Contraband

by George Foy

  Gershwin pulled out a pouch of tobacco from his jeans. ‘Don’ know. No one know. Mebbe not even a person. Mebbe him just ’nothah name for BON.’ Gershwin shook his head. ‘Somethin’ cree-azy happenin’ wit’ BON. Somethin’ hot an’ mean.’

  A frigate bird wheeled over the harbor. A couple of big-footed gawpies, figuring it was another, larger gawpie, tried to catch up to it and failed. Their wings flapped frantically.

  ‘I’m lookin’ for a plane, Gershwin. Or a boat, even. See, I need a cargo. I got to get some quick cash.’

  The boombox timer clicked. Dr Funkenship rocked into ‘Jungle Boogie.’

  The islander rolled a cigarette between the first three fingers of his left hand. He lit the cigarette and blew smoke gently out the side window.

  ‘Queek cash,’ Gershwin said, and sighed. ‘Queek runs. Queek life, mahn. Whole world goin’ cree-azy for queekness.

  ‘You know,’ he continued at length, ‘you nevah get best jobs before now. People say you too picky sometimes, you no run certain cargo; mostly, people say you too cree-azy. Cree-azy Skid. Go too fast. How many boats you sink, pilot? How many planes you ditch? Goin’ too fast for sea, for engines.’

  ‘I din’ lose that many,’ the pilot began, his voice heated, loud, but Gershwin held up one hand flat, a peace gesture. He was laughing quietly.

  ‘Don’t harass yourself, mahn. Don’t matter to me anyway. All I sayin’ is now maybe people be lookin’ for Crazy Skid Marak, same reason dey not seekin’ you out before time. Because you go, fast as greased lightning. Because you no scared of weather. Mebbe BON no catchin’ t’ief so fast as you.’

  ‘I’m a good trader, Gershwin.’

  ‘You elegant,’ Gershwin corrected him. ‘You not good, but you elegant. Pretty cargoes: yellow diamond, green jisi crystal, white gold, run ’em all fast, fast like cree-azy bahstahd. Come wit’ me.’

  They went outside, down the sand to the water. The harbor at Sandworm Cay consisted of a fissure in the coral protected by concrete pilings to keep the sand from filling it in. The Connie lay roughly halfway down the western side of it. A boatyard that once had specialized in repairing turtle schooners lay at the harbor’s head. The turtles were gone now, the remaining schooners used to transport tourists. A French company had built a five-story cement hotel at the harbor mouth in hopes of attracting young singles to an isolated place where they could dive on staghorn coral and cavort naked in the fine, pink madrepore sand; unfortunately the same sand had betrayed the place, chewed at the concrete, duplicitously snuck out its underpinnings, eloped with the storm currents, so that now the beach was gone, and so were the singles, and the building lay canted at a fifteen-degree angle, foundations shattered, its dining room regularly scoured by surf.

  None of the buildings on Sandworm Cay lay plumb and true, because of the sand. You had to drink to stay level, on the Cay, people said.

  It was an old excuse.

  ‘Plenty of boats.’ Gershwin pointed at the marina, where a number of long, low, sharp-bowed hulls nuzzled the pilings. ‘Coupla planes in de hangar, too, but dem slow, prop jobs. Plenty boats. Price of boats way down. Price of cargo way up, pilot.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll go sailin’ this time,’ the pilot said. He picked up his bags from Gershwin’s office and headed for the marina.

  *

  Plenty of boats.

  There must have been thirty of them in the marina. An ancient Royal Air Force search-and-rescue launch, seventy feet of heavy engines and light plywood still painted in white-and-blue camouflage, rotted resignedly at one end of the dock area. A twin-hulled Scarab – both massive outboards burned – rubbed herself raw on a bulkhead opposite the SAR launch. Craft of every size and shape filled the space between, but all had two characteristics in common; all possessed the sharp, mean lines, the needle-nosed bow to poke into wind and waves with minimum resistance; all were built with hard chines at the side and flat, scooped-out sections underneath, so the thrust of horsepower at the stern would kick their light hulls out of the heavy drag of displacement, wedge them at an angle against the sluggish water, then smack them three-quarters out of the wet stuff altogether into a sweet fast plane that rode as much on air as on liquid.

