Windward Passage

by Jim Nisbet

  “You don’t need no fucking vibrator,” he assured her. “Mayaguana Passage.”

  As he’d swallowed more rum, Red groused about the comparable scale available on the rather expensive computer chart on his on-board navigation system, which displayed more or less the same data as the paper chart, which was to say, hardly any data at all. This was an out-of-the-way place.

  They’d brought along that chart as well as much of the package Red had taken off the wreck of the Vellela Vellela, Charley’s relevant letters to Tipsy, a hand-held GPS, and the bearing compass. Athwart the dinghy were also a pick, a shovel, posthole diggers, a machete and a bush hook, plus snorkle, fins, mask, with two six-packs of Kalik beer and a gallon of water on ice in a cooler. The second time he took a break from rowing, Red snapped the cap off a bottle with his teeth and spat it into the Caribbean.

  “That’s the most macho bullshit thing I’ve seen since George Bush landed on that aircraft carrier,” Tipsy observed. “Without a doubt.”

  Red offered her a sip. She declined. He downed it at one go and flung the bottle skyward. “If I had the shotgun,” he growled, “I’d blast that sucker to shards, just like we did your cellphone.”

  “That was very satisfying.” Tipsy admitted. “But I’d still like to know how Quentin is doing.”

  “You told me he doesn’t have a cellphone, (a), and, (b), I’m telling you again that cellphones don’t work out here anyway. Sit back and enjoy it. Soon enough, technology will pinch out the silence of wide-open spaces.”

  “Still, if you were to be blasting beer bottles with a shotgun, every bounty-hunter within twenty miles would know we’re here.”

  “Not to worry.” Red wiped his mouth and took up the oars. “Today, we’re all by our lonesome. Unless you count ghosts.”

  “What, no casino?”

  “Just the Big Casino.”

  “Is that the same as Manifest Destiny?”

  “Did you know that the Bahama casinos brag of the highest payoff in the world?”

  “What’s that mean? They let you keep your pants?”

  “True story,” Red chuckled. He glanced over his shoulder. “Let us review our first instruction.”

  Tipsy opened Vellela Vellela’s logbook to the place marked by a paper clip, already rusted by salt air.

  … don’t forget to allow for something like ten years’ migration of magnetic variation. Tonight, from this anchorage, I can see the mouth of the creek. Oddly enough, Vellela is anchored on the exact back bearing of the vector from the creek to the middle of the entrance to Man of War Channel—277° True. …

  The page reflected the glare of the sun with great intensity. Tipsy lifted her eyes from it. Red had carefully set stern and bow anchors so that the bearing to the center of Man of War Channel, as determined by GPS, ran right through the axis of Tunacide and the rode of its two anchors. He’d given a lot of scope to the rode of the stern anchor, which lay toward Long Cay, and buoyed it with a fender. A straight line between it and the stern of the boat accurately reflected the bearing to the mouth of Man of War Channel.

  Now Red shipped his oars and fiddled with the hand-held GPS until it had found three satellites and made decisions about where it was. “Hm,” he said, peering over his half-lenses. “It’s not always this bad, but look at this.” He tilted the little screen and shaded it with his hand. “The little dart is us. This wavy line is the northwest curve of Long Cay.” He pointed over the bow.

  She followed his finger, studied the beach, then studied the screen. “According to this device,” she realized aloud, “we are about a hundred yards up on the beach.”

  “Hard aground. And which direction is that beach, the real beach, over the bow?”

  “East, more or less.”

  “That’s correct. And where is it on this screen?”

  She looked up. “West?”

  “That’s what is known in the trade as a degraded position,” Red said. “Technology, schmecnology.” He switched off the unit, dropped it into the canvas tote bag, followed by his glasses. “But this looks good for a start,” he added, backing one oar sufficient to jockey the dinghy onto the vector given by the fender and the swim ladder of Tunacide. “Two seventy-seven degrees true, straight back through Tunacide, bears directly on Man of War Channel. Plus eight degrees forty-five minutes West variation. Plus ten years times six minutes equals one whole degree’s worth of annual increase—correct?”

