"We're not getting stuffy in here," Adam said, "but we're staying dry. There must be some kind of semi-permeable coating on the boat cover. Do you know anything about it?"
"No, but I have looked on it and I have found it to be good."
"Just another piece of amazing Westronese technology. I hope we have a sample of whatever it is in the crates the chief gardener sent us," Adam said, hunkering down on the floorboards and getting as comfortable as things permitted. "Your last statement was almost biblical. Could it be that this storm is finally leading you to religion?"
"Not a chance. If I've got to die, I'd rather do it as an honest man, not as a wimp groveling on my knees in front of a spook."
Adam just shook his head, unwilling to open up on an argument we'd been through a dozen times.
I said, "I have read the Bible, though, something that you Catholics never do. At least it was something I never did until I quit being a Christian, and then only because I needed all the ammunition that I could get."
"Right," Adam said. "In grade school, I asked a nun, one of my teachers, about the Bible, and she said that I shouldn't read it. She said that it was dirty, so, being basically a good kid, I left it alone."
"Reasonable. It really is a dirty book. Look at what Abraham did to poor Hagar."
"I don't want to hear about them."
The storm showed no signs of lightening up, so I crawled forward, dug out the sleeping bags and air mattresses, and tried to make us as comfortable as possible for the duration.
THIRTY-FIVE
Three days later, I awoke bleary eyed in what I was sure was early morning. Adam was still asleep. There wasn't anything that we could do except wait for the storm to go away. There hadn't seemed to be much sense in keeping one man awake, on watch, since we had already done what little there was to do. Everything that could be tied down, sealed up, or otherwise secured already was. If the sea and storm were going to kill us, they would do so without our permission whether we were asleep or not.
Lying awake there, I suddenly realized that something was strange. The incessant, joint-wrenching pitching of the waves had stopped, but the noise of the storm, which we were sure by then was a full-blown hurricane, was as loud as ever. But the weirdest thing was the way that the bow of the boat was at least five feet lower than the stern. I reached over and shook Adam awake.
"Yeah? What's wrong?"
"I don't know, but I think maybe we're sinking. The bow is low in the water."
Adam was nearest to the tiller, and he started undoing the lacing that held the boat cover in place.
"Treet, wiggle your way forward and see how much water we've taken on."
"Right."
It made sense. Small people are better at crawling through tight places than big people. I slithered downward on my belly, headfirst over lashed down crates and barrels, all the way down to the bow to find that everything there was still reasonably dry. I could feel the boat moving. We weren't on shore and hung up on something. Mystified, I crawled back up to the stern.
"It's dry!" I shouted. "Could something have grabbed us and be pulling us down?"
By this time, Adam had enough of the boat cover off to stick his head out into the air above the boat.
He pulled back his head and said, "Nope. Partner mine, we are surfing! We are on the side of one bodacious wave, and if we aren't doing thirty miles an hour, I'm a German's uncle!"
I had to pull him down, shove him away from the hole, and stick my head out, before I dared believe what he was telling me.
It was awesome! Not three feet behind us, the huge wave was breaking, spraying frothing white water all about us. In front, I looked down into a massive trough at least a hundred and fifty feet ahead of the bow of our little boat, and then the water heaped up, and up, I don't know how high. The scale of things was simply beyond the range of my ordinary thinking. To left and right, the wave seemed to go off into infinity, and to do it in an almost straight line. The wind was strong in my face as I looked forward, which was the opposite of what one would ordinarily expect. I was a while thinking about how the wind pushes the waves forward, and how, just below the crest of a wave on the leeward side, there has to be a barrel rolling counterwind going. It was a while before I finally brought my head back in, to let Adam have another look.
"Amazing, isn't it?" Adam said, his head stretching against the boat cover so he could look at the compass on the binnacle. "Even wilder is the way we're still going northeast! I think that we oughta tell the people at Guiness about this, 'cause we must be setting a world speed record for surface travel in a tubby lifeboat! Our prayers are answered, or mine are anyway, since yours wouldn't count. Another day or two of this, and we'll be on the beach in sunny Acapulco!"
I was so stunned by what I had just seen that I couldn't think of a suitably cutting rejoinder to Adam's digs. But such is the transience of human nature that even the most incredible spectacle eventually gets boring, and in a few hours we laced the boat cover back down and broke out breakfast, cold Spam and colder creamed corn that Roxanna had once appropriated from the warehouse to her own pantry, thus saving it for our current epicurean repast.
* * *
For the last few days, we had been spending most of our time swapping old jokes, and since Adam had a better memory for such things than I did, I was forced to invent some to keep even with him.
"You heard the one about Jack and Jill?" I asked, knowing that he couldn't have since I had just thought of it.
"Do you mean the clean poem, the dirty poem, or the children's poem with all the gratuitous violence?"
"None of the above, but remember the dirty one for when it's your turn. No, Jack and Jill were two young people who hired into a production shop on the same day. For a few months, everything went well for them, since they were both cheerful, energetic types, and everybody around the shop liked them.
