Flotilla

by Daniel Haight

  I noticed that the Dixie Star was back. I was surprised – we a couple months away from Steeplechase. Ignacio tied up and I actually enjoyed helping him with the usual cargo chores. As the last bag of rice hit the dock, I heard a sharp whistle – Riley was leaning over the railing of the Phoenix, grinning evilly. He flipped me the bird and I grinned while flipping one right back at him.

  “Welcome home, loser,” he called. “How’s your love life?”

  I laughed and called back, “How’s yours?” He stopped laughing and scowled at me. I stuck my tongue out in response. All the stuff with my Mom disappeared. That was a mainland problem. I was back out here with my people and that trash could wait.

  People waved when they saw I returned and that felt great. They were surly to outsiders but once they accept you, you’re in for life. I soaked it all up – this was a welcome change from life on shore. I was talking to someone right next to the Phoenix gangway when my dad appeared from out of nowhere to say hello.

  “Well, there’s the big man,” he said happily, and stuck out a hand to shake. I grabbed it, my first man-to-man handshake with my Pop and then he yanked me close to give me a bear hug. “Nice to have you back.”

  “Nice to be back,” I said, nodding to the big white structure just to our right. “What’s that thing doing here?”

  “Oh, that?” he looked up, carelessly at it. “I run it.” I was about to pick up my bag when I realized what he said.

  “You what?”

  “I run it…I was gonna tell you but I wanted to surprise you.” He looked at me, not able to hide the sly smile at being able to pull one over. “Surprised?”

  “Oh, my God,” I almost shouted. “You did it. You actually did it!” We both yelled and shouted – Dad had pulled off the scam to end all scams and was running the Dixie Star as he promised he would.

  I started to see him a little more clearly. He was wearing a pair of clean chinos and a freshly-pressed cabana shirt. His normal three-days-worth of beard was missing and he smelled faintly of aftershave. All of this was a far cry from the usual look and feel. Dad was running a casino … he had a steady job on the colony. He was finally out of the fishing business, just like he wanted.

  I was very happy for Dad. But still – I was a bit distracted. There was a certain someone that I came out to the Colony to see. She wasn’t there when we arrived on the Horner but after I dropped my bag in my room, Dad beckoned me out to the fishing porch. “Observe,” he commanded. A ship was cruising by, a stripped-down and modified houseboat, by the look of it. As I looked closer, I suddenly saw what it was. “Heck,” I said. “It’s a fruit stand!”

  Dad was smiling happily. “Another one of our deals – Miguel bought an old houseboat, fixed it up and ships out fresh produce from somewhere to sell it here.”

  “Doesn’t Pac Fish know?”

  “Know? They’re partners!” he beamed. “They get a piece of it and we get to sell to all the different colonies…it’s perfect!” I was impressed – Dad had put together several very successful scams in a very short amount of time. Why didn't he tell me?

  I re-checked all my emails to be sure but nobody had breathed a word about any of this to me. Not Riley, Miguel, Stacy or her parents – it was all a complete smokescreen. But who cares, right? I mean, this is seriously amazing what Dad has managed to create. I’ve never been so proud of him in my life.

  I should have seen it coming.

  Our current position is: 34°45'23.45"N 120°41'28.20"W

  Chapter Ten - The Brief and Unsuccessful Voyage of the Cooger & Dark

  Back at the Gun Range, Miguel was grilling some flap steak while they filled me in on the fruit stand and everything else that had been going on. They had been experimenting with importing groceries to the Colony. Miguel's brother was some kind of manager at a grocery store in Glendale and they worked out a way to run milk and cookies out here on a modest profit.

  They even gave Stacy a job. She was actually working on something as a surprise for me … I wasn't allowed to see the boat yet. Waiting to see her in these next few minutes would be more difficult than the previous 5 months. It was all I could do to not yell “I want to see my girlfriend!” at Dad. They said it was her idea so I choked down my complaint and sat down to lunch. They had a lot to tell me.

