by Jim Nisbet
“How come?” the lady asked.
“Charley’s dead,” Cedric said.
“I’m sorry to hear it.” She handed him the printed receipt. “Take a right out of the elevator on the second floor.”
In a bar. He wasn’t sure when, where, or how he got there.
Another guy, already in there, was already drunk.
Cedric was loaded, too. This bar lacked a television, it was fairly dark, the sound seemed to be turned off on all the poker games, though their lights flashed, and Frank and Nancy Sinatra were singing “Something Stupid” together.
The nap had worked out okay, but he woke to the reverberations of televisions in every room around him—one above, one below, one each on two sides. So he checked out.
The spaghetti had been soggy, the meatballs tasteless, the Caesar salad frozen, and the wine a vinegar—an al Dante meal, indeed. The free poker chips never materialized, perhaps because, having tasted each of the servings, he put down his fork and waited for the next installment, only to find himself repeating the performance. The thing that protracted the meal beyond a half hour was the whiskey-rocks he enjoyed between each disappointing performance from the kitchen.
He had an hour to kill before the next bus.
The jukebox fell silent. Cedric dropped his sea bag next to a stool and ordered Irish whiskey from the well and on the rocks. The bartender wore a flannel shirt, black jeans, athletic socks, bedroom slippers. Her hair was carelessly piled atop her head and affixed there by two black enameled chopsticks with ideograms stenciled along their length that wished everybody, no doubt, a happy new year.
“That looks like a double,” Cedric observed.
“Let me guess,” the woman said. “You can’t control yourself so you want me to dole it out slowly.”
Cedric smiled and raised the glass. “Cheers.”
“What are you looking forward to?” said the man at the corner of the bar.
“Who?” Cedric looked around. “Me?”
“You,” the man said. “I’m buying you that drink and I want to know what you’re looking forward to.”
Cedric shrugged. “San Francisco.”
The man blinked. “That’s it?”
“You don’t like the answer, don’t buy the drink.” Cedric counseled him.
The man shook his head. “You look to me like one a them immigrants that stretches carpet in high-roller suites. Either that, or you’re going to San Francisco because you’re queer.” He squinted. “Which is it?”
On the coaster in front of Cedric, “Winner!” was printed in a red arc of wanted-poster type surmounting a two-inch disk of mylar in which, if the angle were correct and the light sufficient, the drinker would see a reflection of his own face.
Cedric took a second look at the character across the bar. This individual had a very closely shaved pink face beneath a drying-at-low-tide peninsula of thin hair. Although he probably weighed two hundred pounds he looked as though he might be in some kind of shape, despite the gin blossoms that festooned his upper cheeks and the fractaling veins that empurpled his nose. Bags subtended his eyes, which distension served to sadden his malignity. His labored breathing reinforced the banality of the drivers X-ed over the words Desert Golf on the breast of his polo shirt, open at the neck and displaying a lot of hair among which nestled a chain of miniscule links from which depended a droplet of gold resembling a molten spermatozoon.
Cedric always noticed the hands and in this case the man wore on the third knuckle of the middle finger of the right hand a ring set with a large hemisphere of garnet. A proper delivery of this stone could pop the orbit of a man’s eye like a ball-peen hammer shattering a light bulb.
Cedric leaned one elbow on the bar, pinched his nose and upper lip between thumb and fingers, and said tiredly, “I don’t know a goddamn thing about carpet or high rollers or homosexuality—although,” he added thoughtfully, “I am a sailor.” He turned his head and scratched one ear, then looked back at the man and added, “But even if I did, I fail to understand why I should even entertain the idea of discussing it with a peckerwood such as yourself.”
Six days of boredom is enough already.
“What did you call me?” the man replied after a stunned silence.
The bartender had retired to the far end of the bar to page through a copy of People magazine, but now she looked up.
Boredom aside, Cedric couldn’t have said exactly why he responded thus to a perfect stranger. Maybe the stranger didn’t strike him as perfect? The bar was sea-sawing? Maybe whiskey actually worked? “Look,” he said reasonably. “Is this nineteenth century behavior in the twenty-first century, or what?”
