Ragged Man

by Ken Douglas

“ No one’s ever done that to me.”

  “ Really? Ann never did that?” she asked, getting to her feet.

  “ No, never.”

  “ Why not?”

  “ I don’t know. We never did that kind of stuff.”

  “ How often did you guys have sex?”

  “ Almost every night.”

  “ Was it good sex?”

  “ It was always great.” He felt a pain in his heart. He would never be over her death. She was the first thought in his mind when he woke and the last before he fell asleep. Their sex, by some people’s standards, may have been routine, but it was full of love, and love, he thought, was never routine. If more people enjoyed the kind of sex life he’d shared with Ann, then the world would be a better place.

  She took his hand and gently led him to the bed. They cuddled in each other’s arms and kissed. She broke away and stripped off her skirt and panties, allowing Rick to revel in her body.

  “ I haven’t been with anyone since Ann died and it’s been only Ann for the last twenty-five years.”

  “ Then I’m going to do my very best to make this special,” she whispered, lowering her lips to his, while at the same time reaching between his legs, making sure he was hard again. She let go of him and rolled onto her back, guiding him into her and they began a long, slow, easy kind of love-making that continued for the better part of an hour, ending with them climaxing together. And at that final moment, for reasons he didn’t understand, a picture of Judy Donovan flashed through his mind.

  Chapter Seven

  The engine changed from a smooth rumble to the rough chugging of idle. They were there. It was still dark. On Fridays the Seawolf left the Palma Pier at midnight on its weekly overnighter for the serious anglers. Judy, like most of the fishermen, slept till they reached the fishing grounds.

  Steeling herself, she rolled off her bunk onto the deck, put on her shoes and headed for the galley. Coming from the warmth of below to the cold of a morning at sea snapped her awake. Sometimes she asked herself if it was worth it, but J.P. loved to go out on the all day boat.

  Drinking a cup of coffee, she picked up her rod with its five hooks and headed toward the bait tank, trying not to slip on the slimy deck. She set the coffee by the tank and, with a quick count to three, thrust her hand in, grabbing for an anchovy. The bait net was gone. She latched onto one of the fast moving little fish and jerked her hand out of the cold water, spilling her coffee.

  She baited one of her hooks, repeated the process four more times, then sighed when a smiling man returned the net without a clue that he had committed a gross rudeness by taking it away from the tank. She felt like telling him, but instead took her rod over to her position.

  Looking overboard, she saw a school of silvery mackerel swim by and uttered one word, “Shit,” under her breath. They’d try to steal her bait before it hit bottom, where the unsuspecting cod lay waiting to become dinner. She hoped she had enough weight on the line to get her hooks down before she lost her anchovies. Crossing her fingers, she dropped the line into the water and watched it sink.

  She smiled when the bait slid by the mackerel without a strike and she spun out her line. Five hundred feet to the sea floor. Then she wound up five turns and waited. She thought about a cigarette as she watched the gulls soar overhead, backlit by the rising sun, but it had been almost a year and she didn’t want to start back up. Settling in to get comfortable, she felt the first quick tug, then another, then a third. She started winding.

  “ Fish tonight!” she yelped.

  Then she saw it, six feet of graceful glory, circling twenty feet away. Blue shark. Shifting her gaze skyward she saw three pregnant looking birds gliding into position. Pelicans. It wasn’t going to be easy. When she judged she had only about fifty feet of line left, she stopped winding and watched the shark. It seemed an eternity, the animal had done this thousands of times, she was an amateur compared to it. She watched as the shark turned and headed toward her line. There was nothing she could do if it decided to take it. Then without warning it turned and struck.

  “ Damn!” an unlucky fisherman cursed as Judy wound with all the fury she could muster.

  Forty feet, then thirty, then twenty, ten.

  “ Oh boy!” she squealed.

  Another shark, coming fast. Five feet, closing rapidly.

