A Five Year Plan

Chapter Ten

The Juarista was indeed a beauty. Lou Malta explained her construction history inside the enclosed flybridge while they were getting underway.

‘Sh-she was built in San Diego,’ he explained in his stuttering drawl. ‘The way the hull’s constructed means she has a low center of gravity and a deep V-entry in the water. Producing a very comfortable ride for you people, whatever the sea’s like. I never knew anyone to get sick on this boat. Not even from Pepe’s cooking. Of course we’ve got the thrusters and stabilizers to simplify handling, but it’s the hull that makes the difference. And a reverse sheer below the transom there makes backing down as smooth and d-dry as if you were standing on the sh-shore. Where’d you say you boys were from?’

Dave said, ‘LA.’

‘LA, huh? Which part?’

‘All over.’

‘Mmmm. All over. My favorite place.’ He giggled. ‘Just ask Pepe. Well, you picked a pretty good time of year to come after marlin and sailfish. January’s usually our best month.’ He gave them a searching north to south look. ‘How much sport-fishing experience have you boys had anyway?’

‘Enough,’ said Al.

Malta shrugged. ‘W-well whatever. Pepe and I? We get all levels of experience on this boat. Just a few weeks ago, we were fishing for yahoo with these three types from New York. And I swear I found one of them trying to kill the fish with his cellular telephone.’ He giggled again. ‘I swear, it was the funniest thing I ever saw. Wasn’t it, Pepe?’

Pepe grinned and said, ‘Yes, Lou.’

Pepe was a beautiful black boy of about thirteen, wearing a navy blue T-shirt with a white Nike swoosh logo and a pair of baggy Guess jeans. He was down on the cockpit, tying off ropes and smiling broadly at Malta whenever their eyes met. CR had a big gay scene and Al and Dave could see that Pepe was Malta’s cachero. Malta himself, wearing a pair of sky blue Lycra cycling shorts and a white T-shirt with Garfield the cat on it, was a curious-looking man. Fortyish, Rod Stewart haircut, pink Pilsbury Doughboy face, rimless eyeglasses with blue frames, and a large gold earring with a cartouche to match the one hanging around his pudgy neck, he looked more hairdresser than fishing skipper.

‘Pepe will fix you up with some tackle. We’ve got more or less everything you’ll need, although you two are the lightest travellers I’ve ever seen down here. Talk about the accidental tourist. Don’t you think so, Pepe?’

‘Yes, Lou.’

‘Like I said,’ Al growled. ‘We got a lot of our gear stolen in San José.’

‘CR is a very pretty country,’ said Malta. ‘But the thing about the country is that it’s just so impossibly p-pretty that it seduces you into a false sense of security. There are thieves all over.’

Dave said, ‘That’s true of everywhere.’

‘Well yes. But really.’ Malta tutted and sighed loudly and shook his head in apparent despair. ‘A man’s fishing equipment is something sacrosanct. Isn’t it, Pepe?’

‘Yes, Lou.’

‘You boys were insured though?’

‘Yeah, we got insurance,’ said Al. ‘You got insurance?’

Malta picked up the slight note of threat that was carried in Al’s remark.

‘Oh you boys’ll be safe enough on this boat, won’t they Pepe? We’ve got every creature comfort. TV and VCR in every cabin. Air-conditioning. We’ve even got a misting system to keep those rippling muscles of yours cool when you’re in the fighting chair. It gets pretty hot out there when you’ve got a big one. I even put a little patchouli oil in the mist reservoir just to make the air smell nice. I don’t know about you, but fish isn’t my scent of choice. And Pepe’s a pretty good little cook, despite what I said. And I don’t just mean he knows how to use the microwave. He can cook up pretty much anything you want. Pepe knows what men like to eat. We have plenty of s-supplies. You just tell him if there’s anything in particular takes your fancy. Just as long as it’s fish.’ He giggled again. ‘Just joking. We’ve got lots of steaks in the freezer. And plenty of beer. You boys want a beer?’

