by Jim Nisbet
She’s enjoying this, Red realized.
All the years he’d been in the Caribbean, nothing like that waterspout had happened to him, and no woman he might have been with would have handled it with such equanimity. She doesn’t know enough to be frightened, Red told himself. But all she said was, “What about that hole, forward?”
She was still grinning. Red had seen this grin before. It was the expression of the thrill felt by the natural sailor. She could have been a kid, who, taking the tiller for the first time, abruptly realized herself completely in charge of her manifest destiny, and conning like she’d been doing it all her life.
Not one of his kids, Red adduced sourly, no tiller for them. No rudder, either. Rudderless children. Red had no faith at all in psychiatry, but at one point Carmen convinced him to take their daughter to a shrink. After just a couple of sessions the chick had taken Red aside and asked him if he’d ever heard of the reality principle. You mean like, he’d responded, do your job or die? Well, she’d frowned, the textbook definition refers to a person’s awareness of and adjustment to the world around her so as to assure herself of the ultimate satisfaction of her instinctual needs. It sounds like you’re talking about happiness, Red had said. Yes, the shrink had agreed, your daughter is unhappy. I paid two hundred bucks so you could tell me that my unhappy daughter is unhappy? Red exploded. Things went downhill from there. Point being, this woman, Tipsy, is her brother’s sister—she likes being at sea.
“Now you’ve seen a waterspout,” he told her.
“Is that what that was?”
“I’ve not seen one in a while, myself. And I’ve never seen one that close up.”
“Is it possible to get closer?”
“You go ahead,” Red said, affecting a frank invitation, “I’ll wait here.”
They laughed.
“Let me patch that hole before we try it again. Sit here and let Otto steer. You see another one of those things? Take the wheel, cut Otto loose, and point her southeast of the disturbance.” He glanced at the GPS display. “Otherwise, steady on at eight knots and ten degrees.”
Tipsy restored the course and reset the pilot. “Tell you what, Skipper. Do your thing topside. I’ll take charge below.”
“Where have you been all my life?” Red responded, smiling despite the hole in his boat.
“San Francisco,” replied his wringing-wet crew.
After retrieving and properly belaying the anchor, he used a pair of duckbill pliers to break off a few fiberglass splinters around the perimeter of the hole in the foredeck, pitching them overboard as they came away. When the wound was reasonably debrised he took its measure with a steel tape. Then he stepped below, laid out a rectangle on a scrap of 3/4” marine plywood, and hacked it out with a saber saw. Then he ran a 1/2” round-over bit in a router around one perimeter of the four newly cut edges, picked up the sawdust with a one-gallon shop vac, and painted the plywood with quick-drying primer.
The third or fourth time he headed aft to retrieve tools, Tipsy had the galley shipshape. Though the carpet was squishy.
Who says it has to be wrong girl, wrong time, wrong place? Red caught himself wondering.
He reappeared on deck with the scrap of plywood and a five-gallon bucket full of tools, uncoiling a dropcord as he went. Tipsy flashed him a smile from the bridge and held up both hands. Easy as pie, her gesture seemed to say. A skyward glance told him that the weather had reverted to the Caribbean’s beatitudinal custom: a bright sun crowning a cobalt sky, cumulo-nimbus parading westward, the odd unthreatening thunderhead, southeasterly swells somewhat less than majestic, stately one might say, maybe thirty seconds apart, parading under ten knots of breeze gusting to fifteen. Air temperature was probably back up to seventy degrees, not yet returned to its customary seventy-five or eighty after the depression of the passing cell. The foredeck had already dried. The rest of the passage promised to be fine indeed. We’ll still raise Long Cay before nightfall, Red thought, as he strapped on a pair of knee pads. He knelt stiffly at the hole in the foredeck and tried the painted scrap. It overlapped the hole by about two inches all the way round. That would do for now, and maybe forever. He flipped the scrap over, rounded edges down. He swabbed the deck around the hole with a rag soaked in acetone. Retrieving a caulk gun from the bucket, he followed the hole’s perimeter with a fat bead of white adhesive. The caulk gun squeaked like a tern. Completing the circuit he sat back on his calves, his back to the bridge. A little creaky, ain’t we, old man, he told himself. I’m a goddamn inch shrunk, from my prime, comparably slower, and three weeks under the wheel of one or another drive-away cars transporting heads and broads coast to coast and back again didn’t help. Time was, I could heave an engine up and out of the hold, let alone a transmission. I could catch a punch with the right hand as I was delivering one with the left. No longer. These days I’m set back on me wiles, arrgh. He grimaced. Like that’s changed worth a shit. I could be rolling bocce balls in some retirement home if I’d played my cards—card—right. But here I am. Sixty-four with nothing but boatloads of t-shirts and weird people calling my shots from far away. A hole in the boat? No problem. But far away people calling my shots?
