by Jim Nisbet
“Zeitgeist,” La Bwana reiterated, as if suffused by introspection, “hales from the same German era that bequeathed us heroin and propaganda. Zeitgeist, heroin, propaganda—what a legacy!” La Bwana declared, “And yet, these, too, shall pass … !”
Animatronic simulacra of hypsignathus monstrosus, the female of which has an ovipositor the size of a cutlass hilt, Möbiused the microsphere, ovipositing flybuttons throughout the holotorium, each of which displayed one or another of the sanctioned logos appropriate to the current Info. (“The State Is Best Served In Silence,” “Immediately Following The Game,” read one, “The Losing Team Shall Be Sacrificed,” read its companion, along with the old standby, “Resist Little, Obey Much,” as well as the classic, “Ahhhh hahahaha …”) The flybuttons disseminated themselves Poissonately beneath the pyrolyzed acreage of the Holodome, among delegates, telegates, and hologates. Beams of enlightenment swiveled amongst the crowd. The smurfs kept their Planck distance. Shadow9s slept in dark louvered lockers, in rows, like bats, like hypsignathus monstrous, like in shifts. It’s a budget thing.
Fade to black amid the strains of the old Condor Silversteed standard,
You came to me
Like a bill from nowhere …
Tipsy frowned and shifted in her chair. Had she mailed a check to PG&E? But she did not wake up.
… The spotlight reignited as Condor Silversteed himself made a surprise appearance, not to perform but to wave at you, ready on the left, at you, ready on the right, and at you, ready down the middle. …
A girl standing right next to the moonlighting Officer Few screamed “He looked at me! He looked at me!” and fainted of happiness.
It is The True.
VI
WINDWARD PASSAGE
A day spent sailing is not attributed
to the sumtotal of those allotted
to a man’s life
On the wall at the Cat ‘n’ Fiddle
Sausalito, California
THIRTY-SEVEN
THE CARIBBEAN LOOKED GOOD. ITS BLUES WERE CERULEAN. PORPOISES swarmed under the bow, laced air to water beyond the pulpit, and squealed. Gulls trailed after the stern and snagged bits of smoked ham launched off the tips of her fingers. Fish claimed what little the gulls missed. A million dollar yacht motored in this direction and a two million dollar yacht sailed in that direction, and everybody looked good. Having been gone for a while, Red engaged a lovely suite in a beachfront motor court while the bottom was waxed and the stainless polished. He loosed a curious mixture of bleach and white vinegar in a glass chafing dish below decks, left closed the port holes and sealed the companionway for twenty-four hours, aired it out for an additional day and, voilà, no mildew, no mold, not a single living creature survived the resulting chlorine gas.
“That ordnance sounds dangerous,” she observed.
“Only if you inhale,” Red pointed out.
“Do insects inhale?”
“No. They bite.”
Red even went with her to the supermarket, the first man in her life since the carpenter to do that, and picked up the tab for $450 worth of booze and groceries. Then they went to a big chandlery and spent a comparable amount on gear—foulies, sun block, shorts, hats, flares, batteries, charts. Red insisted that Tipsy wait until he had departed the building before she paid cash for the charts. Then they went to a bookstore where she stocked up on mysteries plus titles concerned with women living aboard, women at sea, The Idiot’s Guide to Radar, and a book specifically about catching and preparing edible Caribbean fish. If it was inedible, there was an appendix on taxidermy.
“Man,” she said, “look at the tools you need.”
Red had a look. “It’s the same stuff you need to bleed a diesel.”
“Then we’re covered?”
“We’re covered.”
“Good. You can mount the trophies.” She added the book to the pile.
Red just laughed and paid the bill.
Tipsy had never seen anything like it. After a week or so, the realization dawned that San Francisco had fogged her brain as well as her weather, and that, until this trip to Florida, a very fundamental thing about her brother had escaped her notice: the Caribbean is a beautiful place. So what if it’s hot? Some people consider that a plus.