  Smugglers’ boats. You could tell by the lines, and the horsepower, and the fact that most were painted in dark colors for night work. A few wore light skirts of Kevlar plating around the cabin, and had slits instead of windscreens in case BON or the Santa Martans were waiting with their heavy machine guns. Two had once borne active armor around the wheelhouse, flat tiles of plastique designed to detonate armor-piercing shells before they had a chance to do their work. The tiles had all melted away or exploded in the sun’s heat, leaving these craft with an oddly chewed appearance, like puppy toys.

  In all the boats, the cargo areas were large. They had too many antennas to be racing craft.

  The pilot walked back and forth between the hunched-over worksheds and the crazy-angled docks, shooing away wild donkeys, looking for the right craft among the purple evening shadows. He noticed that Gershwin’s wife’s cousin had followed him from the Connie, but was too absorbed in his task to think anything of it.

  The majority of the boats were useless, hulls cracked or rusted or gone soft with rot. Their engines were missing, or worn out, or burned. The few that looked half-serviceable were either too small or too slow. There were two exceptions; the first, a Deluxe Fountain, with triple Mercruiser powertrains, had a busted skeg and a crack down the port side. It was a little too stiff for ocean work.

  The second was a big old Circuit vee-hull with a couple of big-block Fords that might do the trick. However, its hull was made of light fiberglass and looked brittle.

  This brittleness was a definite drawback. The waves of the Caribbean, like those of the North Atlantic, had in the last ten years grown seven percent higher, and therefore more dangerous, for reasons no one fully understood but that people suspected had to do with the variations in temperature and wind direction spawned by the same factors that produced ozone showers.

  The pilot walked behind one of the turtle schooners hauled up behind the SAR launch, and found more boats hauled between the schooner and the farthermost shed; in fact there were eight or nine of them. But from the huddle of beached craft one shape fanfared out of the evening, one set of dynamic surfaces came together in a pattern so familiar it drove all musings and ennui clean out of his consciousness, sucked the air from his lungs, and stopped him in his tracks under the schooner’s scarred counter.

  ‘Miss Benthol,’ he muttered to himself, though he knew it could not be the Miss Benthol, the Miss Benthol had last raced fourteen years ago, it had to be one of her successors, the Miss Benthol II, III, all the way up to Six when the Benthol company had given up sponsoring giant unlimited ocean superboats; but they never changed the basics of the craft, for some reason to do with trademark recognition they always hung on to the same clean lozenge of transom, the incredible overhang of bow, the stubby wings on each side with the stabilizer flaps that made her, nearly, a flying machine.

  The pilot was almost in a trance with the memory. He found a ladder and climbed till he was standing on the bow of the superboat, looking aft seventy-five feet to the cockpit.

  He’d watched these boats when he was a boy. Never live; always on TV, or in the miniaturized fantasy of small plastic model kits. He’d bought the first Miss Benthol kit when he was ten, or eleven anyway – spent days laboring over the thing. He could almost see the tiny bits of engine, gray plastic in their unfinished state, still attached to those intricate plastic trees they were molded on, twenty or thirty different engine parts to a tree, they were so darn daunting when you first unwrapped the cellophane and opened the model box.

  Flaking paint on both wings of the real thing confirmed the pilot’s guess. Mi s en ol III, he read, the familiar red letters shining through a thin layer of camo.

  The boat carried two F-16 canopies, port and starboard, one for throttleman, one for d
river/navigator, but the controls all had been bunched under the starboard canopy, for single-handling.

  The engines were Lycomings, twin T-99s. The port one looked like it might be OK. The starboard was half dismantled, and sand had seeped in through one of the inspection ports. It was getting too dark to see properly, and the pilot had to feel around inside with his hands, recognizing problems by their shape.

  His father had not approved, of course. It was not the act of modeling he disapproved of, for he himself collected model trains and later on, when he got laid off from his last railroad, the Vermont Central, would go into the business of repairing and selling HO-scale sets. Rather, it was his own love for railroads, especially old railroads, that got in the way. He could not understand the attraction of superboats, or even the racing turboprops and jet fighters the pilot switched to later. To him they were toys: frivolous, unreliable, delicate aberrations, isolated from the heavy tread of real commerce. Speed meant nothing to Roman Marak; it was getting where you were going, on time, with useful import, that mattered.