Fuck ’em.
He laid a bead of caulk around the perimeter of the painted plywood. Then he twirled two diagonally opposite corners of the plywood between his two middle fingers and dropped it over the caulked wound in the foredeck. Nice placement if he did say so, nearly parallel to the centerline of the boat. With a slight wiggle of the piece he gradually brought all of his weight to bear on the patch, until caulk oozed from its entire perimeter. It would make a good seal.
Now he sat back on his calves again. The lower back hurt and no joke. This lower back thing was one of the reasons he’d sold his beloved Barbarosso, a gaff-rigged ketch of some sixty-three feet, because, even though she was set up for it, he could no longer single-hand her. Getting that main gaff aloft was one thing; getting it down in weather was something else. Even the mizzen gaff could be a misery. The last time he’d taken her out alone he’d torqued his back while merely hauling on a jib sheet. He’d brought her in under tremendous pain, pain like he’d never known, way beyond a knife wound or a clout on the head for two examples, or even of that to be recalled from his foot having been caught between a tumblehome and a bullrail. That foot still hurt. The back had become unpredictably unreliable. …
But with a woman like Tipsy a man might go sailing again. He pulled a screw gun from the bucket, inserted a combination countersink and pilot bit into its quick-change chuck, and bored a chamfered hole through one corner of the plywood patch. Then he switched bits and loosely anchored the corner with a galvanized 1-1/4” #2 tulip-head Torx screw, not driving it all the way home. Switching bits, he touched up the alignment and sank a pilot hole through the corner diagonally opposite the first one. He changed back to the pilot bit and proceeded to eyeball an evenly-spaced series of chamfered holes around the perimeter of the patch. After he’d vacuumed the dust and chips, he bladed a dab of the adhesive caulk over each hole with a one-inch putty knife.
By now Red’s back had stiffened considerably, and various aches were stabbing along the muscles parallel to his spine. He emptied the tools onto the deck, inverted the bucket, and sat down on it.
Teach Tipsy all this stuff, he was thinking. She’s a quick study. My knowledge and her natural sagacity, my experience and her young back, my wisdom and the agility of her youth …
As he exchanged the counterbore for the Torx bit, he gave a thought to its identical twin, resting these several months at the bottom of the sea some forty or fifty miles north of Havana. Torx bit, your innocuous ilk got me into this pickle in the first place. He thought about it for a moment. I’m no longer sure how I got into this pickle.