"Then word came down to their foreman that new orders to the shop were slowing down, and that it would be necessary for him to lay off one worker. The problem was that it was a union shop, and the rules required him to lay people off by seniority, in reverse order of that in which they were hired, and regardless of their value as workers. Since Jack and Jill both had the same low seniority date, this meant that he was going to have to lay off either Jack or Jill.
"The trouble was that he didn't want to do it. They were both very hardworking kids, and what's more, he really liked both of them. So naturally, he procrastinated. A week went by, and then two, and he still hadn't laid either of them off. Finally, the plant superintendent called the foreman up to the head office and chastised him for his blatant dereliction.
" `I know that you like both of those kids, but you have to lay one of them off. Which one is up to you, but either Jack or Jill has got to be laid off.'
" `You're right,' said the foreman. `It's my job, and I'll do it. I'll tell you what. It's lunchtime now, and they're both out, but the first one of them to come back, well, I'll take him or her to my office and explain the facts to 'em.'
"It turned out that Jill was the first one back, so the foreman called her to his office.
" `Jill, I'm sorry, but, you see, well, it's come to the point where I've either got to lay you or Jack off.'
"And Jill said, `Well, I'm sorry too, boss, but I've got a headache, and so I'm afraid you'll just have to jack off.' "
Adam laughed politely as we went surfing into the evening. He launched into a long and improbable tale about how his grandfather got robbed on his first day in New York City, but I can't relate it since I fell asleep in the middle of the story.
* * *
The boat pitched and crashed, and again I woke up knowing that something was very strange. The noise outside was still loud, but different, somehow. I was surprised to find that the bow of the boat was no longer five feet lower than the stern. It was four feet higher. My first thought was that we were somehow going backward.
Adam was quickly unlacing the boat cover
as I said, "How can your sea anchor possibly be in front of us?"
"It can't."
"Then how can we be surfing on the `up' side of a wave?"
"We can't. Look, stupid, we're not surfing any more. We're not even floating. We have arrived. We have landed. This is a beached boat! What part of that don't you understand?"
Adam crawled out of The Concrete Canoe and I followed. We were not on the rocky beach that I had envisioned, but rather in the shambles of a once-impressive building, a hotel, by the look of it. The bow of our boat was propped up on the copper top of a full-service bar. The wave that we had been riding for three days had driven our boat right through a set of boarded-up picture windows that had once looked out onto the beach. Water was still receding out of the hole we'd made, taking various tables, chairs, and other fixtures with it out into the blustery night.
The bartender, two attractive (if wet and bedraggled) waitresses, and four drunken customers were staring at us in disbelief.
Adam turned to them and said, "Are we too late for last call?"
* * *
We had not made landfall at Acapulco, as Adam had predicted, but at Zihuetanejo, just over a hundred miles west of it. All things considered, it would have been a remarkably good piece of navigation if it hadn't been such an incredible load of blind luck.
"Luck, hell!" Adam said, "Why can't you believe that I have God on my side?"
This time, I let it go, and ordered another round for all present. We had no Mexican money, but my credit cards worked. One of the waitresses, using her limited English rather than my nonexistent Spanish, eventually got around to asking about our strange clothing. I told her that we had been acting in an amateur Shakespearian comedy when we had been shipwrecked, and the story was believed. Buying new clothes was the first item on our agenda in the morning. Adam had to settle for some strange-looking beachwear until a specially made suit, shirt, and even necktie could be tailored for him, but then people his size always have a problem with buying clothes.
The Mexican police took only three days to decide that we were victims of the storm, rather than vandals intent on wrecking the best bar in town. The fact that Adam's insurance policy on The Brick Royal covered the damage that its tender, The Concrete Canoe, caused when it penetrated the hotel didn't hurt matters a bit. I hadn't even known that we had insurance on our ship. Or perhaps I should say on Adam's ship, since as it turned out, I never had gotten around to putting the thing back into my name. Also, the boat itself, completely unscathed despite all the rigors of the trip and the hole punched in the side of a major hotel, was graciously donated by the two of us to the local lifesaving society, which pleased the local mayor and his cousin, the chief of police, as well. It seems that they both enjoyed deep-sea fishing, and hinted that The Concrete Canoe was remarkably well suited for such a noble occupation. And since they were president and treasurer, respectively, of the lifesaving society, well, we took the hint.
It certainly beat the heck out of having them decide that we had stolen the forty-two pounds of gold we had on board, and retaining it for evidence.
I was about to reset my watch to local time when Adam stopped me. At his insistence, we carefully checked its time against the time given us by the phone company. It was only a cheap electronic watch made by an unknown outfit called "Innovative Time," but the thing proved to be dead nuts accurate. With this information, and a book of navigation tables, we were able to calculate our true position at the time of the first fix we took after leaving the Western Isles. Then, given satellite weather photos, and modern charts of ocean currents, we figured that we would be able to make a good guess at the approximate location of the Western Islands for the next few months.
The Westronese agricultural samples were shipped along with everything we had made out of Super-Hemp via UPS to Adam's mother in Bay City. It had taken me fifteen hours to fill out the paperwork on it to get it through customs, and unless the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency decided that we were small-time drug runners, there wouldn't be a hangup.
