The Atua Man

by John Stephenson

  No one responded to Larry’s cursing. Even making coffee below couldn’t be done without cursing. Larry shouted at Jason, motioning to the wind and the sea. “What are you doing about this?”

  Finally, Larry got up and pulled Jason with him. “You take the helm. Our course is twenty-five degrees. At one o’clock tack back to one-thirty-five. You have the first watch.” Larry then disengaged the self-steering hub from the wheel and went aft and pulled the servo rudder out of the water. He came back to the cockpit and stopped at the hatch to the aft cabin; “Dave, you have the next watch. You better try to get some sleep.” With that he opened his hatch and disappeared into his own world.

  Chapter 20

  Waikiki

  Tuesday May 2, 1989

  The next evening Lillian had dinner with Elizabeth on the lanai of her apartment. She told Elizabeth her feelings for Jason and David, and about the dilemma she now faced. Elizabeth was not shocked; in fact, she had seen it coming. Her council to Lillian was to be true to herself. But she also told her to be patient and not make any decision in the emotion of the departure. The boys would be gone almost half a year, and the important thing was to keep them in her prayers and meditations.

  Then Lillian told Elizabeth that she was going back to London. She had an offer to do a West End play and had come to the conclusion that acting was her true calling. She told Elizabeth that she would never forget their time together, and all that she’d learned by helping her pull the material from her classes into a manuscript. They parted in love, but Elizabeth’s detachment from emotion manifested as indifference. Lillian knew Elizabeth loved her, but Elizabeth’s impersonal nature rubbed Lillian the wrong way. She remembered how David had misinterpreted that spiritual principle. He thought the St. John family was so cold whenever the problems of life had entered their world. Perhaps they were marvelous healers, but sometimes a person just needed a friend. Where was the line between the emotions of human life and the divine indifference taught by all the mystics?

  There had to be a balance.

  That night Lillian wrote two letters.

  Dear Jason,

  I was miserable last night, doubly so because of the night before. I can’t stop crying. You’re breaking my heart, J.J. I know that sounds selfish. You have such gifts, and I feel we are destined to be together sometime, but I can’t wait until that time comes. As painful as it is, I need to set you free to set myself free. It’s agony to think of you at sea with Larry. I know you think of this trip as an initiation and that somehow you’ll be worthy of your gifts if you survive, but what about those who love you? Don’t we have a say in this too? All I can say is that I love you and hope that someday we can look back on these days without regret.

  I’ve decided not to spend any more time in Hawaii. I’ve been offered a part in a play in London. It’s a wonderful new play, so when you return from the South Pacific I’ll be in London. Your mother will know where I am. When you are finished with your adventures and ready to seriously continue our relationship, call me.

  Until then … Aloha.

  Most affectionately, Lillian

  Dear David,

  I’ve gone to London to establish my career. I have a part in a new play and I feel it is right to put what I’ve learned spiritually into my art. I think you should do the same thing. Hopefully your voyage to Tahiti wasn’t too bad, but if it was, leave that boat and come to me.

  I love you, and I think we would have a happy life together in the arts. Don’t worry about Jason. I’ve already told him I want to be free. I will always love him, but I don’t think I could make a life with him. Maybe that voice that said I would marry him meant something other than a physical marriage. I would have never doubted it until I met you.

  Please call me as soon as you can. I miss your voice already. All my crying on the boat yesterday was as much about losing you as it was imagining the hell you are going through. Perhaps I’m wrong. I hope I am.

  All My Love, Lillian

  The next day on her way to the airport, Lillian realized that Elizabeth had been right; she was hypnotized. If she couldn’t overcome her attachment to Jason perhaps the mystical life wasn’t for her. She had studied Dr. Green since her days at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and thought she had a good grasp of mystical principles. She could meditate and see a change in herself. She had experienced physical healing, but she didn’t think she could ever be like Elizabeth. She could not detach herself from her love. At least that was her perception of the St. Johns. That’s why she had to let Jason go. Perhaps this experience was necessary for him, but Lillian needed to put aside her spiritual practice and just live her life—though it would be according to spiritual law to the degree she could manage it.

