“That many?”
“They’ll drop like flies.”
“I hadn’t considered that.”
“You’ve got to consider everything.”
“It’s a shame you’re so busy. You sound just the man for the job.”
Like Claudius and Sennacherib, Prentiss Throckmorton and Colonel Broadnax both recognized that the man who made the land could define the look of it. The land could reflect the values of its maker. Colonel Broadnax was thinking he could make it look like Venice, with canals and gondolas. Or like Morocco, with minarets and eunuchs. First he’d make the land, then decide. After the real work was done and paid for, then he’d figure some way to cut Throck right out of the picture.
Back in his nautically appointed cabin, Colonel Broadnax tied Delilah to the four-poster with brightly colored scarves. She wore only her black stockings and garter belt. Once she was spread-eagled, her sweet pink nipples pointing at the ceiling, A.C. said, “He wants me to do it.”
“Do what?” Delilah asked, alarmed.
“Make some land.”
“Oh, that,” she said, relieved. “Well, sweetie, I’m sure you’ll be tip-top at making land.”
“Would you mind struggling this time? You know, squirm and kick. Money is no object.”
SEA BLUE
Doom Loomis posed no apparent threat to society. That’s why the New York State Penal Authority had agreed to release him three months early so he could attend his father’s funeral on Omnium Key. Doom was born on Omnium Key and grew up playing along the shores of Small Hope Bay, but his parents’ marriage disintegrated when Doom was ten. Since Doom’s father had been a crook, there was no question as to custody. Doom’s mother had taken him north to New York, and he hadn’t been back to south Florida since. Now Omnium Settlement was sinking, falling inch by inexorable inch back into the oolitic limestone bottom of Small Hope Bay from which Colonel A.C. Broadnax had dredged it sixty-three years before.
Doom’s mother was more angry than sad. Her upper lip curled sharply at the corners, an expression vivid in Doom’s childhood memory whenever his father had fucked her up again. Even now from inside his ceramic urn, which Marvis Puller gripped between his insteps on the cockpit sole, Doom’s father was fucking her up. If it weren’t for that last wish of his—that his ashes be distributed over Gulf Stream water—she would be on dry land, not pounding to windward in this treacherous slop. Now her new, her fourth, husband, Norman Futterman, was pleading wordlessly with his eyes, speech gone: “Get me off this boat or kill me quickly.”
Doom had only this morning met his stepfather, a self-made meat packer from Wyandanch, Long Island. Norman was the first normal man Doom’s mother had ever married. The other three had all been crooks.
Had the decision to sail been left to Captain Bert, this trip to the Gulf Stream would have been postponed for better weather. But Norman couldn’t wait. He needed to get back to the packing plant, because, unsupervised, his cutters would embezzle his prime cuts and sell them to up-and-coming Mafia underlings, leaving him hocks and gristle. This boat, a forty-two-foot steel sloop, was Doom’s legacy, He had no firm idea how to sail her, but at least she didn’t make him feel like Norman, who clung now to Doom’s mother’s breast like an infant macaque.
Doom was surprised at the violence of Staggerlee’s motion. Time after time, hulking rollers bucked her bow, hung her for a moment on the balance of her keel, and then dropped her into the troughs. The wind had been blowing twenty knots with higher gusts from the east for two days. Each year in strong onshore winds, one or more inland tourists were swept from the jetties at Bird Cut to seamen’s deaths. Sometimes their bloated bodies washed up on Omnium Beach several days later. Sometimes not.
Doom’s father’s body had washed up on Omnium Beach. Black, bloated, partly eaten by crabs and fishes, it was found by a strolling florist from Philadelphia who owned a time share on Tequesta Key and who, after seeing what the ocean did to its dead, traded his beachside condo for one in Utah.
Broadnax County sheriff and acting coroner, Lincoln Plotner, ruled the death accidental, by drowning. Staggerlee was found at anchor two hundred yards off the beach. Sheriff Plotner concluded that Denny Loomis had anchored for a swim, gotten downcurrent, grown exhausted, and gone under. An open casket was out of the question, he having been a link in the food chain for forty-eight hours.
Norman Futterman wheezed and gagged and made disquieting gurgles with his nasal fluids. “Couldn’t we just do it?” he rasped. “We’re in the sea. Couldn’t we just do it and go home?”