  He sometimes used to come into his son’s room to look over his shoulder; and what was terrible then was not the reaction but the lack thereof, over and above his father’s chronic spaciness. ‘Miss Benthol,’ he’d say neutrally, glancing at the magnificent assemblage of cockpit and stern-drives and chromed heads, the product of hours of tongue-in-teeth effort. ‘Very nice. Don’t forget your homework.’ And the pilot had got used to it, had even done his share of disappointing, the handful of times the old man tried to close the gap by trying to interest his son in this perfectly functioning BB 2000 electric locomotive, or that ten-wagon replica of the Brno Mail; had disappointed his father, not out of revenge, but simply because trains were slow, and predictable, and not what he wanted to do.

  And his father would sigh, and say, ‘Your brother liked them,’ as if he, Joey, could remember anything his brother liked; as if that could cut any ice with him after seven years in any case . . .

  The pilot squatted for a long time by the starboard engine, recognizing coils, intercoolers, injection nozzles, diagnosing how they were sick with the stubby pads of his fingers.

  Below the splayed fiberglass wings of Miss Benthol, the tall boy in pleated locks stood, curiously still, gazing upward at the shade against shade that was the pilot.

  By the time the pilot was finished the last glimmer of sun had soaked from the sky and the stars were very bright. He had a drink at the Connie, collected his gear, and went to find the owner of the boatyard.

  Chapter Thirteen

  ‘On waking up, before turning in, and any time your ass feels disoriented, immediately fix your position, using at least three bearings on known reference points with righteous angles between each. It does not matter if your space is psychological or physical: it is good for the ass to know where it is in space.’

  Hawkley

  Appendix ‘F’: ‘Navigational Religion’

  The Freetrader’s Almanac and Cookbook

  It took two days of negotiation and five bottles of Pusser’s Rum to get the boatyard owner, a notorious horsetrader when it came to used boats, to agree on a price. For twelve thousand Deutschmarks worth of gold ‘King Fook’ wafers – the premium currency of the Trade – as well as six VR-Portables, he agreed to give the pilot the Miss Benthol III and her two crippled engines. In exchange for another two Walkmen he threw in use of one of the worksheds plus tools and generator power for as long as it took to make the craft serviceable.

  It took Gershwin three days to find a cargo. This was a farmed-out deal, through a DeLisi contact, from a group in Guajira that talked revolution and Adorno but got rich, mostly, on cocaine and guns. The contract was not for cocaine but for heads, political heads in this case, eleven Chilean activists who wanted to emigrate to the States but had been refused entry because of subversive behavior in their pasts, stuff like opposing the extinction of harp seals, organizing rallies for international peace, supporting Node-communities in Patagonia, or joining rent strikes. A Chilean Adornista group was financing the run with Cumbia concerts and bank robberies. The pickup date was roughly three weeks away; a radio signal, at the last minute, would determine the final rendezvous.

  A courier flew over from Trinidad with the run-money, six thousand Deutschmarks a man, sixty-six thousand Deutschmarks, or forty-five thousand dollars, in thin ‘biscuit’ wafers of Bolivian silver. The pilot gave Gershwin ten percent. He made a round trip to New York, giving ‘Brian Veitch’ a rest, using a Canadian UCC-card this time, to deposit the balance in one of his safe-deposit boxes.

  With ‘head’ runs, there were two rules. You always got cash up front, and you never brought it with you. People who forgot the first rule ended up broke; people who forgot the second often ended up facedown, sans cash, on whatever dock or airstrip they’d had the poor judgment to bring their cargo to.

  *

  With the business settled, the pilot got down to work.

  Gershwin convinced him to hire the tall assistant, Eltonjohn, as go-fer and guard. The pilot figured Gershwin was trying to get the kid out of his bar without pissing off the wife. However he agreed, partly because he needed the help, mostly because he owed Gershwin for the contract.

