“I’m still young,” Tillman confessed, surprising himself, the words blurting forth from his mouth unsolicited. Tears of gratitude slipped down his face from this unexpected report of the heart.
He looked down at the endless water, waves struggling and receding, the small carnation of foam marking his mother’s entrance into the sea, saw her, through the medium of refraction, unwrapped from her shroud, naked and washed, crawling with pure, unlabored motion down the shafts of light and beyond their farthest reach, thawed into suppleness, small glass bubbles, the cold air of her last breath, expelled past her white lips, nuzzled by unnamed fish. Now she was a perfect swimmer, free of the air and the boundaries of the living, darkness passing through darkness, down, down, to kiss the silt of the ocean floor, to touch the bottom of the world with dead fingers.
They had watched her plummet with a sense of awe and wonderment, as boys would who have thrown an object from off a high bridge. The pilot regained altitude and they continued westward. The realization came into Tillman, a palpable weight in his chest. I don’t belong here, he said to himself, and immediately resisted the feeling, because that must have been the way she felt all her life.
Then, with the rich peaks of the island in sight, the heaviness dissipated. “It’s beautiful here,” he heard himself saying.
“What’s that?” Roland shouted back.
“Beautiful,” he repeated, and throughout Roland’s clumsy landing, the jolt and thunder of the runway, “Mother be at peace.”
Dead Reckoning
When I dropped out of Old Dominion, I took the first job I could find, flipping hamburgers in a fast-food place near one of the marinas in Ocean View. My education wasn’t helping me one way or another, and it was time to do something that would enrich my life—as if anybody’s life is like a loaf of bread you can press vitamins into. I was ambitious, I thought, but not strong. Working in a place like that seemed a fitting penance to endure until I figured myself out. Dumb, I know. Not the inspired thinking that really changes lives. I would come home greasy and exhausted, my hair unhealthy and smelling like onions. I felt like a floozy. Occasionally I would find enough energy to barhop and sleep with men I didn’t know very well. You’ve heard stories like this, I’m sure. But it was the best time, the right place to lose hold of myself. If you don’t do it when you’re young, then I think you must get stuck forever being perfect and unreal.
The bleakness just kept increasing until they switched me to a morning shift. It was the end of March—the azaleas and dogwoods tried to make me appreciate that although I think spring is a phony season, hardly there at all before winter forgets what it’s doing and summer bears down with its heat and humidity. I hated waking up early at first because I could never seem to spend the night decently. No matter how much I worked on myself in front of the bathroom mirror, my eyes still looked dulled, my mouth decadent, my skin subterranean, my pride—my thick blond hair—unmanageable, an expression of how untied I was. I’d bicycle down Oceanside to the hamburger joint and start heating up the grease. From the very first day this guy would come in every morning around eleven to get a cup of black coffee, a bag of french fries, which he’d soak in vinegar, and a piece of apple pie. Sometimes I’d take his order, sometimes Janine would. Janine obviously knew the guy. She’d ask, “How’s it going?” He would look serious and say something like, “No turnbuckles. I can’t find the right turnbuckles,” or, “I’d like to know just how the hell anybody can afford teak?” Then he’d march off to one of the tables, unroll the big piece of graph paper he always had tucked under his arm, spread his order out on the diagrams and scratches, and study them while he ate, doodling atop the doodles he had made the day before. The plans were so coffee-stained and sticky I don’t see how he got the boat built.
It was clear that he cared as much about food as I did about my job. His name was Davis and he was, whenever he came into the place, filthy. His jeans were caked with epoxy, his T-shirt looked like a painter’s palette. He wore tennis shoes that could have been chewed on by a shark and he had the worst fingernails I’ve seen on anybody. They were smashed and black and jagged, with enough dirt beneath them to occupy a geologist. I liked his body, though. For all the junk he ate he was handsomely lean, and yet his arms were so muscular they seemed swollen. He never bothered to comb his rusty hair, but it was too short then to give him the wild Leif Ericsson look he has now. If I had created him I would have had more sympathy for his face. Davis had a face you expect to see scars on, like a tally of what’s been paid, but he only had a little one, a thin white line that italicized his left eye. I don’t know how he got it. His skin was much redder than his hair, his features so abrupt—he looked like a man whose element was fire, who could only be happy with the world ablaze, which was odd, because he loved the sea more than anything else. He was not a romantic figure; his appearance was too haggard—scary—for that. I was attracted to him nevertheless. I was intrigued, glance by glance.
