Windward Passage

by Jim Nisbet

  Ah so. The method and its path stand revealed.

  “Oh baby …” Cedric whispered, and he shifted and resettled sufficiently to slip The Rivers Ran East between the nape of his neck and the seat back, smacked his lips twice, thrice, and sighed contentedly.

  The warm and humid slipstream of the bus, traveling at seventy miles per hour, blustered fitfully at the open window.

  The steady pressure resumed. Cedric’s forehead chilled. A bead of sweat trickled from his throat over his Adam’s apple to the hollow beneath and hovered there, like a bubble in a compass. A hand clamped over his nose and mouth. It smelt of cigarettes and piss and ropa vieja.

  The Rivers Ran East is one and one-eighth inches thick. The ice pick penetrated to one and one-sixteenth inches.

  Cedric spat ten cubic centimeters of saliva into the hand and shivered like a bride.

  The ice pick withdrew and came back with a vengeance, making a new bore into the book to a depth of an inch and a quarter. Next to a mole that always itched unpredictably, in the dimple just to the right of the top of Cedric’s spine, the steel tip drew blood.

  Cedric released through his frame a single, spasmodic shiver.

  With a jerk, the ice pick withdrew through the thicknesses of both book and seatback. The palm remained cupped over Cedric’s mouth, and now its thumb and forefinger pinched his nostrils shut. Cedric didn’t breathe, but his eyes were open, and his marlinspike was poised to gimlet the wrist to the ceiling. The hand relaxed but lingered. Still Cedric did not breathe.

  The hand released his face.

  Cedric slowly sagged against the window frame with a bubbly sigh. The Rivers Ran East tumbled to the sea bag, thence to the empty seat, thence to the carpeted floor.

  The passenger behind Cedric stepped into the aisle, cleared his throat, and hawked a twinkling bolus of mustard-colored phlegm at the hollow below Cedric’s right ear. The passenger watched it glisten as he straightened his shirt. He removed his little hat and absently shaped its creases, all the while studying the motionless figure slumped in the darkness below the window beyond the sea bag.

  The passenger smoothed his hair with one hand and resettled the hat onto his head with the other. Then he took up his little tool tote, zipped it shut, and began to make his way toward the front of the bus, swaying with its motion as he went.

  Not a minute later the Hound with the El Paso destination placard slowed and arced off the highway, circled through the service apron in front of the Ochopee pump island, and hissed to a stop facing west again. Its diesel settled into an irregular idle. Its door opened with a clunk. One passenger got off. Nobody came out of the store to greet the bus.

  The disembarked traveler didn’t enter the brightly illuminated store, its every exterior source of light orbited by insects and bats. Behind the building, rain caps rattled atop the stacks of idling diesels beneath a haze of carbon monoxide and humidity. In the dark swamp beyond throbbed the entire phylogenesis of Amphibia.

  Walking purposely, cla-clack, unhurried, clackaclack, the thin traveler dropped a folded newspaper into a trash can as he passed between the two gas pumps, before he faded into the shadows beyond the far corner of the store. A moment later he reappeared on the brown cement path that meandered past two unlit outdoor privies, whose doors tilted open, admitting their fetor to the night, and he finally disappeared among the gaily colored running lights of tractors and trailers.

  The door closed and the airbrakes coughed. The bus wallowed through the compliment of a wide right strophoid, regained the pavement of Alligator Alley, and accelerated though six ratios into the night.

  ELEVEN

  ACCORDING TO ARNAULD, THERE WASN’T A TORX WRENCH ON THE ENTIRE island. Torx technology hadn’t arrived there yet. But it was time. Arnauld made one by square-cutting the tip off a screwdriver and grinding six flutes parallel to the shaft. Then he locked a pair of vice-grips perpendicular to the handle, and voilà—a torque-able Torx wrench. It worked great. Arnauld dove the hull a couple more times, we had a tin cup each of sun tea with a little rum in it. He casually asked whether I’d visited Boca Chica lately, that’s all I needed to hear, and soon enough he was on his way. That little stinkpot of his sounds like a seagoing mambo lesson.

