by Phil Bowie
“I want him to see it coming,” Strake said, speaking slowly. “You listen to what I’m telling you. First, I want you to break him. Take your time doing it. I want him to hurt. I want him to see it coming.” “We’ll take care of it, Louis.”
“Now, you’d better be going. I’m sure you have some young lady waiting. You always do. And the traffic is bad.”
7
SAM BASS WAS IN THE PRIVATEER WAITING FOR VALERIE to get off work, nursing a draft at the bar and watching a “Gunsmoke” rerun on the muted TV, the jukebox belting out “Wild Thing” at the eardrum-splitter setting. The back bar above the multicolored ranked bottles was decorated with plastic muskets, a draped Jolly Roger, and crossed sheet-metal cutlasses.
He had visited the Stilleys that morning. Adele had driven Ralph back home the day before. The hospital had been holding him to monitor his heart condition. Over Adele’s fresh-ground coffee in their gleaming much-gad-geted contemporary kitchen the three of them had gotten into a discussion about their favorite old dirty jokes, one on Ralph’s top ten list being the quickie about the man who walks into this book store and asks the buxom young lady at the counter, “Excuse me, do you keep stationery?”
“Well, right up until the end,” the young thing replies demurely, “but then I just go all to pieces.”
Sitting there in the chrome-plated kitchen, Sam had suddenly realized that it wasn’t so much the jokes but the way Ralph’s face wrinkled up and he chuckled and wheezed wholeheartedly to himself that set you off. Sam had promised to come back one evening in a week or so with Valerie and Joshua so Adele could serve a royal feast to all of them.
Mrs. Bradley was watching Joshua. Valerie would meet Sam here tonight and they would dance for a while and he would have one or two drafts while Valerie had a vanilla Coke and they would talk with their friends who drifted in. If Ruben Dixon happened by with his Coast Guard comrades Sam planned to coerce them into lightening their wallets considerably buying rounds for the house.
A sunburned muscular man in his thirties with shaggy blond hair and a dimpled grin walked up to stand beside Sam and shouted, “You Sam Bass?”
Sam nodded.
“How about we go in the back, have a little talk.”
Sam shrugged, got off the stool, carrying his draft, and followed the man into the pool room where there were somewhat fewer decibels in violent collision. They took a corner booth. The room was decorated with more mementos of that era when the difference between a pirate and a privateer had been only a matter of one’s political alliance. In other words, Sam often thought, things haven’t changed all that much since then. Same old thing; different century.
There were framed plaques on the walls summarizing the exploits of buccaneers Stede Bonnet, Henry Morgan, Jean Laffite, and Calico Jack Rackham, and of buccaneer-persons Anne Bonny and Grace O’Mally. In a central place of honor on the back wall in a large ornate frame there was somebody’s acrylic rendition of the infamous Blackbeard, dressed all in black, his fists resting on his hips and his booted feet set wide, wearing a ferocious expression, his pigtailed beard wild, smoldering hemp fuses sticking out from under the brim of his tri-corn hat, a brace of black powder pistols behind his wide belt.
Blackbeard—Edward Teach to his mother and his business associates—had owned a big house on Ocracoke, often called at the time Blackbeard’s Castle, and another house up the Pamlico River in Bath, where he entertained neighboring planters and certain politicians lavishly and kept one or two of his fourteen wives. The hefty Teach had finally been wounded twenty-five times and then beheaded in a savage fight just off Ocracoke in November of 1718 by a crew sent on the mission by an angry Virginia governor, North Carolina’s Governor Charles Eden by all accounts having been a well-paid friend to the pirate.
One legend had it that on certain dark nights you still might catch a glimpse of Blackbeard’s eerily glowing body swimming in the sea near the island in search of its head, and indeed, on murky nights when phosphorescence made the breakers burn green and the wet beach sand lit up magically if you ran on it—a glowing disc at each footfall—the legend was a bit harder to disbelieve.