He walked in one day after I had gone through a long, depressing evening in a bar with Janine, that old scene, not caring how much I drank, half wild from this great reservoir of ambivalent desire I felt was in me. By eleven I was a zombie; it took me a second to realize Davis was standing across the counter from me and talking.
“What?” I said wearily, pushing the hair out of my eyes, hating the oily touch of it. I just wanted to go home and sleep for a year.
“You look terrible,” he said.
“Thanks. So do you,” I told him. “You always do, you know that.” He smiled, and the smile was more than I imagined it would be.
“So you built a boat?” I already knew he had but I asked him anyway.
“Yeah. Finishing up. She goes in the water in three or four days.”
“Need a crew?” I blurted out. I had not really intended to speak that sentence, only to test out the feeling on myself.
“Oh?” he said suspiciously, the grayness of his eyes bearing down on me, critical, but not by the same standard as the guys in the bars. “Do you sail?”
“Sure,” I answered. “Well, a little bit anyway.” The only boat I had ever been in or on was a canoe. I was more of the horseback, hiking type—I’d grown up in the Blue Ridge Mountains outside of Charlottesville. Nothing strange or special about me; I was an ordinary girl.
“Well,” said Davis slowly, as if he wasn’t sure he was being smart. “If the sailmaker gets off his butt we’ll go out on the bay some Saturday. Next week. Maybe.”
It did not take three or four days for Davis to get his boat in the water—it took him more than a month. The entire time he acted mad or preoccupied so I stopped talking to him about it. Then one afternoon he showed up as I was getting off work and took me sailing, more or less.
Davis was a master craftsman, and a wry bastard of a perfectionist. It had taken him four and a half years to build Impetuous—a gaff-rigged sloop, thirty-two feet long, and double-ended, her black hull ferrocement. The design was seventy years old and somehow, even though the boat was brand new, Davis had succeeded in giving her an ambiance of graceful age, as if she had been day sailing the Chesapeake since before our parents were born. Everything aboard was not bright and polished and packaged, but quiet, comfortable, and loved. Under full sail Impetuous was breathtaking, something bigger in my life than had ever been there before.
A lot of time passed, though, before I learned these details about the boat, learned what gaff-rigging meant and that Impetuous had it. When I first went aboard I didn’t know stem from stern, didn’t have a nautical fact in my head. And I couldn’t have guessed how stubborn a true perfectionist can be. I ran my hand along the beautiful woodwork in the cockpit. Davis frowned. “It’s not right. Doesn’t drain right.” Every time I made a compliment, he would say something to undercut it. That’s the way he is: it’s one of his characteristics I strive to ignore.
That first day on Impetuous was like petitioning to join a club that you desperately want to belong to, even thoug
h the club’s only function is to confuse and harass people who fit your description.
“Let’s do it,” said Davis. I’m sure I must have looked like a silly belle, eyelids fluttery, clapping my hands, my heart so certain I was meant for this.
I asked him what he wanted me to do. He wanted me to sit in the cockpit and be prepared to take the tiller when he told me to. I felt a nice warmth in my blood that came from being with Davis, and absolutely no apprehension about what was going to take place. I sat down innocently on the edge of the cockpit, my legs crossed comfortably, my fingers resting on the shaft of the tiller, feeling as grand as if I had the best seat in the house at the most spectacular show ever to hit town. And it started out like that. Davis, magician and sorcerer, salty and seaworthy, huffed and grunted and raised the mainsail, dazzling me with its white immensity, its thunderous rustling. It shone like snow and swelled as big as a mountainside. It was wonderful.
