Chickenhawk: Back in the World - Life After Vietnam

CHAPTER 12

November 1980—John Tillerman had been a helicopter door gunner in Vietnam in 1969, had chosen to move to the same woods I had, was also building his own house. We had similar backgrounds and interests when he offered me the smuggling job.

As people, we were quite different. Tillerman was big: six feet tall, 175 pounds; a sturdy man, strong, filled with energy bordering on frenzy. I was medium-sized, medium strength, and lazy. Tillerman set a dizzy pace, racing around making sure everybody was happy, which put some people on edge. He went to the University of Virginia after the war and graduated in 1974 with a major in psychology.

Patience had seen John walking down our road, found out he was a new neighbor, and brought him over to see our place. We told him we were trying to be writers, which seemed to impress him. He said he sailed yachts for a living.

As I got to know John—I’d wander up the quarter-mile sandy path between our properties and watch him and his uncle building his house—I learned that he’d taught himself to sail by building his own small boat and sailing it single-handedly to England and Portugal and back. He seemed to have plenty of money, which, he explained, was the consequence of his ferrying-yachts-for-rich-folks business. He was generous, the kind of person, I think, who’d be generous even if he was actually rich, rather than just flush. He insisted on lending me the money to buy an electric typewriter to replace the manual portable I’d been using, without setting a pay-back date. When we had car breakdowns on the paper route, he’d immediately offer his car or truck.

Tillerman was gone for weeks at a time. When he returned, he’d come down and tell Patience and me about his adventures at sea, describing the kinds of people he had to deal with—always portrayed in his stories as rich, selfish, dumb as stumps—and the perils of sailing. He described hair-raising storms that lasted days. He claimed pirates were boarding yachts in the Caribbean and killing everybody on board just to get boats to sell to drug smugglers. I liked the stories because I liked adventure and I’d always wanted to sail, but John’s drinking habit—something I understood very well—often made his tales repetitious and tiresome. I wondered if I was like John when I drank.

But John was a godsend for us, and he set about teaching me the business. The business was smuggling marijuana and only marijuana. He and his friends had considered bringing in cocaine—it’s much more compact and profitable—but they decided they couldn’t handle the karma (these were sixties veterans, grown-up flower children, graduates of the Carlos Castenada School of the Universe). Marijuana, in their opinion, was harmless. John smuggled pot, but he seldom smoked it, preferring alcohol.

We drove to a marina in Jacksonville to see the Namaste, a thirty-six-foot custom-built sailboat based on a Westsail hull. She was a fiberglass double-ender based on a Norwegian lifeboat hull design. The Namaste had just been put into the water after being trucked from California.

“See how the cabin is almost flush with the deck?” John said.

“Yeah. That’s good?”

“You bet, Bob. Very good. When the waves start coming over this lady, they don’t have anything to bash against.”

“Good design.”

“Yep. They use boats like this in the North Sea, Bob. They know about storms up there.” He pointed to a Hunter sailboat which looked posh with lots of varnish and brass and teak. “Piece of junk, Bob. Total waste of money. That boat was designed to sit right there, tied up. It’s a party boat for people who don’t know how to sail.”

We hunkered down on the dock and John pointed to the Namaste’s painted waterline. “See how it’s about half a foot out of the water?” John smiled. “They did that in California before they shipped it.” He looked around. The closest person was a guy sitting on a deck chair in the Hunter, a hundred feet away. “That’s so when we load up with a couple tons of product, the water line looks just right, like we got nothing on board, eh? Empty fucking boat.”

I nodded. These guys think of everything.

The Namaste didn’t look seaworthy, however. Its mast and rigging had been removed for the truck ride to Florida. Coiled cable, crumpled tarps, paintbrushes, paint cans, and tools lay scattered on the deck. “It’s a mess, Bob. But in a couple weeks you won’t recognize her. We got lots to do. We have to step the mast and set up the rigging just to get it sailing, and that’s only the beginning. We need to put on the vane gear—”

“Vane gear?”

