by Phil Bowie
Melvin Stanton met him at the door of the small station quarters carrying a thick coffee mug in one hand. Ira had his camera bag slung from his shoulder. They shook hands and Stanton led him down a hallway. The quarters were immaculate, with vinyl floors waxed to high gloss. The door to a radio room was open, a crisply uniformed young woman wearing a headset seated in front of the lit-up equipment. Somewhere out back a diesel generator hammered noisily at high rpm. Stanton ushered him into a small conference room decorated with a large nautical chart of the mid-Atlantic coast and framed photos of cutters and motor lifeboats and their assembled crews. A fit, lean man wearing a paint-stained denim shirt was slouched at the table. He had a mass of black hair resembling a charcoaled mop. Early forties. He looked damp. His jacket and cap were drying on the back of the chair beside him.
“You must be Sam Bass. I’m Ira Cohn, with the Raleigh Sentinel.”
Bass looked immediately defensive, but leaned across the table to take the offered hand and shake it once, unsmiling.
Stanton said, “We’ve got coffee in a thermos and a couple dozen donuts there in the corner. Help yourself.”
“Thanks, I sure will.” Ira turned over a mug bearing the Coast Guard emblem and filled it with steaming coffee. He piled six donuts onto a paper towel and took the feast over to sit at the table with the other two men. He got out the recorder and notebook and began asking questions between large mouthfuls of donut and sips of the aromatic coffee.
Stanton was smilingly cordial and helpful, filling him in on the weather and sea conditions, what facts he knew about the Stilleys and their ketch Osprey and the procedures of the rescue, the capabilities of the motor lifeboat and its crew chiefed by an old hand named Ruben Dixon, volunteering information about how many distress calls they got annually and about the Ocracoke Station in general and its long proud history. Bass volunteered nothing, just sitting there quietly with his hands wrapped around his mug, gazing down into his coffee. Ira let the tape run and used the notebook to supplement it, jotting impressions and ideas as they came to him.
“So, Mr. Bass. I understand it was you who found them. In your plane.”
Bass didn’t look up. Just nodded.
Ira flipped back a page to some notes he’d already written on Bass. Not handsome. Somehow striking, though. Might have been a cowboy in an earlier time. What the hell’s bugging him about me?
“How did you learn about the Stilleys being in trouble?”
Bass gestured at the recorder and said, “Maybe we could do without that for a minute.”
“Sure thing,” Ira said, and switched off the recorder and put down his ballpoint. He didn’t need them anyway. He had a memory like a Gateway computer. He used the notebook and recorder mostly to help him think, to make interviews appear semi-formal, and so interviewees would remember they had been recorded when they sometimes later might want to decide they really hadn’t said that. Bingo, he thought. Now we’re getting to what’s bothering him.
Bass leveled penetrating gray eyes at him. There’s a hell of a lot more to this guy than shows on the surface, Ira thought.
“I hope you’ll understand, Mr. Cohn. I’m not associated with the Coast Guard in any official way. I do have a couple of friends here at the station, though. I was talking with one of them on the phone early this morning and he mentioned the Stilleys.”
So somebody in the Coast Guard had asked him to conduct the search, but they’re not supposed to do that.
“Please. Call me Ira. I understand. Suppose we just say you heard about the Stilleys from a friend. How’s that?”
“Good,” Bass said, but something sizable was still bothering the man. Ira could sense it. He switched the recorder back on. “Flying a light plane out there this morning had to’ve been pretty rough, to put it mildly.”
Bass looked into his coffee again and said, “It was turbulent but not all that bad, really. Visual flight rules conditions, basically.”
Aw shucks time. And bullshit. I’ll have to dig at him, Ira thought.
Then things began happening fast. There was the whapping of an approaching helicopter outside and the young woman called down the hall, “Chief, the motor lifeboat’s coming in the inlet.”
Stanton pulled on a slicker and Bass stood and grabbed his jacket and cap, Ira noting that Bass matched his own height of six two. Ira gathered up his own gear.