“No,” the man replied smugly, saliva evident in his sibilants. “This is Nevada.” The menace in his voice was sufficiently histrionic as to be only slightly less implausible than it was unmistakable.
Cedric turned to the bartender. “Is this any way to let your customers talk?”
“What way is that?” the woman asked him, wide-eyed.
Cedric jerked a thumb toward the man in the catbird seat. “His way.”
“Mister,” she said. “Talcott there is a regular, and I don’t know you from Charley Chan.”
“Charley Chan.” Talcott guffawed caustically. “Fucking queer.”
Cedric blinked, sighed, set down his glass. “How much for the drink?”
“I done told you, immigrant,” Talcott said, before the bartender could reply, “I am buying your goddamn drink.”
Cedric looked at Talcott. “I don’t accept drinks from racist peckerwoods.”
The bartender gasped.
Talcott manifested a grin of intense satisfaction. “What’d you call me?”
“How much for the drink?” Cedric repeated to the bartender.
“I’m talking to you,” Talcott said.
“Racist is nothing you haven’t been called before.” Cedric looked from the bartender to Talcott. “Unless this entire town is chickenshit.”
Talcott’s mouth deployed a leer and he straightened up on his stool.
My my my, Cedric observed to himself, the corpse sits up in the sun. And it’s tall, too.
“Never have I ever been so disrespected.” Talcott’s expression subsided into one of aggrieved sincerity. “I’m not sure I appreciate it.”
“One of the things about getting infantilized by alcohol,” Cedric advised him, “is that you have to get used to deriving less and less nutrition from eating more and more shit. The upside is, from early on, it all tastes the same.”
Though he frowned at this, Talcott pushed back his stool.
Make that two-thirty, two thirty-five, Cedric thought, and maybe six foot three.
“Double down!” one of the bartop poker machines suddenly erupted. “Pow pow, pow pow pow!”
Cedric stood and dropped a ten dollar bill on the bar. “I sincerely hope there’s enough in there for a tip,” he said to the woman without looking at her, “I’ve got a bus to catch. By the way, I’d like to thank you for pouring an honest drink.” He rattled the ice in the empty glass and fed a couple of cubes into his mouth. “I am a little concerned, however,” he allowed, as he set the empty tumbler on the bar, “about your taste in customers.”
Talcott stepped around the corner of the bar, buffing the ring on his right hand with the palm of the left, and waxing with pre-coital anticipation.
Cedric chewed ice and pointed at the street door, which was now directly behind Talcott. “It would be a very easy thing to abstract yourself from between me and the exit. Smart, too.”
Talcott shook his head. “I am the red carpet to your future, you immigrant pissant.”
“Well,” Cedric said, manifesting resignation as Talcott approached, “I guess we’re about to determine who is the bigger sociopath in this joint.” He stuffed his folding money into a back pocket of his jeans. “Or the dumber,” he added.
A diminutive wisp of a premonition wafted from the left side of Talcott’s brai
n to the right side, as mirror-imaged in the man’s eyes, but it radiated little more comprehension than the ghost of a man who has spent forty-two years as the host of a television game show, only to drop dead in the studio parking lot of a massive coronary.
“Peckerwood,” Cedric said wearily, “you’re in my goddamn way.”
Talcott, each hand balled into a fist, advanced a step. He might have had something going for him, other than the punch he could throw with the ring, but Cedric, who liked his eye sockets just the way they were, didn’t wait to find out. Before Talcott could uncork the ring, Cedric sortied a left at his nose. Talcott brushed it clumsily up between his two crossed forearms, completely exposing his torso, and all went irrelevant. Cedric’s right jabbed twice the base of Talcott’s sternum. The blow would have been damaging in any case, let alone that blow repeated, but Cedric had taken the precaution of striking with a fist clenched around the heft of his new rigging knife. The knife was not open, to be sure, but it added considerable linear momentum to the two blows. Talcott exhaled so thoroughly that his lips flapped, covering the backs of his own wrists with saliva. Cedric administered a third blow to the abdomen, right above Talcott’s dick, if he had one. Then the insides of his knees touched, he evacuated, and his entire anatomy transmogrified into primordial pith.
