by Jim Nisbet
It was hard for Tipsy to think of a book she’d never read. “Don’t you have glasses to wash?”
“If it’s intended to justify his existence,” Quentin persisted, “it’s either going to be infinitely long or infinitely short.”
“I’m not even sure it’s real.” Tipsy favored Quentin with a glance of annoyance. “What’s with you today?” Quentin raised an eyebrow and indicated the pile of pills heaped on their own coaster next to his pint of soda water. “Nobody to fight with,” she guessed.
Faulkner held a corner of the envelope under the bib of the espresso machine and cracked the valve. A serrated corner of the triangular stamp lifted into the steam.
The next day the funkiest little boat you ever saw turned up, first thing in the morning. I was below when she arrived, making myself some breakfast and thinking about going ashore for groceries and a look around the ville. After all, I’d never called at Rum Cay before. I stuck my head out the companionway, and what should I descry but an old Monterey, Jambo by name, which is Swahili for Hello, or Greetings, as I’m sure you know. The stack was rusted through in so many places it looked like a vine trellis.
How in the hell that little guy got here all the way from California, to which the design is native, its skipper couldn’t tell me. He’s only owned her for a couple of years. Arnauld’s Dive Service was lettered along either side of the hull. Fore and after decks and even the roof of the house were festooned with gear—an old compressor for tank and hooka diving, wire brushes, stiff-bristled nylon brooms with long and short handles, all kinds of scrapers and tools, coils of line, heaps of chain, oxy-acetylene tanks, a gasoline-powered welder/generator, a milk-crate each of new and used zincs, a crate full of solvents and epoxy products, and so forth.
He pronounced his name the way the French pronounce it—Ar-KNOW. Raised in a boatyard in Guadeloupe by an American father and a French mother, he learned to sail before he could walk, and to race before he could properly read. And if there was anything besides hotel servitude to be had on an island, he had called there—damn near every island in the Bahamas, Windwards, Leewards, Antilles, assorted Gulf ports up the east coast of Central America, Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, and the Florida panhandle down to the Keys, too.
That bit about Guadeloupe was a nice coincidence. I know the boatyard—it’s where I rebuilt Vellela Vellela—and I know his mother. She still
runs the place. Dad long gone. Good name for a song. Probably the name of 200 songs. Alcohol got him. So that more or less puts to sleep wondering about what the connection with Red is.
Arnauld was friendly enough, but after those few preliminary remarks he was all business. So much for a lube and tune-up, so much for going aloft, so much for roving halyards, seizing lines, such-and-such markup on parts, and a minimum fee for scrubbing a bottom, compounded by the number of feet below the waterline, compounded by an hourly rate if the job goes long. We haggled, but Arnauld wouldn’t budge. Within the context of a charade, you’d think it wouldn’t matter. But Arnauld seemed to enjoy the play-acting. It was a pretty exorbitant price by Florida standards. But, as Arnauld needlessly pointed out, we weren’t in Florida, and it wasn’t my money. In the end I agreed to his price for keel, rudder, and through-hull inspections, as well a thorough scrape of the bottom and zinc replacement, paid in advance. I gave him cash and Arnauld wrote me out a receipt. He prepared to dive Vellela Vellela and I went back to my breakfast.
But sitting below and listening to somebody thump around your hull is an uncomfortable feeling. So I finished the dishes, borrowed Arnauld’s dinghy, and rowed to town.
Ah, sister Tipsy. Shall I go into the languorous delights of out-of-the-way tropical ports? The little towns associated with them can be somewhat the same, and they’re not all good, but I never tire of them. There’s every sort of strange vegetation, of course. And racially, too, the whole Caribbean is mixed up. There’s Spanish and French and the whole east coast of Africa, and American English and English English and all kinds of derivative patois and Creole. Great people, in any case, right down the line. And have I mentioned the food? You tasted a good conch fritter lately? Of course not. Are you still living off beer and chips? And I bought some stamps at the little postal window in what they call the Administration Building.
“French fries, he means,” Tipsy said helpfully. “That’s what they call French fries in the islands. Like they call them in England.”
“Freedom fries,” Faulkner goaded, handing her back the stampless envelope.
