68 Knots

  Joy patted his shoulder. “You were never in any danger,” she said. “God sent you on that mission. He wouldn’t abandon you.”

  “Well, I was damn worried,” BillFi said with a smile. “Don’t you ever do that to me again!”

  Two days later, Arthur had anchored the ship in a secluded bay and called the crew together around the dining table. He was pale, and he was obviously choosing his words carefully.

  “Here’s the situation,” he said, as Logan poured himself some scotch. The others declined. “Joy says we have just a few day’s worth of food left. We had twelve hundred dollars, which would have paid for a lot of food—and kept us out here a long time—but we spent it on ‘other things’ instead. We’re down to just a little bit of money, so unless we can think of a way to get some money or some food, we’re going to have to quit.”

  “So let’s quit,” Marietta said with a scowl. “I thought this whole thing was stupid to begin with. Let’s just take the stuff we bought, go home, and find something else to do. Sailing up and down the coast is pretty boring, if you ask me.”

  “I don’t want to quit,” Logan wheezed. “Yeah, maybe buying some of this stuff was a totally dumb idea. I mean, except for the booze, of course. But I don’t want to go home. Noooo way! My mom is totally murder to be around.”

  “I don’t want to quit, either,” Joy said. “I came here to learn how to lead in accordance with God’s will, and I still want to do that. Dios mediante, God willing, I plan to start a church back home in Texas—the House of Joy—and I’ll need all the leadership experience I can get!”

  “Who says we have to quit?” Crystal said, her blue eyes flashing around the table. “I don’t know how we’re going to feed ourselves later, but for now, we have a gourmet meal at our fingertips.”

  The crew was silent for a moment. Then Logan downed his scotch and asked, “What do you mean?”

  “Look,” Crystal said, running a hand through her short blond hair, “every day, when we’re sailing, someone has to be on the stupid bow. Why?”

  “To watch out for lobster floats,” Arthur said, annoyed that the conversation had slipped out of his control. “They could get fouled in our rudder and make it hard to steer. But the point is that—”

  “Exactly, Einstein,” Crystal said. “Lobster floats. Floats connected to lines that are attached to lobster traps. Lobster traps filled with—lobsters! Whenever we want, we can just pull up a couple of traps and help ourselves to all the lobsters we can eat!”

  “I know some great recipes for lobster,” Joy said. “Boiled lobster, lobster alfredo, lobster bisque. And I think I could make something decent with lobster, pasta, and Szechwan pepper. But we can’t just take the lobsters. That’s stealing, and stealing is wrong. It’s immoral, and it’s against God’s will. So we can’t.”

  “Just plain butter,” BillFi said. “I like it with just plain butter and a little salt. Just butter and salt.”

  “Or melted cheese,” Logan said, rubbing his flabby belly. “Some lobster, a lotta melted cheese, and some crusty bread. Oh, wait. We don’t have any bread.”

  “Hold it!” Arthur said. “Think for a minute. First, Joy’s right. You’re talking about theft—stealing lobsters from the fishermen who put out those traps. That’s illegal, and I don’t—”

  “It doesn’t seem too bad to me,” Crystal said, “compared to, you know, dumping a dead guy off the bow.”

  Arthur was silent for a moment. He shook his head. “Forget about it,” he said. “If we get caught, we could get in a lot of trouble. We also might get shot at.”

  “Oh, come on!” Crystal said. “We won’t get caught. We’ll only do it when no other boats are around. No one can see us. I don’t think—”

  “No!” Arthur said. “I’m your captain, and I said no. We are not going to do something illegal and risky just because you all lacked the discipline to stick to your shopping lists.”

  Crystal sneered. She turned to address the rest of the crew. “Hear that?” she said. “Arthur, our fucking captain, said no. Well tell you what, Mr. Fucking Captain. Unless you have both the strength and the balls to stop me—and I doubt it on both counts—I’ll go get lobsters whenever I feel like it. You got a problem with that, I won’t bring one back for you.”

