Back Bay Blues

by Peter Colt

  “Gawd, Red, I never knew you liked pickles.” Sometimes the kid from Alabama still poked out.

  “I could say the same of you.” I said it without thinking. That was one of my many curses, having a brain that works slower than the mouth attached to it. He looked at me out of the sides of his eyes, and for a second, I wondered if he was going to hit me. Then he threw back his head and let out a loud, deep laugh. He chucked me on the shoulder, and I winced.

  “See, Red, I knew you would get it.” Our sandwiches were up at the counter, and we took them to our table with a couple of Cokes. I don’t know about Chris’s, but my sandwich was fantastic. The dark bread, cream cheese coupled with the heat of the horseradish, cooling sprouts, and superb roast beef were a thing of beauty.

  “Red, I’ve given a lot of thought to your watercraft problem.” He said this around a mouthful of sandwich. There were crumbs in his beard. “I think you need a folding kayak. Like we trained with in the army.” They had been made of canvas and wood, olive drab throwbacks to the OSS and our fathers’ war.

  “Where are we going to get one? A museum?” Kayaks were now made of plastic or fiberglass. They were rugged and nearly unsinkable, wide in the beam and good for rivers and rapids.

  “Nope, there is a place not far from here that sells high-end outdoor equipment. They still make and sell Kleppers.” Klepper had made the first successful folding kayak at the turn of this century. The old Klepper kayaks we had seen were light and elegant thin-hulled creatures. They were made with a light wooden skeleton and had waterproof canvass and rubber stretched over them to form a hull and top.

  Klepper was a seventy-year-old company that did one thing better than anyone else, and that was the folding kayak. Chris was onto something. A Klepper would be lighter than a modern one made of space-age plastics. It could be folded and transported in the bed of Chris’s pickup and deployed quickly. Also, our pickup wouldn’t attract as much attention with the kayak folded in the bed.

  “They aren’t cheap, Red. But you could pawn it afterward and get some money back, or I might buy it from you. I might have need of one someday.” He was smiling, excited. The truth is, we both felt like we were planning for an op, like we were back in Nam. We finished our sandwiches and braved the traffic in San Francisco in search of a special kayak.

  San Francisco reminded me of a hilly, palm tree–growing, hippie-infested version of Boston. Both cities seemed to have the same amount of litter, but San Francisco was seriously lagging behind in the pothole contest. The cable cars were running again after an almost two-year hiatus to repair and refit the whole thing; Mayor Feinstein’s crowning achievement.

  We found the store that Chris wanted and went in. It was full of expensive, high-quality camping and outdoor equipment. You could buy Pendleton wool shirts and sweaters, European outerwear, silk long underwear, or Doxa dive watches. All of it came at a premium price.

  Chris knew one of the clerks and explained what we wanted. He was able to find us one in dark blue canvas and a paddle. The store threw in a life jacket that was more like a vest than the big orange affairs found on ferries. After paying for it, my gold coin money was down to a pale reflection of itself. We pulled Chris’s truck to the alley behind the store, and the clerk met us with two large canvas bags. There, he showed us how to fold and unfold it. That done, it was packed into its two canvas bags and put in the back of the truck.

  We stopped at an A&P for some additional supplies: a couple of liter bottles of fancy French bubble water, a can of salted peanuts, and a can of salted cashews. I also grabbed a box of raisins, a couple of apples, and a box of sandwich bags. I was going to be paddling for a few miles in a windy bay and laying up for the better part of a day watching ships swinging on their moorings. Chris also picked up some steaks, potatoes, and spinach for dinner.

  When we pulled into the laundromat parking lot, it was just getting dark. We split the load to be carried inside between us. Inside the apartment, Chris set about making dinner. I laid out the gear I would take with me on the recce. Chris insisted that I should take the gun with me. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I wasn’t planning on scaring pigeons. On the other hand, a .22 Magnum was better than no gun.

  I folded the surplus store clothes and put them by the couch with the Converses and the KA-BAR knife. Most of the equipment and food went into the dry bag that Chris had loaned me. I left out only what I would need to wear in the morning. I had more than enough food to carry me for a day. I wrapped the revolver in a sandwich baggie. It would ride in a pocket. Twelve loose rounds went in another. I wouldn’t need more than that.