  With a jerk she pulled the line, winding furiously and grinning as dinner, eyes bulging, burst from the ocean. But the grin was short lived, because a pelican, diving like a kamikaze, swooped out of the sky and grabbed her fish. It swallowed, fish, hook and all. Then it went limp and waited. Waited to be cut loose. Like the shark, it too had played this game before, it was like the birds knew they were protected. Gone was her dinner. There was nothing left to do, but cut the bird free, curse and try again.

  Such are the perils of rock cod fishing, she thought as she heard J.P. shout out, “Mom, that was almost beautiful.” Hearing him say that made it all worthwhile.

  “ Did you catch anything yet?” she asked her son.

  “ Naw, I slept in.” It didn’t even occur to her to look for him when she got up. She thought he would be up front at his favorite spot fishing with the regulars. The fact that he wasn’t, meant that something was wrong.

  “ I’m sorry, I didn’t notice. I just assumed you were up and at ’em. You always are.”

  “ I was sleeping too good to get up early.”

  She was worried about that. She wanted to know why and though she didn’t want to pry, she thought that maybe now was the time to bring it up.

  “ You haven’t been sleeping well lately, have you?”

  “ What?” J.P. snapped his eyes away from the blue Pacific and looked at his mother.

  “ Come on J.P., I hear you get up during the night and go to the kitchen. And I see the way you drag your butt around the house. What’s wrong?”

  “ Nothing.”

  “ Come on, you can tell me.”

  “ You’ll think I’m stupid.”

  “ I would never think that.”

  “ Dick Rainmaker told me that he saw the Ghost Dog.”

  “ What?”

  “ You know, the Ragged Man’s dog.”

  “ J.P., that was just a silly superstitious story that Ann believed in.”

  “ It killed her, and I really did see a knife that day. I did.”

  “ It did not kill her. She had cancer. She was sick and she had a stroke. We’ve been over this knife business. It was a bad day, you saw those poor souls with a knife and you imagined they had something to do with Ann’s dying.”

  “ No, I didn’t, and I saw something big and black go into the bushes. It was the Ghost Dog.” He was convinced.

  She’d thought J.P. was over that horrible day. He was resilient and she’d thought, no hoped, that he’d bounced back, but apparently that story about the Ragged Man gave his memory something to hang on to. She wished he would let it go.

  “ Maybe you saw a dog or something out back, but that doesn’t mean it was the Ghost Dog and who started calling it that anyway?”

  “ All us kids call it that.”

  “ If you and the other kids are seeing anything, it’s probably just someone’s big dog running loose.”

  “ Okay, Mom, let’s not talk about it anymore.”

  “ Okay.” She felt like he was shutting her out and she hated it.

  “ J.P.,” came the booming voice of Wolfe Stewart, “we missed you this morning.” Judy turned and saw the bearded captain approaching.

  “ I didn’t feel like getting up, Captain.”

  “ Really, you?”

  “ J.P. hasn’t been feeling well lately,” Judy said.

  “ Well I got some news that will perk you up.”

  “ What?” J.P. asked.

  “ Rick called a couple of days ago. He said he’ll be back soon.”

  “ Oh boy! Mom did you hear that, Rick’s coming back. He’ll know what to do about the Ghost Dog.”

  �
� What?”

  “ It’s nothing Wolfe, just a fantasy.”

  “ Is not.”

  “ J.P.!”

  “ It’s nothing, Captain,” the boy said, understanding the tone of his mother’s voice.

  “ Coming up front, J.P.?” the captain asked as he turned to leave.

  “ Mom, I’m going up front to fish with the guys. Okay?”

  “ That’s fine J.P., I think I’ll get some breakfast. You want to use my rod?”

  “ Okay.”

  Judy handed him the rod and watched as they started for the bow.

  “ Wolfe,” Judy called after the captain.

  “ Yes.” He turned back to face her.

  “ Where is Rick now?” She didn’t know why she wanted to know.

  “ He’s visiting a friend in L.A.”

  “ Christina Page?”

  “ I wouldn’t know. All I do know,” he said, with an unmistakable twinkle in his eyes, “is that he called and asked how you and J.P. were doing.” He paused for a second, as if in thought. “Oh yeah, and he told me he’d be back soon.”