“Yeah. It’s this tricky gizmo from England that steers the boat automatically. Works like a charm. You’re going to love it. You like mechanical stuff, I know. No one gets stuck holding the tiller with that thing on the job.” He smiled. “Vane gear, new radios, antennas for the fucking radios, depth finder, bonding strip—”

“Bonding strip?”

“It connects everything to the ground side of the electrical system. We’ll put a copper strip all around the inside of the hull and make sure all the metal stuff and all the electrical stuff is hooked up to it. It’s good in lightning, and it’s good for the electrical stuff. That’s going to be your job, Bob.”

“This smuggling business sounds kind of like work, John.”

“That’s a fact, Bob. We’ll earn our money.”

“So, mast, sails, wind vane, and bonding strip. Then we go.”

“Nope. Need to clean out the water tanks—water smells like a damn locker-room shower stall; get a canvas dodger—that’s like a convertible top that sits over the hatchway, keeps major water out when it gets nasty.” John swigged beer. He had a can with him from dawn until he slept. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Yep. Need to buy lots of stuff. Tools, spare parts for the engine, nautical charts, food—lots of food. Basically, Bob, what we have here isn’t a yacht; it’s a yacht kit. You like kits?”

We laughed. John was referring to the struggle we had had putting together an ultralight airplane he’d bought six months before. The plane arrived as a big bundle of wires, tubes, and fabric with an instruction book. The thing was complicated, took us weeks to put together. I refused to fly it because it didn’t have what I considered to be proper controls. John flew it, and crashed every time. Disgusted, he later sold it.

“Anyway, most yachts are used like that one.” He pointed to the glitzy Hunter. “And they come apart in the first serious storm. I know what boats to use and how to rig ’em so they make it.”

After John showed me the Namaste, we drove around Jacksonville in his pickup truck buying supplies that John paid for in cash. Getting the boat ready would cost twenty thousand dollars, all cash. He had wads, pounds, stacks of cash. A lot of money flashed around in this business, but I think it was the work itself that John loved the most. “This is free enterprise at its most exciting—one of the last real adventures left, Bob,” he said. “I mean, sailing the seas, avoiding the Coast Guard, pirates, making lots of money. This is exciting stuff. How much adventure is there left in the world? Sometimes I think I lived before and I was a pirate or an explorer, something on the high seas; I can feel it. I did this before.”

“How much time do pot smugglers get these days?” I asked, surprised, but it sprang from my mouth automatically.

John shrugged. “Two years,” he said quietly. “Some people I know did two years.”

A jolt shot through me. Could I handle two years in prison? Did I even want to know if I could? Concern for the consequences is natural before dangerous missions, so I quashed the nagging foreboding that I was on a doomed quest. John knew what he was doing.

I had known what I was doing during the assaults in Vietnam; and I believed that was why I survived. But on this mission I had no training. I didn’t know anything. I’d never been a smuggler before. I didn’t know how to sail, had never even been close to a sailboat. “The odds of being caught,” John continued, “are about nothing outta nothing, Bob. Lotsa guys out there doing this; very few caught. Maybe five percent. If that much.”

We stayed in Jacksonville, living and working on the Namaste during the week, returning to High Springs to visit our wives on weekends. At the marina, John walked to a nearby phone booth at ten o’clock every night and waited five minutes for a phone call from the scam master. The phone rang about every other night. I never heard what was said—didn’t want to.

After the forty-foot mast was stepped, John began to rig the boat. He did most of the rigging himself. He was setting the boat up so most of the lines for the sails—halyards and sheets—were controlled from the cockpit so we wouldn’t have to go out on deck during storms. John gave me a roll of thick copper tape and told me to attach it to the bulkheads in a continuous circle around the inside of the hull. I worked in the cabin most of the time.