“Frites de liberté!” Quentin declared. His chin rested on his crossed forearms, which in turn rested on the bar. Inches from his eyes, little bubbles rose through the clear body of the pint of soda water, beyond the diminishing selection of medicaments. “Frites de liberté, d’egalité, de fraternité, et de mort.” Quentin smiled contentedly. “Fries of death.”
“You’re already paying me to help you die,” Faulkner pointed out. “Ready for more? Tipsy?”
“I’ll have another.”
“Quentin?”
“What is it, anyway? What’s so attractive about drifting aimlessly on the face of the sea, year in and year out?” Quentin muttered at his glass of water.
“You should try it sometime,” Faulkner suggested, as he landed Tipsy’s next beer in a fresh, frosted glass.
Quentin rolled his eyes toward Tipsy’s new beer, then up at Faulkner, then away. For twenty years Faulkner had worked every spring and summer in this bar, saving every dime he earned. Come October, Faulkner flew south with his bankroll, two or three bags of gear, and his guitar. Every October his 34-foot Columbia lay waiting for him in Zihuatanejo or in a cove in the San Blas Islands or in a little port in Honduras, Guatemala, Belize, or maybe even way down the coast of Chile. He’d had wives and girlfriends, though none currently. Faulkner was another one of these guys who sailed out the Golden Gate on the tide one fine morning thirty years ago, took a left, and never really came back.
“Sounds too much like unpaid work to me,” Quentin said.
Faulkner didn’t give a damn what Quentin thought. But at the moment he was washing glasses in the sink under the bar and his mind was unoccupied. “Aren’t you listening to Charley’s letter, Quentin? Does it sound like work?”
Quentin made a face. “I’m sorry, Skip, but my opinion is that, in general, there is no free lunch.”
With a soapy hand, Faulkner indicated the menu chalked onto a slate above the back of the bar. “Where’s it say anything about a free lunch?”
“All over the place, but perhaps most especially in the gringo’s view of the tropics. And it’s never real.”
“Okay. Speak for yourself.”
“I was speaking for myself.”
“You think that all cruisers do is bob around and talk to each other on the radio while drinking rum and harmonizing sea chanties over fresh fish for breakfast?”
“Yes.” Quentin sat up. “I do.”
Faulkner set the last glass to dry on the mat and toweled his hands. “It’s hard to explain the mysteries and pleasures of the sea to somebody whose idea of a rough ride is a restaurant table with one short leg.”
“Hooo—no!” whooped Tipsy, looking up from her letter. “That got a rise out him.”
Indeed it did get a rise out of Quentin.
“Last month some yahoo on this side of the bar calls me a communist as if the adjective were an ultimate pejorative—worse than executive talent pool, say, or exophthalmic spirochete. …”
Tipsy’s eyes rounded with anticipation. “Go get ’em, Quentin.”
“… And today,” Quentin continued, “from the other side of the bar, a potentially simpatico soul, a working stiff like myself, is accusing me of—what?—Black Urban Professionalism? I’m not sure when it was that I got to be It around here, but hey, Faulkner, take your choice. What’s it going to be? Little fucking twits with crocodiles on their shirts, or me—” Quentin jerked a thumb at his own chest—“who at least knows which end of the fucking glass to drin
k his water out of?”
“I changed my mind,” Tipsy said. “Take it easy.”
Faulkner folded the dishtowel lengthwise in the gutter on his side of the bar. “Aside from the fact that buppies, as you call them, spend real money on real drinks at this bar, as opposed to free glasses of soda water on account they know the bartender, I don’t really give a shit.”
“That’s right,” Quentin retorted, with not a moment’s hesitation. “You don’t give a shit because in one month or two at the most, you’re going to be some thirty degrees of latitude south of here, sitting on your ass in a deck chair as the sun comes up trying to figure out the three chords to ‘Margaritaville’ when all you really want to do is open that first beer and forget the whole thing.”
“Five,” Faulkner said.
Quentin started. “Five what?”
“‘Margaritaville’ has five chords.”
“And you call that a life?” Quentin suddenly shouted.
Faulkner stabbed a soapy finger at the compartmentalized box of pills on the bartop and hissed, “And you call this a life?”
“Low blow!” Tipsy scolded Faulkner.
