The Sail

by Landon Beach

  Little Lloyd handed the bag over the counter, and the large man snatched it. Robin moved back from the doorway as he heard footsteps approaching. His muscles tensed and his heart felt like it was going to bust through his shirt. He had an advantage because if the running truck was the robber’s, then he would be heading away from Robin when he came out of the doorway.

  The man stopped right before the opening and dipped his hat, “Thank ye.” Then he bolted toward the truck, kicking up dust with each heavy impact of his cowboy boots.

  It took Robin a few strides to close the gap; he rammed his head into the middle of the robber’s back and wrapped his arms around his waist, squeezing as if to force his guts up through the robber’s mouth. The man’s hat flew off as he lost his balance and was driven to the ground.

  The man tried to turn over in an effort to aim his gun, but Robin was too quick. He took a handful of slimy hair and slammed the man’s face into the gravel. The man let go of his gun and tried to push himself up, but was soon flattened as two more bodies jumped on top of Robin. One was Little Lloyd Darwinger, and the other was Trist. The robber struggled against the three, but after his face was smashed into the ground one more time by Robin, he gave in. They stood him up and Little Lloyd belted the giant in the face, chest, and then the face once more. Levana was out of the Suburban and running toward them when Jessie came out of the station with a roll of binder twine followed by the remaining customers. Within minutes, the man was tied up to one of the Totem Poles and police sirens could be heard approaching.

  ✽✽✽

  After being interviewed by the police, getting a courtesy fill up of their vehicle, a free propane tank, a 12-pack of Vernors, and a case of Budweiser from Little Lloyd, the Norrises were on the road again.

  “What was that?” Levana said.

  “I don’t like people who steal,” Robin said.

  “I watched the whole thing,” she said. “I’ve never seen you like that before. It was scary.”

  Robin had never wrestled or played football, but he had taken karate during his freshman year at Central Michigan. The instructor, well past his prime, taught each class from a stool and began every class by saying, “Boys, nothin’ fortifies a man more than gettin’ kicked in the face and dropped to the pavement. The question is: Will you get back up?”

  “I wanted to help,” Robin said.

  “Did you think about what could have happened?”

  He hadn’t. “It happened fast,” he said and looked through the rearview mirror at Trist. “I had some pretty good help though.”

  Trist broke his first smile of the day.

  “What if he shot one of you?”

  “Bullet would have bounced off.” The cool air felt good again as it flowed over his hands on the hot steering wheel. The adrenaline rush had made him want to drive home—to be in control.

  “Don’t make a joke of it, Robin. You and our son just tackled a felon.”

  “You’re saying we should have let him go?”

  “Yes. It’s not your place to play sheriff, Indy.”

  And that was how she described him to her friends. ‘Oh, you didn’t know Harrison Ford worked at Hampstead Hospital? Yeah, he moved, and I married him.’ Some people looked twice when they saw him in person, and the whispers grew—how long was he visiting from California? Fuck California.

  “I thought we did well,” Trist said.

  Levana turned around. “Don’t start with me, Tristian.”

  Robin thought about pushing it further, but backed down. Besides, he had done it. “Okay. No more sheriff.”

  She smiled at them both, “It was impressive, though,” she started to grin, “kinda like...”

  Robin and Trist said together, “Indy.”

  Levana did a dance in her seat, “You got it!”

  “Thank ye,” Robin said, dipping his baseball cap.

  She rolled her eyes and laughed, “Okay, where did that line come from?”

  “The robber.”

  “Oh dear God,” Levana said.

  4

  A few minutes later the Suburban broke the crest of another rise in US-23 and below them lay the last winding mile until the turn-off to Haven Point and home.

  Levana’s brother, Tyee Beecher, ran the family hardware store in Hampstead. After passing away twelve summers ago, their father had left the store and waterfront lot it stood on to Tyee and left a separate lakefront lot and exactly two-hundred thousand dollars to Robin and Levana, a godsend to two young parents with an almost zeroed-out checking account. Tyee, Robin, and long-time friend and local bait store owner Mickey Leif had built the Norris family home on that lakefront land: a three-story log fortress. It was testament to his character that Tyee was not bitter about what was left to his older sister; the spacious waterfront lot plus the hardware store’s value was close to half-a-million dollars then, nearer to a million now.