Below decks, the Namaste was divided into three compartments. Coming through the hatch from the cockpit, I stepped down a short ladder into the galley, which had a counter we used for navigation plotting and cooking on the starboard side. (The counter was the only table-like surface on the boat. John had removed a fold-out table from the main cabin because it took up too much room. Bales are bulky.) A gimbaled alcohol stove was mounted next to a counter and small sink directly across the aisle. A low partition and a post separated the galley from the main cabin, which had an upper and lower bunk on the port bulkhead, a cushioned bench along the other. The bow compartment contained the head (a pump-to-flush-toilet), a rope locker, two narrow bunks that met at their heads in the triangular bow space, and the sail closet where spare sails, anchors, and spools of line were kept.

John wanted the bonding strip installed neatly because the Namaste would be turned over to a partner after the trip. That partner had put up the money for the boat and the outfitting, and he’d be coming to inspect the boat before we left. I had to thread the copper strip through all the partitions, which meant a lot of tedious cutting and carving to get through the plywood panels and lots of bending and soldering to route the copper ribbon and make it conform to the bulkheads. I spent over a week doing this.

John finished the rigging. The Namaste began to look like a sailboat. She was thirty-six feet from the tip of her bowsprit (a spar that projects from the bow) to the stern, and twelve feet wide. John called the mast and sail arrangement a jib-headed cutter. Two forestays (cables that brace the mast) ran from the mast forward. The longest, from which the jib (forward sail) was set, called the jibstay, ran from the masthead fitting to the tip of the bowsprit. The second stay, which held the staysail (the middle sail), was attached fifteen feet behind and parallel to the jibstay. The mainsail boom, hinged to the base of the mast, hung across the cockpit from the mast to the stem, able to swing inside the running backstay, which was anchored to a small stem pulpit. Shrouds (also cables) ran from the top of the mast to each side of the boat and were held away from the mast with spreaders. All the stays and shrouds were anchored to deck fittings called chinplates, with tumbuckles so you could adjust the tension in the cables. Two plastic-coated cables attached to stanchions, looking like a fence, ran from the bow pulpit (a narrow platform with a steel railing that sat on top of the bowsprit) back along each gunwale to the stem pulpit. This fence-like thing is called a safety line. It is the last thing you can grab when you’re being washed overboard. John added one cable down the middle of the boat, running parallel to the deck, from the mast forward to the bow pulpit. This cable was a safety line to which you could clip the snap-shackle of a safety harness if you had to be out on deck in a storm.

While I finished the bonding strip, John was out buying brand-new radios: a single-side-band long-distance transceiver, a short-range ship-to-ship transceiver, and a loran navigational receiver. When the bonding strip was in place, I ran wires from the aluminum mast and every major cable and metal part of the boat to the bonding strip. If lightning hit anything, the charge would be channeled into the sea.

I unpacked the radios John had stacked in boxes in the main compartment. John had experience installing marine radios, but the details on these high-tech receivers exceeded his knowledge. I knew nothing about installing this stuff, but I studied the instructions in the boxes and visited marine electronics stores and asked them what to do.

When I worked on the boat, it was just work, but interesting work. Something about boats makes mundane chores more fascinating than the same work on land. I didn’t think about what I was doing.

When I was out shopping for wire or paint or caulking or just getting advice, I was constantly aware that I was helping get a sailboat ready for a smuggling trip. I had the childish feeling that everyone I talked to could read my mind—they could see this red neon sign blinking next to me: Smuggler. Blink. Smuggler. It was an eerie feeling, but it was not just paranoia. When people at marinas in Florida see two or three men, who pay for everything in cash, working full-time getting a yacht ready for deep-water sailing, they become suspicious, and it’s usually well founded.

During the second week of preparation, we picked up the third member of the sailing team, Bob Ireland, at the Gainesville airport. Bob, who came from Indiana, was my size, with dark hair, and (I found out later) was an accomplished artist. He joked around with John and affected a Spanish accent because John could speak fluent Spanish and loved to hear Ireland massacre the language. Immediately, John decided we had to have nicknames because “two Bobs will make us crazy.”