  “ Thank you.”

  “ It’s nothing,” the captain said, dodging a fisherman on his way to the bait tank.

  “ Oh, Captain,” she called again.

  “ Yes.”

  “ Why didn’t he call me if he wanted to know how we were?”

  “ That’s a good question.” He smiled his answer, then with a wave, he left and went back to the front of the boat, leaving Judy to ponder what he’d said.

  She suspected that Rick was staying with Christina Page. Christina was one of his old bootleg cronies and bootleg cronies stuck together.

  Having been married to one of them, Judy knew about Rick’s four big customers: Evan, the Rolling Stones collector in New York; her ex-husband, Tom, the Led Zeppelin collector in Toronto; Danny, the Bob Dylan collector in New Orleans; and Christina Page, the Beatle collector in Long Beach.

  She stopped her reminiscing and made her way to the galley to replace the spilled coffee. She took the steps down to the galley, bouncing through the door, smiling at the old men playing poker in one of the four booths.

  “ How’s it going, guys?”

  “ Great,” a bucktoothed man named Henry said, “except for the fact that I’m losing my shirt.”

  “ You guys paid to fish,” she said.

  “ And we’re gonna, right after this hand.”

  Judy took the booth across from the poker players and watched as Henry won the hand with a queens over tens full house. She wished them luck as they made their way topside to wrestle with the Pacific for their dinner.

  “ I’ll be back in a flash.” The cook dropped a plastic menu on her table. “Nature calls and I need a break.”

  “ Take your time, I’m not in a hurry.”

  “ Coffee pot is behind the counter, I’ll be back in fifteen or twenty.” He took the steps two at a time, leaving Judy alone in the galley, studying the menu.

  “ Mind if I join you?”

  She looked up to see a big man with close cropped hair.

  “ No, of course not, I’d appreciate the company.” She was drawn to his steel gray eyes.

  “ I don’t like fishing,” he said.

  “ Then why come out on an all day fishing boat?”

  “ I’m in town awhile, kind of on vacation, and I was bored. But now instead of being bored in a nice warm motel room at six in the morning, I’m bored on a freezing cold fishing boat in the middle of the ocean.”

  “ I’m a little bored myself.” Judy laughed, catching his smile.

  “ Then let’s be bored together,” he said.

  “ What a marvelous idea. Would you like some coffee?” She rose and walked behind the counter, without waiting for his answer, and poured two cups.

  “ Black.”

  “ Two black coffees coming up.” She carried the cups back to the table and set them down.

  “ Thanks,” he said.

  “ My name is Judy Donovan.” She held out her hand.

  “ Sam Storm,” the handsome gray-eyed man said, taking her hand.

  Judy hung up the phone with a smile. It had been a long time since she’d been out with a man. She was looking forward to dinner. The dinner didn’t really seem like a date, more like extending the long conversation that was interrupted when the Seawolf docked. She checked the wall clock, 4:30. An hour and a half and she had much to do.

  She waltzed out of the kitchen and danced up the stairs. She was acting like a girl on her first date and it felt good. Sam Storm might be closing on sixty, but he was still a head turner, and he was a charmer. The way he looked at her made her feel wanted. Of course, she told herself, she was probably imagining it. Men didn’t go out of their way to meet a small town woman with a child.

  At the top of the stairs, she entered the bathroom, whirling in front of the full length mirror, keeping her eyes on her reflection as she spun around. Her new figure looked good. She had been without sex for so long, she wondered what it would be like.

  She unbuttoned her shirt and slid it off with a fluid motion. Her jeans and panties followed. She kicked them out of the bathroom and shivered into the shower. It wasn’t cold, but goosebumps ran up, down and around her body. The hot shower failed to calm her. She was excited.

  She shampooed her hair and rinsed. Conditioned her hair and rinsed. Added more conditioner, shaved her legs, rinsed again. Changed blades, shaved again. Shut off the water, toweled off. Dried her hair, smiled at the mirror. She was ready.

  Ready but naked, she laughed to herself.

