by Jim Nisbet
Tipsy started. “Quentin!” She stood up. “I forgot about Quentin!”
TWENTY-FOUR
TIPSY STOOD OFF THE BENCH AND ALMOST FELL OVER. “WHAT DID YOU DO to me?” she wailed, holding her head with one hand—and the edge of the chart table with the other.
“Pure reflex,” Red said, steadying her. “Plus, don’t forget, you’re on a boat.”
“How could I forget this nightmare?” She tore herself away from him. “Quentin!”
He lay on his back, right where Red had left him, with his head on the sword mat at the top of the companionway, its bleached sisal soaked in blood. Just as they reached him, Quentin began to spasm and vomit.
“Quentin!” Tipsy grabbed his shoulders. “What are you—” She shook him violently. “You choke on own your puke and I’ll kill you!”
“Son of a bitch,” Red groused, as he tried to push her out of the way. “Every time I turn my back on this job, it goes straight to shit.”
“Stop puking!”
“You know CPR?” Red demanded. “If not, move!”
“Are you kidding?” she replied, pushing back. “I can’t even swim!”
Red brushed her aside. “Call his name.” He rolled Quentin onto his stomach, with his head slightly beyond the top step of the saloon companionway. With an adroit, simultaneous push on either side of Quentin’s spine, he caused a bolus of mucus and vomit to be ejected from Quentin’s nose and mouth.
“Call his name!”
“Quentin! Goddamn you, answer me!”
Red rolled the half-conscious Quentin onto his back and swept the mouth with his forefinger, bringing up more mucus. He placed one hand atop Quentin’s sternum, his other hand atop that, and pushed down and released fourteen times, counting aloud. Then he pinched Quentin’s cheeks so that his mouth opened, leaned over, and his mouth was an inch from Quentin’s when Tipsy yelled, “Stop! Wait! Stop, stop!” and yanked Red by his hair.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Red angrily stiff-armed her. “I’m trying to save this guy’s life!”
Staggered by the blow, Tipsy began to hyperventilate. “He—He—”
“Out with it!”
She slid to the deck. “He has AIDS, you fucking idiot!”
Red blinked. “This guy has AIDS and I’m the idiot?” Tipsy’s eyes enlarged. Then she kicked him. Red ignored it. After a mere second’s consideration, he applied his thumbs to either side of Quentin’s jaw and thrust them upward. More mucus appeared at the corners of Quentin’s mouth, but not in such quantity as before.
“Soak a rag in cold water and bring it here. Maybe there’s a pair of gloves under the sink. If not, look in the engine room.”
It wasn’t the napkin with the yacht’s name embroidered into it that took her so long to find, it was the pair of rubber scullery gloves, neatly folded behind the trash can under the sink. By the time she returned to the bridge Red had air flowing through Quentin’s throat, and his chest and stomach were moving, though somewhat spasmodically. “Fold it up and press it against the head wound. Steady pressure, not too firm. Call his name.”
“Quentin … Quentin!”
Quentin groaned.
“Excellent! Call him!”
“Quentin.” Her voice broke. “Quentin, please!”
“T-Tipsy,” Quentin whispered.
“That’s it, old man.” Red belayed the chest compressions. “What’s your name?”
“Asche,” Quentin stammered feebly. “As in p-pain in the Asche. …”
Red raised an eyebrow. “I believe he’s going to make it.”
“He’d even make jokes at your funeral.” Tipsy took Quentin’s hand.
Red frowned as if puzzled. “What better place to make them?”
Quentin now breathed, if laboriously. His eyes remained closed. “I’m exhausted,” he whispered. “And I’ve got a splitting headache. What have you been drinking?”
Tipsy smiled through her tears. Back when he was a hypochondriac, before he had real medical problems, Quentin was a student of contact hangovers, to which he often referred as near-field wickedness.
“Let’s put him to bed,” Red suggested. “When he feels up to drinking some water, we’ll try to get some aspirin into him.”
“Are you sure it’s okay to let him sleep?”
“Why not? If he can’t sleep, we’ll have to deal him in on the rest of the pain that’s available around here.”