He began to winch up the anchor and call instructions back to me. Then he started yelling, curses like knots tied into the weave of my fantasy. I began to feel unworthy, a moron, a bug. “Starboard, damn it, starboard.” When he saw I didn’t understand he yelled Steer right, for Chrissakes! so I swung the tiller right as far as I could, the boat began to circle the wrong way, and he screamed at me, “To the right, goddammit, what’s wrong with you?” I felt terrible, but how was I to know that when you pushed the tiller right the boat went left? We ran aground there in the anchorage—serious taboo for a prideful sailor, an elemental failure, like a farmer who can’t plow his rows straight. Somebody had to come pull us off because Davis had no money left over to put an engine in the boat. His yelling frightened me, but in the days ahead I got better. I don’t know why he gave me the chance but he did, and I took it.
One Saturday in June we were out in the middle of the Chesapeake, a day of sluggish weather, no pressures. When the sun started to fade and drain into the haze of the far shore, we headed back in but the wind died before we were halfway there. We drifted in the humid evening light until the water shallowed enough to set an anchor out. Night closed us in gently and we lit the kerosene running lamps and hung them in the rigging. Out there in the middle of nowhere they looked cheerful and secure. I felt as if everything bad in my life had remained onshore and everything good was out on the water with me. We went below, shared a can of tuna fish with saltines and drank warm beer. On the quilt-covered bunk we lay in each other’s arms until morning, whispering. Oh, he was so full of chivalry, this Davis; he could be tender and patient when he wanted to. I thought to myself I’d fall far in love with him someday. Maybe he’d fall in love with me, too, although I’m not certain what made me think that, unless it was that I was a woman willing to tolerate him, his quick shouting, the pick pick pick of his perfectionism, his demanding (and hypnotic) presence. I kept quiet and mostly tried to please him. It was just the right thing to do. I finally wanted something. I finally felt that something was worth the effort. I was that clear about Davis and the boat.
Davis was in the Navy, he had been for six years. His current tour was up in July and he wasn’t going to reenlist this time. He served night duty as a radio technician. During the daytime he sweated over Impetuous. I don’t know when he slept. He had joined the military because he was bored and because he was poor. That’s how he came in, and that’s how he was going out. The boat had taken all his money. Routine had neutralized his job. Now he planned to sail around the world, the hard way, through the Strait of Magellan, across the Pacific without a landfall to New Zealand, around the Cape of Good Hope—all of this without a motor to depend on. “So what?” he lectured me. “How long do you think engines have been on boats?” The first leg of the voyage would take him to the Grenadine Islands in the Caribbean, where he had already arranged to charter the boat out for the winter season. Enough money would come in this way to pay for food and whatever else was needed.
“Can I go with you?” I asked. He glared at the hesitation in my voice and I wondered if I were crazy. Then I said, “Take me with you, Davis.”
“I don’t think you can handle it,” he said. “It can get pretty rough.”
“Yes, I can,” I insisted. I hadn’t the slightest idea of what he meant by rough. “You just can’t go off and leave me,” I said. “I want to be with you.”
He didn’t have an answer right away, but he did say yes. I withdrew what savings I had from my bank and bought a small diesel engine for the boat. He never really was a purist about it. He just didn’t have enough money himself. It took about three weeks to get it in and running properly. Impetuous felt more like home to me after that. (But oh, the back talk I was to endure from that engine, the diesel muttering, and Davis muttering—a woman muttered against.)
Davis got his walking papers from the Navy, I moved out of my apartment, and we lived together on board. The Coast Guard offered courses in navigation and Davis wanted me to sign up even though we weren’t going to be around long enough for me to be certified. The books weren’t easy to comprehend and the instructor cared very little for women, but I enjoyed working with the equations and learned what I could. Now on our day sails we steered the boat out of the bay into the ocean. It was more rigorous but didn’t seem impossible. The perpetual heaving made me sick but Davis said that was normal and I would get used to it. In the meantime without Dramamine I had no more equilibrium than a sedated duck.