Outside, the wind had lost some of its punch, the rain had all but quit, and there were ragged bright holes in the overcast. The helicopter, a Bell JetRanger rigged for EMS, its strobe lights flashing, approached the pad slowly, the pilot obviously cautious in the still-brisk gusty wind. It settled onto its skids and throttled back to cool-down rpm. Two white-clad EMTs climbed out and ducked under the rushing blades to be greeted by Stanton. One of them carried a large metal case and the other a light-weight fold-up stretcher. Stanton walked with them from the pad three hundred feet to the dock and told them the lifeboat was due within just a few minutes. One of the EMTs signaled with a rotating forearm back at the helicopter pilot. Keep them turning.
Ira had the Nikon out and had already ripped through one roll.
They all watched as the motor lifeboat rounded the harbor entrance and rumbled up to the dock, Stanton effortlessly heaving coiled lines to the life-jacketed crew who tied them off expertly. Ruben stepped from the salt-flecked wheelhouse as soon as the boat was secured and shut down, gesturing for the EMTs. They climbed on board and went down into the aft passenger cabin. Within a few minutes they came out with Ralph Stilley strapped to the stretcher, his left arm encased in what looked like an inflated pillowcase, his color gray, his eyes closed. Adele, who seemed to Sam to have suddenly aged a decade, trailed them, helped off the boat by Ruben and one of the crew, a young freckled woman with short brown hair.
Adele had a haggard, agonized expression and looked childlike in her yellow slicker and orange life jacket. She saw Sam and gave him a strained, distracted little smile, her attention totally focused on her husband. She tugged at the sleeve of an EMT and said, “But I want to go with him.”
“I’m sorry, lady,” the EMT said. “There’s just no room. It’s a serious fracture but he’s going to be fine, I promise. We’ve given him something for the pain. Call the hospital in about two hours. We really have to leave now.”
“It’s all right, Adele,” Sam said, walking over to stand beside her. “I’ll fly you to Greenville as soon as I can get some fuel.” He was thinking I’ll get permission to drain the fuel out of Phil Saxton’s plane if I have to. Or just drain it and tape a note to the windshield. Phil had an unlisted phone and was only on the island when he was not out to sea on a trawler for weeks at a stretch.
Adele clasped her hands under her chin, nodded meekly, and watched them load up her husband and then take him away, moving fast to the west.
Ira changed rolls quickly.
Sam put a hand lightly on her shoulder and said, “Dammit, Red. You look like holy hell.”
Ira realized it had been exactly the right thing to say as he watched her turn her face up to Bass and that lost-little-girl look was slowly fading, replaced by a tired grin and a glint in her eye.
“What,” she said, “I don’t look like I’m ready to party?”
Sam smiled and squeezed her shoulder.
“Oh, Sam,” she said. “It was bad. We thought it was just going to be a rainstorm. Then it got worse and worse through the night and we took down all the sail. Ralph was in the cabin fiddling with the radio and I was out in the cockpit and this monster wave came out of nowhere and hit us. We heard the rear mast crack and then it just…it just crashed down on the cabin. It smashed all of the electrical stuff and broke Ralph’s arm. The bone was sticking out and I didn’t know what to do. He was bleeding and he was in horrible pain. I managed to get the radio to work and Ralph said give them the numbers off the GPS and then it all quit. The mast was floating alongside all snarled in the rigging and every once in a while it would slam into the boat
. I got Ralph tied into a bunk and went out and tried to steer the best I could. The motor ran slow for a while and then it stopped, too. It seemed to go on forever and there was just nothing I could do. Then I heard the engine and I knew it had to be you. And there you were, bouncing around up there while we were bouncing around down in the waves and it was almost funny and I cried and I knew you’d lead them to us. They shot a rope to us and came over in a raft and got Ralph and then came back and got me. And then I looked back and Osprey was gone. Just gone. If you hadn’t found us when you did…who’s this?”
“Ira Cohn, with the Raleigh Sentinel, Mrs. Stilley.” He had the tape recorder going in his shirt pocket.
“Really? Well, look, take a picture of this,” and she grabbed Bass by his jacket, pulled his head down, and planted a kiss full on his mouth, hard. Bass actually blushed.
Then she clamped him in a side-hug, her damp head barely coming up to his armpit, and smiled widely at the camera as Ira shot away.