  The pilot made another round trip, to Lauderdale this time, to buy engine parts.

  He got the port engine running within six hours but the starboard was another matter. Its turboblower was sealed and fairly clean but everything else was a mess. The electrics were frazzled, the Bravo drive rust-bound, the intercooler clogged. Valves and pistons needed retapping and grinding. He had forgotten just how clumsy Eltonjohn was. The kid kept dropping things, or slamming hard tools into soft metal. However, he was so full of enthusiasm, so heavy with sorrow when he screwed up, that the pilot did not have the heart to fire him.

  So the pilot attacked the starboard engine like he was fighting a metallic wrestler; shirt off, thumbs in gouge position, using any purchase, any leverage, any mechanical advantage he could. He disconnected and hauled out the turboblower. He pulled out all the cowlings and baffles and jacked the engine up three feet so he could get to it from all angles. He lined up all his tools, then broke down the cooling jacket and the rest of the freshwater system. He bathed the drive gears in a solution of WD-40, Mystery Oil, and kerosene; then, using one-and-a-half-inch socket wrenches slotted into four-foot lengths of pipe, he broke the grip of rust and forced the different components apart. He jury-rigged a boiler from an old scuba tank and reamed out the intercoolers with high-pressure steam. Then he did the same with the fuel system.

  The first few days were hard. The engine was a normal secondhand high-performance engine, which meant it was in far worse shape than seemed conceivable at the start. All the injectors needed to be taken apart and cleaned. Two of the alternators needed new bushings.

  Pipes broke, bolts sheared, tools bent. Eltonjohn dropped a timing computer in the sand. By mid-morning the temperature climbed to over a hundred in the shed and the pilot had stripped down to shorts and still the sweat came off him, so he looked like he’d just gotten out of the shower.

  The pilot’s general doubts fed on specific problems. He cursed as he sweated, and strained his shoulders. He wondered why he was killing himself for work he no longer respected as once he had.

  But as time passed he felt better. All the old skills were there. He took to diving off the dock every hour and a half, swimming hard underwater in the sapphire-colored sea, and that discipline helped keep him cool both emotionally and physically.

  Four or five days into the job he got that odd transition feeling he used to get working for Cal Bigbee. It was the same mental shift he’d felt even earlier, when he started working on old Chevies, in the great hormonal stretch of thirteen when parents mutated, like in science fiction, from strangers to aliens, and girls became so ripe with power you could not look at them without running mortal peril, and a boy’s only friends were the machines he worked on and a flatulent retriever mix name
d Herb. That was the first time he had felt the shift, and the feeling had not changed, it still had the same effect, as if he were one smooth trouble-killing process that started in his brainstem and flowed smoothly through his tools and into the engine he was touching. Sex became the perfect fit of the right socket wrench on a bolt, climax that first grudging ease as it started to loosen. Philosophy was the just understanding of lubrication; how WD-40 soaked into the heart of oxidation, and sweet-talked the molecules, convinced them to change valence, to give in; how oil bribed off friction like a City building clerk or a Johnsonist pastor. The fine erosion of grinding paste on high-tensile valve seatings was esthetic to the Nth degree. His hands – cut, scabbed, permanently black with oil – became high priests in a mystical cult whose chief aim, as in most mysticism, was the perpetual wearing down of tolerance, finer and finer, till you got as close to the primal emptiness as possible. Emptiness was zero friction; emptiness was perfect vacuum. In the space-out of intense work the pilot caught himself asking the same silly questions he used to worry about when he worked on Chevies, or on Cal Bigbee’s boats; to whit, Why did man seek the absolute? (Where was the five-eighths socket?) Was it a nostalgia for the womb, for the beginnings of life, some deep yearning for that first shot of warm salty water that cradled the human embryo, and the fish it derived from, and the first amoeba that begat the fish, all the way down to the initial slam of lightning into a hundred primal soups, and the quickening of split and difference into life and, eventually, death (and where in hell was the pressure driver)?

  One lunch hour he went looking for Eltonjohn and found the kid involved in a religion of his own. He was standing on the harbor bulkhead, measuring the sun’s angle to the horizon with a yachtsman’s cheap plastic sextant.