‘Beer’d be good,’ admitted Dave.

‘But what am I thinking of? You’ll want to see your cabins. Naturally you each have your own head and bath. Go on, take a look around while I get the beers. Only pay particular attention to the salon. I’m kinda prouda that. Designed it myself. It’s ornamented with custom-made glass by Lal-Lalique.’

Al and Dave went below. The boat was as luxurious as Lou Malta had promised. And with the headroom reaching seven feet in the salon and in the staterooms, it had an impressive amount of interior volume. Dave didn’t much care for the taste — it was too fussy — but it was plain to see that no cost had been spared in fitting her out with every conceivable extra.

Dave said, ‘Hey, Al. This boat’s worth a lot more than a mill. Say not much change out of three and you’d have been more accurate.’

‘So?’ Al was more interested in investigating Lou Malta’s sleeping arrangements than his own. Inspecting the cedar-lined drawers and closets he sneered and said, ‘It’s like I thought.’

‘What is?’

Al glanced up at the mirrored ceiling and then spat onto the black silk sheets that covered Malta’s double bed.

‘He’s fucking that kid. My Petey’s not much younger than that Pepe kid.’

‘What of it? Those two girls you were with in Key Largo last night weren’t much older than Pepe. They were maybe fifteen or sixteen at most.’

‘Bullshit. But even if they were it’s different for girls. Number one, girls mature quicker. And number two, that was straight sex.’

‘I thought you said you had them going down on each other?’

‘That was for my benefit, not theirs. That kind of sex don’t count. That was just like a couple of actresses playing a gay part for a movie. With me being the camera. It don’t make them queer. But this—’ He bent down to pick up a magazine from the cabin floor and Dave caught a glimpse of older men having sex with younger boys before Al flung it aside in disgust. ‘This is something else.’ He looked angrily at Dave. ‘What?’

Dave shrugged. ‘I still think this is a lot of boat to repo for the loan of a million.’

‘Yeah, well that’s the nature of collateral. Ain’t you heard? We’re in a recession. Money’s tight.’ He laughed cruelly. ‘And I bet that’s a lot more than I can say for that faggot’s ass.’

‘I’d better go and give him the bad news before we get too far offshore,’ said Dave.

‘You do that. Sooner those two fags are off this boat, the better I’ll feel. There’s magazines and videos in that creep’s fuckin’ drawer that would give Hannibal Lecter a nightmare.’

Lou Malta wrung his hands and wept, ‘What am I going to do?’

Dave and Malta were sitting at opposite ends of an L-shaped sofa in the now stationary boat’s salon. Malta was on his second pink gin, although it looked large enough to have been a third and a fourth as well.

‘Get some things together,’ Dave told him. ‘And the thousand bucks we paid you up front for the charter? Keep it. We’ll turn the boat around and head back towards Quepos. When we get in sight of the CR coastline, you and Pepe can take the inflatable and row ashore.’

‘But this boat. It’s my whole life.’

Dave said, ‘Not any more. What you’ve got to hang onto here is the fact that you still have your whole life. You may not have the boat, but you’re going to live. If it was up to the gorilla on deck, you’d be lip-gaffed, hoisted for a fuckin’ picture and then dropped over the side for the sharks.’

Malta trembled visibly and emptied his glass.

‘Jesus Christ, really?’

‘Really. He’s a violent man. And he works for a violent man. Tony Nudelli? I’ve seen what he can do to people.’

‘I had no idea that, um... that Tony was so mad with me.’

‘Sure you did, Lou. Sure you did.’

‘I guess I did at that,’ said Malta. ‘It was a stupid thing to do, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes it was, Lou.’

Malta got up from the sofa a little unsteadily and walked toward the stairs down to the cabins.

‘I’ll get that bag.’