“No!” Quentin, smiling viciously, stood up on the lower rung of his barstool and spread his arms to encompass the entire bar. “I don’t!”
In the silence that followed this exchange, somebody somewhere in the bar emitted a long whistle that started out on a middling pitch, rose to another, then elided smoothly down through ever-lowering pitches until it petered out.
Quentin cocked an ear in the direction of the whistle. “You know what I think this is all about?”
Neither Tipsy nor Faulkner made an answer.
Quentin nodded. “It’s about the great cloud of ineffable guilt hanging over this entire country. Here we sit, boozing it up, money in our pockets, psyches intact—at least we think our psyches are intact—while in various locations on the other side of the world, our armies—yes, the Armed Forces of the United States of America—are blowing the shit out of anybody who gets in their, which is our, way. Men, women, children—all life forms, dogs and infrastructure and entire cultures included, are incinerated daily on behalf of the most beknighted, misguided, and crypto-imperialistic foreign policy this country has ever espoused, and that includes the Vietnam Experience and the Monroe Doctrine and the so-called Spanish American War. And, however, as with various doomed, dreadful, mendacious conflicts, ostensibly carried out on behalf of the good citizens of this country, and for the good of the good citizens of this or that occupied country, and not under any circumstances for the good of the bad people of this country, any more than it’s on behalf of the bad people of that country, they’re terrorists if they’re against us, they’re patriots if they’re with us, whose job it is of our armed forces to hunt down and kill wherever they may be found, if they can be found, which they can’t, because they don’t per se exist, because their name is legion—this endeavor, as I say, foisted on ourselves at least as egregiously as it is on our supposed enemy, has twisted the national psyche. Are we not all in this together? Is it not as James Baldwin said, that all men are brothers? That’s the bottom line? If we can’t take it from there, we can’t take it at all?”
“Amen, brother,” Tipsy encouraged him.
“Must you lecture us?” somebody shouted.
“Let him speak!” insisted another.
“Shut up!” shouted a third, although it was not clear whom they addressed.
“Guilt,” Quentin persisted, “and guilt alone, brings us low. For we, as a polity, have transgressed our global brothers and sisters. Every one of us knows that at this very moment men, women, and children are being decimated by a wide selection of the most vicious weapons ever assembled by any technology in history. Forget nukes. Who needs them? We got radioactive bullets, we got Thermit mortars and phosphor grenades, we got five-hundred-pound laser-guided bombs, we got helicopter-mounted Gatling guns that spit 2,500 exploding .50 caliber rounds per minute, we got unmanned drones armed with air-to-ground missiles. No! Ladies and gentlemen,” Quentin slapped the bar with the flat of his hand, and his pills jumped. “The real question is how anybody with a brain in this country can sleep at night. Every endeavor is no more or less than a distraction from the horrible truth, that, even as we sit here and argue about it, inhuman acts are being performed upon our fellow humans in our name, whether you spend your life meaningfully or not. And I ask you …” Quentin placed the palm of one hand over his heart and scanned the bar, “has not a concerted regime of cruelty and excessive brutality replaced that of due process, habeas corpus, and impartial justice? And for what? For one thing, and one thing only.”
“One thing?”
“Shaddup!”
“Did he say one thing?”
“Who cares!”
“And free the pandas while you’re at it!”
“What thing is that?”
Quentin raised a single index finger. The bar fell silent. “So that many people, mostly Iraqis, but also young American men and women, just like you and me—except that most of them grew up poor and, wanting to make something out of themselves, volunteered for the armed services, whereas we did not—can die face down in the sand in a foreign land. And why? I’ll tell you why. So that China will be guaranteed the oil reserves she needs to take over the world.”
Silence overwhelmed the bar. Tipsy, beside him, and Faulkner, across the bar, stared.
“Hear hear!” somebody erupted. “Yes yes!” shouted another. “It’s China’s war,” acclaimed a third. “Who knew?” queried a fourth. “Buy the dude a drink,” clamored a fifth. “Left-wing cunt!” “Right-wing shill!” “Centrist pawn!” “Gung hay fat choy!”
Quentin collapsed onto his stool and stared rigidly over his glass of water. His upper lip quivered. “There,” he declared unequivocally. “I’ve said it.”