  Elizabeth also wrote a letter to her son that day. Without Lillian helping her, she had no desire to stay in Hawaii. She gave notice to her apartment manager in Waikiki and returned to her home in Los Angeles.

  Chapter 21

  At Sea

  May 1989

  It took almost two days to reach the Big Island of Hawaii, forty hours of close-hauled sailing with twenty-knot trade winds and fourteen-foot seas. The Aires hadn’t worked since the first night out when Larry, frustrated by what he believed to be a flawed piece of equipment, began to blame Jason for the violent weather. Larry had a mind that made those bazar connections seem almost rational.

  Those first couple of days set the tone for the whole trip. David was at the helm when the sun rose directly over Mata‘i’s bow on that second morning. The yacht was approaching the Alenuihaha Channel separating Maui from the Big Island. They were a few points off the wind and Larry had taken one of the reefs from the mainsail. Mata‘i had a fine sea-kindly motion as she rose to the top of the swell, splitting its top before riding down into the trough and sending heavy spray back toward the cockpit, drenching the foresail and then rising again.

  Larry came topside and stood behind David for a few moments before David realized he was there. David was in the rhythm of the boat, playing with every micro change in wind direction and velocity, keeping the boat at speed while playing the swell. It was a dance, Mata‘i was his lady, and the sea and the wind were his orchestra.

  “You handle her quite well,” Larry said, startling him. “Most racing skippers I know like to beat the shit out of a boat in this kind of weather.” David didn’t answer as Larry went forward into the salon. He was driving Mata‘i the same way he would one of the ocean racers that had made his reputation as a helmsman in the international regatta circuits.

  Larry came back with a hand held direction finder and took bearings off various landmarks along the windward coast of Maui.

  Jason came up on deck and stumbled back to the leeward mizzen shrouds to piss over the side.

  Byron came up with two cups of coffee and gave one to David. “Are we going to Mexico or Tahiti? I thought we were supposed to sail south, not east.”

  “We need to make our easting. I’d rather take it now than have to beat our way into Papeete,” Larry informed his brother.

  “You’re not going to duck through that channel ahead and give us a couple of days’ smooth sailing?” Byron said referring to the channel between Maui and Hawaii Island.

  Larry looked at Byron as if he was an idiot.

  That night, after a monotonous day sailing down the windward coast of Maui, Mata‘i had left Hana astern and was half way across the Alenuihaha Channel, considered to be one of the roughest on the planet, bound for the Kohala coast of the Big Island. David was back at the helm and he kept his eye on the knot meter. They were still too close-hauled to surf the swells, but their sailing angle had improved the further east they went. Still, the ride was not very smooth. Jason was in the salon cleaning the dinner dishes—a duty only he and David shared—and the diesel had been idling since sunset. Larry insisted that the batteries be charged every night. He and Byron lounged in the cockpit, sipping brandy under a dark and cloudy sky.

  “I was in the
1978 Newport-Bermuda race,” Byron said. “Were you with me on that one, Larry? No, I think it was just my first wife and her brothers. We partied all the way down. Can’t remember where we placed. But you took the ‘Lighthouse Trophy,’” he said to David.

  “We had a great crew from the Brown sailing team, and a very nice old Cal 40 loaned to us by an alumnus. He wanted his boat in the race and came along for the ride. I guess it paid off,” David said.

  “Why the East Coast?” Larry said. “I thought you were a California boy like Jason.”

  “Just the way things worked out. Two weeks ago I was staying at a fleabag hotel in Barcelona getting my fill of Gaudi.”

  Jason came up from below and stood in the companionway. “Can we turn off the diesel yet? It’s an oven down here.”

  “What’s the reading on the batteries?” Larry said, getting up.

  “Both banks one hundred percent.”