My credit cards stopped working. It seems that the bank in the States hadn't heard from me for over a year, and had put a stop on the account. Adam had never used a personal credit card once in his life, since they were issued by bankers and other unsavory people that he preferred not to associate with. His old company credit card was, of course, as defunct as his old company.
We bundled up all of our insurance forms along with our claims on the policies to send them off to our lawyer, Alan Greenberg, back home. I phoned him to tell him what was coming, and he just said, "Come home, both of you. Bring the papers with you. Do it now."
So we gave away the rest of the food, supplies, and other gear that we had on the boat, mostly to the hotel bartender in thanks for his forbearance. We both thought that serving us politely showed a lot of class, considering the way we'd just demolished his bar. After we'd given it away, we discovered that both of our unopened water barrels were still filled with some of the rum we'd bought back in Puerto Rico. Had the trip lasted much longer, and with us trying to survive on rum instead of water, Adam and I could have died of dehydration, a nasty death.
"Adam, do you think that the rum could have been a third try at doing us in?"
"Nah. It was just some stupid mistake. We was real rushed, that morning, and tired, too. Anyway, nobody would be so rotten as to make you die of thirst with sixty gallons of booze right next to you."
"No. Think about it. We bought four barrels in Puerto Rico. We pretty much killed one of them by the time we hit the island. Then we took another barrel from the warehouse to Roxanna's place, for that party. That left two barrels still in the warehouse during the fire. These have to be the same ones, because the islanders don't distill liquor."
"Damn. You've got to be right. So whoever started the fire, stole the booze before they did it. Then they somehow switched these rum barrels for two of our water barrels. We are dealing with some nasty sons of bitches, there. And if they're that bad, are they going to hurt our ladies when we're not there? Even when it can't do them any good?"
"Adam? Would you pray for our women?"
And such was our distress that neither one of us thought my request unusual.
* * *
The barrels never had any markings on them, since the rum was probably bootlegged in the first place. But studying the three barrels we had aboard, these two were obviously machine made, and the almost empty water barrel was just as obviously made on the island. Still, we had no use for them, and in fact we had already given them to the bartender.
The bartender was delighted to have the rum, and presumably put it to various good and profitable uses. At least, rum drinks were on special for the rest of our stay in Mexico, and presumably for a long while after we left.
We paid off our hotel bill with my credit card (which, after my third begging and pleading session with the bank, was again working), rented an old but well-cared-for car, and picked up Adam's newly tailored clothes, so he had something to wear besides tights, a terry cloth serape, and a loud bathing suit. We bought two small carry-on suitcases to hold a change of underwear, a few trinkets, and twenty-one pounds of gold each, and we caught a plane that morning out of Acapulco for Detroit.
THIRTY-SIX
We were in Bay City that night, and in Alan's office the next morning. After a minimum of social pleasantries, Greenberg pulled out a yellow legal pad and started right in.
"I know that the two of you have a year and a half's worth of stories to tell, but we have to spend the afternoon in court, and what we're seeing the judge about concerns the two of you. Now then, pursuant to your instructions, as implied by the powers of attorney that you gave me, I have looked into the strange circumstances surrounding the demise of your fortune, your company, and your marriage, Treet."
"What strange circumstances?"
"The fact that it all took place at the same time, and entirely too quickly, for starters. Normally, a company bankruptcy will dra
g out for a year or so, and a personal bankruptcy takes at least half of that. And no way does Michigan law allow a divorce to be granted in three weeks flat!"
"Then how did the judge allow it?"
"The judge didn't allow it. He caused it. He was conspiring with that carnivorous ex-wife of yours. Together, they came up with a plan that gave her not half of your wealth, but all of it."
"But why would he do such a thing?"
"Why? That's usually a hard one to answer, but in this case, it's fairly clear. Exactly one week after the two of you left town, your ex-wife married the judge, but they had been working on the plan for a long time.
"Fact one. The Brazilian company that you were dealing with never did go bankrupt. They mailed you a check on time and for the full amount owed, some seventeen point three million and change. But they mailed it to a post office box number here in Bay City at what they thought was your request. That is to say, your wife and the judge stole some of your company letterhead, typed up a letter to the effect that you were now using the P.O. Box number, and forged your name to it. After you were out of town, they cashed the check."
"But, we got Brazilian bankruptcy forms, and letters from Brazilian lawyers," I said.
"They were forged, and drop mailed through Brazil from here. Look in the back of Popular Mechanics for a listing of foreign companies that do drop mailings and that sort of thing. It usually costs a couple of bucks to get a foreign stamp put on your letter and to get it dropped off at a foreign post office. Deadbeats use the system all of the time.
"Fact two. Your company's bankruptcy sale was never properly advertised. No legitimate buyers showed up for it, and everything was sold to one bidder at less that five cents on the dollar. Needless to say, this bidder was working with the judge and your ex-wife.
"Fact three. Or maybe this isn't a fact, since I can't prove it, but it appears that an attempt was to be made on your life, while you sailed through the Panama Canal, but apparently it misfired."
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