“You’re right. If he goes to sleep we can—” She stopped and frowned. We can what—take turns holding Charley’s head? And abruptly she realized that it had been some fifteen minutes since she’d last remembered to be upset about her brother’s head. Damn, came the very next thought. If that doesn’t prove you can get used to anything. …
One arm under the shoulders, the other under the knees, Red cradled and lifted Quentin as if he weighed no more than a bolt of velvet. They bundled Quentin into a bunk in the captain’s stateroom, which opened off the pilot house. Donning the blue gloves, Tipsy rinsed the blood out of the cloth napkin and reapplied it to the head wound. The gash, though two inches long, did not appear to include a skull fracture. Even so, the sight of it rattled Tipsy.
“Head wounds always bleed disproportionately to their severity,” Red reassured her, as well as Quentin.
“And proportionately to how much blood thinner you’re taking,” Tipsy pointed out.
“Warfarin, probably,” Red speculated. “Same shit they use to kill rats.”
Tipsy scowled. “You’re just a walking physician’s desk reference, aren’t you?”
“Maintain the pressure,” Red said. “It’ll just take longer for the platelets to rally to the cause.”
Two rinsed napkins later, the blood had slowed to a trickle.
“This boat is bigger than your apartment,” Quentin whispered, as Tipsy tucked the edge of a Tartan blanket under his chin. He lowered his eyes. “What’s with the tacky plaid?” And he fell asleep.
“He’s going to be fine,” Red said, as Tipsy closed the stateroom door.
“Thanks to you.”
Red regarded her. “Why didn’t you keep your mouth shut?”
“About the AIDS?” She shook her head. “Don’t be ridiculous.” The gloves were streaked with saliva, mucus, and blood. Red found a box of latex gloves in the engine room, and without a word they set about cleaning up the boat. They took up the sword mat, which was Velcroed to the deck, and put it into the washing machine, along with Quentin’s bloodied shirt, various cloth napkins, detergent, and bleach. They found a mop and a bucket and detergent and swabbed the deck and companionway steps. When they’d finished they returned to the saloon and washed up.
As he added a capful of bleach to the last basin of water, Red asked how long Quentin had been living with AIDS.
“It’s been about five years since the diagnosis,” came the answer.
Red rinsed his hands. “Is that why he’s so thin?”
“He’s always been slim, but, yes, he’s slimmer now.”
“Does he do the various medications?”
“A three-way cocktail. Plus the blood thinner, vitamins, and I don’t know what-all else.”
“What’s the prognosis?”
She shook her head.
“Nature will take its course,” Red adduced. “Some people survive for a long time. It helps to take care of yourself.”
“Hanging out with me probably doesn’t do him all that much good. He’ll get vituperative with anybody he disagrees with, which, while it stimulates him, makes demands on his energy. But he no longer drinks. That was a big step. The worst thing—” She lowered her voice. “The worst thing is—was—his fast lane with no-brain boyfriend, who’ll down any drug that comes along and still likes a popper as he’s coming.”
Red raised an eyebrow. “That’s bad for you?”
“It’s bad for Quentin. Not anymore, though, maybe?” She crossed each middle finger over its index finger. “Quentin seems to have broken it off with hi
m.”
“Does he have anybody else?”
She shook her head. “Just me. His family quit talking to him decades ago. Now, ironically enough, he’s outlived every one of them.”
“Why’d they quit talking to him?”
“He’s gay, and they hated him for it.”
“Stupid,” Red said. “But at least he knew why they hated him.”
Tipsy considered this. “You know,” she said, “I’ll have to point that out to him. Anyway,” she added, “you saved his life.”
“I’d have done the same for you.”
She looked at him. “Mouth to mouth?”
He looked at her. “You know, when we were fighting back there?” He snapped his fingers. “I just about got wood.”
So much for coquetry. Tipsy’s jaw dropped, but she didn’t manage to suppress a smile, and she blushed.
Red preceded her to the chart table and poured two glasses of rum. As she was drying her hands, he said to his drink, “I’d have done the same for your brother, too, if I’d gotten there in time.” She added the hand towel to the washing machine, a compact Italian front-loader which would make an astonishing variety of audible machinations as it both washed and dried. After a prolonged study of its control panel, she managed to start it.