‘Lou? You won’t do anything else that’s stupid, will you? Like come out of that stateroom with a gun in your hand. That’s just what the gorilla wants. An excuse to kill you and Pepe. You understand me?’

‘Yes sir.’

‘Good boy.’

Dave stood up and followed Malta to the top of the stairs. He had no idea if Al was carrying a gun. Just because he couldn’t have brought one aboard the plane didn’t mean he wasn’t carrying now. San José looked like the kind of place you could buy one easily, no questions asked. And someone like Al wasn’t the type to leave anything to chance. No more did he know if Lou Malta had a gun. But if Dave had run out on a man like Nudelli, a man who lent the loan sharks their money, then he’d make sure he always had a gun around. Probably two or three. So he followed Malta downstairs and looked through the door of his stateroom to make sure. Lou was staring into an empty sports bag, as if wondering what to take.

Dave said, ‘C’mon, we haven’t got all day.’

‘All right, all right, I’m doing my best for you, you inhuman bastard.’

‘Doing your best for me?’ Dave shook his head and yawned. That was the thanks he got for keeping the guy alive.

Malta started to stuff things into the bag: wallet, passport, jewelry, a bottle of Obsession for Men, Walkman, toilet bag, cellular phone.

‘I think you’d better leave the phone,’ said Dave.

‘Oh yeah. Sh-ure. OK. Well, couldn’t I just take the operating chip out of it and leave that behind? It’s useless without—’

Growing impatient now, Dave said, ‘Lou. Will ya leave the fuckin’ phone?’

Malta shrugged and stared at the contents of his bag almost incredulously for a moment, then zippered it up. ‘I’m done,’ he said tearfully and came through the door.

Dave grunted, needing to take a leak. He said, ‘Go up on deck and tell Pepe you’re both leaving. I’ll be there in a minute.’

Emerging onto the lanai deck a couple of minutes later, Dave blinked furiously in the bright Pacific sunshine and took a deep breath of the fresh sea air. Below there was a decadent smell of Obsession and something else that he didn’t much care to try and put a finger on. Al was leaning over the rail looking down onto the cockpit from where the serious fishing was done. Hearing Dave he turned around and Dave saw that for the second time in thirty-six hours the other man’s white polo shirt was covered in blood.

Dave shook his head and said, ‘What? Another fuckin’ nosebleed?’

The very next second he heard a loud splash, like the sound of someone jumping into the water, and turned toward the bow of the boat. Instinctively, he said, ‘Where’s Malta?’

‘He hit me,’ shrugged Al, and threw a jagged piece of broken glass over the side. It was part of the jar containing the baby hammerhead he had bought for Petey. The dead fish now lay on the teak deck at Dave’s feet. It was surrounded by a lot of blood spots like so many shiny red coins. Al rubbed the back of his sparsely haired head and looked vaguely sheepish.

Dave was frowning now, suspecting something was wrong. ‘Al? Where the fuck is that faggot?’

‘Man’s got a speech impediment,’ said Al and jabbed a thumb at the cockpit behind him. ‘He’s dead.’

Lou Malta lay in a spreading pool of blood like something they had just hauled up from the depths of the ocean, his legs twitching spasmodically as if with one good jerk he might propel himself back into the life-preserving water. The broken jar had crossed through the midline of Malta’s throat with such force that his neck had been severed from shaving line to spine.

‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ exclaimed Dave. ‘What happened?’

‘What could I do? He tried to brain me, the lousy faggot.’

A monkey wrench lay on the lanai deck a short distance from the baby hammerhead as if confirming Al’s story. Malta’s bag stood inside the doorway of the salon, as if he had put it down there before stepping outside with intent. But Dave was suspicious. It was possible that Al had left the wrench there himself before stabbing Malta with the souvenir. And yet that wasn’t the most obvious murder weapon Dave had ever heard of. Surely if Al had meant to kill Malta he would have chosen something a little more wieldy. Something he hadn’t been planning to present to his son.