  Tipsy’s finger, following the figures through a column of addition on the margin of the chart, arrived at the total. “Two eighty-six.”

  “Have a look. Hand me that anchor.”

  She passed along a little salt-rusted ten-pound Danforth with its yellow hank of polypropylene rode, and Red dropped it in the bow behind him. Tipsy took up the yellow bearing compass, and sighted along it.

  Sighted along its rubber boss and a notch molded into the compass housing, toward the buoy and the stern of Tunacide.

  “What’s she bear?”

  “Two hundred and … These marks are two degrees?”

  “Five.”

  “Three hundred and …”

  “Come on, come on,” said Red impatiently.

  Tipsy told him to shut up. But each time she lowered the compass to read it, she fouled the result.

  “Goddamn it,” Red said, “give me that—”

  She swiped it out of his reach. “I suppose you hatched out reading compasses.”

  “And that I did,” Red growled. “Arrgh …”

  “Hold your water. I’ll get the hang of it.”

  “That reminds me.” Red stood up in the stern, rocking the dinghy only moderately, unzipped his shorts, and arced a stream of retired Kalik over the side.

  “If you did that the other way,” Tipsy said, and holding the compass at arm’s length, one eye closed and the other squinting, “I could sight right under it.”

  Red zipped up. “Be just like sailing into St. Louis.” He stretched his shoulders and resumed his seat. “What’s the goddamn answer?”

  “I think it’s two eighty-two.”

  As the boat moved to port, the compass needle moved to starboard. Backing one or another of the oars Red jockeyed them to and fro until Tipsy got the hang of the compass.

  “Goddamn it. …”

  “You got no water to hold,” she reminded him. “So relax.”

  “That reminds me.” Red repeated his performance with a fresh bottle of beer. “Damn, that’s good.” He smacked his lips and heaved the second empty toward Tunacide. “I hope we don’t run out.”

  “You’ve got ten to go.”

  “Like I said.”

  “Two eighty-six. We’re there.”

  Red studied Tunacide. The white fender, maybe a quarter of a mile to seaward of the dinghy, bobbed up and down in close apposition to the center of Tunacide’s transom, as if eager to sketch a line there. “So far so good.” He lifted both his legs and neatly spun a half-circle on the plywood seat. “Now for the mouth of the creek.” He took up the binoculars and, with a glance aft, squared his shoulders toward Tunacide and slowly glassed the shoreline of Long Cay. “Too far off,” he muttered. He handed Tipsy the binoculars and turned to take up the oars.

  When Tipsy lifted her legs to turn forward she nearly upset the boat.

  “No woman should ever forget,” Red said, regarding her as he rowed, “that her ass is her center of gravity.”

  “I’m not going to dignify that with an answer.”

  “Fine. Just don’t undignify things by capsizing us.”

  They rowed another quarter of a mile.

  “Well?” Red growled. He was wringing wet, the dew rag was saturated, and the scar in his palm felt like it was on fire. “What could it have taken to bring along a pair of gloves?” he asked nobody in particular.

  “Foresight,” came the prompt answer. “For some reason,” Tipsy added, binoculars to her face. “I can’t tell what I’m looking at.”

  Red cranked the dinghy throug
h a half-circle and dropped the oars. “Gimme.” He studied the coastline. “Aha.” He handed the binoculars back to her and pointed. “There.”

  He spun the bow back toward the beach and pulled steady and strong. She corrected him occasionally, but, watching their wake and the bigger boat, Red kept their course remarkably straight. Soon they heard surf. Tipsy lowered the binoculars. Red looked over the gunwale. “There’s a little current.” He dipped his fingers over the side and tasted them. “Fresh water.”

  Tipsy smiled. “You think?”

  He looked left and right, then laughed. There was beach on either side of them. They had rowed straight into the mouth of the creek. ”

  “It’s a stream. Just like Charley said.”

  Red frowned. “I think it’s too big.” He looked over the side. “He said that he and Cedric walked their dingy up it.”

  “But they had a thousand pounds of chain aboard.”

  “… which would swamp this thing. They were still navigable. Still afloat.”

  “Maybe it was a bigger dinghy?”

