“I dig you.”
“Very well then. So here you come blowing that goddamn horn like Caesar returning from the wars. I mean what you are saying with that horn is, ‘Open up, you crud, and let the beautiful people pass.’ In which case he is just naturally going to let you drag your ass around out there until he is good and ready. What you have to remember is that he already hates your guts just looking at you. I mean you are talking to an underprivileged man. Be kind to him. Cajole him. Understand his personality. Now look at that one dead ahead.”
I looked where he pointed. The bridge was a good two hundred yards off and if Harry could see the bridge keeper at that distance he had better eyes than mine.
“Now I would deduce,” said Harry, “that that sonofabitch was probably rejected by the ILU at some point and is a red-hot reactionary who voted for George Wallace in the last election. By the time I get done blowing this horn he will think I am the Grand Panjandrum of the Ku Klux Klan and will open this bridge like it was Lester Maddox himself.”
Whereupon he took up the horn and blew. If my calls had sounded like a dying cow his were like a love-sick mule. But I will be damned if it didn’t work. When we were still about a hundred yards off the bridge began to open.
“You see?” said Harry, and pulled the hat down over his eyes and went to sleep.
Only when we were almost on the other side did I see the tugboat coming toward us with six barges. That of course was what they had opened for in the first place. I thought it better not to mention this to Harry.
The river had widened slightly and was full of terrible old hulks. Some were half sunk and all smelled bad. There were old tubs from Honduras and Turks Island and Panama that seemed to have a smell all their own. The Cuban refugee boats had a pretty distinctive odor too, but at least they were painted purple and sky blue and other beautiful colors.
Where the river left the land we passed through a dredged-out canal to the ocean. At the end of the canal there were two stone jetties, and beyond the jetties the open sea. It was the first time I had ever seen the ocean. It looked formidable. All kinds of craft were passing between the jetties and bouncing around like corks. Would Jezebel hold together? What if there was sediment in the fuel tank and the engine quit? What if I got seasick? Did Harry know what the hell he was doing?
Then we were right in between the jetties, and the chop there was something fierce. The wind was beating against the tide and the water boiled. Jezebel tried to pull herself loose and drive straight in toward the rocks. When I finally got her under control we were only about six feet off. Clouds of spray shot over the deck and once or twice she was just about laid over on her beam ends. The masts described sickening arcs through the sky, and the monkey hung on for his life. Suddenly he opened his mouth and a stream of half-digested peanuts rained down. Harry never budged. He was as calm as if we were still in the river.
Then we were through it. The waves were still high but spaced out longer, and the boat had a chance to recover between them. Harry stretched and said, “I’ll take her now. Secure the engine and get up the main.”
I had the sail about halfway up when it stuck. I gave it a good yank, the rope parted in the middle, and the whole thing came down with a bang. When I looked at the rope I could see where the strands were kind of gray and dead-looking. Like practically everything else on the boat, it was rotten. But Harry wasn’t disturbed about little things like the main halliard breaking.
“Murphy’s Law,” he said.
“What’s Murphy’s Law?”
“Whatever can go wrong will go wrong and always at the worst possible time. One of the primary rules of the sea.”
“I see,” I said for lack of anything better. I mean there we were floundering around out there with no way to get up the sail.
“Any suggestions, Number Three?”
If I had known him a little better, I would have suggested that we sink her right there and collect the insurance. But then he probably didn’t carry any.
“I guess we’ll have to try to rig a new line,” I said.
“I guess you will,” Harry agreed. “Get cracking.”
It meant shinnying up the mast. That cost me most of the skin from the inside of my legs. The boat was broadside to the swells and rolled like crazy. The mast went back and forth about forty degrees on each roll. And the monkey bit me.
“Kick him into the ocean,” Harry advised.