Lou Malta stopped twitching before Dave could get to him. It was obvious there was nothing to be done.

Dave said, ‘So who jumped off?’

‘The kid, I guess. Pepe must have seen me kill his boyfriend and figured he was next.’

‘Not an unreasonable conclusion.’

Dave climbed up to the flybridge to get a better view of the water surrounding the Juarista and, about fifty yards away, saw a small figure swimming strongly in the direction of the mainland. Sitting down in the cream leather pilot’s chair, Dave started the engines and took hold of the helm.

Al yelled up to him, ‘What are you doing?’

‘Going after Pepe. It’s five miles back to shore, against a riptide. He’ll never make it.’

Down on the cockpit deck Al said nothing. Instead he started to maneuver Lou Malta’s body over the edge of the transom, all the time cursing him for a lousy faggot.

Dave drew the boat close to Pepe, slowed the engines and then threw the boy a lifebelt on the end of a line. But Pepe, terrified of what he had witnessed back on the boat, was too scared to grab it.

‘C’mon, Pepe,’ Dave called down to him. ‘Take the line. Nobody’s going to kill you, kid, I promise.’

Treading water for a moment, Pepe shook his head. He said, ‘No way, man,’ and began to swim away from the boat again.

Dave returned to the pilot’s chair, gave the engines a short burst of gas, and then revved back the same way as before. Coming outside again he spoke to Pepe in Spanish, gently telling him that the other guy hadn’t meant to kill Lou; that it had been an accident; and that anyway it was Lou who had attacked Al in the first place. Giving Al the benefit of the doubt. Ten minutes passed in this way and still Pepe was too scared to take the line.

‘Throw him the inflatable and let’s get the fuck out of here,’ urged Al.

Dave’s eyes caught something else surfacing briefly in the water near Pepe. It looked like a harmless tarpon, he thought. Around eighty to a hundred pounds in size, it was a good one too. Good silver color, big dorsal. By the time he realized what it was there were others, all of them summoned by the blood from Malta’s body.

Dave’s heart missed a beat and he yelled down to the boy, ‘Look out. Pepe, get out of the water. For Christ’s sake, grab the fucking line.’

Seemingly unaware of the sharks, Pepe shook his head as if Dave’s angry outburst had merely confirmed what he’d suspected all along. By the time he understood what Dave had been yelling about, it was already too late.

As if sensing that Malta would wait, the sharks concentrated their attack on the swimming boy. Dave could only stand and watch, horrified, as the sharks hit Pepe like a gang of playground bullies — first one, then another and then all at once, with an audible snapping of jaws that Dave felt in every nervous fiber of his being. Pepe screamed, slapped the water in front of him and, gulping air and water, disappeared briefly under the foaming confusion of reddening water. It was then Dave saw what species of shark these were. Hammerheads. Bigger deadlier versions of the baby that still lay on the deck. Dave felt himself shiver at the ferocity of their apparent revenge. Pepe reappeared only once, water and blood bursting from his screaming mouth, a hand already missing from his arm. He kept shaking his head as if he couldn’t quite believe what was happening to him and Dave was almost relieved when the boy finally disappeared under the surface of the water.

Al yelled, ‘Did you see that? Did you see that?’ He laughed as if callously enjoying the horror of what he was witnessing and with no more sympathy for Pepe’s savage fate than if the boy had been part of some B-movie’s lengthy body count. ‘Fuckin’ Jaws, man. Jesus, I never thought I’d see something like that. That was totally awesome.’ He shook his head. ‘I knew I was right. I knew it. Don’t ever get in the fuckin’ water.’ And then, like a man who had witnessed the birth of a child instead of the death of one, Al lit a large Macanudo.

Dave watched the frothing boil of shark, water and young blood until he was certain that Pepe wouldn’t surface again, and then cut loose the lifebelt, once pure white, now bright red. Slowly he climbed down from the bridge, sickened. Seeing the baby hammerhead, he stamped on its T-bone head and then flung it angrily into the ocean.