  “It's a rough gig, though,” Miguel said. “Other guys do it and we're all trying to keep our prices as low as possible.” He said something bitter in Spanish. All I caught was 'pendejo'. Wordlessly, I looked to Dad for a translation.

  “He's talking about the Children of the Burning Man,” he explained. “They were selling their groceries under cost … they were losing money and we were going out of business.” Their profits were sinking lower and lower with each grocery run. Pretty soon Miguel put a halt to it, judging that their next order wouldn’t even cover the gas it took to bring the groceries out.

  “I might as well pay Ignacio to do it,” he complained. Running food and other staples out in the rain, you dealt with leaks and packages that weren’t adequately wrapped. You ate the cost when you couldn’t sell the food and Dad ended up eating a lot of dinners made out of half-ruined bags of rice and dried pinto beans.

  It was a pretty dark time for Dad. Without the groceries, he was back to pen patrol in the wintertime. Even with a dry suit, it's still cold, wet and miserable. Around the middle of February, Dad was fighting a cold and had been eating Fisherman’s Friend more often than hot meals.

  “We were keeping our distance at the moment. The grocery deals had cratered and we were both pretty stressed about that,” Dad related. “My cold was getting worse and I was skipping Pen Patrol to try and recover. We started losing fish.”

  “On top of this,” he continued, “some payday loans and capital investments made by Pac Fish were starting to come due.” Dad went on to outline how he took a loan out buy the Horner when he first arrived to the Colony. He had refinanced those loans every single year he had been out here - seven, and counting - and then he got a nice little note from the AP department of Pacific Fisheries. “Due to changed policy the outstanding loan could not be refinanced or extended and I should make plans to repay Pacific Fisheries within the next 8 months.” He was still bitter about it … it could have meant an end to Dad's time on the Colony.

  “But then, two guys from the Children of the Burning Man showed up. They were able to bring out groceries at prices that were even cheaper than Miguel. They wanted me to deal with the customers and be the storefront.”

  “How did they get the groceries so cheap?” I wondered. Dad and Miguel snorted simultaneously.

  “Stolen, no doubt,” Dad replied. “I was broke … I didn’t ask questions.”

  Dad liked that they didn’t approach him like a flunky, he said. They saw him as a valuable asset, hearing stories about his previous experience running orders in from shore. The older guy, Stan, was a total burn-out but he was still sharp enough to talk numbers when he wasn’t maundering endlessly about ‘how it all could have been’. The younger one named Chris seemed to be positioning himself as a leader. He had the ideas, creating a bulletproof shipping empire and he left the details to his older counterpart. They wanted to hire Dad and pay him a salary ... much better than trying to collect on each grocery sale.

  “They had the moxie and they had the money,” Dad said. “Anyway, I was out of time. It's worked well so far. Shipments and money started coming in … I've started to make traction on the loans. Plus, the winter catch paid off well.”

  Oh, right – the catch. My experience with the cold water of the Pacific made me forget that Dad had been able to sell off his fish. All three pens had been sold at the same time … just a hair less than five thousand pounds of tilapia. At ten or fifteen dollars a pound, it was a pretty tidy sum.

  Dad started making some things nicer on the Horner. He got one of the left-over race boats from last year and named it Horner C Minor. Yes, I know it isn't a real musical term. Deal with it. He finally fixed
the head – it no longer smelled like piss and farts – and he got himself some new breathing gear and a new wetsuit.

  “I started making new deals with people again,” Dad continued. “Greg from the Ensenada trip started buying groceries and so did a lot of other people who blew me off before. Between the prices and the fact that it was me, not the hippie freaks, we started doing pretty well.” Dad wasn't content, though. He still had his sights on one really big score: Getting the Dixie Star back to Colony D … permanently.

  “He never shut up about it,” Miguel said – transferring the meat to a cracked china plate. The Dixie Star was docked and shuttered up north at another colony – C or B up around Santa Barbara – when it wasn’t here. “He was working a deal to get it down here on a trial basis and then I realized that the pendejos weren't selling fresh fruit and vegetables.”