“Did he tell you he’s a cowboy at heart?” she said.
Bass was unsmiling and trying surreptitiously to shade his face with the brim of his ball cap, but the fill flash would wipe out the shadow nicely.
What the devil, Sam was thinking. It’s only the Raleigh paper. Who’s going to see it? Don’t worry about it.
Since the helicopter had arrived Ira had not had to ask a single question. Sometimes you just plain get lucky, he thought.
Then he remembered Samantha Blackstone.
3
SAM WAS FLYING BACK ACROSS PAMLICO SOUND AT TWENTY-five hundred feet in the fast-gathering night, the sunset afterglow behind him. He had left an exhausted Adele at the hospital with her suitcase to spend the night with Ralph, who was in a massive cast and resting comfortably.
The air was scrubbed clean and silk smooth, the airplane just about flying itself on its own inherent stability. A large Carolina moon was climbing into the cobalt sky, a billion shavings of pure silver adorning the wide sound and the limitless sea beyond. The Outer Banks formed a slender black band fifteen miles ahead, broken by the inlets in several places, curving gently away as far as the horizon to the left and to the right. In the center of the broken band straight ahead the lighthouse winked slowly and Ocracoke Village sparkled in the darkness. So the power was back on. There were only scattered feathers of high cloud lightly veiling the emerging stars. It was a night fit for the slumber of the gods.
Ma Nature’s way of apologizing for losing her temper in the storm earlier.
Legally, nobody was to use the unlighted Ocracoke strip beyond one-half hour past official sunset. Which had occurred about forty-five minutes ago. Well, Sam thought tiredly, once you start violating aviation commandments I guess you just get on a roll.
He was on a frequency with Cherry Point Marine Corps Air Station because he was transiting one of their several coastal restricted areas, and was squawking their assigned transponder code. He thumbed the push-to-talk switch and said, “Cherry Point. Cessna three niner zero Whiskey Sierra. I have Ocracoke in sight,” thinking now don’t go getting all technical about the time, son.
The bored controller came right back, “Roger Whiskey Sierra. Radar service terminated. Frequency change approved. And have a good night, sir.”
“Thanks, Cherry Point. You too. Cessna Whiskey Sierra.” He changed the squawk to the VFR 1200 code and switched over to the silent unicom frequency.
He had all his night vision and the moon was nearly full so the landing posed no real problem. In a few minutes he came in over Ocracoke Village at a thousand feet, the lights like a baroque necklace all around Silver Lake Harbor, set off by the dim anchor lights of several moored boats, the Osprey not among them tonight.
He waited until he was on a long final for the shadowy strip before turning on his powerful landing lights, recalling the old joke about what you do if you lose your engine on a night cross-country. You set up for best glide and go through your emergency checklist, and when you get close to the ground you turn your landing lights on. If you don’t like what you see, you turn them off.
He made one of those rare absolutely perfect landings during which you could not feel or hear just when the tires kissed, and taxied slowly to the tie-downs. He stood out on the apron for a few quiet moments taking in the night sky. The wind sock hung limply on its pole, worn out.
“I know just how you feel,” he said to it.
He had topped off in Greenville so he would be able to drain the avgas from his tanks to replace what he had borrowed earlier from Phil Saxton’s Lark, an older high-winger that looked like a Cessna until you saw those knobby-kneed gear and a few other peculiarities. Phil refused to even think about burning auto gas. Sam’s note was still taped to the Lark’s windshield. Transferring the avgas and then refilling the Cessna with auto gas was a chore that would have to wait for early in the morning. Then he would try to look up Phil and tell him what he’d done.
When he parked on the sandy patch in front of the cottage the phone was ringing persistently inside. He hurried in and grabbed it.
“My hero,” she said. “Hi, Val.”
“I heard you drive up. Don’t you think you should get a muffler for that antique Jeep before the tourism committee has it condemned? On second thought, you can probably get away with it for a while yet. The whole island is talking about how you rescued the Stilleys practically single-handed.”
“Aw shucks,” Sam said.