  I took ten one hundred–dollar bills out of my wallet and put them in a sandwich bag. Money was a tool in this case. It might come in handy when ID wouldn’t. I left my wallet with Chris. If I were wearing my Rolex, that would have come off, but I only had the Timex version of a dive watch. I took off my dog tags and put them next to my wallet. If something went wrong and I bought it . . . there was no one who would miss me or come looking. I was disposable and not for the first time in my life.

  Chris had salted and peppered the steaks. The potatoes were almost baked. He sautéed the spinach with onions this time instead of nutmeg. When the spinach was cooked, he added a little bit of heavy cream and blue cheese. The steaks were pan seared for exactly three minutes a side. Our potatoes were simply served, split lengthwise with plenty of butter and salt. He opened another Italian wine. This one was from Sienna, and it was good. It had a rooster on the label. It was a meal fit for a last supper.

  “Red, why do you do all of this?” He was looking at me over the table, a piece of steak impaled on the tines of his fork, hovering in midair.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The private detective thing. You have told me nothing but stories about the stuff you have lost: girlfriends, your oldest friend, your car. You get shot at, beaten up, blown up, your beloved Karmann Ghia . . . whoosh. What for? You are one of those guys who could do anything.” I didn’t necessarily agree with him about that. I was pretty sure that Hugh Hefner was never going to hire me to hang out with him at the Playboy Mansion.

  “When I came home from Vietnam . . . I had this dream, this vision that I would be like my friend, Danny. I would go to college, get a degree, get a job, meet a nice girl, and settle down. Start family, buy a house in the suburbs, have a dog and a station wagon . . . you know, all of it.”

  Chris nodded, chewing on a mouthful of steak. “Yeah, I know what you mean.”

  “The problem was that I wasn’t normal anymore. I spent three years in Vietnam running Recon, flying Covey. I had seen and done things . . . well, you know. I could fake it for short periods of time, you know, normal.... ‘Oh yeah, did you see the Red Sox last night? I think the new Fords are just great!’ But the truth was I was a guy pretending, mimicking normal. Then I was watching the helicopters taking off from the embassy on TV, Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather talking about it. Then I knew.”

  “Knew what?”

  “That I should have died in Nam. I shouldn’t be here. I wasn’t normal anymore. I didn’t care about the Red Sox or if it was raining or what the latest fashion was. I wasn’t going to get a degree, go work in an office, whatever. I tried the cops and for a while it helped. Then I realized that they had more bullshit and rules than the army. In the end, I had to be my own boss. Being a soldier, being a cop . . . that was all I knew.”

  “That simple?”

  “Yeah, pretty much. Plus, I figured once in a while I might be able to help someone, some little guy who couldn’t stick up for himself.... There is a world full of bullies.”

  “I know what you mean. Being a merc, fighting in Africa for money and for the guys . . . that was my version of what you are talking about. Being gay, there was no place for me in the army. There was no place left for me in Alabama.” He shook his head. “Guys like us don’t settle down and start families. We don’t get to have the stuff that other people get to. We don’t g
et to go out and pretend that the world is all hunky-dory.”

  “Too true.”

  We finished dinner and practiced putting the Klepper together and stowing it again in its two bags. The larger one held the rubber and canvas that made up the shell, the smaller a series of lacquered wooden pieces that made up the skeleton. The pieces fit together to make the bow and stern of the kayak. They hinged in the middle, then were fitted into the skin. The skin had valves that you would blow into and they would inflate, tightening the hull, making it rigid. They also added buoyancy in case it shipped water. It reminded me of a bigger version of one of those wooden dinosaur kits they sell at the children’s museum.

  After a few tries, we were able to put the Klepper together in about five minutes. We would be doing it in the near dark, cold and damp down by the water in the wee hours of the morning. The idea was for me to get to Ryer Island before first light. That should give me enough time to set up a quick hide using the poncho and the scrub brush. We went to bed a little while later.