  The house was five miles north of Hampstead, but a welcome five miles. It was quiet, they had decent neighbors who were seen rather than heard, and it provided the opportunity for the Norrises to live life their way. There were no computers in the house and only one television and one phone unplugged every night at 6:00 p.m. However, there was a state-of-the art workout room; a two-story library; a theater room with a stage where Robin, Levana, and Tristian would recite Baldwin, Ginsberg, Frost, Bishop, Rich, Miller, and Williams; a music room with surround sound and a collection of records that put the local music store to shame; a wine cellar; a sewing room; and a meditation room with floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over Lake Huron.

  In terms of solitude, Robin was a reincarnation of the scholarly Trappist monk Thomas Merton, but with a short fuse that he had failed to lengthen. If Merton’s famous book, The Seven Story Mountain, was the tale of an older, wiser Thomas Merton looking back and critiquing a younger, uneducated Thomas Merton, then Robin’s book would record a futile attempt at helping Trist avoid the sins of his father.

  The furniture in the house was hand-made by Robin and Tyee. When they had started, his brother-in-law had said, “What in the hell does a Hampstead Hospital nurse like you know about carpentry?” After he corrected one of Tyee’s miscalculations on the angle of cut for a chair back, Robin had replied, “Apparently, enough.”

  To one side of the house was a fruit and vegetable garden, and to the other side, a gigantic pole barn where Robin and Trist had restored Levity. Levana claimed that they were never moving again—she would die in this house. It had always been a joke between them, but now it was he who would die in it.

  Robin saw a sign on the side of the road and slowed the Suburban.

  “What are you doing?” Levana said. “We’re almost home.”

  “I’m going to check out this garage sale real quick for some odds-and-ends we might need for the trip.”

  Robin pulled off on the shoulder and turned the vehicle off. The best deals on “stuff” were not at Wal-Mart, but rather at summer garage sales on US-23. However, he’d never stopped at a sale on this stretch of highway before and didn’t know the owners of this particular house—another idiosyncrasy for the lakefront property on either side of Hampstead: the owners could be residents of the town or they could simply be well-off visitors who summered in Hampstead.

  “Can you make it quick?” Levana said.

  “Be back in a jiffy.” He looked in the back seat at Trist. “You wanna look around?”

  “No thanks,” said Trist.

  Robin gave Levana a quick peck and then began walking up the driveway. The sun was hidden behind a wall of clouds and through the trees behind the garage Robin could see the navy-colored lake water.

  He entered the garage. A stack of plastic water jugs—who in the hell would buy any of those—forced him to maneuver to the center aisle formed by two large metal tables. His arm brushed a jug. It fell, and he sliced his thumb on the corner of one of the tables as he tried to catch it. A quarter-inch red line split his thumbprint. Great. He looked for somethi
ng to wipe the blood on but found nothing—at least nothing he was willing to buy in order to apply pressure to the cut.

  He walked out of the garage, put his thumb in his mouth, and then sucked up as much of the blood as he could; he spat in the grass—an old trick he had learned from his grandfather. He examined his thumb—still bleeding. Funny. The bleeding had always stopped when his grandfather had done the trick, but then again Robin had been young and maybe his grandfather’s thumb had kept bleeding too. Come to think of it, his father had done the same thing whenever he had cut himself.

  He re-entered the garage, too cluttered for anyone to notice that he had left, and located stacks of books on a corner table—wouldn’t hurt just to see what’s here real quick.

  The first stack: cheesy romances with worn covers, a Reader’s Digest collection of condensed novels, and a paperback dictionary. He moved to another stack. Half-a-dozen mammoth paperbacks by James A. Michener. He had read two of the books, Space and Centennial, so he picked up the other four: Texas, Hawaii, The Source, and Alaska. Wait. Would he be able to finish all four before...well, maybe Trist would enjoy them one day.