“I have two rewards for you. The first is one of your favorite suppers. I called the hospital to find out how Ralph is and what time you left, so everything’s just about ready. I’m putting the corn muffins in as we speak.”
He pictured her moving about in her warm steamy kitchen deftly doing amazing things to magical concoctions that would render them delicious, her cordless phone clamped between her shoulder and her ear. He could barely do instant oatmeal right, so what Valerie Lightfoot did in her kitchen held an aura of the mystical for him.
“What’s the second reward?”
“After we put Josh to bed we’ll get comfortable and discuss that one at length.”
“Do you hear that sound?” he said. “That’s me coming in your back door.”
He hung up and took only long enough to get into fresh underwear, jeans, and a decent shirt. He could shower at Val’s. Maybe the two of them could. It would conserve soap and rain water.
He went out the back door and used the sandy path they had beaten into the grass over the past year, winding through a grove of gnarled wax myrtles and yaupons, to the back door of Valerie’s cottage. Both his and her small houses were old rentals on the fringe of the village with metal roofs and gutter systems that drained rain water into large cisterns, shallow wells anywhere on the Banks tending to be brackish at best. Maybe one day the three of them would live in one cottage or the other. It would save rent and utilities. But neither he nor Valerie had raised that subject yet, both being stubbornly independent by nature and neither wanting too much baggage just now for a number of private reasons.
She met him at her door with a kiss on his cheek and a lingering hug. Her long black hair was done back in a pony tail.
Returning the hug around her narrow waist, he sniffed and said, “Meatloaf.”
“Nope,” she said. “Vanilla Fields. Fourteen dollars for a little spray bottle at Wal-Mart. I only wear it for special occasions like rewarding a hero.”
“Come to think of it, you do smell pretty good, too. And feel pretty good.”
“Careful, there are small eyes watching.”
Five-year-old Joshua Lightfoot stood in the doorway to the living room with two fingers in his mouth, watching solemnly.
Sam stepped aside, went down on his haunches, held out his arms and said, “Come here, Curly.”
Joshua lit up and ran barefoot across the kitchen, nearly knocking over a chair, flung himself at Sam, and administered a breakneck hug. “Come in my room and play Star Wars,” he said. “You can be Hanz Olo.”
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br /> “That’s Han Solo,” Valerie said. “Uh, uh, Mister Sky-walker. Go wash your hands. You too, Chewwy. And then both of you can set the table. Supper’s almost ready.”
“Can we light the candles and turn out all the other lights?” Joshua said.
“Okay, now go.”
Sam carried him into the bathroom and set him on his feet. Joshua turned on the water and Sam stood behind him and reached around the small shoulders to lather their four hands together vigorously while the boy giggled.
The cottage had only two bedrooms, a living room, a bath, and the kitchen, so they sat in candlelight at the rickety kitchen table, which Valerie had burdened with her version of meatloaf casserole, the recipe for which Sam thought ought to be kept in a bank vault, steaming foil-wrapped sweet potatoes, a vegetable concoction that even Joshua always devoured, her own ginger iced tea, and hot corn muffins with honey butter.
Under the table Joshua propped one small bare foot on Sam’s knee as usual, Valerie quietly and sincerely said grace as usual, and they all dug in.
Halfway through the meal Valerie asked, “What are you doing tomorrow?”
“I’ve got a chore at the airstrip first thing. Then I’ll go pick up Adele Stilley at the hospital if she wants me to. I’ve got a lot of finish work left for Brad Meekins on that newest rental cottage he built, but he doesn’t seem to be in any great hurry for me to get it done. No charters scheduled. Why?”
“I wondered if you could pick Josh up from kindergarten at three. I don’t get off until nine and Mrs. Bradley has to go up to Nags Head and won’t be back in time to watch him.”
“Sure. We’ll find something to do. Go bungee jumping, maybe. Or skydiving. We’ll grab foot-longers and milkshakes at the Burger Box. Maybe rent a good old western from the General Store later and fix up some popcorn. If he’s bad I’ll spank his backside.”
“Oh, sure you will,” Valerie said. “Whenever the two of you get together it’s not real easy to tell right off which one’s the five-year-old. Just remember his bed time is eight.”