  “I see,” Arthur said icily. “I’ll tell you what. We’ll put your idea to a vote, and when you lose, you’ll be forbidden from diving for lobsters at any time. And if you do, we’ll leave you at the next port.” He looked around the table. “All in favor of violating your captain’s orders and stealing lobsters, raise your hands,” Arthur said.

  At first, no one moved. Only Crystal’s hand shot defiantly into the air. Then slowly, Logan lifted his hand, too. “Melted cheese!” he pleaded as Arthur glared at him.

  “Fine,” Arthur said, “that’s two votes to six. Any others?”

  A moment later, BillFi raised his hand, and Jesse did the same.

  “I vote no,” Marietta said. “I’m with Arthur.”

  Dawn voted yes on the grounds that the Sea Goddess would give them whatever they were supposed to have; the vote held at five in favor and three opposed. Joy just shook her head.

  “Fine,” Arthur said, fuming and hoping that everyone knew it. “The vote carries, and Crystal gets to lead a group to steal lobsters. Understand what we’re doing, though. We just decided to break the law. Not bend it—deliberately break it. Not because McKinley tried to cheat us. Not because we were committed to a great summer on an old schooner. We’re breaking the law now because we bought sweaters and sleeping bags and a boombox in Freeport.”

  He shook his head slowly and turned to face Crystal, who was staring at him with a smirk on her face.

  “Bring back enough for everyone,” he ordered.

  Because Jesse wasn’t able to row the dinghy—his arm was still striped with purple bruises—Crystal took one oar, and Logan took the other. BillFi gave directions from the bow, and Marietta rode in the stern. Once the vote had gone against her, she jumped to side with the majority.

  “Which one do you think we should take?” BillFi asked no one in particular. He pushed his glasses up his nose. “There’s a red-and-white float. Should we pull up that one? The red-and-white one? Or maybe the one with the blue stripes. Should we pull that one up? The one with the stripes?”

  Marietta rubbed oil over her already tan skin and scanned the lobster floats bobbing in the bay. They offered a kaleidoscope of colors, but a few patterns began to emerge. The floats were painted in eight different color patterns, and she guessed that eight different fishermen worked this area.

  “I think that’s right,” Logan said. “I think the colors are how they, you know, tell their floats apart.”

  Marietta did some quick counting.

  “Most of the ones out here are solid pink,” she said. “I think we should try a few of those first, ’cause that fisherman is less likely to miss a few lobsters than the other ones.”

  “Good idea,” Crystal said. “But we’ll spread it around a little. If we have to check several traps to get enough lobsters, we won’t do all the same color. That way, the fishermen might not notice the missing lobsters and get all pissed off. Let’s go for that nearest pink one.”

  The dinghy glided slowly toward the float. When it was close, BillFi reached over the side and grabbed the mossy line that trailed into the shadowy water beneath it.

  “Got it!” he said. “I need some help.”

  Crystal and Logan put their oars down and scrambled to the bow. They grabbed the line and pulled together, and slowly the wet slimy rope slithered into the dinghy.

  “I see the trap!” Marietta called out. “It’s almost here.”

  A few more pulls, and the trap broke the surface. The crew hauled it, dripping, into the dinghy.

  The trap looked like a miniature Quonset hut, rectangular on the bottom and curved on the top. It was made out of small slats of wood, and netting covered the two ends. It was gray and green
with algae, and water poured off it into the bottom of the boat.

  One lobster lurked inside. It was dark green and about ten inches long, and it had one large, intimidating claw.

  “How do you open this thing?” Marietta asked, touching it like it might explode. Then she saw a small door that was latched shut. “There it is.”

  “Well, go ahead,” BillFi said. “Open it and get that lobster out of there. Go ahead. Go ahead and get it.”

  “Yeah, Marietta,” Logan said with a grin. “Go ahead.”

  “Me? Why me? Why don’t you reach your hand in there and get it out?” Marietta said. “I’m not sticking my hand in there.”

  “Oh, give me a break,” Crystal said, sneering. “You people are so afraid of everything.” She turned the latch, and in motions almost too fast to see, she thrust her hand into the trap, grabbed the lobster behind its claw legs, and yanked it out. She dropped it to the bottom of the dinghy and shut the trap.