There were lingering rumors of buried treasure hereabout or thereabout along the Carolinas coast and as far north as Tangier Island in the Chesapeake Bay, certainly not disclaimed by regional tourism interests. A research company had recently discovered what were most probably the remains of Teach’s biggest vessel, the forty-cannon Queen Anne’s Revenge, in shallow water just down the coast near Cape Lookout, where it had rested for going on three centuries, and there was already a popular exhibit of rusty barnacled shot, a blunderbuss, and other artifacts set up in a Beaufort museum.
There was a small sign nailed to the booth wall that said:
HAVE YE FLOGGED YER CREW YET TODAY?
“Bo Brinson,” the man said, extending a large callused hand across the much-pocket-knifed booth table.
Sam shook it and said, “You need a pilot?”
“Why I’m here. I’m only a plain fisherman. Tryin’ to make a livin’. Like my daddy and his daddy. From over to Pantego. You want another beer?”
He signaled the waitress, an attractive young brunette dressed like a wench in a full burgundy skirt and white peasant blouse, and she blushed coyly when Bo turned the full force of his white-toothed dimpled grin on her. “Lord, but you’re a pretty thing,” he said. “Would you please bring this gentleman here and me two drafts? I’d be obliged if you’d put that on a tab for me.”
When the waitress was out of earshot, Bo grinned at Sam and said, “You ever done any fish spotting?”
“No. But I suppose there’s always a first time.”
“That’s the attitude. Me and Spud, my partner, ran my boat over from the mainland this afternoon. She’s a twenty-three-foot skimmer. Beamy, with a flat bottom and square bows, a tower in the center, and a jet drive. Built for the shallows and to run out a corral net in a jiffy. She’s tied up at the public dock and we got us a room at the Pony Island. We’ll be goin’ out before daybreak. We’re after sea mullet. Fish about three foot long. Speedy. You find them in schools anywheres from a dozen to a whole bunch. It’s the time for ‘em. Over in Japan they like their caviar, you know? Well, sturgeon’s harder to net every year all around the world and I guess mullet roe don’t taste half bad if you go ahead and call it caviar, so the price of sea mullet’s gone up ten times what it was. There’s some good money to be made. Thing is, now everybody and his white-haired grandmother is after ‘em. Fisheries got so they can’t sleep at night worryin’ we’ll net every last one of them poor sea mullet in just a week or two. So now they say you can’t spot ‘em from a plane. You with me so far?”
“I think so.”
The waitress came over with the drafts. It seemed as though the top of her peasant blouse had slipped a bit since her last visit. She took enough time wiping off the already clean booth table so that Bo, and incidentally Sam, absolutely could not fail to notice she was most generously endowed and unfettered by a bra.
After she left, Bo said, “See, I figure what Fisheries don’t know won’t hurt ‘em. Say you was to spot for us, Sam. We’d use a radio—I expect you got a spare hand-held for us or you can borrow one—but we never say fish or hey, there they are or like that. We use a code. We meet someplace tomorrow morning off behind the island here and you fly around, take a good look. Right now you’ll find ‘em in around the marshes on the sound sides of the Banks, sometimes in no more’n two foot of water. No problem for us. We can get ‘em if they’re swimming in dewey grass. Easy to see from up there. Not near so easy from down here. Okay, you spot a school you say on the radio, ‘I think I’ll take a aerial picture of this interestin’ feature here.’ Or whatever. And you circle. We blast over there and you fly right over that school and wag your wings.” He illustrated by wiggling a meaty hand in the air above the salt shaker. “We get close enough to see ‘em from my tower and then circle ‘em with the net. You go off and gas up or
whatever. Drink a beer. Give us no more’n thirty minutes to get ‘em in the boat, ice ‘em down in boxes, and re-rig the gear. Then we do her all over again. We get all our boxes full to the top, we hightail it for the fish house over to Hobucken. We meet right here tomorrow night and you get paid cash money. I’d say a fair share of the take, but you got no way to know how much that will be, so let’s just say a straight fifty an hour, from the time you crank her up until you shut her down.”
“Even if you don’t catch anything?”
Bo turned up the wattage on his dimpled grin. “Now, there’s about no chance of that at all, with you spotting and us netting. I’m flat the best there is around here. You just ask my old gray-haired momma. I figure we could use you regular for the next two weeks. Maybe longer. We all make us some money. What do you think?”