“The man wanted the Gulf Stream,” said Marvis Puller. “He’s goddamn going to get it.”
Staggerlee was stopped nearly dead in her wake by a particularly nasty wave, and Doom’s father’s pot popped from between Marvis’s insteps. It clattered forward on the floor until Doom caught it soccer-style and footed it back to Marvis.
“How much longer, then?” Norman mouthed dryly.
“Good day or two,” said Captain Bert. “Why don’t you get some sleep?”
“Day or two! Nooo!” For a frightful instant, Norman Futterman envisioned his condition by tomorrow this time and then vomited down the front of his new wife’s foul-weather gear.
“Bert, you’re still an asshole,” she snarled. In a soft voice she said to Norman, “Not two days, darling. He was just kidding.” She glared at Bert. “It’s more like twenty minutes. Try watching the horizon. Deep breathing.” But it was too late for that. His eyes had rolled back in his head. She laid him out against the cabin trunk on the bridge deck and covered him with a blanket as though he were the one to be buried at sea. Heavy spray in fat bullets came regularly over the bow and blew aft into the cockpit. Doom’s mother went below.
“I hear you did time,” said Captain Bert without moving his lips.
“Uh-huh,” answered Doom, hoping Bert would have the good taste to drop it.
“What for?”
“Genocide,” said Doom. This old Captain Bert probably was an asshole, but he clearly knew how to handle sailboats. He stood stalwart at the wheel, spinning it deftly away from the waves and back again in the troughs to ease the motion. His hands were like fat hams. Doom would have thought them incapable of deftness. Bert was thinking about dousing the working jib and setting the storm sail. Or maybe no headsail at all.
Marvis Puller had been studying the urn between his feet. He said, “How do we know whose ashes these are?”
“Denny’s ashes. Whose do you think?” said Bert.
“Yeah, but how do we know that? We only got the funeral guy’s word on it. For all we know, these are brickettes from his backyard barbecue.”
“Jesus, you are one cynical Negro,” said Bert without moving his lips. “I went to school with that boy. He wouldn’t bullshit me about Denny’s ashes.”
Norman suddenly lunged for the rail as if to end his misery in the dark still of the deep. He fell against the lifelines, vomiting. Marvis Puller, averting his eyes, held Norman aboard by the belt.
“Look, you always want to throw up downwind,” Bert said.
Doom went below to see his mother.
Down there, the motion felt more random and chaotic than in the cockpit, where one could see oncoming waves and connect them to the lurches and heaves they caused. Below, the violence seemed domestic, not nautical. This was a room, living quarters, with a dining table, beds, a kitchen aft, a toilet up forward—his father had lived here as if in a long, thin house. Of course, domestic violence was nothing new to Doom or his mother. He planted his back against the companionway ladder and waited for his eyes to adjust to the dimness.
His mother, having removed her befouled gear, had curled into the leeward, the low side, berth. Doom heard her crying softly before he actually saw her. From handhold to handhold, like an arboreal ancestor, he made his way toward the sound. She looked into his face. She was old, but Doom remembered her young face, when she had taught him to swim in warm waist-deep water at Omnium Beach. T
he Australian crawl, she had called it.
“I’m leaving this afternoon, Dennis.”
“I figured.”
She explained that this leaving of hers was more than a return to Wyandanch. Once she shook out the sere contents of that urn, Denny Loomis would no longer be welcome in her memory. She hoped Doom understood.
He assured her he did.
“I haven’t been a successful mother.”
“Sure you have.”
“You wouldn’t have gone to prison if I hadn’t married all those bums.”
“I probably would have anyway.”
“I loved your father, Dennis. I never stopped, after all these years, but damn it, he was sixty-six last week, and still working the con!”
“Was he really?”
“Some kind of real estate dodge. ‘This will be the one,’ he told me. I didn’t even ask. He was addicted to law-breaking. Some people are, you know…Prison didn’t scar you, did it, Dennis?”
“No, Mom, it was minimum security. Mostly we lived in tents in the woods. Like the Boy Scouts.”
“What are you going to do now?”