“If you stay on the water,” Red pointed out, “it doesn’t matter how hot it gets.” When they first walked down the dock, pushing a cart full of books and supplies, Red had stopped them alongside a huge boat. “Welcome aboard.”
Tipsy couldn’t believe her eyes. “This is Tunacide?”
“According to the transom.”
“Red—it’s beautiful!”
“So are you,” Red said. “You really like it?”
“Like it? It’s the nicest boat I’ve ever been this close to.”
“But it’s way smaller than Kreutzer’s Revenge.”
Tipsy frowned. “Never heard of it.”
“Well,” Red said, unabashedly enthusiastic, “get closer.”
On the trip across the country, they had become inseparable. They consulted each other over the smallest decisions. Peanut butter, for example. Smooth or crunchy? Whatever you want, darling. No no, dear, you decide. … How about this motel? Sure, why not …
The captain’s berth was as expansive and comfortable a place as anyone with reasonable appetites for such things might have hoped for, in which to wait out the tail end of hurricane season. They went to bed early and got up late. They anchored out in various secret spots scattered about the Keys, they snorkled, they prepared excellent meals and consumed them at their leisure, they drank all day but rarely to excess—spoken like a true alcoholic! Truth to tell, however, it was too hot for heavy drinking. Tipsy took to sunbathing on a thick towel on the foredeck with sun block, hat, and a Simenon wedged between the anchor rode and the deck so it wouldn’t blow away before she may or may not get around to finishing it. She developed a nice tan and a thorough one too; nude swimming and sunbathing were entirely acceptable at every one of Red’s solitary anchorages, as were eating and drinking in moderation so as to look good doing it. Tipsy quickly narrowed it down to iced white wine spritzers and a drink called a Stormy Weather—a pint glass brimful of cracked ice, a jigger of a cheap, excellent black Haitian rhum called Dithyrambe du Gonave of which Tunacide carried two cases, a squeeze with its wedge of fresh lime as an antiscorbutic, topped off with an English brand of ginger beer of tart piquancy such as she’d never tasted, of which there were at least four cases in the hold. Fit to slake the thirst, sting the tongue, and mellow the hemoglobin—delicious.
It turned out Red could prepare any kind of fish any way she wanted, let alone ways in which she didn’t know she wanted but learned to crave, so there went that cookbook, but he also had in his head a quiver of odd recipes for, as an example or two, a killer Caesar salad, another salad, perhaps Thai in origin, based on jicama and serrano peppers, as well as a Moroccan dish made with apricots and lamb served over couscous. Tipsy eventually let Red do at least half the cooking because, although she wasn’t incompetent in the kitchen, most of their meals consisted of seafood complemented by a grain and a fresh vegetable.
“Ice,” Red told her, “is a pain in the ass to keep on board a boat, even a big power boat like this one. The systems necessary to maintain refrigeration and manufacture ice probably cause more problems for recreational boaters than any five or six of the common hazards to navigation—excepting, of course, diving under the influence.”
“So,” Tipsy said, rattling the ice in her empty glass, “why maintain them?”
“Anywhere in the tropics,” Red said, “ice is a number one trade item. You can get anything in return for ice.” His eyebrows waggled like a pair of time-motion studies of pupa gestation. “Poontang, for instance.”
“Really?”
“Check it out.” He cleared his throat. “Hey, babe.” He rattled the melting remnants in his empty glass. “Want some ice?”
“Yeah.”
> While Tipsy sunbathed the days away on the foredeck, Red whiled them away astern, sipping beer and keeping an eye on a pair of fishing poles. His fair skin prevented Red from going entirely naked, so he costumed himself with a long-billed fishing hat with flip-down shades and a neck curtain, a pineapple shirt marketed as The Octopus and His Friends, cargo pants with their belt threaded through the holster of a multitool, and a pair of flip-flops as, around midday, the deck became too hot for bare feet.
So, around midday, Tipsy and Red convened for lunch and a nap.