Ireland said, “Me? I’m definitely a Ramon—” He turned to me in the backseat and said, “You? You look like an Ali to me, Bob. Okay?”

“Call me Ali,” I said.

“Ali! Ali!” Ireland chanted. Muhammad Ali the huge prizefighter; Bob Mason the 135-pound pencil-neck. We all laughed.

We drove to our woods near High Springs.

John got out a rolled-up nautical chart that night while we sat around his dining-room table.

“The plan, man?” Ireland asked. John moved some plates aside and unrolled the chart.

John smiled, swigged some beer. He spread out the chart and put glasses and ashtrays on the corners because it wanted to roll up. “Wanting; having, Ramon.” This was John’s favorite expression: the smuggler’s slogan. “Wanting lots of money; having plan.” John picked up a pencil and tapped on the map at Jacksonville. “The plan. We leave Jacksonville when we get the word,” John said as he began tracing a route with the pencil. “We sail due east for a while, due east, till we get to deep water, here. Deep water, out past the Bahamas. Then we head southeast to the Virgins. All told, the first leg is about thirteen hundred miles. Thirteen hundred miles. Take maybe ten days, two weeks. About ten days, if we get good winds. Then we’ll lay over in Saint Thomas for a few days before we head south. A few days there, then we head south.” I stared at John. Why was he repeating himself so much?

“What’s going on in Saint Thomas?” asked Ireland.

“Take on final supplies. Stock up. Top off the fuel tanks, the water tanks, and stock the food lockers—”

“And la cerveza locker, si, Juan?” Ireland laughed.

“Is a bear Catholic, Ramon? The cerveza locker? The cerveza locker? This ain’t gonna be an easy trip, not easy, no, but we’re going to be living good.” John raised a beer and we touched cans. “Living good! Wanting; having! Okay. We re-provision here; we also install the transducer for the depth finder. Have to have a depth finder. I know a beach we can use to keel-haul the boat. We’ll keel-haul the thing—”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Basically. Well. It’s simple. We get the boat in shallow water at high tide. Then we haul it over on its side; pull it over on its side when the tide goes down so we can get to the bottom of the hull and drill a hole for the transducer—the thing the depth finder uses to send and receive sonar signals.”

“Why not do it in Jacksonville?” I asked.

“We’re running out of time, Ali. No time. Plus we’d have to haul the boat and I think the people at the marina are getting suspicious. They act suspicious. Besides we have to wait in Saint Thomas for the scam master to bring us some money anyway. We’ll have time to kill there.”

I nodded, distracted. John was nervous. And seeing the plan on the table suddenly made what had been just talk reality. Before, I’d been a sweaty laborer working on a boat, forgetting, or denying, why I was.

“Okay,” John said, tapping the pencil on Saint Thomas. “Okay. Saint Thomas is the last we touch land until we get back, okay? And this Caribbean leg is dangerous,” he said, dotting a line between Saint Thomas and Colombia. “We got dangerous shit here. We got pirates out here sniffing for our money and the boat on the way down. We got pirates out here sniffing for our cargo and the boat on the way back.” Pirates? Ireland and I look at each other. “Now. Okay. We sail from Saint Thomas, windward across the Caribbean, six hundred and fifty miles directly to the Guaijira Peninsula, and meet up with Ike—that’s the code name for the contact—on the coast, near Carrizal, here. About here,” he said, making a tiny dot next to the coast. “We load up and beat back across, out through the Annegada Passage through the Virgins. Trade winds are always from the north; have to beat back up; not comfortable; need industrial-grade jockstraps for that part. Now we got fifteen hundred miles of dodging el Coasto Guardo.” John smiled. “But that’s why we’re so far out, off the usual routes. Coast Guard stays closer to land. We curve way out and come back in until we get about here,” John said, tapping on a spot about two hundred miles off the coast of South Carolina. “About here, then we turn southwest.”

“Whot happy, Juan? We meesing the Florida?”

John laughed. “No. No meesing the Florida, Ramon. No meesing the Florida. No. From here we sail to Charleston. Near Charleston; they haven’t decided exactly where, yet.”