Little else mattered. Cedric stepped back. Talcott reeled, sagged, clasped both hands to the afflicted part, and collapsed into so abject a genuflection it might have shattered both patellae. Adroitly set up for the kill, had Cedric skewed homicidal, Talcott looked up at his new master, whose head appeared to him to be rising toward the ceiling. A singular pallor suffused the bepuzzlement that transfixed Talcott’s visage and, though he waited, the blow did not come. It didn’t have to. Talcott fell forward like a timbered redwood and kissed the floor a dreadful smack, snapping off both of his upper incisors. Talcott made no move to break the fall. The impact sounded as if someone had swatted the parquet with a sock full of nickels. Talcott was spared awareness of this ignominy, however, for on the way down his right temple glanced the two-inch brass knob on a footrail stanchion, and by the time the bar flooded to bursting with paramedics, firemen, and police officers, Talcott’s enjoy-by date had expired.
The owner appeared, too, an older individual with a tousled cowlick who had obviously been napping in some back room. “Thank you, stranger,” the man said, pumping Cedric’s hand. “That Talcott prick was the bane of our establishment. Until you came to town, nobody would go up against him. Good riddance to bad Irish rubbish.” He indicated the bartender, who modestly touched her hair. “As a fit reward, I want you to marry my daughter. Someday,” the owner spread his spare arm, “all this will be yours.”
The woman behind the bar smiled. Cedric hadn’t noticed the gap between her teeth. Nor the freckles in her flanneled decolletage. The package looked rather attractive.
“I’m deeply gratified,” Cedric said, “but I think we should have sex first.”
This startled the owner. “Say,” he narrowed his eyes, “are you from San Francisco?”
“Not you and me,” Cedric hastened to clarify. “Me and your daughter.”
“Oh, well,” the man beamed, reassured. “That’s different.”
The daughter beamed too, and she set aside her copy of People magazine.
Cedric woke up.
The bus roared out of a narrow gap rockdrilled through the shoulder of an arid butte, and the highway descended into a long, sun-blasted valley. A sign, faded from the green of pool table felt to a sage without chroma, loomed large in the windshield
Right Lane Route 68
KINGMAN 1-3/4
BULLHEAD CITY 40
and disappeared into the rearward bluster of the Hound’s blowby.
When Cedric attempted to rub the glare out of his eyes, he discovered that his right fist was balled up around the marlinspike knife. Jesus Christ, Cedric thought, looking at the knife, whose blade was closed, if I don’t ease up on that brown liquor, these blackouts are going to make a monkey out of me.
The Greyhound took the exit without slowing.
FIFTEEN
WHAT WITH ONE THING AND ANOTHER, I’VE GOT THE MOOD AND THE TIME FOR this last rumination. There’s some guys fishing small boats around here today. For a few bucks I’m sure I can get one of them to take a letter into Landrail Point, whence eventually it will make its way over to the post office at Colonel Hill. Latter is slam on the other side of Crooked Island from here, a matter of some fifteen miles as the fish flies, way more than that as the ambulation rambles. Not to mention, the supply boat only stops by there once a week. So it’s probably going to be a good long time before this gets to you, Sis. And that’ll be it for a good long time after that. A real long time.
Early in his career Red stole two kilos of cocaine right out from under the mule smuggling it. On the car ferry from Port Angeles to Victoria—that is to say from the US to Canada—the mule met a pretty French Canadienne and spent the trip in the lounge chatting her up. The language barrier didn’t seem all that much of a problem, for she laughed at everything he said. She was working for Red, of course. Red had been waiting for his chance and this ferry ride was ideal.
Ironically, if the authorities were slaying the guy, Red might have been doing him a favor. If they were going to pounce so as not to lead the mule’s organization to suspect it had been penetrated, a customs bust at an international border would be an innocuous way to do it. We say nothing, here, of what the mule’s organization might do to him for blowing the run, regardless of the reason for his failure.
