by John Straley
“But tell me now, Jonathan. Was it Ewers? You know. I know you do. I don’t care anymore about the trial. Did Ewers kill your brother or not?” I asked him.
His glittering eyes scanned the sea. He did not look at me. “I testified at trial and they grilled me on both sides. The prosecutor only asked a few questions, but the defense attorney took me over and over every little detail. How many times had I been shown the photo book? How many times had I been interviewed? Had they mentioned anyone else’s name other than Ewers’s? Had they encouraged me to be more certain than I had been? None of that shit matters, Cecil. My story is my story. Nothing they might put in a fucking magazine was going to change that.”
I sat without speaking. The mewing of the gulls seemed to crawl up my neck.
“So who killed the Sands family and your brother, Jonathan?” I asked him.
“Ewers wasn’t convicted of it. That should have been enough for him.”
Gulls worked the air just above Jonathan’s head. Their broken singing seemed to set him on edge. Out to the south I saw a boat on the horizon, black smoke coming from her stacks. I raised my arm and pointed, but Jonathan started to talk.
“My story is my story, Cecil. Nothing new will help Albert now. Nothing new will help Richard Ewers either. I don’t have anything else to say.” Then his voice wore out and Jonathan sat staring down at the cuts on his shins.
“There!” I blurted. The binoculars were broken in half, but in the blurred circle of the monocular, I saw the wavering image of the Winning Hand steaming toward us. I saw someone at the helm on the flying bridge, and by the way the figure was standing and steering with one hand while she scanned the sea with her own binoculars, I knew it was Jane Marie.
I refocused: the image became clearer. A figure stood at the front of the bow wearing a bomber jacket-style float coat and a blue ball cap. This figure had bandy legs and walked the foredeck like a cowboy.
“I think George Doggy is with her,” I said, and heard Jonathan go below. The Winning Hand was bearing down on our position and I watched as she grew larger in my vision.
I heard a clatter on the stairs. Then Todd cleared his throat and said, “Uh . . . Cecil.” When I looked toward the hatch, I saw Jonathan standing there. He had a 30.06 hunting rifle in his hands. The rifle had a large scope and a leather sling. I watched him jack a cartridge into the chamber and level the scope at the bow of the Winning Hand.
11
You might wait for them to rescue us before you start killing people,” I offered, just as a place to start. Jonathan’s right hand trembled on the rifle bolt, and I tensed to jerk it out of his hands, but instead he mumbled something, took the rifle butt from his shoulder, then stared at me with a cockeyed look that reminded me of his cat chasing phantoms.
The Winning Hand steamed closer, wobbling on the horizon like a toy boat. I waved and the figure standing on the flying bridge waved back with a wide-arced, country-style hello. Jonathan propped the rifle in the cockpit and went below, still mumbling. With every passing moment, I could sense him sinking deeper into the fog of his medicated life.
“I wonder if they’ll have a camera with them?” Todd mused, easily gliding over the incident with Jonathan and the rifle. “Seeing this boat in its somewhat dilapidated condition would certainly be worth documenting.”
I took the cartridge out of the rifle’s chamber. I considered putting the gun back down below, but I kept it right beside me.
The Winning Hand seemed to glow white as she rolled through the swells. Gulls cast their shadows on the water as they dipped into her wake. Every moment of terror and violence the sea had visited on me in the last two days seemed to be somewhere over the horizon.
I headed the Naked Horse up into the wind and lashed her jerry-rigged sail hard back to the stern so the sail acted only to position and steady the crippled boat. This would allow Jane Marie to bring the Winning Hand alongside more easily. I heard Jonathan clattering around belowdecks, and I slid the rifle a bit closer and wondered how long it would take me to jack the round back into the chamber if he came charging out of the cabin with another weapon. Jonathan was a long way from stable, and I couldn’t quite predict his next move, but because of his fatigue and the lithium I didn’t expect the next move to be either sudden or violent. Still, I didn’t have much of a track record in predicting anyone’s behavior in the past few days.