“Charleston? Why?” Ireland said, dropping his mangled Spanish routine.

“Because that’s where we make the drop-off, Ramon. Destination-land. Where we go. The shore team is already there, living in a beach house, checking out the area. They live there now; they fish; they shop; just folks; checking it out.” John winked and smiled. “Surprise! We not going where you theenk we go, eh, Ramon?”

Ireland nodded, looking worried.

“Don’t worry, Ramon, Spence is there; Mitford; Wheely and Rangey Jane; about fifteen dingers you know. They know what they’re doing. They’re watching everything: the drop-off point and every approach to it. They’ll give us the final clearance before we come in.” Ireland smiled, but he was still worried about something.

The spot where John said we’d turn southwest was a hundred miles north of Charleston. “Why so far up before we turn back?” I asked.

“People spot us coming in will think we’re cruising down from Cape Fear; think we’re a yacht on the way down from New York, maybe. Just on a cruise from New York. No clue we’re coming up from Colombia, Ali. Not a clue.”

Pretty slick. Except for saying everything twice, I was beginning to think John had his shit together.

“That last leg is over fifteen hundred miles of winter Atlantic. Lotsa nasty weather, amigos. Winter Atlantic weather.” John grinned. “Altogether, we’re talking about more than a four-thousand-mile cruise, here. Four thousand miles, plus.”

“Madre mio!” Ireland, reacting to the distance, smiled and then, looking serious, said, “But why Charleston? We’ve always had good luck in Florida.”

“Florida’s getting hot. Too hot in Florida. Last place they’d expect to see pot coming in is Charleston, Ramon. Nobody goes to Charleston. Who goes to Charleston?”

“Nobody goes to Charleston,” Ireland said, smiling.

“Right,” John said.

I walked home feeling antsy. Four thousand miles in a thirty-six-foot sailboat? Pirates? Coast Guard? The plan seemed okay, but what did I know? What were the odds? I fought back the nagging of my conscience, which claimed I was just not cut out for this stuff. It was just not me. I considered quitting that night, before I got in any deeper, but I’d said I’d go. Plus the alternative was grim: no money, no job, no hopes for either. Besides, I reminded myself, I had felt the same sickening butterflies in Vietnam, just before the assaults. Once you get into action, the doubts vanish. Just suck it up and do the mission. Thirty thousand dollars could last us three years. Three years to get a book published.

Just do the mission.

CHAPTER 13

November 30, 1980—Jacksonville is having a cold snap. It’s forty degrees inside the Namaste. I’m lying in my bunk in the main cabin. I put my hand out and touch the bulkhead. The hull is just thick fiberglass, cold as steel, clammy. Ireland is asleep in the bottom bunk, John is on deck talking to the partner, Ray, the guy who owns the boat. I can only catch snatches, but I get the gist. Ray is unhappy with how long it’s taking, how much it’s costing. John is talking, louder, repeating himself. I’m getting depressed.

“Sure,” John says. “You sit out there in California while the dingers are busting their nuts putting the fucking boat together. Comes on a truck. Comes in fucking pieces. Yacht-fucking-kit. What do you know about going to sea, Ray?”

Ray says something, but he speaks in a low voice. I met him when he arrived and he acknowledged me as one of the help. He was friendly, but distant. He was a businessman trying to get his ducks in a row. I sympathized.

“Yeah, you sailed. You sailed once,” John said. “Somebody else did the work, you were management, along for the ride.”

“Along for the ride?” Ray’s voice was angry.

“Okay. Okay. Sorry. I exaggerate sometimes—”

“Sometimes?”

Ray talked for a long time, and I drifted off. Did John know what he was doing? Or was Ray just being a nagging boss? I wished we could just get going.

Ray was gone the next morning. John told Bob and me that he had smoothed everything out. Ray was just an asshole worried about his money. “I told him he was going to make a fucking fortune and we were going to make it for him. Asshole.” We smiled. It’s great fun to hear the boss called names. Ray wasn’t the boss, but he was part of… management.