  “Maybe this is all bullshit,” Red replied darkly. He gave the oars a few powerful strokes. “Look over the side. You think you could touch?”

  She looked. “No. But it’s so hot, I’d love to try.”

  “Watch the compass.” Red continued to row against the mild current of the freshet. The beach turned into brush, the creek narrowed and the brush closed above them. Two hundred yards up the creek, “Whoa,” Tipsy said. “Look.” She showed him the compass, carefully holding it level. “North used to be that way.”

  “Boxing.” They exchanged glances. “So it’s not bullshit.” He peered over the side. “That’s a lot of fucking chain. It’s ten feet deep here. Maybe the tide’s in,” he added. “What would it have taken to check the tide table? Don’t answer that.”

  The creek had deepened as it narrowed, the vegetation nourished by it now provided shade. Red pulled the dinghy to the south bank and grabbed the branch of a casuarinas to hold the dinghy against the current. The needle of the compass spun, meaningless in its glycerin.

  Red thought about it. “After he got off parole Charley saw Cedric exactly once, to the best of my knowledge. It was in Key West. Cedric was living aboard a wreck of a borrowed boat and drinking a fifth of vodka every day.”

  “That’s a bit much,” Tipsy acknowledged.

  “Even though they’d been friends for a long time, the scene didn’t interest Charley. He went back to Miami and found me. I fixed him up with the job in Guadeloupe, and that was it for Charley and Cedric.”

  “Cedric figures in a lot of letters,” Tipsy agreed. “Up to a point.”

  Red cocked an ear. “That’s a Bahamas finch.” They listened. “Nice bird.” He shifted his grip on the casuarinas. “So my money says, if that really is a trove of chain down there, Cedric and Charley parked it at least twenty years ago, before Charley went to prison.”

  “So the ten years of annual increase is just there to give us a bearing?”

  “Maybe. Or to raise a flag for those in the know.” Red looked upstream, then downstream. “Twenty years of hurricanes and erosion.” The starboard bow of the dinghy gently touched the north bank. They both looked over the port side. The bottom looked like scoured clay. A couple of feet above it, two little fish pointed upstream, holding their own against the current.

  “Sheepshead minnows,” Red said. “Good bait.”

  “Red?” Tipsy asked. “What if you wanted to dig a hole down there, bury something in it, and cover it up?”

  Red shook his head. “You’d have to caisson the fucker.”

  “Which means—?”

  “You sink a culvert or an open-ended box—or form it with pilings and a pile driver or, god forbid, a sledgehammer. After you pump it out, you can excavate inside it.”

  “To keep the water from ruining your every move?”

  “Yes. Under the circumstances, it’s completely impractical.”

  “Yes.” She looked around. “But Charley was here.”

  “He described it well enough.”

  “So they just dumped their chain here and left. In the intervening years …”

  “Nature covered it up,” Red finished for her.

  Tipsy slapped her shoulder. “What’s that?”

  “Noseeums,” Red said. “They’re one of the reasons nobody lives here anymore.”

  “Dammit.” Tipsy slapped herself again. “How come they aren’t eating you?”

  “They are eating me.”

  “Well?” She slapped herself twice.

  “Well what?”

  “How come you aren’t slapping yourself silly?” She slapped herself. “Like I am?’

  Red shrugged. “Because I don’t give a shit.”

  “Let go of that bush. Get us out of here.”

  “What about—”

  “Turn loose. Let’s go down to the beach and cogitate this over a beer.”

  “I’m your man.” Red released the branch and the dinghy began to drift toward the beach, Red fending off the embankments with an oar. Soon enough, the sounds of mildly breaking surf reached their ears.

  The creek broke out of the brush, shoaling as it fanned across the tidal flat. Red beached the dinghy, stacked their tools and supplies ashore, made a lean-to of the little vessel and its oars, its hull towards the sun, so that it threw a little shade.

  Tipsy dropped her shorts and halter top to the sand. “I’ll be right back.” She waded into the creek up to her knees and fell sideways into it. “It’s cold!” she gasped when she surfaced. “It’s great!”