  “So?” I asked.

  Miguel shrugged. “So I went to work.” Within a week he located a burned-out ship that he could recondition. With Dad's help, they towed the wreck back to the Colony and gutted the wreckage to begin the process of rebuilding the ship without a dry dock or any heavy lifting equipment. Dad invested money to purchase equipment and materials out of his growing funds. The burned parts of the ship were removed and they built it up as an open space that would accommodate shelves and bins and cash registers. Someone installed a decent lighting scheme that you might see in an upscale grocery store and figured out how to run it all using DC-converted power. They stocked the shelves with some on-shore groceries and fresh produce from local hydroponic gardens.

  “I was planning a ‘launch party’ flyer for the ‘Farmers Market Boat’ when an email arrived from Pac Fish,” Dad said. “They were interested in our ideas for running the Dixie Star year-round on the Colony and wanted a meeting. We got permission to bring the Dixie back and berth her next to the Phoenix.” He grinned and ruffled my hair. “You were coming in a few weeks … I wanted to surprise you.

  “So we got the deal for the Dixie Star signed and a week after that, we were in business.” They had a decent restaurant set up on the Promenade deck and put together some great gourmet seafood dishes. I would have thought the place was out of the price range of the Colony but it was jammed every night. It was a nice change from the usual rough-and-crusty lifestyle.

  “The slots and table games filling up the place when this other thing happened,” Miguel said and Dad nodded sourly. The Asian members of the community were concerned about the kind of attention the Dixie would bring and perhaps criminal elements. They were vocal about it, enough so that everyone had to have a sit-down in the Executive suite on board the Phoenix. For an entire afternoon, Rick and Miguel had to endure squabbling from Pac Fish, the citizens and other hangers-on.

  “So what do you recommend? Should we close the Dixie Star?” the Pac Fish suit asked their spokesman.

  “Not at all … we welcome the income the Dixie generates.” The spokesman was a tough old gent named Le Cheung. He spoke English with a British accent and his arthritis forced him to limp along with a carved rosewood cane. He lived with his family, or what he called his family: poor expats from Macau and Taiwan. “We think the gaming facilities would benefit from some Asian influence and balance out the clientele.”

  They wanted to install games like Pai Gow and mahjong, Cheung explained. Dad was totally against it but Miguel wanted him to give it a chance. The main thing, according to Dad, was that Le Cheung wanted to take it over, not share it. “We give them this and next week they’re back for something else. Maybe a bigger piece of the action,” Dad had complained.

  “I said that I didn't think so,” Miguel grinned. “For one, they know there are more round-eyes and brown people on this boat than Asians. They kick us out, there’s a big hole in the water where the Dixie used to be before morning. The Dixie is big enough that nobody wants it to go away.”

  “Yea, but I was right about our share of the profit going down.”

  “We’re still making money, pal,” Miguel said mildly. “A smaller piece of the pie is better than no pie at all.” The whole thing started out crazy and was moving too quickly to have any control over. Dad still saw a million problems with it but decided to along with it. Like Miguel said … they really didn’t have a choice.

  Dad finally stopped his story long enough to take a bite of Miguel's flap steak. I haven't mentioned it up until this point but he does make some of the best steak you'll ever taste. It's amazing.

  “The details of setting up the Dixie kept us going 24 hours a day,” Miguel said. “Who knew that people would eat so much bread at a restaurant? We went through 90 of those sourdough rounds in the first night and we thought that would last us a week.” Getting bread out here was difficult, too, forget fresh bread. They had to run around getting a bakery set up and ironing out any 'quality control issues'.

  “I was still upset about the games,” Dad continued. “I said to Miguel, 'You seriously see no problem having them along for the ride like this? I mean … pai gow? I don’t know pai gow – I’ve only seen people play mahjong. We’re supposed to be running this casino and I don’t know half the games we offer.'”

  “Yeah, and I was like 'So?'” Miguel laughed.