  Chapter 19

  Three in the morning came quickly. I had gotten about five hours of sleep. I had dreamt about Vietnam and Thuy. I kept seeing the Ghia blowing up; then it turned into a napalm strike in the jungle. Beautiful orange pillars of fire against the backdrop of lush green and the sound of screaming. Not for the first time I was thankful that I couldn’t smell burning flesh in my dreams. I woke up when Chris turned on the lights and bellowed out like a drill sergeant, “ON YOUR FEET!”

  Seventeen years after basic training, after screaming drill sergeants, I rolled out of the couch, my feet hit the floor, and I bounced to the position of attention. I realized what an ass I was when I heard Chris guffawing.

  “Oh, Red, you are fucking priceless, man.” I said something about him having a relationship with himself. I went to shower, more to shake the cobwebs off of my tired brain than to get clean. I was probably going to spend the day sweating and lying in low-tide mud, getting nothing but smellier.

  When I came out of the shower, I shivered. It was a cold, raw San Francisco spring morning. Based on the darkness outside, it was only morning in the most technical sense. I walked out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel and Chris handed me a steaming mug of coffee.

  “Jesus, Red, aren’t you taking some real chances, strutting around in a towel in front of the Mercenary Queen?” It was the first time I had heard him make a joke about his sexuality since he had told me.

  “Buddy, if I am what does it for you, you definitely need to raise your standards.” He laughed. We both could joke about it, just like we could joke about war, death and violence. If there had been any awkwardness or discomfort, we both knew it was gone. I dressed in wool socks; the fatigue pants; the Bundeswehr undershirt with its stylized, not Nazi, eagle on the front; the wool long john shirt on top of that. I would save the sweater and the watch cap till we went outside.

  Breakfast was simple, toast and scrambled eggs, more coffee. Chris gave me a Thermos of it to take with me. We loaded the gear into the truck, and by quarter to four we were on the highway. There was no traffic, and we made it to the put-in point southeast of Montezuma, the tip of Simmons island, a little before five. We had the kayak assembled and the dry bag stowed by five. I put camouflage paint on my face, neck, and the backs of my hands. The wool watch cap and blue sweater went on. We shook hands and Chris said, “Good luck.” I shivered and, in my mind, heard the sound of Hueys as I slid the kayak into the murky water of the Suisun Bay.

  Ryer Island was in front of me, almost a kilometer, a klick, away. Across the bay, the lights of the factories and refinery twinkled in the mist. The map told me that there was a small channel running through Ryer Island from north to south. It didn’t take long to get to the island, and by the time I reached it, I was used to the feel of the kayak. It was more stable than a canoe, but much lower in the water. It was nimble and swift, but it was work to paddle. The wind always seemed to be howling, and I was not looking forward to paddling out across the windswept bay to the ship when the time came.

  I paddled easterly until I found the channel running through the island and turned east, or hard right. I followed the contour of the island until I was near the tip. According to the map that I had studied, there was a V-shaped inlet, almost a small harbor or, in this case, a scale model of one. I paddled in and beached the kayak.

  I stepped out and sunk into muddy silt over my ankles. I freed myself with some effort and dragged the kayak up on shore. I slung the dry bag over my shoulders, stuck the paddle in the kayak, which I then lifted upside down over my shoulders. I walked, stumbling in the growing light, over the uneven ground and scrub brush. When I was close to the eastern shore, I put the kayak down behind some scrub and quickly piled some brush on and around it to break up its outline, then went looking for my spot to lay up.

  The spot turned out to be a depression roughly six feet long and four feet wide. It was about a foot deep. It was grave-like. I quickly stretched the poncho across it using the bungees from the four corners to the trunks of nearby bushes. A two-and-a-half-foot stick in the poncho’s center propped it up. I quickly gathered scrub and grass to help hide the nylon poncho.

  I crawled in. I had enough room to stretch out. I could take off my sweater, and that and the dry bag would make a good pillow. With the binoculars, I could see the Adams on her mooring. If I had to guess, she was about a mile and a half away across the choppy bay. I had enough room to get stuff out of my dry bag, like food, water, and coffee.

  The grass was damp and smelled of salt and sea. I hadn’t brought a sleeping bag or tarp and my pants were soon damp, but the wool sweater, wool long sleeve undershirt, and watch cap were keeping me warm. Also, the poncho’s low height soon trapped my body heat. When the sun came up, it started to warm the poncho hooch. While I was rummaging in the dry bag for one of the MREs, I found a paperback book.