  “Let’s go,” she said. “At this rate, this’ll take us all day.”

  They tossed the trap back into position and rowed over to a green float. The crew pulled on that line, and the trap slowly came to the surface.

  No lobsters. The trap was empty.

  They rowed some more. The next trap, beneath a half-purple and half-white float, held two lobsters. Crystal plucked the lobsters out of the trap. “Only five more to go,” she said. “If we each want only one, that is. We should probably get more.”

  Logan groaned. “I don’t know how many more of these traps I can pull up,” he said. “These things are like, incredibly heavy.”

  “I know what you mean,” Marietta said, rubbing more oil into her skin. “I can’t do more than one or two more. This is hard work.”

  Crystal shook her head. “Pretty sad, ladies,” she said, staring flatly at Logan. “Okay, fine. How long are these lines? How deep is the water here?”

  “Not much,” Logan said. “Maybe like, eight feet.”

  “Fine,” Crystal said. “Just row us to the next trap. I’ll take care of it.”

  Logan shrugged and rowed the creaking dinghy over to another pink float. Crystal stood up in the stern and kicked off her sneakers without rocking the boat.

  “Just wait here,” she said, sliding off her socks. “I’ll be right back with the lobsters.”

  She pulled her shirt over her head and tugged her shorts down over her hips and off her legs. She stood for a moment, dressed in only a small sports bra and underwear, then took a deep breath and dove over the side.

  Logan rolled his eyes. “She’s totally nuts,” he said. Everyone in the dinghy peered over the side, but none of them could see a thing.

  Less than a minute later, Crystal swam up through the murky water, splashed through the surface, and shook the saltwater from her short blond hair. She had a lobster in each hand.

  “Here,” she said, tossing the lobsters at Logan. She took a few more breaths. “I’ll be right back.”

  She dove down again and resurfaced a moment later, gripping two more lobsters behind their claw legs. She lobbed them into the dinghy, swam over to another float, and ducked her head into the water. She raised her rear end and then her legs into the air and dove downward.

  Before an hour had passed, Crystal had collected a dozen lobsters in addition to the first three. Then she grabbed the gunwale, flipped herself into the dinghy, and pulled her clothes back on.

  “Okay,” she said. “Let’s go back to the ship. I don’t know about you, but I’m fucking hungry.”

  Joy sat on the bow and tried to think and pray at the same time. She knew in her heart that stealing the lobsters was wrong—a sin—but she didn’t think God wanted her to quit and go home. She was going to create a new church, after all, and the House of Joy was sure to do enough good to offset the theft of a few lobsters in Maine. Besides, she thought, do the lobsters belong to the fishermen just because they crawled into a trap? If we had caught them just before they went into the trap, that wouldn’t be stealing at all. Surely God doesn’t want me to quit just because we got the lobsters a minute too late, does He? But we wouldn’t have gotten the lobsters at all if it weren’t for the traps. So if it is stealing, then it’s a direct violation of a Commandment, and surely going home was better than defying God’s will. “Dios mio,” she whispered. “Help me decide what to do.”

  She had started to pull her coin from her pocket when she felt a hand on her shoulder. Dawn sat down next to her and dangled her long legs over the side.

  “It’s no fun sometimes, is it?” Dawn asked, her green eyes staring out to sea. “We’re spiritual beings trapped in a messy human existence. The answer is not always clear.”

  Joy nodded. “I don’t know what to do,” she said softly.

  “I think you shouldn’t do anything you can’t undo,” Dawn said. “If cooking and eating the lobsters are wrong, I’m sure God will forgive you. But if you leave the ship, I don’t think you’ll be able to come back if you change your mind.”

  Joy was silent.

  “Just give it some time,” Dawn said, pulling her red baseball cap over her light brown hair and flipping her ponytail out the space in the back. “If you don’t know the answer right now, then maybe you should give it time to reveal itself.”

  Joy nodded again. She was silent for a while, her chubby hands holding onto supports while her mind considered her options. Then with a sudden movement, she spun her coin on the deck. Saint Christopher—the patron saint of travelers. “I’ll stay,” she said, putting the coin back into her pocket. “For now, anyway.”