  Cargo secure, the next anchorage is Albert Town on Long Cay, blue water all the way. So after I spent a couple of hours laying our course, I passed the rest of the afternoon in a hammock strung from the mast to the forestay—never underestimate the holding power of the icicle hitch!—sipping tea and reading Konstantin Paustovsky’s The Story of a Life. Ever read it? If you haven’t, do so. It’s a beautiful book, a memoir of Russia at the turn of the last century, a stunning banquet of melancholy, adventure, horror . . . all of it depicting a world long gone. I’m very taken with it. Let me copy out a passage for you. (Copying favorite passages, by the way, or reading them aloud, is how I taught myself to write, insofar as I know how to write at all, as if you didn’t know.)

  Volodya Rumyantsev was the brother of Uncle Kolya’s closest friend at the Bryansk arsenal, Captain Rumyantsev. Volodya was hard of hearing. There was always hay in his red beard, because he slept in the hay barn. He despised every kind of human comfort. He would put his folded student’s overcoat under his head instead of a pillow. He dragged his feet when he walked, and he talked indistinctly. Under his overcoat he wore a faded blue Russian blouse, and he belted it with a black silk cord with tassels.

  … He was filled with love for provincial Russia. He knew it intimately—the fairs, the monasteries, the historical estates, the customs. He had traveled to Tarkhana, to Lermontov’s birthplace, to Fet’s estate near Kursk, to the horse fair at Lebedyan, to the island of Valaam, and to the Kulikovsky battlefield.

  Old ladies everywhere were friends of his, former teachers and officials. He used to stay with them. They fed him cabbage soup and little cakes filled with fish, and in gratitude Volodya taught the old ladies’ canaries to whistle a polka, or he gave his hostesses superphosphate. They could spread a little in a geranium pot and produce the most enormous blossoms to amaze their neighbors.

  He took no part in the arguments about the fate of Russia but he would move in when the conversation got around to Tambov hams, or the frozen apples in Ryazan, or Volga sturgeon. No one could compete with Volodya in knowledge of these things. Uncle Kolya used to say jokingly that Volodya Rumyantsev was the only man alive who knew how much sandals cost in Kineshma and the price of a pound of chicken feathers in Kalyazin.

  One day Volodya Rumyantsev went to Oryold and brought sad news back to us. We were playing croquet beside the cottage. The game appealed to all of us. Games dragged out sometimes after it had grown dark, and lamps were carried out on to the croquet ground. We quarreled at croquet more than anywhere else, especially with my older brother Borya. He was a good player, and quickly became a “rover.” Then he would knock our balls so far that sometimes we couldn’t even find them. This made us very angry and, when he was aiming, we would chant, “The devil under your hand, a toad in your mouth!” This tactic sometimes helped and Borya would miss.

  We also quarreled with Gleb. When Gleb played against Sasha he always missed and lost on purpose, just to please her. But playing with Sasha against us, he performed miracles of skill and daring, and always won. All the inhabitants of the cottages usually gathered for our croquet games. Even Uncle Kolya’s two dogs, Mordan and Chetvertak, ran up to watch the game, although they then lay down cautiously under the pine trees so as not to get hit by a ball.

  On this morning it was just as noisy as always on the croquet ground. Then we heard the sound of wheels; Uncle Kolya’s springless carriage was driving up to the cottage. Someone cried out: “Volodya Rumyantsev has come!” No one paid any attention to this: we were all used to Volodya’s private departures and arrivals.

  A minute later he appeared. He walked up to us in loose overalls and boots. His face was all creased up, as if he were going to cry. He was holding a newspaper in his hand.
r />   “What’s the matter?” Uncle Kolya asked him, frightened.

  “Chekhov has died.”

  Volodya turned and walked back to the cottage. We ran after him. Uncle Kolya took the paper from Volodya, read it, threw it on the floor, and stalked off to his own room. Aunt Marusya went anxiously after him. Pavila took off his pince-nez and cleaned them for a long time with his handkerchief.

  “Kostik,” Mama said to me, “go down to the river and call your father. Let him interrupt his fishing for once.”

  She said this as if my father should already have known about Chekhov’s death but with his usual flippancy had attached no significance to the news and had not grieved over it. I took offense for my father, but I went down to the river. Gleb Afanasiev walked with me. He became suddenly very serious.