I finally bypassed Ho and wriggled up to the top. I had with me another piece of line which did not look much better than the original. And even if the line held, the block looked about ready to pop. And the shrouds were covered with rust. It was a long way down. I figured on the next roll the whole mickey-mouse contraption would let go, and I would be shot out into space like from a slingshot.
In a way, though, it was kind of great up there. I mean you could really see. From that distance Miami Beach looked like Camelot. And up ahead an endless sheet of purple water flecked with whitecaps. On the horizon a couple of big tankers shoveling white water. And sticking its nose out between the jetties unmistakably and absolutely was Charisma.
When I came down I said, “Don’t look now but I think we’re being followed.”
He squinted back to where I had pointed. She was coming up fast and certainly in our direction.
“What does that poor boob want now?” said Harry.
“Maybe he’s decided to kill you after all,” said Miss Wong.
CHAPTER 7
IT WAS LIKE THEY HAD GONE CRAZY. MISS Wong said Harry was a kind of catalytic agent that drove people right out of their mother-loving skulls. She said she had seen it happen before. But take this time with the Burgers. They were zombies, walking dead, until they met Harry. He zinged them like stepping on a high-tension wire. They didn’t even know how dead they had been until they got a jolt from Harry. But it was kind of addictive medicine. They couldn’t let go of him after that.
Anyway, Charisma charged up astern like she meant to go right through us. And there were Mr. and Mrs. Burger jumping up and down and waving their arms. We rocked wildly in their wake as they circled around us. They were hollering at us but the wind blew their voices away. All the same the message was clear; they were going with us. Harry, ignoring the whole thing, stood at the wheel gazing sternly out to sea like Christopher Columbus. They hullabalooed around us a few more times, and then dropped back and took up a position astern like a mother duck watching a baby learn to swim.
This time we got the sail up and the halliard held. It was the first time I had ever been under sail anywhere, and it was kind of exciting. Jezebel laid over as she caught the wind. The big, ragged, floppy tent of a sail billowed out. And the old tub seemed to come alive, like some old horse suddenly beginning to prance around the barnyard on a brisk fall morning. And without the engine it was marvelously quiet. Like gliding. We charged out toward the horizon at a snappy three miles an hour.
Somebody had eaten breakfast off the chart; it was spotted with coffee stains and marmalade. But you could still see a little speck called Bimini and that was where we were heading. It was only fifty miles away, but the trouble was we had to go right across the Gulf Stream, which was going faster than we were. So, all the time we were sailing east we were really going north. And in addition there is such a thing as leeway in a sailboat. I mean, you don’t just point the boat in the direction you want to go. You point it in a totally different direction and just hope that one thing will sort of balance out another. And hope that the boat will hold together. And that you don’t get clobbered by a hurricane. Altogether I figured our chance of hitting Bimini was about one in four hundred.
It took us four days to go the fifty miles. Murphy’s Law was working overtime. For one thing the compass was a joke. It was one of those mickey-mouse gadgets designed to be stuck on the dashboard of a car, and it kept falling off wherever we stuck it and finally broke altogether. After that we steered by the auxiliary compass which was mounted on the head of
a plastic ballpoint pen stamped COMPLIMENTS OF METROPOLITAN MORTGAGE COMPANY. And, of course, the sails blew out. They were so old and rotten they just seemed to dissolve every time the wind got over ten miles an hour. So I sewed. And when I wasn’t sewing I was trying to fix the engine, which had quit again. I opened up the strainer and found it looking like the bottom of a spittoon. There was everything in there but cigar butts, and there might even have been a couple of those. In addition, we sprang a leak. Or leaks. Suddenly we had water over the floorboards and I let out a holler.
“You don’t want to get into a sweat, Number Three,” Harry said. “A little water is good for the boat. Keeps the bilges sweet. Prevents dry rot. Start pumping.”
“Where’s the pump?”
“Up forward. Use your eyes, son.”