Goddamn technology. He triggered the screw gun while grasping the keyless chuck, to make sure the quick-change chuck was tight. Another ouch for the not quite healed palm of his left hand, and is a skipper’s sacrifices never done? He pinched
four or five screws out of the mouth of their canvas bag. The tip of one of them stung him under the nail of his forefinger, drawing a tiny bead of blood. Sweat dropped off the end of his nose. Hey, man, he reminded himself as he drove a screw into an unscrewed corner of the patch, you could have lived differently. He drove a fourth screw diagonally across the rectangle from the third one. You could have gone to graduate school and got that degree in civil engineering. He snugged down each of the two anchoring screws. You actually went and looked at Clemson University, in Clemson, South Carolina. What a shithole, and, even at so great a distance of years, you shudder to recall it. He drove the fifth screw through the middle of the port-side edge. The year, I don’t remember. It was in the twentieth century. A freckle on a noseeum’s thorax, historically speaking. He considered the next screw. A time so distant, they didn’t even have Torx screws. He drove it. Back then they still used cupped galvanized four-penny nails to hang drywall, for chrissakes. Can you beat that? He drove a screw. They had fluorescent lights, though. Those fluorescent lights I do remember. Row upon row of them, and how they buzzed over grids of all-in-one flip-lid chair-desks, varnish long gone, their metal the color of the type on Death’s business card. Steam radiators along the wall below the sills of mullioned windows—it gives a man the willies to recall the scene. But to have lived it? A dodged bullet for sure. Single-glaze windows: cold in winter and hot in summer; dirt-dobbers deceased on the dusty sill; and linoleum floors, brown streaked with green. Walls painted an irreproducible gray, same color as the radiators. But you figured that one out. He started another screw in another countersunk hole. They just took all the five-gallon buckets of leftover paint and poured them into one fifty-five-gallon drum and painted the whole school with the result. The engineering school, anyway. So now, that one spun out. Cammed out, is the proper term; nobody but engineers ever use it. He backed out the screw and pitched it overboard. Saved them a whole lot of money, probably so they could paint the English department pink. Another screw. Maybe they sank the surplus dough into the big bamboo demonstration slide rule hanging over the blackboard. Whole semesters were dedicated to slide rules and their logarithmic scales. Son of a bitch must have been two feet high and ten feet long. Another entire technology blown away by progress. Gone as the glaciers from Glacier National Park. Sailboats remain. Where does that leave you? Screwing. Year in, year out, screwing. Screw or be screwed, and there’s your reality principle. Take calculators, for instance. Another spinout, and the Torx tip slipped off the screw head and dug a nice little divot into the deck. Not the plywood patch, but the deck. Luck of the afflicted. Another screw. Teach Tipsy to do this. Technology will probably change before I get around to it. There will never be enough time. It’s thoughts like these that slowed my progress to this pretty pass. It was right there. Where? Get this one right. He drove it right. On the bulletin board. A plaque. How do you forget another man’s nightmare? Same way you remember it? Good answer, even if it’s a question. I got another. Shoot. How do you remember it? He wiped caulk off the Torx tip with a rag. One man’s dream is another man’s nightmare? He folded the rag over the caulk and swabbed his forehead with the flat of it. Nothing but questions. He dropped the rag and pinched up some screws. Even though the school was deserted, job placement want-ads covered the engineering department’s bulletin board, all of them yellowed and desiccated, flyblown and brittle, left over from the previous spring. General Electric. The Navy. IBM. Lockheed. Boeing. FoMoCo. The Georgia Department of Transportation needed two civil engineers. But it was the plaque above the bulletin board. The plaque and the obituary tacked next to it. He drove a screw. Its head sank a quarter of an inch into the plywood. This Bulletin Board The Gift of Henry C. Greenly: The finest product this school has to offer. The next screw was a half-inch longer than its mates. He tossed it overboard. The obituary explained how Hank Greenly had retired after dedicating his entire career as a civil engineer to a single eleven-mile stretch of freeway between Wilson, North Carolina and a town called Pittsboro. Hank Greenly shepherded the project from its inception through funding, through the ins and outs of permitting, environmental impact review, drawings, revisions, plancheck, more revisions, Title 19 energy calcs, seismic calcs, wetstamps, submittals and approvals, the evictions, relocations and compensations throughout the drainage and right-of-way, construction, an incompetent subcontractor, bad weather, the accidental maiming of a pan driver, an executive bribery prosecution, a plea copped with no admission of guilt, three cases of snake bite, a rabid skunk that chased a visiting Congressman, rejection of wet fill, of frozen fill, of substandard concrete, the pre-computer wording and triplication of change orders … One overpass, four each of on- and