Sam’s kitty was getting skinny. The Cessna was coming up for its annual inspection in a month, and needed new tires. His rent would soon be due and he was running up a fuel tab at the village station. With fall coming on there were fewer tourists on the island so his sightseeing business had dropped to almost nothing. The motels were filling up with anglers drawn by the excellent seasonal surf fishing, but they seldom booked a charter other than an occasional emergency sortie to bring in a load of fresh bait. He’d been working on the new rental cottage for Brad Meekins but had been waiting for two days now for Brad to take his pickup over to the mainland on the ferry and bring back sheet rock, paint, wallpaper, and moldings that were needed.
“I think you could talk the varnish right off of this table,” Sam said. “The best thing would be for me to give you GPS coordinates, but that’s out because any bureaucrats listening would be able to home in on the spot, and so would any of your competitors who figure out what’s going on. There’s a way it could work fairly well, though. You could get one of those day-glow-orange ball caps. They’ve got some over at the General Store. I’ve got a cheap old square radio at home that has four bands on it, including the aviation band. You can’t transmit but you won’t have to. I’ll give you a frequency to monitor. That way, if anybody asks you can just say you’ve been listening to George Strait on the FM band; nobody can say you’ve been in touch with an airplane. We meet at some location like you said. I fly over you and say something. If you hear me you put on the cap. Also, when you’re wearing the cap it means you haven’t seen, or heard about, over your marine radio, any kind of law boat nearby. I may have trouble sorting out one kind of small boat from another up there. I’ll go look for the fish. If I seem to be moving too far away you start up and follow along. If I spot a school I won’t circle. I’ll climb up where I can see both you and the spot where the school is. Then I’ll say ‘downwind for one-nine’ or some other number. That means you steer a compass heading of one-ninety. When you get within a hundred feet or so of the school I’ll say ‘final for one-nine.’ These are common phrases that could be coming from anywhere in the eastern part of the state. Except I won’t be giving my aircraft number, of course. I want to sound like some farmer who’s lazy about his radio procedures, maybe flying near some dirt strip. You take your hat off when you want to quit for the day. If I disappear it will probably be just to get fuel at Manteo or somewhere. Stay where you are until I come back. If I don’t show in, say, an hour and a half you know you’re on your own. Tomorrow night you come here, but I won’t be around. Talk to Tony, the bartender. He’ll tell you my hours flown and you pay him. He’ll get some money for his trouble. You give me a number where I can reach you or get a message to you if you’re not still at the Pony Island.”
“You came up with all that just now? Sam, I like the way you think. What we could do is we get one of those hats for Spud, too. That way if we both got ‘em on it means one thing. If just one of us’s got it on it means something else. If the one who’s got the cap on is standing in the bow it means something else, you see? If he’s in the stern—”
“Let’s keep it simple, Bo.”
“Maybe you’re right. So. We got us a deal?”
“We’ll give it a shot. One thing, though. Since this is illegal, I couldn’t shut my conscience up for anything less than seventy-five an hour.”
“You sure you ain’t a lawyer, Sam? You’re a bandit. But, okay. Far as what’s illegal it’s all how you look at it, ain’t it? Over in the South China Sea they go fishin’ with bombs they make from fertilizer and fuel oil, or they use cyanide. Kill every damn thing in a couple acres of water, including the coral. Go around after and pick up what they want and leave the rest. All we’re trying to do here is put a little food on my gray-haired momma’s table and maybe pay some on her QVC bill.”
“Sure.”
“Look, Sam, how many people you know always drive the speed limit? Nobody, right? They sell a lot of radar detectors. Come April fifteenth after supper how many people shave a little on their taxes? Everybody, right? Tell Uncle Sam they been givin’ fifty a week to their favorite church. They got to go look one up in the phone book. That trip to Busch Gardens or Mickeyworld with the kids and the mother-in-law was really a job interview. Waitresses only make about seven bucks a month on tips. Everybody’s got a real short memory about any cash they take in, don’t you? Hell, I do. The smart ones, they get some bookkeeper with a real good pencil sharpener knows all the rich man’s tricks, and he helps ‘em shave even more. Then the bookkeeper lays a big flat fee on ‘em but his secretary really only spent two hours ticklin’ her computer mouse to work it all out. The secretary herself’s doing a little thing with the petty cash the bookkeeper don’t know about. You give the lawyers and the doctors and the politicians and the inboard motor mechanics half a chance, what are they gonna do? Carve just as big a slice out of you as they can make off with, is what. Here’s another one.