I rummaged around in the forepeak. Empty paint cans, useless brushes, a broken stove, lifeless rope, anchor with one fluke busted off, hammer head with no handle, a mile and a half of rusty wire. Finally the pump—one of those old tin things with a dried-out washer. You couldn’t have emptied a teacup with it. I brought it up and showed it to Harry.
“You’re the engineer,” he said. “Pumping is in the engineering department.”
When things were going good it was his department. When the ship was sinking it was my department.
The water was lapping the bunks now and there obviously was no time to lose. I needed rubber or leather to fix that pump. The only leather I had seen was Harry’s briefcase tucked under his bunk. He might take a dim view of my chopping it up, but if I didn’t do something soon it would only go down with the ship anyway.
It was full of some kind of diagrams. I removed them and cut a nice round patch out of the side. I stuffed them back, shoved the whole thing under the bunk, and started pumping. I pumped for like a day and a half and then started over again.
Fortunately we had no storms.
Charisma finally got tired of our nonsense and charged alongside.
“Which the hell way are you supposed to be going?” her captain bellowed through his bullhorn.
“North by east.”
“Well, you’re heading south by west. Where’s your compass?”
Harry held up the ballpoint pen. I thought the captain would have a stroke. When he had pulled himself together they lowered a basket containing a compass in a beautiful mahogany case. With it was a bottle of champagne tied up with one of Mrs. Burger’s pink ribbons. She blew us a kiss.
“Why don’t you stop all this nonsense and let us give you a tow?” the captain said.
“Tow be blowed. I’ve wrung more salt water out of my socks than you’ve ever sailed on,” Harry answered.
On our third night out we saw something that might have been the loom of a distant lighthouse. Harry consulted the chart. He looked smug. “That will be Great Isaac Light. Just where it should be. We’re only forty miles off course.”
So we headed south. Two days later we saw a fringe of trees on the horizon. Then a radio tower and rooftops and finally the land itself looking low and very brown. I wondered if it was Bimini or China. I did not feel much excitement because I was too tired. I had been up and down that bloody mast half a dozen times. And I had broken my back pumping. And I had lain head down in the bilge cleaning the crap out of the strainer. And I had slept in a hole so small I could not raise my head six inches from the horizontal. Altogether I figured I had lost about fifteen pounds.
Not so Harry. He looked rested and refreshed. At ease with the world. Proud of his navigation.
Miss Wong was her usual self, cool and unfathomable and beautiful as ever. Charisma followed doggedly in our ragged wake.
A reef circled the island. We sailed all around it looking for an entrance. At last we found a narrow cut marked by a range. Harry claimed it was the range marker although to me it looked more like a ruined chicken house. But as it turned out there were no chickens on Bimini.
Unhappily, wind and tide were against us, and try as we might we could not get the old girl to beat through the cut. We strapped her down as hard as we could, but when we did she would not sail at all. Or if she did sail, it was sideways. There seemed nothing for it but to get the old Palmer going again. But I was not very happy about that because of the smell of gasoline all over the place. I was pretty well convinced that next time we pressed the starter, the whole thing would go up in smoke and we would go with it. But the ship was still leaking, and it seemed better to die a quick death in an explosion than a slow one manning the pump.
So I told myself here goes nothing and pressed the button. The usual cloud of oil and smoke spewed back onto my mattress, but otherwise it was okay. The pile of junk actually ran.
“Stand by to lower all plain sail,” said Harry. “Avast and on the double. Which means I await your pleasure, Master Bullmore.”
I pointed out that it might be better to keep the sail on her since only a complete moron would put his trust in that engine.
“Oh ye of little faith,” cried Harry. “Lower sail, sir, and be damned to you.”
So I did. And we started through. At full throttle she turned up a big fat thousand RPM. It was barely enough to hold us against the tide. When we did progress, it was a foot at a time. The Palmer wheezed and groaned. Suddenly she gave one of her typical farts and out came a cloud of smoke. The cabin was thick with it. The monkey shot into the rigging, and the cat ran for cover in the bilge.