  “Spring-fed,” Red said. As if to himself he added, “So maybe the tide is out.” He sat down in the shadow of the dinghy and retrieved a beer from the cooler. By the time Tipsy came back ashore, droplets of water running along her goose flesh, Red had exchanged an empty bottle for a full one. He admired her as, facing the sun with her eyes closed, she arched her back and wrung water out of her hair.

  “Beer?” He tendered the newly opened bottle.

  “Just a sip.” She drained half of it. “Damn,” she said, lowering the bottle, “that’s delicious.”

  “It won’t put you on your ass, either.” Red pulled a third bottle from the cooler. “Not so much alcohol. Perfect for the tropics.”

  “I’ll say.” She handed over the empty, and he dropped it into the cooler.

  “What,” she said, “no skeet practice?”

  Red frowned. “Hell, no. Look around. This place is pristine. I aim to help keep it that way.”

  “Unless you count the acid reflux due to slavery,” she pointed out.

  “That was two hundred years ago. Out there,” he pointed at the ocean, “a bottle goes to the bottom and makes a nice home for a hermit crab. Here,” he indicated the beach, “it’s just unsightly.”

  Tipsy joined him in the slip of shade. “I never figured you for being so sensitive about ecology.”

  “You have to excavate a lot of crust,” Red agreed.

  She took up the waterproof packet and withdrew its various materials. “Waterproofing the logbook I can understand,” she said, setting it aside. “Likewise the boat papers, money, passport, which leaves us with these two pages torn from the Ricketts book.”

  Red considered them. “I’m amazed the mildew didn’t get to them a long time ago.”

  “That aside, why did Charley keep them?”

  “Because he named his boat for the creature described by them.” Red lifted a shoulder. “Why else?”

  As Tipsy read the two pages to herself, Red watched the surf.

  “There’s a passage you didn’t read before.”

  Red squinted. “You mean that stuff about how it sails?”

  “That’s it.”

  Red continued to watch the surf. Tipsy read aloud.

  The sailing ability of Vellela may be demonstrated in a broad shallow pool on the beach. George Mackie, one summer at Dillon Beach, designed an ingeniously simple experiment, us
ing plastic bottle tops for controls (they sailed straight across the pool as good controls should). Computing the angle of arrival of Vellela on the opposite side, he found that the “best sailors” could tack as much as 63o to the left of the wind. Thus it would seem that the name “by-the-wind” Vellela vellela Linnaeus is a more musical name for this stray from the high seas.

  “Well?” she asked, somewhat gently.

  Red raised his bottle to his lips. “Well what?”

  “Sixty-three degrees,” Tipsy said, “is what.”

  Red stuck his tongue into the mouth of the upturned bottle, stopping the flow of beer, and blinked.

  “Sixty-three degrees,” Tipsy repeated.

  Red lowered the bottle and stared out to sea. A mile or so out, Tunacide rode to her anchors. Even from so far away, he could see a gull perched on the radar mast. The two pages of Ricketts fluttered in the breeze. Red looked at them. He looked far up the beach, where a pair of tall casuarinas leaned away from and back into the invisible air. “What wind conditions did Charley record, those days he was here?”

  Tipsy opened the log to the paper clip. “Wind 10-15 knots southeast on day one …” She turned a page. “Ditto, day two.” She turned a page. “Ditto, day three.”

  “Pretty standard Bahamian breeze.” Red continued to stare. “Southeast,” he repeated. “If you were a stickler, that’d be one thirty-five. Left of the wind, Ricketts says?”

  Tipsy ran a finger down the printed page. “‘… as much as sixty-three degrees to the left of the wind.’”

  “Tacking,” said Red. He knifed his left palm to the southeast. “So your Vellela Vellela is sailing into the wind, and tacking sixty-three degrees to the left of it.” He tilted the hand. “That would be a starboard tack …”

  “He said left,” Tipsy objected.

  “Quiet,” Red said. “The tack is named for the side of the boat the wind is coming over. One thirty-five less sixty-three …” Red moved the hand counterclockwise. “Seventy-two degrees.” The hand stopped. “East northeast.”

  “Seventy-two degrees,” Tipsy repeated.

  “True story,” Red moved his hand ever so little. “Seventy-eight magnetic.”