Davis decided that Cape Hatteras, the graveyard of the Atlantic, might be too drastic an initiation for me, so we were going to follow the Intracoastal Waterway to the top of the Florida Keys, then do the long haul to Puerto Rico, replenish our supplies there, leave the Atlantic for the Caribbean Sea, island-hopping our way to the cluster of Grenadines. We had to be in Bequia by November 15 for our first charter group, three medics whom Davis played softball with on the base. On the map it all looked charmingly simple, islands like stepping-stones from one continent to another. I quit my job and phoned my parents. They said no and I said good-bye. We left Norfolk the first week in August.
The Intracoastal Waterway, I discovered, is a party circuit for weekend warriors. The three weeks we spent on it lulled me into the notion that traveling by sailboat was like driving a sleek but clumsy bus from one good time to the next. The developed stretches along the canals reeked of money and Southern idleness; in some marinas I felt the yachtsmen’s disdainful eyes on Impetuous, as if she were an old Chevy wagon in a parking lot full of Mercedes and Porsches. We sneaked through Miami in the middle of the night into the free anchorage at Dinner Key. Our generator malfunctioned, costing us six days waiting for the new part to be hunted down. Davis stayed angry minute by minute; all he wanted was to get out on the sea where he didn’t have to depend on other people. When the generator was fixed and we thought we could leave, Betty, a hurricane prowling Barbados, made us think again. We sat under sunny skies for another week until Betty blew herself out on the thumb of the Yucatan. On a Friday morning in September we motored out Government Cut, raised our sails, and surged into the Gulf Stream.
There is much to say about the voyage but only one thing that really matters: by the third day out from land I thought Davis had it in his mind to kill us. I honestly did. “You’re navigating, you know,” he’d told me days before in Miami. I’d said okay, accepting the task casually because I knew perfectly well he was a better navigator than I was and would catch any of my mistakes. At Monty’s Raw Bar, I drank beer and munched conch fritters, leisurely charting out our course, an agent who had never actually left the travel office and therefore had no idea what the tickets, the reservations, the itinerary, represented.
We headed south-southeast through the Straits of Florida. My unsteady stomach was pacified by Dramamine; I felt brave and twice as alive as I ever had been. The Gulf Stream was calm, the wind well mannered but there, always there. After four hours on watch, Davis turned the boat over to me for two. Everywhere I looked the world was blue. I was alone with my man and that was it, that was al
l that was left of the planet.
When the sun went down I started worrying like an old lady. I had the sensation of being blind, moving too fast, out of control. We were in the shipping lanes and I imagined one of the big tankers crunching right through us. They have so many lights that at night on the sea they show up like cities rocking in a void. You can’t see where you’re going; you have to have faith, and faith was something I was beginning to lose. I stood watch from ten till midnight and from four to six. My grip on the tiller seemed to be my only hold on life. I stared at the compass as if it were a crystal ball. Everything I needed to know was spinning around under the faintly lit dome, and yet I felt I hadn’t the power to read it correctly. I felt this grave loneliness—more than anything else I wanted Davis to wake up and be next to me, wanted to touch him, have him reassure me. Davis and the sun both came up at the same time. I was cold and afraid, crying inside from the responsibility that cut into me like the blade of an ax. Davis looked relaxed—strong and liberated. He brought me a cup of hot coffee, said he was proud of me. Everything’s going to be okay, I thought then. Everything’s all right.
The second day we were becalmed. The ocean never appears more endless than when the wind stops and the surface slows like gelatin. I studied the charts. How much were we losing to the current? How much drift did I have to compensate for? At noon I raised the sextant in my sore hands and shot a fix on the sun. I computed and drew lines and checked the books, eventually marking a little x on the edge of the Grand Bahama Bank.
“I think we’re right here,” I told Davis, spreading the chart out on the hot deck in front of him.
“What do you mean, you think?” he answered me. “Don’t think, just know.”
“It’s hard to know for sure, Davis,” I said. “Don’t get upset.”
“I’m not upset,” he said. “But your well-being depends on knowing, not thinking you know. Aren’t I right?”
Easy in the Islands Page 4