  “So I was like, 'what happens when we have to step in? What if there’s a problem? How would we know if the customers were getting cheated?'”

  “Just like I told him, we didn't need to,” Miguel explained. “It doesn’t matter if we know the game as long as the customers do. Look,” he put a beer down and began to gesture, a move that meant Miguel felt passionate about something. “They can’t run a dirty game – they’d be out of business in a week if people stopped playing. They’ll have to run clean games or at least look so clean no one can tell the difference. Meanwhile, the white guy and the brown guy – they run the rest of the show and everyone knows we’re just looking for an excuse to throw the tables overboard.”

  “Are we going to throw the tables overboard?” I asked.

  “No. It doesn’t matter what we’re going to do – it only matters what they think we’re going to do.”

  “Huh?” I was lost.

  “Miguel’s logic is layered.” Dad explained. “Sound familiar?” Ugh … layered logic again. This was one of Dad's favorite things to beat me over the head with last summer. I was not going there with him now.

  The way they saw it, Dixie was a huge success. On the first night, half of the Colony was trying to get in the door. Poor folks who had been living on their start-up loans were trying to get in and Rick had those folks bounced before they got a chance to sit down at a table. On one issue, Pacific Fisheries had been absolutely adamant and Dad was determined to meet it: keep the trash out. Sure, it sounded harsh but there was a moral to this story – you couldn’t afford to let the guys who owned you money get into even deeper debt. Even if they were positive they could win enough to pay off their loans, you didn’t let them in.

  “The fishing, the Dixie and the scams were a beast to keep organized but man, was it paying off!” Dad was smiling … happier than I’d ever seen him. He had been through a lot these past few years, working and scraping to find a comfortable spot here. Along with rebuilding his life in some semblance of order, he wanted to build his relationship with us. I have to say that it was great to see that after all his talk, he was getting there. Dad took some time away from the casino to work on the Farmers Market boat. There were still tons of details they had to work out.

  “Then he comes up with this name for the boat,” Miguel said. He sounded like it was irritating and amusing at the same time.

  “What name?” I asked.

  “The Cooger & Dark.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Literary reference,” Dad replied. “From a book. See, it’s from an old Ray Bradbury novel and-”

  “Never mind.”

  “Everyone likes the name,” Dad complained. “Nobody wants to hear about where it comes from.” The burned out hulk had new paint a
nd welded-steel structure, new vinyl and paint. It looked like a custom job you might have spent your 401K on, the one where you docked it in Lake Arrowhead or Lake Mead and never went anywhere else.

  We finished our late lunch and spent a few minutes trying out a new .22 rifle that Miguel had purchased. I was very happy … this summer would be perfect. “When can we go see the boat?” I asked.

  “Right now,” Dad grinned. “We need to take a spin around the colony and show off the sign anyway.”

  We strolled over to wear the boat was docked, half-way between the Horner and the Gun Range on E-ring. People were still welcoming me back and it took a few minutes to work my way over to the Cooger & Dark. It's hard to be polite when all you want is to see your girlfriend and get to all the making out we discussed. Don't worry – I'm going to be a gentleman: I still remembered Ethan and his machete.

  It was really supposed to be a perfect moment for me. I think Dad wanted it, too. I landed at the Colony and he's pulling out surprise after surprise. The Dixie Star, the floating farmer’s market … I'm getting hugs and handshakes from everyone I run across. The Land of the Weird is welcoming home one of their own and now … now my Dad is no longer a screw-up. He’s hit the jackpot and I’m going to be spending the summer basking in the glow of it all. It makes what happens next almost hilarious.

  The trouble started somewhere underneath. The original engine had been gone over by someone, not Miguel obviously, and a fuel leak had been missed. The boat was idling before its trip around the Colony with new banners advertising a ‘Farmers Market Experience’ merrily flapping in the breeze. We were watching and waiting to board Dad’s most recent accomplishment, another milepost in the journey away from being 'Rick the Ocean-going Loser'. It was at this point that the fumes got heavy enough to ignite.