Al was still standing on the lower deck occupying the bloody space where Lou Malta’s body had been, the cigar chomped between his teeth jutting out over the shark-infested water like a warship’s gun barrel. Springing down the steps into the cockpit Dave snatched the big cigar from Al’s mouth and flung it into the sea after the baby hammerhead.

‘What the fuck—?’

‘You dumb ox,’ snarled Dave. ‘Don’t you know anything? Pushing Malta’s body into the water when you did was like sending the sharks an e-mail. Jesus Christ they must have thought it was Thanksgiving.’

Al looked around evasively.

‘OK, I’m sorry,’ he yelled back at Dave. ‘It never occurred to me.’

‘And while we’re on the subject, did you have to kill Malta? What happened to the deal we made?’

‘He came at me with the wrench. I grabbed the jar, smashed it against the side of the boat, and let him have it. I didn’t mean to kill him. Just to mark him up a bit.’

‘Mark him? You damn near sawed his head off.’

‘Yeah, well I ain’t sorry I killed him. Goddamn pedophile. My son Petey’s not much younger than that kid Pepe.’

‘Not any more he isn’t. Thanks to you, Pepe is dead. Thanks to you Al, Pepe just got eaten by the fucking sharks. Thanks to you this boat and Lou Malta were probably the best it ever got for Pepe. Think about that when you smoke your next premium cigar.’

With slow defiance Al pulled another Macanudo from the pocket of his bloodstained pants, sucked its length as if it was his own forefinger, and then lit up. He puffed the cigar in Dave’s face and said, ‘OK, I’m thinking. What the fuck happens now?’

Dave met Al’s eye, hating him, finding the hate returned in spades. He shook his head and turned away, disgusted at Al’s display of cold-bloodedness.

He said, ‘Let’s get out of here. We’ve got a lot of sailing to do.’

The bridge of the Juarista was fully computerized and it took Dave less than an hour to familiarize himself with the electronic chart plotter, the radar system, and the auto pilot. But once he had keyed in their course for Panama and the Canal there was very little else to do except periodically look at the monitor screens. With a fuel tank containing nearly 4,000 gallons, a 600 gallon per day fresh-water maker, and a freezer full of food, they were completely self-sufficient for their voyage back to Miami.

It was a twenty-four-hour cruise down to Panama City and the entrance to the Canal and, keen to be away from the scene of Lou Malta’s murder, Dave decided to avoid any ports of call and sail through the night. Happy to keep out of Al’s murderous way, he stayed up on the flybridge, snatching the occasional hour or two of sleep on the sofa. Al himself remained in his stateroom, drinking beers, watching movies on his VCR, and eating several microwave meals before falling asleep around midnight and sleeping until well after lunchtime the next day, when they arrived off the coast of Panama. The journey through the Canal itself took a full day and a half, and, Dave decided, was probably the most interesting thirty-six hours he’d had in five years. Three sets of locks — Gatun, Pedro Miguel and Miraflores — raised ships entering from the Pacific side on a kind of liquid stairway to the Caribbean side. There were no pumps. Gravity performed all the necessary water transfer.

Summoned by Dave’s calls to come and take a look at one of the modern wonders of the world Al finally emerged from his cabin, reeking of sweat and beer and wearing a Dolphins shirt and a pair of cutoff jeans. He nodded without much enthusiasm as Dave explained what a feat of engineering the Canal was and seemed quite unimpressed by the close proximity of so many larger vessels.

Al said, ‘So what’s in it for them?’

‘Who?’

‘The fucking Panams, that’s who.’

‘The Canal’s controlled by some kind of international body.’

‘Yeah? And what’s their angle?’

‘They charge a toll to get through the canal, of course.’

‘You mean like on the Florida Turnpike?’