As she closed the teak bifold doors that concealed the laundry closet, Tipsy was nearly overwhelmed by feelings such as she had not experienced in a long time, if ever—tender regard, gratitude, the fatigue that succeeds a surge of adrenaline, the incongruous opulence of the amenities which presently surrounded them, anger, shock, a severed head in the refrigerator. When you drink yourself to sleep most nights, she thought to herself, it’s hard to articulate any feeling at all. Aloud she said, “Are you ready to tell me what happened to Charley?”
“Are you ready to hear it?”
She nodded. “Yes.”
Red wasted no time. He stepped to the wheelhouse, returned with a briefcase, cleared the saloon table, and unfolded a bedraggled chart. NOAA 11013, Tipsy read at a corner of its margin, Straits of Florida and Approaches. Also from the briefcase Red produced dividers, a pencil, parallel rulers, a navigation triangle, a knackered copy of Reed’s Nautical Almanac for the Caribbean, and lastly a school copy book, its cover a mottled black and white to which was glued the type of label one might expect to find on a jar of home-made jam, white with a red border and chamfered corners. On it was written, in Charley’s careful script,
Log of Vessel
Vellela Vellela
Vol. XI
“Volume Eleven,” Tipsy read aloud. “He was only aboard that boat for three years.”
“Charley tended to bloviation in his logbooks.”
“And the other ten?”
“Gone down with the ship.” Red tapped the copy book with a finger. “He made the last entry in this one the day before she foundered.”
Tipsy stared at it.
“Wrap yourself around a drink,” Red suggested.
She looked at her glass. “I’ve had enough for the moment.”
Red took a sip from his own drink and set it aside. “Where was Charley the last time you heard from him?”
Tipsy indicated the bottle. “A place called Rum Cay. Wait. It was the next stop. He sent me a rambling couple of pages from his next stop. I can’t remember the name, but it was a day’s sail from Rum Cay.”
“Long Cay.” Red took up the dividers. “They’re quite close together, and either one is a good place to begin the tale of Vellela Vellela’s last adventure.”
“Charley’s last adventure,” Tipsy qualified glumly.
“And your next one.”
She shook her head. “I don’t do adventure.”
Red produced a pair of reading glasses from the briefcase. “You do now.” Displaying the habitude of a man unused to wearing them, starting with one ear and working toward the other, he wrapped the temple bars around his face by hooking one onto his left ear, then turning his head inside the spectacles until he’d hooked his right ear. He cocked his head back, so as to read through the half-lenses, and touched the dividers to the chart. “Rum Cay.”
Tipsy leaned over the chart. “It looks tiny.”
“It is that.” Pricking one leg of the dividers into a pre-existing hole at Rum Cay, Red stretched the other leg of the dividers almost due south, until its pin touched another island. “Long Cay. See this symbol?” He touched a finger to the chart. “That’s a wreck. Probably more than one.” He moved the dividers over to the latitude scale, on the right-hand edge of the chart, and read off the distance. “… About sixty-seven nautical miles. Rum Cay is big enough for a bar, diesel and groceries, a one-man dive outfit, not much else. Albert Town, on the other hand, on the south end of Long Cay, is deserted.”
“You’ve been there.”
Red shook his head. “Never had a reason to visit Albert Town. I own a piece of a little business on Rum Cay, however, that silk-screens t-shirts, which I then import into the States. They’re designed by my former wife and screened by her current boyfriend. They’ve lived on Rum Cay ever since she got out of rehab.”
“I thought your wife died of cancer.”
“Different wife.”
“How many wives have you had?”
“I can remember two. Your brother was talented, you know.”
“Sure. I … Well, actually … You know, Red, I haven’t. …” She arrested a glance at the refrigerator behind her. “I’m surprised I recognized him.” She managed a small half-laugh before her voice trailed to nothing.
“Are you okay?”
“No. Should I be?”