In the shade cast by the visor on his cap, Red’s eyes twinkled as he marveled at his luck. Well into his sixties, it had been a long time since he’d had a fling purely for the fling of it. He’d look up and realize that a half-hour or forty-five minutes had gone by without leaving a discernible trace in his mind. Or that the bait had been stolen off both lines and he hadn’t even noticed. He discovered that his hands, the one with its scarred palm, the two of them calloused and hardened by years of boat and fishing gear, had developed a new sensitivity. His center of gravity had lowered and his physical presence, never mild, became more assured than ever.
Late in his fifties, having concluded that the casual and convulsive sexuality that had characterized his youth had, while he was thinking of other things, become a thing of the past, he’d tried hookers and call girls and old girlfriends and even a new name or two. No soap. It just wasn’t there. So instead, he concentrated on seeing how much money he could make with the least amount of effort, and how many fish he could catch while he was sitting around thinking about money.
And now, here he was, bobbing around the many coves and inlets and shoals and reefs of the Keys, basking in the unalloyed attentions of a babe almost fifteen years his junior, and it seemed like the most natural thing in the world. Just when you’ve lost interest in the subject …
Things weren’t entirely carefree, of course. The problem needed to be dealt with.
And so, one night after a fine meal of fresh tuna poached in white wine and tarragon, with wild rice, golden raisins, walnuts, and fresh asparagus, and as Tipsy was taking her turn at the dishes, Red topped off both glasses and broached the subject.
“We need to take care of business. Otherwise this idyll,” he moved his glass through a small circle, “will come to an abrupt end.”
Tipsy wore an apron and nothing else. The tapes of the apron trailed from a bow tied at the small of her back. She made room for a saucepan in the back corner of the lower rack in the dishwasher, and stood up. “Is that all there is to it?”
“That’s all there is to it.”
She closed the dishwasher door, started the machine, and turned to face Red. “Well,” she said, “we have the boat.”
Red frowned. “What boat?’
She was drying her hands on the skirt of the apron. “This boat.”
“We need a boat?”
“We need a boat.”
“Why?”
“Because,” she said. “I figured it out.”
Red raised an eyebrow. “Thanks for telling me.”
She shrugged. “At least, I think I figured it out. Besides,” she looked at him frankly. “I’m enjoying myself.”
“I’ll not dignify that with an answer.”
She shed the apron, handed it to him, and headed for their bunk. “Bring out the stuff you took off Vellela Vellela.”
Red stepped into the engine room. When he returned with the briefcase, Tipsy was dressed and waiting for him. “Two heads are better than three,” he said, apropos of nothing.
“That’s not funny.”
“Honey,” Red said, “I—”
“Don’t call me honey.”
“Oh, now. Is this our first fight?”
“Who’s fighting?” she said through compressed lips.
“Good.” Red tapped the waterproof envelope with a forefinger. “The sooner we figure this out and do something about it, the sooner we can get back to doing nothing.”
“Not to mention you’ll get paid,” Tipsy discerned. “Don’t give me that bullshit.”
Red drummed a mild tattoo with a fist on the chart table. “Damn straight I’m going to get paid,” he said quietly. “We—” he pointed at her “—are going to get paid. And why not? Are we supposed to go through all this horseshit for free?”
“Are you referring to my brother’s death as horseshit?” Tipsy shouted back.
Red took a breath. Then: “You know exactly what horseshit I’m referring to. You—we—are icing on the cake. Completely unexpected. That you and I … that we … it’s …”
Tipsy brushed past him into the forward stateroom. Red sat at the chart table and fumed. What is it about this deal, he muttered to himself, that impels me to be behave irrationally? He studied his glass. Am I becoming sentimental?
Tipsy reappeared. “Here.” She set a carved cedar box on the chart table. “All the mail I’ve ever received from Charley.” She pushed the box to one side. “But this,” she took up Vellela Vellela’s logbook, “is all we’re going to need.”