Dave smiled slowly and said, ‘Kind of. Except it costs a little more than a quarter.’

‘What?’

‘Tolls are based on a ship’s tonnage.’

‘What?’

‘OK, they once charged a guy who tried to swim the canal thirty six cents. And that was back in 1928. So guess how much it is for a boat like this today?’

‘What is this? Family Challenge? How the fuck should I know. Five, ten bucks? What?’

Dave was enjoying his anticipation of Al’s reaction. Finally he said, ‘It was $1,000.’ He smiled as Al’s jaw hit the deck.

‘Get the fuck out of here. It was not.’

‘I swear.’

‘A thousand bucks? You’re putting me on.’

Dave handed Al the receipt. ‘Average toll for a big cargo ship is around $30,000.’

‘Get the fuck out of here. And they pay it?’

‘They’ve no choice but to pay it. Unless they want to go round Cape Horn.’

‘Shit man, that’s what I call a shakedown.’ Al looked up uncomfortably at the oil tanker that was moored alongside them in the Pedro Miguel. ‘Most expensive fucking drain I’ve ever been in,’ he said and, without another word, returned to his stateroom to watch the US Military’s Channel Eight on TV.

Dave suspected that Al’s reaction was mostly based on fear. Being at the bottom of a forty-foot screw lock as it filled up with millions of gallons of water felt very claustrophobic. He had set a north by north-west course for Cancun on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, a distance of some 900 miles. From there he intended to sail north by north-east across the northern coast of Cuba. It was a course he hoped would keep them close to land in the event that they encountered anything worse than the roughish sea that, according to the weather station on the radio, now lay ahead of them. The boat was fitted with Gyrogale Quadrafin stabilizers but, in an effort to make time, and because he also wanted to punish Al for what had happened to Pepe, Dave avoided using them altogether. He himself was an excellent sailor. Al, he had already surmised, was not; and by the time the coast of Honduras was behind them, Al was looking as green as a wet dollar bill.

Watching him throw up over the side for the third time in eighteen hours, Dave grinned sadistically. ‘Seems like you’ve thrown up just about everywhere in Central America. You’re one hell of a tourist, I’ll say that much for you, Al. Kind of like a tiger, the way it marks out its territory with piss. Only you seem to prefer to use vomit.’ He glanced back at some seagulls now making a meal of what Al had just thrown up. ‘The gulls seem to like you anyway. At least they like what you had for breakfast.’

‘That smart mouth of yours again.’ Al collapsed on the flybridge sofa and closed his eyes biliously.

‘Smart?’ Dave smacked his lips experimentally. ‘You mean, as in not covered with flecks of vomit? Yeah, I guess it is at that.’ He glanced down at one of the screens in front of him as the auto pilot made a small course correction and simultaneously stored the information in the computer’s dead-reckoning log. Then, taking a deep, ostentatiously euphoric breath, Dave stood up, stretched and said, ‘Hey, Al. Doesn’t this sea air give you an appetite? Reckon I’ll go below and fix myself a big lunch. Right now I could really murder a big plate of rock oysters.’

Al swallowed loudly and said, ‘I’m gonna murder you if you don’t shut the fuck up.’

‘Not hungry, huh?’

‘How long,’ groaned Al, ‘before we get to Florida?’

Dave checked the bottom of the screen where real time displays of position, course, track and ETA were updated every second.

‘Well, according to Hal here, be another forty hours or so before you see the historic city of Miami again. That is if we don’t hit any really bad weather. Which could slow us up some. But I can’t see it changing very much from what it is now. It looks like you and your internal affairs had better get used to this kind of sea.’

Al smiled grimly. ‘And you, motherfucker, had better get used to having me around. Maybe I haven’t yet told you. But I’m your chaperon for the Atlantic caper.’

Dave laughed scornfully. ‘You? I’ve seen poisoned camels that would make better sailors than you.’