I hung, head down, trying to figure out what had happened. Smoke and rusty water everywhere. And more water pouring in. A real geyser. Then I saw that the exhaust line was nothing but a hunk of rusty galvanized pipe about a hundred years old, and the pressure had been top much for it. It had busted in about six places below the water line and the ocean was coming in.
“What the hell is going on down there?” bellowed Harry.
Too busy stuffing rags into holes to answer. Mattress already under six inches of greasy water. And I knew the reef was not more than six feet away. A situation.
“Keep her going!” I yelled back.
He did. But Jezebel was sinking. I raised my head long enough to glance through the port and see that he was heading for a pier.
“Don’t tie her up there,” I yelled. “Beach her!”
He grinned at me. It was one of the times I liked him best. Piled on more steam and ran her straight onto the flats. I always said he had pizzazz. A smack as she hit and everything loose came crashing down. Monkey tossed out of the rigging with a despairing shriek. Luckily into three inches of water. Engine dead. No sound but the trickle of water and Harry’s laughter. My aching back.
CHAPTER 8
IT WAS NOTHING LIKE TAHITI. NO MOUNTAINS coming down to the sea and no flowers and no waterfalls. From where we sat in the mud, all I could see was a flat strip of land with some scraggly vegetation and a couple of ugly, shocking-pink hotels. There were also a lot of wooden shacks, and a whole bunch of stores selling whiskey.
There was a concrete ramp leading up from the water and on it, like a duck in the sun, sat a fat yellow plane. A straw-roofed, open-sided building bore a sign reading airport. Where, I wondered, were all the beautiful black girls with no bras and flowers behind their ears?
Just then one came our way. She was wearing a purple bikini and a rubber diving mask, and she carried a spear gun. Attached to her waist by a piece of cord was a big ugly dead fish about six feet long. It had teeth like a wolf. It was a barracuda.
She came up beside us and raised her mask.
“That was a pretty original landing,” she said.
“Wasn’t it just?” Harry said. “Did you kill that awful-looking thing?”
“Mmm.”
“Better come up and have a drink. You probably need one.”
I bent down to give her a hand.
“Why hello, lover,” she said.
Her fingers were long and cold and seemed to contain some kind of voltage. I felt the kind of tingle you get with an electric drill on a damp floor.
/> She came up easily but there was a lot of her. She kept coming like a shining black eel. When she stood up she was almost as tall as me. Long and elegant like a Watusi princess in the National Geographic.
“I’m McGee,” she said.
She looked around at the boat and began to laugh. Her laughter was unbelievably great, busting out of her pipes like a high-pressure shower.
“What are you flipped-out cats up to anyway?” she said.
“We are a party of missionaries fleeing from the godless Red scourge on the Chinese mainland,” Harry said without hesitation. “I am the Reverend J. Framson Getty and this is my wife and the muscular young man is my son Garble. We escaped down the Whangpoo by sampan and picked up this vessel on the coast. We have been one hundred and one days crossing the Pacific and have had very little food or water.”
She shook the water out of her pretty black head. “You came from China in this?”
“With the Lord’s help.”
“You’re putting me on, man.”
“I beg your pardon, sister?”
I was trying to keep a straight face but the corners of my mouth were beginning to jump.
“Garble is giving the show away,” she said. “Garble Getty. Down the Whangpoo. Like too much, man.” The spurt of laughter shot out again as she clutched at her small hard breasts.
“Levity, sister. Levity.”
“Oh levity my ass.”
“Well I’ll drink to that. To your beautiful black ass. Let’s have the rum on deck, Number Three. On the double.”
I fetched up the rum.
“What are you doing here on the flats anyway?” said the black girl.
“The fucker was sinking beneath us,” answered Harry.
“Out of sight,” she marveled. “So now what?”
“Now the chief engineer goes over the side to inspect the hull.”
Harry & the Bikini Bandits Page 3