“Said what?” Tipsy and Faulkner replied in unison.
TEN
CEDRIC OSAWA AWAITED THE WESTBOUND HOUND, SCHEDULED TO DEPART Miami at midnight.
The No-Fly list was going to be a pesky impediment to a comfortable retirement, if he ever found the means by which to retire, just like the lack of health insurance was going to be a pesky impediment to a healthy one. Retirement? Health insurance? Hah. Plot no flies on me. Samurai laugh, Doppler down the centuries, Ah ha, ah ha ha, ahhh hahhahhahhahahah. …
The Hound grumbled out of the haze of humidity and into the dimly lit station like a ghost of transportation past. Cedric hadn’t been on a Greyhound bus since his long-squandered youth. At the time, as he recalled, the encapsulation of despond available for inspection in every seat had been sufficient to kindle a nascent ambition to make something out of himself.
A sailor, maybe, who finds the pungencies of bilgewater preferable to that of undifferentiated upholstery vapors.
Things appeared not to have changed much. The placard over the windshield said El Paso. El Paso is a long way from Miami. The placard might just as well have posited Alpha Centauri. Although, Cedric reflected, as he watched eight or ten passengers disembark, the latter is less than five light years from Miami. But El Paso? Miami to El Paso is a rat fur piece. The Pelt of No Amigo. Warrior delectation, chortle down unnumbered eons …
The Felt hat of El Paso
Is the skint Pelt of No Amigo
Epidermis of nary friend of mine.
Take it sleeeeezy
Don’t be queeeeasy
Ye olde diastole lifts entropic
Slurry from the Blue Hole of Time …
Sometimes those old songs just get stuck in your head, and you just got to embarrass them until they go away. Benevolent robins of mortification beak Mind Worms out loamy furrows of corpus coliseum. Ahaha. …
Names for nameless things. Fears and trepidations and places never plotted by the theodolite of man, whatnot. One of mankind’s specialties, naming things. Another is messing them up. Crocheted Encomium No. 1: Those with no imagination are destined to commit the unimaginab
le.
On the back it reads: Put another way, those who do have imagination are destined to have the unimaginable committed upon them—a textbook example of a contrapositive clusterfuck.
Thank you. It’s kind of you to say so. May I go now? Sure. Take the bus.
I’m in a pleonastic mood tonight. Either that, or my dura mater is on fire. Doppler burnin’ fu down the smokin’ centuries, cha cha, chachacha, cough cough, coughcoughcough. …
Merdre alert, Cedric reflected, I haven’t had jingle-revenge fantasies like these since I left the States for Alfa Centauri, how many egg cycles ago? Let alone acted one out. Jingle revenge? Egg cycle. Oviposit the offender. The mature three-foot worm breaks through the skin from the inside, broadcasting eggs like soap bubbles on Telegraph Avenue circa 1970. Hold him down. Ah ha, ah ha ha, ahhhhahahaha. …
The driver was a black gentleman in shirtsleeves, visored cap set back on a perspiring forehead surmounted by thinning gray locks, insomniac pouches under roadmap eyes. Cedric nodded hello as he boarded and received in response a request to show his ticket. Cedric showed it: all the way to El Paso, two days, three transfers, thirty-six stops: $134. The driver looked like a perfectly natural extension of the driver’s seat. If there’s random drug testing for drivers, Cedric thought, “random,” or having no specific pattern, purpose or objective, must indeed be the kind of drug testing the company was carrying out, for something had this individual Wide Awake. Existential Awareness, perhaps?
“Nice evening,” Cedric allowed, as the driver returned him his ticket.
The driver ducked his head for a look through the windshield at a large clockface set into the wall above the exit door of the terminal and checked his watch against it. “Eleven minutes.”
Cedric always found himself reluctant to get off his boat. He liked his fun. He enjoyed a hospitable port. But Tunacity was his home. Its environment consisted entirely of things he understood. He was comfortable there. Every night, the thing rocked him to sleep. Ashore was another story. Once docked, it always took him a long time to actually step ashore, find a bar, take a taxi into town, find another bar. And the present perfunctory social interaction only served to emphasize Cedric’s isolation in the teeming greater world.