Doom looked down into her eyes. They were clouded with tears and family regret. Doom blurted out a sob but caught the next one. He had his own history of regret, how could he relieve hers? Doom held her. Her hair smelled old. He was without prospects to make a mother feel proud. And successful.
“You aren’t going to write anymore, are you?”
“No, no more writing. Maybe I’ll stay around here for a while. I’m curious about the hometown.”
“What hometown?”
“Omnium Settlement.”
“Omnium’s sinking, dear.”
“I know. But I have Staggerlee for when it gets too deep.” Doom tried to smile, but the result felt strictly muscular.
“We sailed all the way to Canada in her. Remember?”
“What? I went? On this boat?”
“You were just a child.”
“You, me…Dad?”
“We went nonstop all the way to Newfoundland. Your father was a sane, sensitive man at sea.”
“Newfoundland? How old was I?”
“You were two? Yes, two.”
“…Where did I sleep?”
“When it was rough, you slept right here, with a lee cloth to keep you cozy—” She giggled tearfully. “I don’t want to go all maudlin, but you had a rag monkey you took to bed to make the storms go away. Windy was its name.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I thought you remembered. See, I haven’t been a successful mother.”
“I was two, we left Florida when I was ten—what about the next eight years? I would have remembered sailing when I was eight or nine.”
“We never went again. Dennis gave up the sea for suckers…Let’s say good-bye down here, alone and out of the wind.”
“Good-bye, Mom. Don’t worry about me.” Good-bye, Windy.
“One other thing, Dennis. Those men up there—Bert and Marvis and the others like them—they’ll lie to you about your father. It’s in their interests to keep his myth alive.”
Back topside, Doom watched the state of the sea. It had changed. Whitecaps were now being blown flat before they could crest, their remains whipped in nervous lines from wave to wave. The low land was nothing more than a smudge astern, call it out of sight. Norman was fetally curled on the bridge deck beneath the blue canvas dodger. There were no obvious signs of life.
“How will we know when we’re there?” Doom asked Captain Bert, but the wind took away the answer, and since Bert never moved his lips when he spoke, there was no reading them. Doom clambered around Marvis’s feet and his father’s pot and stood beside Bert at the wheel to repeat his question.
“By the color. There just ain’t no other blue like Gulf Stream blue. You never seen it?”
“A long time ago.”
“She’s way on out today.” This Captain Bert was a seagoing ventriloquist. “Usually she’s close in, a mile or two. I’d of thought the east wind would bring her in, but hell, she meanders wherever she wants. You can’t ever tell.”
Facing dead into the wind, feeling it on both ears equally, Doom had a powerful urge to know—how deep was the water? how hard was the wind blowing? why did the Gulf Stream meander?—concrete things, measurable, provable things. Fuck all dreamy abstraction. “Why don’t we put up bigger sails?” Staggerlee was carrying a double-reefed main and the tiny blade of a jib. “Wouldn’t we go faster?”
“Yep. But we wouldn’t like it none. Probably kill Norman.”
“Rough?”
“Rough as a cob. Sure, we could shake out a reef, we’d go faster. Staggerlee could take it, but we set more sail, the apparent wind’s gonna get up over thirty knots.”
“Apparent wind? What’s apparent wind?”
“Well…You say, what’s apparent wind?”
“Yeah.”
“See, fact is, sailboats don’t sail by the true wind. No, they sail by the apparent wind…Take a tourist standing on the beach, it’s blowin’, say, ten knots. The tourist is feelin’ the true wind. But sailboats ain’t standin’ on the beach. At least you hope they ain’t. Sailboats move, and moving things create their own wind. Stick your hand out the car window doin’ sixty—that’s apparent wind. ’Course the motorist, he don’t give a shit about the wind, because he ain’t sailin’. We’re sailin’. You take today. Accordin’ to this instrument right here, wind’s blowin’ twenty-four knots, right? Okay, we’re sailing into the wind at six knots. Therefore, we’re actually feeling wind that’s blowin’ thirty knots. Hell of a difference between twenty-four and thirty knots. Now say we turned completely around and was still doing our six knots—”
“Oh,” said Doom, “then we’d feel a wind of only eighteen knots?” You couldn’t even depend on the wind being literal. “So it’ll be more comfortable going home?”