But Red couldn’t give a damn about that angle. As far as he was concerned, if the guy had been paying attention to his job, Red would never had gotten his chance, so the responsibility was on him. Or, as Red himself put it, “While his jaw was flappin’, my claws was scrappin’.”
Once aboard the ferry, the mule waited for everybody to go upstairs to the snack bar. Then he moved the load, two one-kilo parcels, each including a powerful magnet, from his own vehicle to the inside of the back bumper of a tricked-out Winnebago with Arizona license plates, which was parked on the car deck a couple of vehicles in front of him. You know the kind. A motorscooter on a rack out front, awnings and bay-window extensions on either side, a Jeep on a towbar out back, the whole rig is forty feet long, it takes three or four people to jockey it onto the ferry. This was in springtime, when the snowbirds head north to British Columbia. The retired couple driving the Winnebago wouldn’t know a thing, and Canadian customs would wave them right through. Altogether an excellent choice.
Then the mule went to the bar, and Red’s move was simplicity itself: he swapped Winnebagos.
Once off the ferry, the mule trailed after the first Winnebago, and Red followed the second one. All either of them had to do was track some ignorant tourists around Victoria for the day. Every tourist eats, has a few drinks, goes to the bathroom, visits a museum. Somewhere along the line, Red would seize his chance.
Meanwhile, up the coast of B.C. in the next day or two, enacting a similar pattern, the mule would make an unnerving discovery.
In Vancouver—ideal on account of a big population base in which to get lost, not to mention a large demand for product—Red would be looking at something like $1,700 Canadian per ounce times 16 ounces per pound times 4.4 pounds equals $119,680 Canadian, depending upon how he moved it, minus the price of the girl. (As it happened she was Red’s partner at the time, name of Darla. So there was a fifty-fifty split. What a babe. And smart? She was faking the Quebeçois accent.) And what, two ferry tickets? Gas? A hotel room? Two tickets back to Florida? Pure profit with very little risk. All you needed was the nerve to do it.
All this by way of reassuring you that, while there are other people out there doing what Red Means does for a living, I work for Red because he’s the best.
Vellela Vellela and I had an uneventful passage to Albert Town from Port Nelson. Sixty-seven miles on a rhumb line, straight out the Crooked Islan
d Passage, never less than a thousand fathoms of blue water under the keel. Excellent and beautiful open ocean sailing under ideal conditions; a broad reach in ten to fifteen knots of trade wind, clear blue skies excepting voluminous cotton balls of cumulus blowing southeast to northwest topped by the odd thunderhead. Barometer steady. One mild squall mid-afternoon, fifteen minutes of solid rain, faired off not long after.
We spoke not a single vessel. Only the stack of a cruise ship rose over the horizon, easterly, at about eleven hundred hours. It looked to be heading on nearly a reciprocal course, and until it disappeared I amused myself calculating how far away it much have been. Estimating the middle of the stack, cut as it was by the curve of the earth, to be maybe 100 feet above the surface; and my eye, with me seated in the cockpit, maybe six feet above the surface (almost exact: I measured it), the vessel figured to have been some 24 miles distant.
That, Sis, is what I call elbow room.
It may well turn out to have been the nicest day of the whole voyage. Only trouble was no trouble at all. The main halyard was frayed, but I gleaned a nice trick long ago from one of Bernard Moitessier’s books, which is, when you reeve a new halyard you cut it long, five feet or more. Every halyard will fray where it passes over the sheave in the masthead block. Before the line breaks you cut off a foot toward the standing part, re-reeve the thimble into the new working end, and presto—an unfrayed halyard.
Moitessier wrote that, as he was sailing around the world or making an extensive passage, he re-rove each of his halyards every week. I don’t need to do that, of course. Moitessier’s running rigging almost certainly was hemp. But I’ve been more or less continuously at sea for three years. So fatigued and frayed lines are an issue.
So are sails, for that matter. Mine are sagging like a cheap suit. Sorry. But if I get to San Francisco I expect to be able to order a new suit of sails.