Unsinkable Mister Brown (Cruise Confidential 3)

by Brian David Bruns

  Contents

  Title

  Part 1

  1: Transylvania Dreamin'

  2. Meet the Parents

  3. Bad Dog

  4. My Big Fat Romanian Wedding

  5. The Worst Birthday Ever

  6. I’m Turning Japanese

  7. Arabian Nights

  8. Catfish and Conquest

  9. Iceberg, Dead Ahead

  10. In the Hall of the Mustard King

  11. The Barry White Omnibus

  Part 2

  12. Fish Pills

  13. Barf Bags

  14. Wood

  15. Thumbprint Rage

  16. Carpathian Snow

  17. Tadpole Twenty-three

  18. That’s Americana

  19. The Burning Spot

  20. Bahama Boom

  21. The Oracle of Delphi

  About the Author

  Author's Note

  Bonus!

  Gothic Part 1

  Gothic Part 2

  Books

  Praise

  Series Awards

  Copyright

  Notes

  Unsinkable Mister Brown

  Cruise Confidential Book 3

  by

  Brian David Bruns

  A World Waters Publication

  From Romania With Love

  “Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent.”

  —Friedrich Nietzsche

  Chapter 1. Transylvania Dreamin’

  1

  Being an optimist sucks. Sometimes a wise man knows when to cut and run, but not me. Good, bad, or ugly, I simply must see a thing through. ‘Life’s a journey’ and all that. Adhering to this philosophy has resulted in a few bizarre career moves. Good was being hired to explore content for a porn site, though perhaps I saw too much. Bad was creating software for a urology office, where I definitely saw too much. Ugly, of course, was working on cruise ships.

  Yet my life was not truly rocked to its foundation until I applied this troublesome credo to that most complex thing called love. Like usual, it did not begin with love, but curiosity.

  2

  The engines woke from their trans-Atlantic drone with a backpedaling roar, signaling the jet’s descent into Romania. I stared out the rain-streaked window, eager for my first glimpse of this country so steeped in legend. The weather kindly fulfilled my Hollywood-induced expectations as we slammed headlong into clouds of angry purple and black, heavy with moisture and pulsing with electricity. Strong winds—the kind designed to heap dead leaves onto an ancient tomb—battered the aircraft. Yes, this would do nicely!

  The aircraft dominated the lonely airstrip in the middle of vast sodden fields. Sheets of rain raked triumphantly across surrounding rows of corn, but were shouldered aside by the imposing forest beyond. The plane came to a halt, and everyone began clapping.

  Clapping? Was a safe landing here that rare? After a mind-numbing fifteen hours flying, this was the first hint that I was far from home.

  But it didn’t look any different. The mix of fields and forest was the same as where I grew up, if a bit more lush. How disappointing. Not that I expected the control tower to actually be Dracula’s castle or anything, but I had hoped for something a little less, well, Iowan. A closer look offered me more when I noticed a row of combat aircraft sinking in the wet grass. They looked as old and worn as the concrete bunkers slumped across the misty distance. Memories of the Iron Curtain were not what I wanted, so I stared at the dark forest and imagined fearsome werewolves growling within.

  Voices in Romanian and English informed me that this was not our final destination, but an unscheduled stop outside a city called Timişoara. We remained on the runway; a few people got off, a few got on.

  A little old lady in tattered robes shuffled down the aisle and sat beside me. For lack of knowing a more appropriate label, I assumed she was a peasant. She wore patched and re-patched clothing more aged than me, and a shredded headscarf more hole than cloth. She wearily released a large bag that was a wonder to behold, an animal-looking thing surely made from some mammal slain decades ago and worked into a carry-on. I marveled that a woman so dressed had gotten her hands on a plane ticket.

  Delays already. I had crossed North America, then the Atlantic, and finally Europe, to test my manliness against vampires and ghosts in Transylvania. Instead I got an old peasant woman. With the mild interest born of boredom, I regarded the fantastical lines of her face and the wisps of gray hair. Her thin bangs teased her eyes so that she squinted a lot.