“Exactly. You want to get subtle about it? Okay. As the wind speed increases, so does boat speed. When that happens, the apparent wind angle changes right along with wind speed.”
“What’s wind angle?”
“The angle the wind meets the sails at.”
“…Okay.” Nothing was ever simple.
“When the boat goes faster, the angle moves forward. When the boat slows down, the apparent-wind angle moves aft. You want to know something else?”
“Sure, that’s why I’m asking.”
“This boat ain’t the only thing your daddy left you, not by a long shot.”
“Shut up, Bert,” said Marvis Puller.
“Well, it ain’t,” Bert petulantly insisted.
“You got no discretion, Bert. You’re a cracker hammerhead.”
“What’s this all about?” Doom demanded.
Marvis sneaked a glance at Norman. Was he listening? Marvis slid aft with the ashes to join Bert and Doom at the wheel. He whispered to Doom, “Could we have lunch or something when we get back?”
“Where we had breakfast?” Doom suggested.
“The Flamingo Tongue Dockside Cafe,” Bert specified. He was disappointed. He wanted to be the one to tell, whereas now it would be Marvis, since Marvis was the accountant. “We’re in the Stream,” he said, nodding at the ocean.
Doom gasped at the sight. The sea had suddenly transformed itself from riled limy green to a soul-deep blue, almost indigo. Long, tapering shafts of sunlight shimmered enticingly down into the abyss. What was down there? Doom recalled seeing while in prison a National Geographic special about a pioneering oceanographer named Beebe, who in a primitive submersible rode the Gulf Stream’s middle depths for hundreds of miles and saw wondrous things. But on the rec-room TV, the power of that blue to captivate, to lure, was lost. This was the real thing. And the way to see it would be from the inside, like Beebe, with blue water in three dimensions and his father in particulate suspension.
Doom’s mother knew by the change in motion that they had arrived at his father’s final resting p
lace. She was already climbing up the companionway ladder. When she was seated in the cockpit, Marvis Puller handed her the pot.
No one spoke. Captain Bert cracked off onto a reach, and the apparent wind dropped. “Does anyone have anything to say?” asked Doom’s mother softly. No one did. Without ceremony, she opened the lid and averted her eyes from its contents. “Well, Dennis…good-bye.” And she shook her ex-husband’s ashes over the starboard rail— “No!” shouted Captain Bert, but it was too late. The wind gusted, caught the ashes, and hurled them aft at twenty knots.
They struck Doom flush in the face, blinding him momentarily. Flecks of gray stuck to his teary cheeks.
“Oh, Dennis!” his mother cried.
“That’s okay,” said Doom.
“You always want to shake out a man’s ashes downwind,” explained Bert without moving his lips.
HOME
The simple fiscal fact of the matter is this: You own Omnium Settlement lock, stock, and barrel,” pronounced Marvis Puller after he had arranged himself beside Bert in a window booth at the Flamingo Tongue Dockside Cafe. Besides the cook and a waitress, a knot of khaki-clad charter-boat skippers sat at the counter over coffee. A tourist family with snorkeling gear ate fried grouper at another booth. The only other diner was a fat cop who had eyed Doom as he entered.
Staggerlee was the only boat tied up at the docks. Doom had been watching her gentle upturn at bow and stern—nothing had ever seemed so balanced as the shape of his boat. “What do you mean, I own Omnium Settlement?”
“Shh—” Captain Bert had seen someone coming. It was the fat cop.
Broadnax County sheriff Lincoln Plotner slid off his stool, sucked in his gut, and strode across the open floor to where this chip off old Denny Loomis’s block sat like a Yankee smart-ass ex-con from the Rotten Apple. You had to be one dubious fucker, you served time in Zoo York, where three pedestrians in five packed felonious intent. It was part of his job to chat up the ex-cons in his county, find out what they had up their sleeves and when they planned to hit the road. Sheriff Plotner wore a gray uniform with a hand-tooled Sam Browne belt that held, just below the bulge of his belly, his handcuffs, Mace sprayer, sap, flashlight, Bowie knife, and .357 Bulldog loaded with dum-dums. His boots were damp from patrolling the ruins of Omnium Settlement.
Apparent Wind Page 2