“How many people you believe have cheated, or thought about cheating, on the little lady, or on the hard-workin’ hubby? Everybody, right? It ain’t been that long ago the President’s getting laid in the War Room, sayin’ hey, no, baby, don’t touch them red buttons over there and the next thing you know there’s a half-dozen cruise missiles headed for some empty mountain in Afghanistan. President says later hey, honest to gosh, I wouldn’t think of even trying to spell Lewbowski, much less prod one.
“Hell, Sam, there’s outlaw in us all. And we like our big-time outlaws, too. Look around. If Blackbeard was nothin’ but a cold-hearted thievin’ killer, why’s he treated like some kinda hero up and down this coast? He walked in here right now his money’d be no good and everybody would want his damn autograph. You know that’s so. Who got more write-ups, Mother Teresa or that asshole Gotti, what’d they call him, the Dapper Don? They did what, half a dozen movies on the godfather thing. Just about everybody in there was a stone killer, but we sit down and watch it all on TV with the kids, see do they discover happiness in the end. What was that most popular series on TV for a while there? The thing about the mob jerk with his wife and kids and his shrink, right? What’s the most important thing in this whole country? Money, right? And the more you’ve got the less everybody else cares about how you got it. Where did the money come from to build Las Vegas? How did the Kennedy millions get started? Who’s been in control of the big labor unions for so long? Who gives a damn, right? You get rich enough you get to live by the rich people’s rules, and they’re not the same as for you and me. Not many rich men in prison. You’re poor like us you just got to bend the law a little once in a while so you can afford your oatmeal. Oh, yeah, there’s a touch of outlaw in us. We can’t help it. Just makes life interesting, you ask me. And like I say, all you and me are trying to do here is put a few beers on the table.”
He watched the wench collecting empties from booths across the room. He grinned broadly, appraising her, and said as an idea evidently firmed up, “Yessir, there’s a bit o’ the pirate in us all.”
“You know,” Sam said thoughtfully, “there was a movie called For A Few Dollars More some years back. Clint Eastwood and Lee VanCleef are fast-d
raw bounty hunters. They team up to go after a pack of killers led by a psychopath called Indio. Over a drink they settle on the terms of their temporary partnership and VanCleef tells Eastwood they don’t want to be shooting each other in the back.”
“Meanin’?”
“Like I said, I think you could talk the varnish right off of this table in about twenty minutes, or the skirt right off of that waitress over there in about two, but we don’t want to talk about our temporary deal here to anybody. It’s just you, Spud, Tony the bartender, and me. Let’s not even tell your gray-haired mother, okay? I won’t talk about it, either. We don’t want to be shooting each other in the back, do we?”
“Hey, sure thing, Sam,” Bo said, thinking you know, the son of a gun even looks like a cowboy.
Later that night, back at the Pony Island, Spud having been asked to take a walk for about an hour, Bo and his companion having done serious damage to a fifth of Jim Beam chased by a quart of beer, Bo, still wearing his new orange hat and his underpants, managed to turn off all but one of the lights. Step two of his three-step plan. The wench, by now minus both peasant blouse and skirt, stood unsteadily there in her panties in front of him, pushed down his tight jockey shorts, and said woozily, “Wow.”
Bo, looking down at himself, said, “What you just done ‘minded me of that movie.”
“Which movies zat?” the wench said.
Grinning dimpledly, Bo said, Free Willy.
The wench fell over onto the bed giggling.
And across the village, as they lay sleepily side-by-side in the darkness, just holding hands now, Sam said, “Val, do you declare all your tips?”
“What brought that up?”
“Just wondering.”
“Of course I do.”
“Thought so.”