  Baby clothes on this table, tools on that table, was that a diaper pail with a $5.00 sticker on it? There seemed to be nothing he and Trist could use. Then, he saw something that couldn’t be for sale.

  He moved past the table overflowing with baby clothes and stood in front of a brand new Desco Light Duty Diving Outfit. Robin searched for a sticker and couldn’t find one.

  “Stupidest impulse buy I ever made,” said a voice behind him.

  Robin turned to see an older gentleman wearing a Detroit Lions t-shirt.

  “And I’m not talkin’ about the t-shirt I have on.” The man pointed a thumb at his shirt. “A gift. I wouldn’t give this team a dime. When Barry Sanders retires, we’re through. But you know what the biggest problem is?”

  “Not a clue.”

  “We’ve never had a quarterback.”

  “Not much of a football guy,” admitted Robin.

  The man took a measure of him. “Not much of a football guy, huh? Well, at least one of us is smart. Should’ve given up watching the game years ago.” He gritted his teeth. “William Clay Ford Senior...ah, whatever.”

  “If you want to talk hoops, though,” Robin said, “Then I’m your guy.”

  “You play?”

  “Played,” Robin said. “Just high school, but my younger brother walked on at CMU.”

  “No kidding?”

  “Well, he never saw much of the floor. Got dunked on by Majerle during his first practice, and I don’t think he ever recovered.”

  The old man hooted, “Who didn’t get dunked on by Thunder Dan?”

  “Good point,” Robin said.

  The old man rubbed his white beard. “You much of a divin’ guy?”

  Robin put his hand on the stacked air tanks connected to the compressor. “Actually, I’ve been pricing these lately. My son and I are taking a sail around Lake Superior this summer, and I wanted something we could dive with to clean the hull or recover a lost item if we’re shallow enough—without having to rig up a tank.” He searched around the table. “I don’t see a mask or air hose.”

  The owner bent down and pulled up a box from underneath the table. “Here’s the rest of it: one commercial free flow mask, one-hundred and fifty feet of three-eighths inch floating air breathing hose, and a scuba style weight belt with a quick release buckle, four vinyl coated three-pound weights, plus one two-pound bullet weight with a brass snap and umbilical clamp.”

  “This all looks brand new,” Robin said. “Have you ever used it?”

  “Once. Works like a charm. The two-horsepower oil-less electric compressor is everything it’s billed to be and more.”

  “Why are you getting rid of it?”

  The old man smirked. “Can’t use it anymore.” He leaned up against the wall and settled in to his story. “I retired a year ago and had some extra cash from my buyout, right? I’m thinkin’ about diving off my boat and don’t want to invest in the whole nine yards of equipment. Just something nice and easy. So, I drive two hours to a dive shop, and in the store is mister compressor. My eyes get big, and, within twenty minutes, the guy’s got me convinced that I’m Jacques flipping Cousteau. I get home with it and the next day set out for my dive. Now, the specs say that the working depth limit for this set is between thirty and fifty feet. But I figure I’ve got one-hundred and fifty feet of hose, right? So, I decide to push it a little and...boom!” The man clapped his hands together. “I put a hole in my right eardrum. Stupid. Have you ever dived before?”

  “Many times,” Robin said.

  The man looked embarrassed. “Well, you won’t have any trouble with it then. What’s your offer?”

  Every compressor unit that he had researched was between three and four thousand dollars. He had been hoping to go used, but only used once? He doubted the man would come down much. “How much were you thinking?”

  A short woman roughly the same age as the man entered the garage from the house, and when she saw what Robin and the owner were discussing she rolled her eyes, chuckled, and said, “Oh, Adam. You and your senseless ideas.” She pointed toward the compressor. “That one may take the cake as the worst of all.” She continued to look at the table where the diving gear was set out. “Where’s your fins?”

  “I’m not selling the fins, all right?”

  She put her hands on her hips. “You told me you were selling the fins too.”

  “Hush, dear. I’m trying to sell the stupid thing,” the man said to his wife.