Al shook his head as if too ill to think of some insult to hurl back in the younger man’s tanned and healthy-looking face. Exasperated he said, ‘The fuck d’you want all that money for, anyway?’

‘That’s an odd question for you to ask. Like one hooker accusing another of promiscuity.’

Al stood up abruptly and, with one hand clamped over his ballooning mouth, went outside the bridge and leaned over the side. During the minutes he was gone Dave did a little philosophical thinking. He thought about the heist and he thought about the money, but mostly he just thought about where he was: on the high seas, with nothing in front of him except the prow of the boat, and not a bad boat at that — it was just about worth the effort of going all the way down to Costa Rica to fetch it back home. Maybe it wasn’t worth the lives of two people, but he could hardly have anticipated anything like what had happened in San José. He was enjoying the voyage, an enjoyment made all the sweeter by the knowledge of how much Al was hating it.

Al stepped uncertainly through the flybridge doorway, wiping his mouth on the sleeve of his football shirt. He sat down at the chart table and drank some whiskey in an attempt to settle his stomach.

Dave said, ‘Been thinking about your question, Al.’

‘What fuckin’ question?’

‘Why I want all that money.’

‘You were right. It was a dumb fucking question.’

‘You ever read books, Al?’

‘Books?’ Al finished the whiskey in his glass and poured another. He was considering the possibility that being drunk he might not notice being seasick. ‘I only ever read three books in my whole life. Three that I remember, anyway. One was Hoyle on Gambling. The second was the Jaguar Owner’s Handbook. I gotta Jaguar. Supercharged XJR. Beautiful fuckin’ car. And the third book I read was about the Roman Caesars. On the whole if I want to read a book I generally wait for the movie.’

‘You should read more, Al. Most of the travel I’ve done in the last five years has been in the pages of books. So, in answer to your earlier question, I want to buy myself a yacht and see some of those places for myself, y’know?’

‘Madonna wants to go to Europe. But I like Vegas.’

‘One book I read was Seven Pillars of Wisdom, by Lawrence of Arabia.’

‘Good movie.’

‘It was all about how he fell in love with the empty space of the desert, right? That’s what I want to do. Fall in love with some empty spaces.’

‘I could introduce you to a cousin of mine. Best lookin’ empty space I ever saw. The lights are on, ’cept nobody’s home. But built like a fuckin’ palace.’

‘The desert. Or maybe the wilderness. The Australian outback. The Yukon. And of course the sea. The sea, I love.’

Al shook his head and grimaced. He said, ‘I hate the fuckin’ sea.’

‘The kind of yacht I want to buy, it’s nothing like this, man. I want a proper boat, with sails. Can’t be too big, or else I have to have a large crew. Two people, including myself d be about right. Gotta picture of the kinda boat I’m gonna buy right here. Want to see it?’ Dave took a piece of paper out of his pocket, unfolded a picture he had torn from an old copy of Showboats International and showed it to Al. He said, ‘Now that’s what I call a boat. Seventy-five foot ketch, clipper bow, wineglass stern, transom windows, Scheel layout. Boat like that costs a lot more than two hundred grand anyway. Kind of boat to see the world in.’

Al looked at the picture and then floated it back to Dave. ‘All those sails? Looks like hard work.’

‘That’s the point, Al. It’s you and the sea.’

‘The sea’s a bitch. And a bitch who’s really out of your league. The kind of bitch who, even when you take her on, you know she’s gonna fuck ya around, and that you’re gonna live to regret it. But still you go ahead anyway and persuade yourself that maybe it won’t turn out that way. But it does turn out that way. If anything she behaves worse than you ever imagined was possible. She’s cold, she’s hard, she’s cruel and she doesn’t give a flying fuck what happens to you. A real ball breaker. That’s the fuckin’ sea, man.’

Dave looked at Al appreciatively. He smiled and said, ‘Well what do you know? Hey, Al, you’re a romantic too.’