  My interest grew robustly when she opened her hirsute purse and pulled out a huge butcher knife.

  I stared at her in open astonishment, but she was intent upon peeling an apple. It seemed ludicrous that her tiny, gnarled hands—spotted, scarred, and nearly broken from untold decades of toil—could so effectively wield such a weapon. Lightning flashed, reflecting sharply along the keen, ten-inch blade. A gust of wind shook the plane, and her slow reflexes brought the knife perilously close to my thigh.

  What was the name of that artery in your thigh, the one that if cut would kill you? I had great difficulty focusing upon anatomy lessons at the moment and, needless to say, my Romanian language tapes had overlooked ‘Please, ma’am, put away your weapon.’

  Suddenly I understood why my Romanian host, Bianca, had been so insistent on the phone prior to my departure. “Let me know exactly when you arrive, and I’ll be there to rescue you,” she had said. “Romanian people are a little bit slippery until you know them better.”

  No kidding.

  The plane surged once more into the storm-thrashed skies, and bucked like an angry bronco. With the very next pitch, the woman again uncontrollably thrust the knife at me—right at my crotch. I avoided crying out, instead mewling a pathetic whine. I quickly emptied the pocket in the seat-back before me to place as many layers as possible in my lap: magazines, safety instructions, even the barf bag.

  Outside, lightning flashed in an obsessive display of raw power, eliciting oohs and aahs throughout the cabin. The noisy kids in the seats before me, who had been kicking and crying all damned flight, now fought and clawed and scrambled over each other for a better view. The old woman was apparently less impressed by the storm than by her apple, which she continued to peel in an ungainly, painfully slow manner. I, too, ignored the storm, my eyes never leaving that knife for the entire thirty minutes to Bucharest.

  No, Romania was not at all like home!

  3

  Ah, but optimists are not fazed by reckless endangerment, nor really anything else, except maybe pimples. My friends all thought I was mad, particularly the one from Romania.

  Stupid, said Mihaela—though as a professional at Microsoft, she frequently called me such.

  Crazy, said Dave—who, as both a professional comedian and a member of Mensa, surely knew how to think outside the box.

  Inspiring, said Ken—who, as a former Seventh Day Adventist now out of the closet, applauded following one’s own path.

  Reckless, said Bianca—the very woman who invited me to Romania after only knowing me three days!

  While it was true I knew Bianca hardly at all, she was Mihaela’s childhood friend, so how bad could she be? If I got into any trouble, Mihaela had strict orders to save me. She introduced us, after all. Actually, the only reason Bianca thought the trip was reckless was because I was flying out of New York City on September 11th, 2002. That was the only reason I could afford the tickets!

  Alas, there had not been a retaliatory terrorist attack, but I was at risk of an unlikely, painful bleeding death at the hands of an elderly peasant wom
an. Perhaps my preparations had not been as thorough as I thought. I reread Bram Stoker’s Dracula, of course, and got all the immunizations recommended by the CDC. The former was vastly more preferable than the latter. Dutifully I informed my long-suffering mother that I was covered for everything.

  Well, almost.

  Measles/mumps/rubella? Done. Diphtheria/pertussis/tetanus? I was all over it, not to mention that polio and hepatitis A and B were in the bag. Tuberculosis was a concern in parts of Romania, but encephalitis was happily on the decline. True, I didn’t get my rabies shot, but Mihaela said Dracula was just a normal dude and the whole bat thing was just myth. So with the primary carrier of rabies out of the picture, what was there to worry about?

  But I was beginning to worry. What if Bianca wasn’t there to ‘rescue’ me when I stepped off the plane? If she wasn’t there, I would be horrendously screwed. I didn’t know a word of Romanian. I didn’t even know how to make a phone call in Europe. There were country codes of some sort, and dialing a ‘1’ at the beginning was not enough. Come to think of it, two months had passed since I met Bianca for those fateful—but short—three days. What if I didn’t recognize her?