George Doggy was indeed on the bow of the Winning Hand. He nodded to me as the boat circled around our bow so she could head up into the wind and come alongside. Jane Marie, on the other hand, was jumping up and down at her steering station, waving and blowing kisses as she steered the large old fishing boat she had re-outfitted for her marine research. The Winning Hand heeled over as she made the turn, and then Jane Marie cut the power dramatically as she eased up alongside. Doggy put out large inflatable bumpers, tying them off to the handrails along the deck so the two hulls would not bang together.
As she came alongside, I could see that Jane Marie’s eyes were red, and the crookedness of her smile betrayed a storm of emotions beneath it.
“There are my boys!” she called out over the idling engine. “There are my boys.” Her smile turned down and broke as she started crying. Doggy threw a line, and I wrapped it once around a cleat amidships and absorbed the shock of the larger boat’s momentum. Jane Marie dove down the ladder. She poked her head in the main cabin of her boat and slammed the door shut. Then she pushed past Doggy, jumped into our cockpit, and started kissing my face.
“Hello, you,” she whispered, between slippery snotted-up kisses. “Hello, you.”
It was when I felt her breath on my eyes that I started crying too. My face hurt from the bruises. My head hurt from her hands brushing against the swollen lump. She kissed me, and I was overwhelmed.
She turned from me quickly and sat next to Todd and started smothering him with kisses. He wiggled and laughed much like a puppy or a ten-year-old boy might, delighted, but still wanting to squirm away.
“Oh, you boys, oh, you boys, I’m never letting you out of my sight ever, ever, ever again,” she cried.
Todd sat back away from her and looked at her with curiosity. That someone would be happy, loving, and crying all at once was something he could only comprehend in an abstract way.
“The harbormaster wouldn’t let us leave the slip during the storm. He refused to let me leave the harbor. I’m not kidding. I’m sure he didn’t have any authority to do that, but still. Refused. I left just as soon as I could. I can’t believe how the wind laid down so fast. We’ve got swell but not much wind today.” Her voice was prattling away almost more quickly than her mind could make sentences. She jumped over to me and touched the cuts on my head with her thumbs and when I winced she touched my face lightly with her fingertips.
“Why weren’t you in the other suit? The other suit with the beacon? Everyone was wasting half the day trying to locate that beacon. It deployed when it pulled out of the pouch. We were chasing it around to the west of here, and then we just happened to see you a little while ago.”
“The skiff . . . The Amelia is gone,” I was finally able to croak out. “I’m sorry, but it’s gone.”
She kissed me on the lips and I thrilled to the taste of her: coffee, lip balm, and the hint of lemon drops. “We’ll get another skiff. The Coast Guard said that you couldn’t have made it offshore and that you were either dead already or would wash up on the shore of one of the close islands. They had no distress call from you. They had spoken with Jonathan on the radio earlier in the storm, and he insisted everything was fine. That’s why they wouldn’t let us look for you. They had their hands full with the cargo ship. Did you see all the shoes? Isn’t that amazing?” She started kissing me before I could answer.
I held her, with my chin resting on her shoulder, as we both took long deep breaths. “Where’s the baby?” I asked. “Where’s
Blossom?”
“She’s up in the galley in her bunk. She’s sleeping. You know how she sleeps on the boat.”
I wanted to move up onto the deck of the Winning Hand and go to sleep next to my baby girl. I started to climb up off the battered sailboat when I heard George Doggy’s gravelly voice above us.
“Well, how are ya, fella?” I looked up, and the sight of Doggy was almost obscured by the sun directly behind him so that his voice emanated out of the halo of light. “We almost started worrying about you,” the voice said. Then I heard a clattering behind me, and Jonathan Chevalier bounded up onto the cockpit seats, his red-rimmed eyes scanning the higher deck of the Winning Hand where George Doggy stood looking down on us.