  Larry checked the engine instruments tucked under one of the lounge seats. “Fuck.” He tapped on the instrument and then rushed below, pulling Jason into the cockpit so he could get by. “Byron, kill the motor!” he yelled from below. “Shit. Shit. Shit. Jason, get down here!”

  Jason glanced at the instruments. “She’s overheating,” then he disappeared below.

  Larry ordered Jason into the scorching engine compartment to discover the problem while he waited in the companionway where the air was fresh. The Volvo was cooled by a heat exchanger, which pumped in seawater to chill the antifreeze running through the engine. Jason discovered a crack in the heat exchanger. Besides being an oven, the engine compartment was cramped. Every time the boat lurched Jason fell against something hot and burned himself. Eventually he sealed the crack with duct tape, which stopped the leak until a more thorough repair could be made when the seas calmed down. After some time below, he came up for air and reported the situation to Larry.

  David and Byron thought Jason had been resourceful and had solved the immediate problem, but Larry was furious. “Who told you to do a fucking makeshift repair? Work done on Mata‘i is to be done properly at the moment. I don’t care what the seas are like. If you put off something like this, or jerry-rig it, you’ll pay for it down the road.” He made Jason go below, pull the tape off the exchanger, cut a length of copper, and properly solder it to make the repair permanent.

  Larry took over the helm and seemed proud of his decision. David noticed that Larry couldn’t steer that well. He kept luffing the jib, causing the bow to fall off a swell with a crash rather than slide over the waves as David had done. David looked at Byron, and Byron just shrugged. Was Larry doing that on purpose to make Jason sick, to punish him? Would his pride let him do that, or was he just mean? Byron nodded to David, reminding him what he’d said before they departed: Larry wasn’t the sailor he thought he was.

  “You’re not worried that he’ll make a mess of the repair?” Byron finally asked Larry.

  “If he does, he’ll do it again. The boy’s got to learn how to deal with things when they need to be dealt with.”

  The next day Larry set a course a few more degrees south of east, and Jason and David shook out the remaining reefs in the sails. Mata‘i fell into a beam reach and showed her speed. Larry was happy on that fourth day. He had planned a fourteen-day trip and provisioned the boat accordingly.

  No one in the crew ate much during the rough weather, and now with the boat on a fast reach, Larry begin cooking gourmet meals—at least Larry thought his ham and onion quiche was gourmet. He thought of himself as sophisticated and cultured and tried to make the social occasions—lunch, happy hour, and dinner—a time for stimulating conversation, well-prepared food, and good manners. This attitude also brought out his elitist tendencies. David was part of the club because he had graduated from an Ivy League school. Jason, on the other hand, was looked upon like hired help—more like an indentured servant—and as such was tolerated but not completely accepted. And Jason hadn’t been doing a very good job at keeping the weather favorable.

  Five days later and eight hundred miles south of the Big Island, Mata‘i was drifting, becalmed in the Doldrums, that band around the planet where the North East trade winds met the Southern trade winds and created an area of calm. The lack of wind had started a few degrees further north than Larry had expected and a day or so earlier. Larry fantasized that if his crew were diligent and played what little wind there was, they could slip through the calm belt in a few days. He saw no reason to waste fuel to power across the six hundred miles of windless seas and stifling heat to find the southeast trade winds. His calculations put the boat about five degrees north and one hundred forty-five degrees west. So, Jason and David were set to work while Larry puttered, and Byron drank. The boys cleaned the boat, repaired things not yet broken, and got ready for the southeast trades that were predicted to soon arrive.

  The sun was hot, and with no wind the boys pulled up everything that was damp from below and laid it out on deck or hung it from the shrouds and lifelines. Mata‘i looked more like a backyard clothesline than a yacht. In the evenings Jason played his ukulele. He entertained the others with “hapa-haole” Hawaiian songs he’d learned when sailing beach catamarans out of Waikiki.

  Byron began going around naked. He complained that in the hot sticky doldrums even his shorts chafed. Larry joined him in the nudist thing, but unlike his brother, he looked like a withered string bean. Byron was buff and in good shape, even if he did avoid work by blaming his bad back. Jason wouldn’t go naked, and David, with his fair skin, couldn’t take that much sun and wore long sleeve shirts with his trunks.