  “Yes, Kostik!” he said to me on the way, and he sighed deeply.

  I told my father that Chekhov had died. My father suddenly grew pinched in the face and all hunched over.

  “Well, well,” he said, in confusion, “how can it be? I never thought that I would outlive Chekhov …”

  We walked back past the croquet ground. The mallets and balls lay scattered on the ground. The birds were making a racket in the linden trees, the sun shone through the leaves and made green spots on the grass.

  I had already read Chekhov and I liked him very much. I walked away, and thought that such people as Chekhov should never die.

  Two days later Volodya Rumyantsev went to Moscow to Chekhov’s funeral. We accompanied him to the station at Sinezerki. He took a basket full of flowers to put on Chekhov’s grave. They were common wild flowers which we picked in the marshes and in the woods. Mama packed them on a layer of wet moss and covered them with wet linen. We tried to pick as many country flowers as we could because we were sure that Chekhov loved these. We had a lot of Solomon’s seal, pinks, and camomile. Aunt Marusya added some jasmine which she cut in the park.

  The train left in the evening. We returned on foot from Sinezerki to Ryovna, and we got home only at dawn. A young moon was hanging low over the woods, and its tender light shone in the pools of rain. It had rained not long before. The grass had a wet smell. A late cuckoo called in the park. Then the moon disappeared and the stars came out, but an early morning fog soon blanketed them. The fog rustled for a long time, trickling down the bushes, until a calm sun came out and warmed the earth.

  Volodya’s peregrinations aside, as well as my own, you may think the Ukraine on July 2, 1904, a long way from the Bahamas a century later—and you’d be right. But so what? As Louis Armstrong said, if you can’t hear the music, I can’t explain it to you.

  But Sis, I’m sure you can hear the music.

  You’ll discover that it’s a hard book to find as it’s been out of print, in English at least, for something like thirty years. I paid four dollars for my used copy in Key West. Could it be any more expensive on the West Coast? I’d never heard of it before. One day, as I was hovering over a bin of tattered spines, the book just jumped into my hand. The Story of a Life has a deservedly famous first chapter. A few lines and I was hooked.

  Famous. Listen to me. Since I discovered it for myself, I’ve never met anybody who has even heard of this book, let alone read it.

  But you’re in San Francisco, for chrissakes. Surely you can find a copy in San Francisco?

  Thirty years! Did I point that out already? I’m pointing it out again. Injustices too numerous to number happen every day, and perhaps each and every one of them is a greater crime than the misdemeanor of this memoir’s neglect. But, so, let them be greater. How is the mind supposed to compass a so-called civilization that daily squanders such gems or, put another way, engenders such philistinisms. Engenders? Hah! Manufactures wholesale, is more like it, and vended at a great markup, down the throat, with a funnel. If paté likewise lacked flavor and nutrition, the force-feeding of geese wouldn’t even be an issue.

  There’s a long list of these cultural atrocities. I needn’t retail them. It would spoil the intense pleasure I took in copying out the passage, despite my penmanship.

  I’m reminded of another book. A History of Pi by Petr Beckmann. It’s full of interesting things, if you happen to be interested in a certain transcendental number; among them, Beckmann estimates the success of a given civilization in terms of its advancement of mankind’s knowledge of pi. By this measure the Roman Empire, despite its might, power, scope, and longevity, achieved very little; not only did it advance mankind’s knowledge of pi not a whit, but in the course of its conquest of Carthage it slew Archimedes, who was arguably, among many other accomplishments, one of pi’s greatest exegetes. Exponents? Ah! A lousy pun at last.

  Perceived by this light, American civilization has sporadically achieved a great deal. But does not its attempt to preserve the cultural legacy of one of its great immigrant populations, namely, the translation of The Story of a Life, add immeasurably to this achievement? And will not future historians rank the subsequent neglect of that book among our culture’s most intimate diminutions?

  Ah, I’m just gassing on. Maybe if there’s some bread left over after this score I’ll bring Paustovsky’s book back into print myself. How do you like that idea, Sis? After all the miles I’ve sailed, the navigation I’ve sussed, the uninhabited cays I’ve camped on, the fish I’ve caught, the reefs I’ve dived, the books I’ve read, the money I’ve pissed away, the drugs I’ve consumed, the women I never married, and the rehabilitation I’ve undergone at the hands of the state—perhaps I’ll wind up being remembered for the republication of a single, obscure work of literature, and nothing else.