Red nodded. “Charley was an accomplished sailor, among other things. Good sextant navigator. Handy with the marlinspike. A fine boatwright. And he could cook, too.” Red leaned over the chart, waggled the folded dividers between fore and index fingers, and peered at the speck at the far southeastern edge of the Bahamas, pale green amid soundings of thousands of fathoms. “Let’s pretend we’re calling in at Rum Cay.” He took up Reed’s, consulted its index, and found his place. “Port Nelson, Rum Cay,” he read aloud. “You may be able to tie up at the government dock temporarily. Depths are reported to be less than 6 feet.” He looked up from the book. “Six feet is one fathom.” He touched the chart. “Just here, on the northwest corner of the island, soundings exceed 2,000 fathoms. If you could see a topographical representation of this tiny island, rising from a bottom two miles deep, you’d probably find it frightening.” He glanced at her over the half-lenses. “Vellela Vellela had a draft of a little less than five feet.”
“Sounds like a near thing.”
Red shrugged. “It’s mean lower low. Anchor west of town,” he continued to read, “as depths permit. The charted approach takes you through a deep passage between several coral reefs. A bearing of 013°T—the T stands for True—on Cotton Field Point brings you safely across the reef. When the dock at Port Nelson bears 081°T steer for the dock. …” He turned a page and flattened the book on the table so she could see it. “Here’s the local chart.” He moved the stainless steel points of the dividers over it. “Heads up, the soundings on this chart are in meters. I’ve marked the bearings. Here’s Cotton Field Point. Here’s the approach. Thirteen degrees bears like this. These are reefs. Prevailing wind and current both come out of the southeast until you get inside, where the wind drops and the current tends to come round this way. … There’s the tide to take into consideration, of course. Here’s the Port Nelson bearing. Come to starboard. …”
“Jeez,” Tipsy said. “Is the point that it’s complicated?”
“Yes, and more so because your brother did this stuff under sail, without an engine.”
“Really? Why?”
“Well, for one thing, his boat didn’t have a goddamn engine. But, for another, that’s the way he wanted it.”
“Is that as difficult as it sounds?”
“Very few modern sailors have what it takes to do it. Skill, patience, nerve—a
nd two anchors immediately to hand.”
“Or stupidity. Or foolhardiness.”
“As you like.” Red took up the logbook. “Let me be straight with you, Tipsy—”
“Oh, do,” she retorted.
Red’s eyes met hers. “Settle down,” he suggested. “I’m hoping that somewhere in here …” He burnished the cover of the logbook with his palm. Tipsy noted, not for the first time, that his hands had been calloused and thickened by work. “… lies a hint or a clue as to what Charley did to himself and, in turn, what he’s even now doing to us.”
“From beyond a watery grave,” she qualified bitterly.
“As I said before,” Red’s eyes were steady on her, “we’re stuck with each other. We don’t have the time to get pissed off about how we got into this. We need to get pissed off about how we’re going to get out of it.”
“Maybe you could start by telling me what ‘this’ is.” She assessed Red with a frank look.
Red assessed her back. “There will be no wriggling on the hook,” he told her. “We’re going to be partners on this problem until it’s solved. You hear what I’m saying?” He shook his head. “We have no choice. You have to trust me; I have to trust you. For the time being, please take my word for that and,” he handed her the logbook, “give this your undivided attention.”
She looked at it but she didn’t take it. “But what—?”
“Before we get off this boat,” he interrupted, “you will have the whole story, I promise, even if it takes all night to explain it. I’m hoping for a little enlightenment myself. Okay? And don’t worry.” He placed the logbook on the chart in front of her. “It’s all going to become too depressingly clear what we’re up against.”
The logbook’s pages, once soaked in water and now dried, looked as if they were stacked in waves. “I dried it with a thermocouple heat gun,” Red noted. “I keep it on the boat for shrink.” She looked up, puzzled. “It’s like a hair dryer,” Red waved a fist back and forth. “Heat-shrink? For sealing electrical connections? It’s a kind of tubing. …” She shook her head. He shook his head. “Skip it.” He opened the logbook to a page marked by a paperclip. “Read aloud. We’ll follow the voyage on the chart.”