“Hello, George,” Jonathan said coldly. I saw the sun glint off the blade of the fillet knife he held in his right hand as he jumped between the boats.
“You planning on gutting some fish?” George asked the bedraggled man coming on board.
“No,” Jonathan replied. Then he walked by the old policeman and straight into the cabin of the old seine boat.
“Now what was that all about?” Jane Marie asked Doggy.
“I feel sorry for that boy,” Doggy said, in a less than sympathetic tone, as he pulled a leather sap out of his back pocket. He slapped the narrow finger of iron shot onto his palm. “But not that sorry,” Doggy added as he looked past Jane Marie into the cabin of the boat where Jonathan was looking around for a place to set his knife.
Doggy looked at the deck of the Winning Hand as if he were weighing a question. “Just the two of you on board then?” Doggy asked.
I looked him squarely in the eyes. “Just the two of us, plus the skipper, George. Have a look for yourself if you want.”
“No, I believe you,” George said.
I lashed the towing lines from the Winning Hand through what was left of the bowsprit and secured them to the anchor post. I lashed the tiller in place so she would track straight in the wake of the old seine boat, then I pulled myself up onto the back deck. I was working slowly, trying to ease the stiffness and pain out of my limbs. I played the tow lines out as Jane Marie eased the throttle forward. Soon the Naked Horse moved easily astern, and Jane Marie increased the power and steered her course for the breakwater in Sitka. It would be a slow ride home, but we would get there in one piece. I watched the sailboat for a moment then turned, stumbling on an orange bundle lashed to the deck. I bent over to examine it and saw that it was a deflated raft. Jane Marie, who had given the helm over to George, put her hand on my shoulder.
“I found him early this morning. He was drifting to the west of here. The life raft must have tumbled like a barrel over the falls all night long. He was almost dead.”
“Who?” I asked.
“Kevin Sands. I picked him up this morning. What could I do, Cecil? I couldn’t leave him out there.”
“Kevin’s here? On board with us right now?” I asked, not really believing it. Jane Marie nodded, her expression a strange mixture of worry and wonder, as if she had won a prize she never really wanted: a bag of snakes or a primed bear trap.
We stepped into the deckhouse. George set the autopilot on the flying bridge and came down the ladder, following right behind us. The deckhouse contained the steering station and the navigation center. Jane Marie had a laptop computer set up on the chart table to the left of the small steering wheel, which was jogging back and forth under the pull of the chain-driven autopilot that steered our course. The depth sounder and radar screen were bolted to the ceiling. A bench along the aft wall served as the skipper’s bunk. There was also a table with one captain’s chair bolted to the deck. This chair could swivel to face in any direction. Here Todd sat, piled up in his old clothes, awkward as a bag of laundry perched there. Jonathan was stretched out on the bench. Jane Marie glanced at him and shrugged. She looked at George Doggy, who was conspicuously silent, scanning the sea directly ahead of us.
“George, I don’t understand. You wanted to find Jonathan. Don’t you want to talk to him?”
“There’s plenty of time for that,” the old man replied.
Jonathan put his forearm over his eyes and smiled silently.
I moved past George Doggy without saying a word and stepped down into the steamy warmth of the galley. There was a compact cooking area within arm’s length of a table. Here Jane Marie had built a small bassinet hung on two sets of gimbals, which allowed the weighted bassinet to stay fairly even with the horizon line. The little bunk was bolted to a pedestal at one corner of the table, out of the way, but still within reach of anyone passing by.
Blossom was asleep on her back, her arms pulled up on her chest so the weird little nubbins of her fingers touched her mouth. Her lips made a slight pulsing motion as if she were kissing the air or dreaming of feeding at her mother’s breast. Her dark hair frizzed up from her skull like a tiny bird’s plumage, and under her eyelids I could see the motion of dreams. The expression on her face changed every second. I imagined concern, then delight, surprise, relief. I watched her for a full minute until I realized that all of these were things I was feeling, and that I had no clue, really, about how to interpret her expressions. I spread my hand across her chest. My hand was weathered and scarred, and it looked wooden. I rubbed my index finger across the softness of her cheek.