  But that’s a pipe dream, yet another among Charley’s pipe dreams. The only reason I know the name of the translator or the publisher of The Story of a Life is because I took the trouble to glance at the title page. The name of the editor who caused the book to be translated and published isn’t mentioned.

  Not to mention there’s never enough money. Goddamn money.

  The boat floats, the boatwright is forgotten, and maybe that’s as it should be. Paustovsky’s book, in my mind at least, remains. And when I die, and the book remains out of print, what will become of this impression? Perhaps above my grave a leaf will tremble. Perhaps, one warm day, in the little grove adjacent the cemetery, a visitor, seeking shade, will find a lost croquet ball. Hah. Faded and checked, dotted with the little perforations peculiar to powder post beetles, half-buried in pine straw.

  A forgotten hemisphere. A microcosmic Ozymandius.

  On the other hand, maybe if this last score comes through, and it really is big, and there are no legal fees or repercussions, maybe I can find a snug harbor for me and this damn boat, and read and read and read.

  Much as I do now, plus or minus a certain exhausted restlessness.

  When I first went to sea, I had this idea that there’d never be a dull moment. There would be danger, whiskey, storms, women, big square-riggers, strange cultures, pirates. Well, there have been all that and more. I had certain charts for so long they fell to pieces. I lost half my left pinky to a back-wound jib sheet—and I’ve probably never mentioned that to you before, have I. I saw a crew member on an ocean racer fall overboard and get nailed by a shark while he was still tethered to the boat. I saw a pregnant woman get knifed in a bar. I can splice double-braid or crown a rope end or throw a tugboat bowline with the best of them. Tune rigging, even tame a diesel engine. I’ve been hauled up an 85-foot mast in a bosun’s chair in heavy seas. I watched a hurricane slam that same boat against a jetty and reduce her to splinters—a million-dollar loss, technically; a one-of-a-kind loss in reality. The first night on my first ship I punched out the second mate, who was drunk and coming on to me. I snorted pure pink Peruvian flake off a 19-year old girl’s ass cheek and chased it with rum the same age. The first and third of these were gifts from a provincial governor’s personal stash. Later, he got his throat cut. The girl married a Swiss surgeon. I pulled a stretch in prison. I never got a tattoo. At
least I’m not a vegetarian. I lived aboard with Sandy for almost three years in Key West, put up with her Scientology, took a berth on a rich man’s boat to make ends meet, came home three months later to find the woman gone. The boat was still there, locked up, it’s true, but with her interior mildewed beyond redemption. The note Sandy left on the berth had been reduced to illegibility by mold, and I never discovered the text. My complexion’s as wrinkled as an old sail but I didn’t get melanoma—not yet, anyway. I helped one of the best boatwrights in the Caribbean shape a hull from scratch. I never killed anybody. I moved a lot of dope for some very tough people. I got caught. I started over again. I squandered money, energy, health, decades. I had a blast or, better to say, I had what passes for a blast. Often I had no fun at all. I contributed to the ephemeral. I spent a lot of time at sea. That’s how one gets healthy again. And recovers time. And space. Spatiotemporal salubrity—you read it here first. I engaged a vast deal of spatiotemporality alone. I’m not sure what that means.

  Of one thing I am certain. The price of freedom was—is—a lot higher than I thought it would be.

  TWELVE

  “THAT CHARLEY,” TIPSY SIGHED. “DO YOU THINK CHURCH BELLS WILL RING across America when, say, Philip Roth dies?”

  Quentin frowned. “No. But perhaps, in homage, some New Jersey masturbator will prolong his ecstasy by one or two strokes.”

  “Whoa, Nellie!”

  “Consider such remarks,” Quentin said modestly, “the prerogative of an old man.”

  Tipsy shook her head. “Some days, next to you, I just don’t feel like a fully developed character. Still,” she folded the letter, “it’s sweet that Charley thinks I’m even capable of reading some Russian memoir.”