  It was a Spenser novel by Robert B. Parker, one of the very early ones that I hadn’t read yet. In the inside cover, Chris had written in his neat script, “Red, in case you get bored or homesick.” He was right. I wasn’t going to be able to watch for sixteen straight hours through binoculars or a telephoto lens. It would be nice to have some sort of distraction.

  The sun had come up behind my hide. A patrol boat with the M60 machine gun made a circuit around the fleet, then went in and out between the groups of ships that were tied together. It moved quickly through the water and headed in. It was probably shift change, and the SPs wanted to go home, go to bed, get in their racks. Or they were heading to get drinks, get laid, maybe go on days off. Who knew from a mile and a half away? I hoped for them that it was drinks and women.

  At seven, I was getting hungry. I decided to try one of the MREs. In my day we had C-Rations, LRP rations and, for SOG, we had special dried rations that were basically freeze-dried Vietnamese staples. We had cans of mackerel to eat with the rice. If we could, we tried to get LRP rations, through trade or trickery.

  In the field, we tried not to smell like Americans. We ate Vietnamese food before missions. Our sterile uniforms were washed in common Vietnamese detergents, no perfumes or smells like American ones. There was no smoking on missions, and we would go hours without speaking, relying solely on hand and arm signals. We never spoke louder than a soft whisper, unless we were in a firefight. Then all bets were off.

  The MREs came in two brown vinyl pouches that had black writing on them. One said, “omelet with ham”; the other said, “beef patty with bean component, not to be eaten before flight operations.” I decided that omelet with ham seemed the way to go, as it was morning. I put the other one back in the dry bag. Inside were foil pouches and cardboard boxes. I pulled out a box that said “omelet with ham” on it and a brown long-handled plastic spoon. Inside the box was a foil pouch and in that was a yellowish flat piece of what looked like anemic yellow Play-Doh with pink chunks in it. It didn’t smell good, look good, or taste good. Not much had changed in the world of army rations exc
ept the packaging.

  There was a pouch labeled “peaches in syrup” that tasted like the old C-Ration peaches. The crowning jewel was something called “chocolate nut cake,” essentially flat, dense, sweet bread with chocolate chips and walnuts in it. It was fantastic. The MRE also came with cocoa powder, instant coffee in a small pouch, a moist towelette, matches, two green Chiclets, the familiar-looking folded pack of toilet paper, and a sleeve of Charms candy. All of the trash went back in the brown vinyl bag and back in my dry bag.

  I spent the morning watching the ship for a bit then reading a few pages every couple of minutes. I watched the patrol boats come and go. They didn’t seem to be on any particular schedule. Fishing boats came and went as I lay in my blind. I took notes about the navy patrol boats and watched birds dive bomb-ships with shellfish.

  By eleven, it was warm enough that the grass was dry. I took off my watch cap and sweater and put them in the dry bag. Around noon, I fell asleep for forty-five minutes. It turned out that the life vest that came with the kayak was fairly comfortable under my shoulders when I was lying flat with my head resting on the dry bag.

  When I woke up visibility was good. There was no mist, and the ships in their stacks rode at anchor, turning into the wind. The wind ruffled my poncho. I heard the sound of a halyard beating against a mast in the wind. Off in the distance was the rhythmic sound of cars going by on the highway. Gulls and terns competed for space in the morning sky.

  Later in the afternoon, I took out the lensatic compass. I opened the lid and formed a tent with the tops and the sight and held it up to my cheekbone. I lined up the wire sight, through the notch, on the hull of the Adams. When I was satisfied, I rotated the bezel until the line of green luminous paint was lined up on the azimuth to the ship.

  I passed the rest of the day watching the ship and keeping track of the patrols. If I wasn’t doing that, I would pick up the book and read about Spenser’s noble efforts in Boston in the 1970s. He was a lot tougher and a hell of lot more charming than I am. I smoked a cigarette, blowing the smoke out slowly, and then field stripped the butt by separating the paper from the tobacco. Then I scattered the latter in a corner of my hooch.