  I need not have worried, for Bianca was waiting at the Bucharest airport as promised. She stands out in a crowd, not because of what she looks like or wears, but what she exudes. Her entire curvy figure radiates self-confidence. Below tussled black hair were black eyes twinkling with mischief, round cheeks, and pouty lips tinged with smug. She waited in a heavy green jacket over skin-tight jeans and a long, grey scarf wound loosely over her shoulders. A single white rose graced red-tipped fingers. We shared a hug, a laugh, and smalltalk as I gathered my luggage.

  “Your flight was good?” she asked with her charming accent. Her English was quite capable, though her grammar was usually off. She was fluent in French, and had been taught the obligatory Russian in school, but only recently learned English—third-hand from movies and music.

  “Oh, it was fine,” I replied cheerily. “I was only mildly alarmed when the old lady next to me pulled out a butcher knife.”

  An understanding nod was not the response I had been hoping for, nor was it particularly reassuring. But if I had wanted something different, I certainly got it in the parking garage when Bianca pulled up the car. It was the tiniest car I had ever seen in my life—and even had four doors! The little European vehicle was literally half as long as my first car, an Oldsmobile, and probably a quarter as heavy. Though obviously used for a long, long time, the flat-white car hummed reliably.

  “What the hell is that?” I blurted as she rose from the driver’s side. Bianca smiled her smug smile and answered with a nonchalant toss of the scarf around her neck.

  “This is Albişoara,” she introduced, giving the car a loving pat (pronounced AL-bee-SHWAR-uh).

  “How old is this thing?” I asked, too agog to realize I was being rude.

  “I think she’s almost as old as you, my dear,” she said. “She was born in 1975. She’s a Dacia, which were the only cars you could get in the communist days.”

  The small trunk in back was sufficient to fit my luggage, but fitting my legs in the front was quite a problem. Bianca wrestled the passenger seat as far back as it would go, and I squeezed in. My hair rubbed the roof just enough to crackle with static. Bianca found that delightfully funny. I did not.

  The weather was a dreadful, punishing rain with thick grey mist, but Albişoara resolutely powered through it all. Bianca exited into heavy traffic and began grumbling at the unmoving mass of red taillights twinkling in the rain. Eager for every early glimpse of a new nation, I pressed my nose against the window. Had it not been raining, I would have stuck my head out and lolled my tongue like a dog.

  Bianca was a woman blessed with tremendous enthusiasm and an infectious laugh; she would as soon dance as walk, and the day was not fit with enough hours to satisfy this need of hers. She always swung and pranced through the house, humming to the song in her head. She even wiggled while brushing her teeth. Also a loving person, she was quick to hug and quicker to kiss. These were all the graces of Bianca I would soon discover—and soon after require—to keep my own life sparkling. But none of it was apparent during that dreary, dismal drive from Bucharest.

  “I hate Bucharest,” she complained as she narrowly avoided yet another long line of stalled traffic—in so doing narrowly avoiding yet another aged fender. “The city is huge and grey and lifeless, yet the animals living here think they God’s bloody gift to the world, as if there is no Romania beyond the capital’s concrete.”

  She was far too surly, and I far too ignorant, to warrant a reply. Instead I began counting the Coca Cola signs along the road, for the weather was too gray to see much past them anyway. Certainly they fought hard enough for my attention—I was up to twenty-three before I saw a sign in Romanian. The sign featured a hilarious illustration of a donut with a frowning face, surrounded by steam and flames.

  “That donut looks pissed as hell,” I observed.

  “Gogoașa Înfuriatâ,” Bianca read. “It means ‘angry donut’. Înfuriatâ—as in ‘furious’.”

  “Exactly how can a donut get angry? Dunk it in coffee that’s too hot?”

  “She lives in Bucharest,” Bianca explained bitterly.

  “She? Donuts are girls in Romania?”

  “Obviously,” Bianca replied rather curtly.