  She padded out of the bathroom to her bedroom. She thought for an instant about what to wear, then selected a lavender silk blouse and tight CK jeans. She decided against bra, panties or panty hose.

  She slid her bare feet into a beige pair of low heels and dashed down the stairs. Only thirty minutes had passed since she’d hung up the phone. An hour to go. Forever.

  “ Wait a minute,” she told herself out loud. “What am I doing? I’m not that kind of woman!” Never had she planned on sex before a date. And this wasn’t a real date. It was dinner, nothing more.

  She marched back upstairs, unbuttoning the silk blouse as she took the steps. She shucked it off as she entered the bedroom. Then she dropped the CKs. Moving toward her dresser, she thought that maybe she was going a little crazy. A year and a half without a man was a long time. From her top drawer she found a frilly bra and matching cotton panties. The next drawer down yielded a cotton Hawaiian print dress. She put it on, then plucked an elastic out of a box on top of the dresser and pulled her hair back into a ponytail.

  A horn honked. He was early. Grabbing her purse on her way to the door, she hoped she wasn’t doing something stupid. All thoughts of a smooth prince vanished when she saw the dusty Ford. She put on a brave smile and jumped in the car. He honked the horn, she thought, he didn’t even come to the door.

  “ Hi,” he said, “I’m a little early.”

  “ That’s okay, I was ready.”

  “ I didn’t see any sense pacing the motel room waiting, so I grabbed the bull by the horns and here I am.”

  “ I’m glad you did. I was a little anxious myself.”

  “ Anxious? I wasn’t anxious, I was sweating. I haven’t been on a date since my wife died fifteen years ago.”

  “ Really, Sam? It’s been eighteen months for me. Eighteen months since my divorce, but you can’t expect me to believe that you haven’t been with a woman in fifteen years.”

  “ I didn’t say I hadn’t been with a woman. I said I hadn’t been on a date.”

  “ You have been with a woman then?”

  “ Well sure, a woman here and there that I might have met in a bar, but when you wake up next to someone you don’t know, who couldn’t care less if you were alive or dead, it hardly qualifies as a date.”

  “ And when was the last time you met a woman in a bar, here or there?” Judy laughed. She was beginning to like Sam Storm.
His honesty was refreshing.

  “ So long ago I can’t remember.” He laughed back.

  He drove straight to the Tampico Diner, taking the alley shortcut off Kennedy, like he’d lived all his life in Tampico.

  “ How did you know about the short cut?”

  “ Whenever I come to a new town I make a habit of getting the lay of the land. I like to know my way around.”

  He parallel parked in front of the diner and jumped out of the car. He had her door open before she started to reach for the handle. A very interesting contradiction, she thought. He honks me out of the house, but he springs out to open the door. Mr. Storm was consistently inconsistent.

  They spent the next three hours eating, drinking and talking about everything under the sun. He told her about his hopes and dreams, his successes and failures, his beliefs and fears, but he also listened. It was a two way conversation.

  “ This has been one of the nicest evenings I’ve had in a long time,” she told him as they were getting ready to go.

  “ I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself.”

  “ I don’t eat out often, in fact, I don’t eat out at all. This was a real treat for me.”

  “ I still think we should have brought your son,” he said.

  “ I tried, but he didn’t want to come.” Judy was impressed with this man. Not many men would want a seven-year-old boy along on a dinner date.

  “ Why not?”

  “ He’s staying at a friend’s in town. It had been planned for a long time.” She wondered why she’d told him that. Was she unconsciously trying to tell him that nobody was home at her house.

  “ Would you like another drink before we leave?”

  “ I don’t think so. I’m ready if you are.”

  “ I’m ready.” He signaled the waiter and paid the bill with a credit card. Then he got up from the table, came around to her chair and eased it back as she rose.

  “ Very gallant,” she said.

  “ Your arm, my lady,” he said, offering his. She took it and they made their way out of the diner to the parking lot and his brown Ford Granada.

  “ You know, from our conversation on the boat, I would have pictured you in a flashy sports car,” she said as he unlocked the passenger door for her.