  She went down into the galley and spent almost two hours banging pots and struggling with the kerosene stove. She emerged at last with lobsters in an herb-and-Szechwan-pepper butter sauce, boiled potatoes, and pesto pasta. Logan opened a bottle of dark red wine. Even Arthur enjoyed the meal.

  After dinner, Arthur gathered the sailors around the table once again. He knew they didn’t want to think about the reality that faced them, but as their leader he had a duty to anticipate the future.

  “This is hard,” he said, locking his hazel eyes on each sailor in turn. “Stealing lobsters is wrong. We can’t believe it isn’t. We also can’t eat lobster for every single meal. But if we don’t get food somehow, we’re going to have to quit and go home. None of us wants to do that.”

  Marietta looked up and scowled. “Oh, I don’t know—”

  “Okay, most of us don’t want to quit,” Arthur said. “So we have to think of some way to get food. We can still take some lobsters every now and then, but we’ll have to figure out something else too. Is there anything we can do—anything that’s legal—to earn some money or get food somehow?”

  “We could take turns, like, getting jobs and stuff,” Logan said. “Nowhere fancy, just McDonald’s or something. Maybe four of us at a time could get jobs for two or three weeks, you know, and earn as much money as possible, and then, like, quit.”

  Arthur shook his head. “I thought of that,” he said. “But to save any money at all, the workers would still have to live on the Dreadnought. We couldn’t afford to rent an apartment or hotel room or anything. And if the workers were going to work every day and come home to the ship, that would mean we couldn’t sail anywhere. Suddenly, instead of cruising and exploring the coast of Maine, we’d be sitting in a harbor somewhere. The Dreadnought would just be a floating apartment, and this summer would be a lot like all the others. Besides, we’d get caught eventually.”

  The crew was silent for a while, sipping wine and soda and thinking.

  Suddenly Logan smiled. “I’ve got it!” he said. The others leaned close around the table to hear his plan. “When I was in, like, sixth grade, my family took a trip to the Caribbean. We totally stayed at some resort on Antigua, you know, the kind with the pink cinderblock balconies along the beach. It was an absolutely great place. “Day–O!” and all that stuff. They had a rec room there, with, like, a ping-pong table, and one evening my sister and I were pl
aying ping-pong when this guy walked in. He was maybe seventeen years old, and even though it was totally hot and humid out, he wore a black velvet vest and black velvet pants. He was from England, and he was totally cool. My sister fell for him right away. For the rest of the evening, they kept trying to get rid of me. They sent me out to check on the constellations for them, and they—”

  “Is there a point to this?” interrupted Marietta.

  Logan’s pudgy body sagged like it had been deflated. “Well, yes,” he said. “One day, while we were on the island, a couple of people came up to us on the beach and handed us a piece of paper. It was a flyer for the sailing yacht Aurora, a schooner—you know, a lot like this one—that these people had sailed across the Atlantic from Sweden. It was a totally great old ship, and the people on board were trying to sail it around the world. The flyer explained that they were on their way to the Panama Canal, and that to raise money for the trip—ta da!—they were offering people a chance to spend a day on board, sailing around Antigua, having a shish-kebob lunch on a secluded beach, and all that stuff. My dad jumped at the chance. He thought it sounded adventurous and romantic.

  “So we all shipped out the next day and went sailing on the Aurora. We even got these, like, souvenir T-shirts from the trip. I don’t know what it cost, but I’ll bet it was pretty steep. “I think we could do the same thing with the Dreadnought, right here in Freeport, letting people take rides for a day, help out with the sailing and all that enchanted tourist stuff. We could charge a bundle for it, and some people would be totally happy to pay it.”

  “Become a tour boat?” Crystal asked with a sneer. “That’s disgusting. What would we do—get cute little uniforms and sing little nautical songs on deck while we sailed around in circles?”

  “No,” Logan said, “nothing like that. We just take people out for a day on the water and, you know, like a nice lunch on a beach somewhere. It would mean keeping the ship pretty clean for a little while, but I think we could make some totally good money pretty quickly.”