Jane Marie handed me a towel and her traveling first-aid kit. “You better clean up those cuts and scrapes. Take a quick shower if you want to. We’ll have enough hot water. I don’t think anyone else wants to. I already asked Todd, and Jonathan is not responding to questions yet.”
At the far end of the galley I took one more step down and looked into the forward berths just on the other side of the door to the head. There, lying in a pile of sleeping bags, was Kevin Sands. His eyes were open and he lay perfectly still.
His face was swollen and deeply bruised. His hair was a matted tangle. His lips were dried and cracked. He looked like a snake lying on a warm rock.
“It seems we both had some luck making it through that storm, huh? “I offered as neutrally as I could manage.
Kevin Sands closed his eyes slowly and then opened them again without moving any other muscle on his face. The Winning Hand rolled through the sea, and I balanced on my feet, swaying like my daughter’s bassinet in order to keep my balance, yet Kevin seemed to be eerily inert, as if something burning inside of him could find the horizon without regard for sight or gravity. He seemed like some strange pivot point.
“Are you all right?” I asked him, but he didn’t move, other than to slowly turn his eyes toward me. He did not speak.
I walked into the head to clean myself and dress my wounds. The water was hot, and I wedged myself into the tiny space, gently scrubbing the salt out of my eyebrows and ears. I sponged off and dabbed at my cuts with a clean towel and then peroxide. Water sloshed in the helmet-sized sink as I shaved quickly once and then more carefully a second time. My father’s old shaving brush sat in the drawer to the right of the sink and the warm bristles were a comforting memory.
Jane Marie knocked and told me she had hung a clean shirt for me on the hook outside the door. I combed my hair, and when I looked in the mirror I almost laughed. I was feeling like Montgomery Clift, but in the mirror I saw a battered Wallace Beery. I put on my clean white shirt, drained the sink, walked out and touched my freshly scraped cheek against Blossom’s face. I closed my eyes and felt her breath on my skin.
When I came up on the deck level Jonathan was sitting on the bench glaring at George Doggy as if he believed he could turn the old policeman to stone.
Jane Marie stood by the wheel. She could make adjustments to the course heading with the autopilot’s toggle switch mounted near her right hand. She scanned the sea ahead of her and pretended not to be paying attention, but next to her left leg, wedged down near a sliding door to the narrow deck, I saw she had placed a gaff hook, w
ell within reach.
“I said, what do you know, George?” Jonathan uttered through his clenched jaws.
George Doggy stood on the other side of the pilothouse from Jane Marie. He kept his eyes on the course ahead.
“Not much. You?” Doggy grinned. Todd sat in the chair, rocking back and forth, lacing and unlacing his fingers. I crossed to him and suggested he wash up. Jane Marie told him she even had put one of his movie cameras on his bunk. When he heard the words “movie camera,” Todd bolted down the galley steps.
“By the way,” George Doggy said to Jonathan, “you don’t happen to know where Richard Ewers is, do you?” Doggy rubbed a hand across his mouth. He had a day’s growth of beard that was a sandy white on his chin and his eyes drooped.
Jonathan didn’t take his burning eyes off the old man’s. “You know, George, there’s a lot I don’t know in this life. I don’t know what would have happened to Albert if he’d gotten the chance to grow up. I don’t know what my life would have been like if Albert and me hadn’t ever set foot near the Mygirl.” Jonathan looked down on the deck as if he were looking back into the past. “I don’t know where Richard Ewers is and I don’t care anymore.”
Jonathan stood up and his hands trembled by his sides. Jane Marie reached down and laid the gaff hook in plain view just next to the wheel. Jonathan glanced at the hook and then brought his eyes to bear on George Doggy once again.