  She shook her head and began straightening some of the baby clothes.

  “I don’t think she liked my diving experiment,” Adam said, watching her organize a stack of bibs. “My daughter came and dropped off a bunch of stuff. Her babies aren’t babies anymore.”

  “I understand,” said Robin. “My baby is seventeen.”

  Adam continued to watch his wife but nodded. Then, he turned back toward Robin. “Where were we? Oh, the price, right.” He studied Robin.

  Trist appeared at the edge of the garage. “Dad, mom wants you to hurry up.”

  Adam motioned toward Trist. “They grow up fast don’t they?”

  “They do,” Robin said.

  Trist turned and went back to the Suburban.

  Adam put a hand on Robin’s shoulder. “I’ll tell you what. I didn’t want to lose too much on this, but I think the old lady wants to see it disappear today. So, if we were to go by the garage sale bartering rules, I’d probably say something like two grand. And you’d say one grand. And we’d settle on fifteen hundred. Let’s bypass the song and dance. Fifteen hundred.”

  “Sold,” Robin said.

  “Oh, almost forgot,” Adam said, reaching down under the table again. He stood up and in his hand was a dive knife that also looked like it hadn’t been used. “Take this,” he said. “Your feet are much bigger than mine, or else I’d give you the damn fins too.”

  “You sure?” Robin said.

  Adam winked to Robin, “Dads should impress their kids.” He shook Robin’s hand and then joined his wife to continue their cheerful bickering.

  Robin headed for the car to get Trist to help him load up the compressor...and to get the checkbook from Levana.

  5

  A cool evening breeze blew through the screen of the open sliding glass door that led from the third-floor master bedroom to the large widow’s walk. The wind opened Levana’s robe exposing a cream-colored silk nightie as she pulled the screen door handle. Robin was seated on a built-in bench with an adjustable reclining back, facing the lake and reading a handwritten list with a flashlight. It was 11 p.m., and the moon’s light formed a glimmering sliver of white on the otherwise ebony surface of the lake.

  Levana closed the screen door behind her and stepped onto the walk with two glasses of cabernet.

  “List complete yet?” She said, handing him a glass.

  It was as r
eady as it was going to be. Even as he studied it again, uneasiness crept into his stomach. He was sure that he had missed something.

  Every chart of Lake Superior was rolled, corrected, and stowed below the navigation table in the cabin of the boat. He had a handheld GPS for back-up, and the motor had been overhauled during the winter. The water capacity was fifty gallons, but he had an extra thirty gallons in the two beer kegs strapped against the bulkhead in the v-berth, which he had transformed into a supply depot and sail locker. On the opposite bulkhead, he had mounted two Coleman steel-belted coolers which kept ice frozen in one-hundred-degree weather for three days. He had an emergency handheld VHF radio, first aid kit, and an inflatable life raft. Levana had packed Trist’s passport along with his. He had made sure that his watch had a new battery and had brought extra batteries for every item that required them on the boat. Each piece of equipment’s technical manual had been stowed on a shelf made of mahogany, hand-rubbed alive through multiple coats of varnish in the boat’s salon.

  Levana had worried about them getting lost and starving to death so she had Tyee rent a refrigerated truck to transport the food and drinks to the Upper Peninsula where they were putting the boat in. She had ordered steaks, fresh cartons of eggs, meatballs, spaghetti, bacon, sausages, crescent rolls, cans of beef stew, cans of tomato soup, a case of beer, three 24-packs of coke, five gallons of fruit juice, half-a-dozen boxes of breakfast cereal, cheese blocks, Bisquick, Saltines, granola bars, cold-cuts, and canned fruit. The longest they would go without making a port call would be four or five days. Then, they could re-supply as necessary.

  After a night shift last week, he had borrowed a duffel bag full of supplies from the hospital. First, he had replenished his “home supply” of 2 liters and a line. The first—and possibly only—thing he had learned from his mentor years ago was that doctors and nurses always kept their own supply of saline bags suffused with electrolytes, B-12, and B-complex at home to cure a hangover.