  Jason spent much of his down time reading. He devoured his Norton Anthology of English Literature. He especially liked Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s description of the Doldrums in his The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

  The hot and copper sky

  The blood Sun, at noon,

  Right up above the mast did stand,

  No bigger than the Moon.

  David, on the other hand, spent his time sketching and writing letters. Even Larry laughed at some of the sketches David made of him, but David would not let anyone know to whom he was writing.

  As Mata‘i crossed the equator at approximately 21:37 GMT on May 12th, in keeping with the traditions of the sea, Pollywogs, any sailor who had not crossed the line, were initiated in to the Order of Neptune in a trial by ordeal. This tradition was more than 400 years old, and the sailors of the great sailing ships endured a diverse collection of pranks—all in the cause of appeasing King Neptune. If successful they would become Shellbacks.

  Larry was the first on deck to begin the Mata‘i tradition. He was dressed as King Neptune, naked, wearing a bed sheet for a cape and carrying a coil of rope and a makeshift trident that looked like an oar with some horns attached to it.

  Byron showed up next, wearing nothing but a shell necklace, that he said came from King Neptune. He claimed that he had already crossed the equator, and was a certified Shellback, but no one believed him. He sipped his special rum drink and sat in the shade of the awning that had been put up when the boat entered the doldrums.

  The Pollywogs, Jason and David, were ordered on deck to begin their initiation. They tried not to laugh at Larry and Byron. Larry order the Pollywogs to strip and asked Byron to tie them up. Byron reluctantly put his drink down and took the rope from Larry. Byron tied the boy’s hands and feet together—lingering a bit too long in front of David’s genitals. Once they were tied up Larry shoved them overboard. Their initiation was to free themselves and swim back to the boat before it drifted away. Neither David nor Jason thought much about being tied up and tossed into the sea. They laughed at the ritual.

  Once the boys hit the water, however, it became apparent that they couldn’t float or tread water, and they began to sink. The surface water at the equator was hot; over ninety degrees Fahrenheit, and it grew much cooler a few feet down. As the boys sank into the cold water, they eventually positioned themselves vertically and tried to coor
dinate their kicking. It didn’t work. As the water grew still colder Jason realized that David was beginning to panic. Jason squeezed his hand and David looked at him. Jason closed his eyes and David knew to try and calm himself. Then Jason lifted his knees and David followed. That allowed them to lift their arms and get a good downward stroke to stop their descent. They found a rhythm—knees up, arms up, and stroke down—that brought them to the surface.

  As they broke the surface, they gulped a few deep breaths. The sea was without a ripple—no wind—but even so, Mata‘i had drifted yards away. Larry and Byron were at the rail laughing. Larry saw Jason look his way and waved a cold beer at him. It was surreal. Jason felt so detached from what was happening, like he was in a dream. Then David pulled him close and gasped, “We need to untie our feet.”

  Jason nodded.

  “Fill your lungs. You hold our feet and I’ll get the knot,” David said.

  They took four deep breaths and grabbed each other’s ankles. Like contortionists in a fetal position, David kept their feet together while Jason worked on the knot. They tumbled head over heels and used more air than they’d expected to keep the sea from going up their noses. Their heads were in each other’s crotches, and they were sinking fast, like a ball tumbling downward. David’s dick kept rubbing against Jason’s ear. Jason tuned out everything and concentrated on the knot. Finally, he got it untied and the boys jerked out of their restraints. They straightened up and kicked hard for the surface.

  After a few panicked breaths, the boys looked around and saw the boat more than fifty yards away. Byron and Larry were no longer laughing. It looked like they were arguing. After Jason and David got their breath, the buddies looked at each other and burst out laughing.

  “You had your dick in my ear,” Jason said.

  “I know. It was the worst fuck I ever had.”

  “Did nothing for me, either.”