off-ramps, a boat ramp, six railroad bridges and two dams the scope of work included, plus eleven miles of four lanes with landscaped medians, all of it built over swamps and quicksand. Every yard of earth had to be removed and replaced with dry fill and compacted. Soup to nuts, it took twenty-four years to complete that project—at which point Hank Greenly retired. That eleven miles of four-lane highway comprised Hank Greenly’s entire professional career, and when it was done, he was done. By then he’d outlived his parents, his only sibling, and his wife and kid who were T-boned by a logging truck two miles from Bun Level, North Carolina, while he was attending a marathon weekend contract arbitration in Charlotte. A fisherman noticed Hank one day, a few months after he retired, standing on one of the two dams built, it was rumored, solely to protect the governor’s summer home some eighteen miles downstream. Hank was staring down its spillway for no apparent reason. It did have a nice, curvilinear sweep to it, shot in with plum bob and chain long before the advent of the laser theodolite. Nobody saw him again. His retirement lasted eleven months. In the end a massive coronary killed him in his chair in front of his television. He liked old Westerns, the real oaters. The stress of retirement can’t be overestimated, as someone stipulated at the funeral. And it just so happened that Red Means had worked on that project one summer, the year before its completion, three years before he decided not to attend engineering college, or any college at all. June, July, and August Red had worked that job, greasing all the big machinery, fixing flats on motorgraders, retreading dozers, but he had no memory of a Hank or Henry Greenly. It seemed almost impossible that they wouldn’t have met at least once. …
There’s no shortage of disturbing stories, but, Red said to the plywood patch, that was one of the most disturbing I’d heard, up to that point in my callow youth. The legion of bummer stories has been thoroughly checked, cross-indexed and stapled to the inside of the vault of one’s brain by the intervening years, of course. But, in the event, a clapped-out pickup truck couldn’t carry him away from South Carolina fast enough. He didn’t stop pushing until he ran out of road, three weeks later, at a seawall with about twenty people hanging around waiting for the sun to set. He inquired out the truck window as to what the big deal was. A pretty girl with a brilliant smile, standing barefoot in a sun dress astride a salt-rusted bicycle with no gears and balloon tires told him that, vis-à-vis sunsets, it was all about having a daily routine; she welcomed him to Key West; and she handed him a joint. Her name was Carmen. …
“Red?”
He looked up, the brim of his hat occluding a full view of her.
“You all right?”
“Sure,” Red assured her. He looked down at the plywood patch. All the screws had been driven. He’d even dragged the dampened butt of the tapered handle of the putty knife around the patch’s perimeter, by way of fairing the caulk squeezed out of the tightened joint. All that remained was to flush a dab of caulk over each screw head, let it dry, and repaint it. Tomorrow, maybe.
“Red?”
“What?”
“It’s hot out here.”
“True story.”
“You sure you’re okay?” She straddled his lap, facing him. The bucket titled. The putty knife fell from his hand as he caught her.
He squinted. Her complexion was tanni
ng nicely, and she was smiling. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m way okay.”
“Prove it,” she said, and she kissed him.
FORTY-ONE
THEY WRANGLED THE DINGHY INTO THE WATER. IT WAS AN OLD PLYWOOD job, glassed from one end to the other, and its outboard, despite being less than five years old, wouldn’t start. After filling the clear morning air with the fumes of uncombusted fuel Red boused the motor off the transom, in order to disencumber themselves of its weight, and cursed it. “I bought this bastard so it would haul my ass around, not so I could haul its ass around,” he muttered bitterly, and set about rowing them in.
They were away early but beads of sweat were rolling off Red’s face before they’d made a hundred yards. He rested the oars, tied a kerchief around his head, removed his shirt, drank some water and set to pulling again, while Tipsy coated his back and shoulders with sun block. He faced backwards to their direction of travel, exposing his back to the morning sun, and the sweat gleamed on his freckled shoulders. Up front the shark’s tooth, its gold culet dangling from its gold chain, swung in and out of the tangle of gray and coppery hair that boiled off his chest.
They were in the lee of the southern tip of Long Cay and protected from the current. But a decent swell had them up and down along the line of their forward progress. Occasionally the oars brought up bundles of tape grass, radiant greens and violets shooting along its lengths. Red periodically shipped the oars to shed it, taking the occasion to rest from his labor. Though his arms were thick and did not shrink from their task, he and Tipsy had remained awake much of the night, poring over Charley’s logbook and letters, even going so far as to spill what was left of a glass of rum over the largest-scale chart of Long Cay they’d been able to find in Key West, 1:3,000,000. “Mayaguana Passage,” he’d insisted. “No mention of Long Cay or Crooked Island or even the Acklins.”
“You’d think I was trying to buy a vibrator at the Vatican,” she grumbled.