buddhist, I’m a Taoist. “When life comes, it is because it is time for it to do so. When life goes, this is the natural sequence of events. To accept with tranquility all things that happen in the fullness of their time, and to abide in peace with the natural sequence of events, is to be beyond the disturbing reach of either sorrow or joy. This is the state of those whom the ancients called “released from bondage,” which I crib from Mr. H.G. Creel’s Chinese Thought. Throw in a taste of Chuang Tzu, a predecessor of Lao Tzu, he who bequeathed us the Tao Te Ching, and you got philosophy fit to satisfy Horatio, if not Schopenhauer. Up to a point, anyway. Not that Horatio ever had the advantage of either of these two guys. One of the beauties of being at this end of history instead of the other end, or even midstream, is that out here on the pointy tip, we got all these myriad selections to go along with our pointy heads. Call it conspicuous spiritual consumerism.

  Of course the problem with this line of thought is, a life free of joy and sorrow isn’t all that interesting.

  So I wrote a mystery, and just to make sure he’s freed from bondage, the author isn’t going to stick around for the dénouement. Are you around for it?

  I’m virtually certain that you will be here for the resolution, for there were a mite too many clues along the trail for you, yes you, not to suss. Which reminds me once again to dispose of the previous 276 pages of this manuscript. Do you note that this is page 279, and that the previous two pages are numbered 277 and 278? Ah hahahaha … That’s huge, no? Huge for me, anyway. It started out as a novel but wound up comprising numerous scenarios or playlisps—that’s a good one; enough of this rum and I’ll really be speed-writing with a lisp, the playlisp’s the thing, the Tempest is one book I’ve not managed to hang onto, but this story, my story, is not so mellow and mature and optimistic. …