Red brightened. “Now you’re talking.” He pushed her drink across the table. “Have a seat.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
“I’M CONVINCED IT’S IN THE LOG.”
“I’d have guessed the letters.”
“He never said anything in the letters.”
“He never said anything in the log, either.”
“I beg to differ. Given that the log is genuine—”
“Is there some reason to think it’s not genuine?”
“What I mean is, we don’t have any reason to think the log is misleading.”
“True story.”
“Okay. So what if it’s really not misleading.”
Puzzled, Red shook his head.
Tipsy pressed on. “He made exactly one stop after he left Rum Cay.”
“Albert Town.”
“Find it.”
Red opened the warped boards and had a look. “He arrived the night of March 16.”
“What’s the date of the next entry?”
Red turned three closely written pages. “March 19.” He paged back. “There’s a lot of blather in between.”
“But he hasn’t set sail.”
“No.”
“What’s the next dated entry?”
Red turned the three pages. “March 19.”
“What’s he doing?”
“Weighing anchor. I see where you’re going with this. No matter what he was up to, Charley wouldn’t skip a navigational entry.”
“Therefore, he spent three nights and two days at Albert Town.”
“True story.”
“For what? There’s nothing there—right? A ghost town, you said.”
“Charley said. I’ve never been there.”
“What were you doing in the meantime?”
“Fishing.”
“You didn’t mind the delay?”
“Nope. Charley was facing a long passage, so I figured he was banking some sleep; or, since he was sailing, maybe he was waiting on the weather; or, for that matter, maybe he was fishing, too. Charley liked to fish as well as the next man. And to tell you the truth, he could have stayed at Albert Town a week for all I cared. It was beautiful out there.”
“Not a bad story. In fact it’s such a good story, I’m betting he made his move behind it. And there’s something else. Read on.”
“Albert Town light bearing so and so, Long Key light ditto. … Anchored in a shoal west-facing inlet within spitting distance SSW of a pretty wreck. … Is that it?”
“A fit of introspection, he called it.”
“Good memory.”
“You think you could plot his position from what’s in there?”
Red scanned ahead. “The rest of this is just a bunch of bullshit about salvaging anchors and rode.”
“With Cedric Osawa,” Tipsy noted.
“That’s true,” Red pursed his lips. “With Cedric Osawa.”
“He gave you that dive knife.”
“Sure. I knew Cedric.”
“Knew?”
“Long time, no see.” Red shrugged. “Good seaman, good mechanic, excellent fisherman. For a long time, Cedric was a particular friend of Charley’s. Due to Cedric’s persistent dedication to blow and alcohol, however, Charley had distanced himself. Cedric’s habits made him less interesting to run around with than he once was.”
“He’s a lush?”
“So it would seem.”
“Well that’s no reason to—” Tipsy stopped, thought about what she was saying, and abruptly reverted to the subject at hand. “Even so, I think we could use him about now.”
Red looked at her, then shook his head. “We need somebody else in on this deal like we need a …” He stopped.
“A hole in the head?” Tipsy finished for him.
Red grimaced. “Let’s just say that I hope Cedric isn’t the answer. Last I heard, he’d become completely unreliable.”
She nodded. “I think Cedric’s superfluous. Although, if things had gone another way, he might have come in handy.”
Red frowned. “Like how?”
She pointed. “Like if you hadn’t found that logbook.”
Red was thinking about something else.
“Read on.”
Red cleared his throat and continued. “Wound up spending a week within a three or four mile radius, diving shoals and inlets for fouled anchors. We found about a dozen. … This?”
“Keep reading.”
“… too big for us to deal with … nine dandy examples of modern and ancient anchor theory, and so much barnacle-encrusted rode we had to leave most of it behind. …”
“We’re getting warm.”
“I don’t expect anybody to believe this,” Red continued, adding, “I don’t either. [B]ut we buried all that extra rode way up a tidal flat, as far as we could float the dinghy under it, with us outboard and pushing …”