  I was tempted to ask if that was because they had a hole in the middle, but after seeing her fume like a donut, I decided to bite my tongue. We finally cleared the congestion of the city to turn onto the highway. Bianca pushed Albişoara for all she was worth, leaning forward over her steering wheel and all but slapping her fenders with a riding crop.

  Albişoara’s engine whined her high-pitched effort to appease Bianca’s commands. The gloom suddenly spat out a dark mass directly before us. We swerved sharply to avoid a plodding, horse-drawn wagon. In the blink it took for us to pass I saw a farmer hunched over stolidly in the rain, both he and his horse long since used to noisy cars passing by. Even as we swerved into the left lane, we were suddenly passed ourselves on the left by a sleek new BMW. Gravel flashed across our windshield as his driver side tore up the far shoulder. Never even hanging up his cell phone, the driver expertly cut us off just in time as both he and Bianca surged right to avoid a head-on collision with a battered Mercedes truck.

  The drive grew awkward. The fact that I had only known this woman three days before deciding to visit was weighing heavily upon me. I wondered when we would rekindle the intriguing vibe that had lured me here—or if. The rain’s grey crept into the interior of poor, sweating and exhausted Albişoara and grew oppressive. Just then, a road sign caught my eye.

  Ploieşti, it read. I leaned forward excitedly, promptly hitting my head on the windshield. Some hair remained where it had caught in a crevice.

  “Ploy-ESHT!” I cried, also trying to rub my head without her noticing.

  Bianca’s tired eyes flew wide, and she stared at me in complete shock. No doubt I would have reacted the same if some foreigner had properly cried out, ‘Arkansas!’ She completely ignored the road, whereas I thought of nothing else. A car zoomed by perilously close, reminding her with an angry horn of her inattention.

  “How you know Ploieşti?” she asked. “And how you know our ‘S’ with a tail is your ‘SH?’”

  “That’s where the oil refineries were that the Allies bombed in World War II.”

  Reminding someone about how your country bombed the hell out of their country is not usually a good icebreaker. In this case, however, it worked.

  “You babaloo!” she snickered. “Mihaela always said you were history lover, and I forget you gave me the entire historical tour of that ghost town. You’re right, of course.”

  Bianca sighed to release tension.

  “Check me,” she chided herself. “I’m sorry. I just hate Bucharest and this bloody rain! It always rains in my heart when I’m in Bucharest. I hoped your arrival wo
uld bring the sun.”

  “Stop, woman,” I groaned. “After twenty hours in a plane, I can’t handle poetry.”

  She smiled. “I get that from my father. If he were here, he would be driving and singing all those traditional Romanian songs. I’ve seen them bring him to tears, the babaloo.”

  “But who cares about Bucharest?” she continued, finally enervated. “I show you the real Romania! Transylvania is so much more pretty, and the bloody rain should be gone tomorrow. It’s so beautiful and true, everything is natural and nothing made up to scratch your joy of life by artificiality or other human touch matters. And the trees will be foxy.”

  I listened to her intently, having forgotten how much I enjoyed listening to her speech. She always used words that I would never have thought of.

  “Foxy?”

  “Da,” she agreed. “All pretty and wild.”

  “And we will eat similar pigs!” she promised. “And drink cognac and wine like bigger pigs, and sing Romanian songs until midnight. And dance to dawn. You do like to dance, right?”

  “You know what they say,” I answered effusively. “White men can’t dance.”

  “Who says that?” she asked, confused. “Everybody dances here. Well, you will dance, babaloo, because I am taking you to a Romanian wedding. Believe me, Romanian parties are the most cheerful and alive ones. Even on the cruise ships where I work, where is Tower of Babel, everybody admits that.”

  “What exactly does ‘babaloo’ mean?”

  “Babaloo just means ‘silly’,” Bianca said, chuckling. “On ships you use lots of words from lots of places. Check I no call you something in Jamaican, like bamboclat or rasclat. That means you’re in trouble.”

  I just smiled and nodded. Trying to change the subject away from dancing and weddings and insults, I fumbled with the glove compartment. I had to rearrange my knees just to get in.