John took us to a nearby Big Boy restaurant for breakfast. While we ate, he told us we were almost ready. It had taken a month to get this far, but the time was near. I was happy to hear it and nervous as hell.

“We move the Namaste today,” John said.

“Move her? Why?” Ireland said.

“Guy at the marina knows what we’re up to.”

“He knows?” I said. “He said so?”

“Didn’t say it. I can tell. We move down the river. I figure we can finish up in two, three days.”

We sailed about twenty miles down the Saint Johns River to another marina. The Namaste sailed beautifully. I couldn’t get over how the light breezes could push this twelve-ton boat along at walking speed.

We got a slip at the marina. The autopilot, the vane gear, had just arrived from England. It’s called an Aries wind vane and John put me in charge of installing it. I had to drill oblique holes in the rounded stern and attach the mounting hardware. Took a day. When I’d finished, we had this weird-looking contraption hanging off the back of the boat. We christened it Rosalinda, in keeping with the Spanish theme that Ireland had established.

Rosalinda had a plywood vane, about the size of a blade on a ceiling fan, that reached above the deck about four feet. The vertical vane flopped around trying to keep aligned with the wind. When the vane twisted Rosalinda’s mechanism, it turned a long rudder that stuck in the water behind the stern. The wind vane’s rudder was attached to the tiller with ropes. The idea was that once a course was set, the wind vane would remain stable, pointing into the wind. If the Namaste changed course ever so slightly, the wind vane’s arm would twist and Rosalinda’s rudder would move and pull ropes that tugged the tiller and put her back on course. It was a clever rig.

That night we went to a movie, The Elephant Man, about a poor bastard who had a hideously deformed face and body. Afterward, everything disheveled, dirty, deformed, or smelly was preceded with the adjective elephant. A messy bunk was an elephant bunk; a tangled knot was an elephant knot; a stale beer was an elephant beer; and, of course, there was elephant underwear.

We drove to a shopping center in John’s elephant truck and raided a Publix. We were kids on a shopping spree. I think our high spirits resulted from the relief that something was finally happening. We used to do the same thing in Vietnam—get happy to be doing something, even if the something was going to get some of us killed. We ran up and down the aisles, each of us with two grocery carts, dumping in whole cases of food. We got canned meat, canned beans, canned vegetables. We got fifty pounds of rice. We got ten cases of beer. We got a case of Winstons. We got forty one-gallon plastic bottles of drinking water in case we ran out. We did all this yelling: “Hey, Juan. Needing theese corned beef?”

“Wanting; having,” John would yell.

“You like asparagus?”

“Wanting; having.”

People could not help noticing us. Probably they thought we were just crazy. It was fun buying all that stuff.

We took hours loading the boat. We packed the beer in the ice chest and buried it under four bags of ice. John said we’d re-ice it just before we left. This was a priority with John. He knew the ice would melt in a couple of days, but he was determined to have cold beer for as long as he could. Ireland and I seldom drank. We were smoking pot.

We pulled up the cushions on the starboard bunk to pack some of the canned food in the lockers there. John pulled out a padded rifle case and took the opportunity to show Ireland the gun he’d bought for the boat. He slid it out of the case—a Winchester .44 magnum lever-action rifle. “Nice,” Ireland said. “I guess.” Ireland wasn’t familiar with guns. He turned to me. “Nice, Bob?”

“Stop a charging rhino in its tracks,” I said.

Ireland shrugged, smiled. “Nice.”

John stashed the rifle under the other bunk and we stacked boxes of canned food in the locker space, converting the locker into an elephant locker. I noticed two cans of paint and a can of paint thinner and asked if we should throw them away—just take up room. John said we might need the paint in the Virgins.

We got to bed late.

We were ready.

John phoned the boss, but didn’t get a go-ahead. Something was fouled up with Ike, our Colombia connection. The next day, December first, the scam master still had us on hold, but John announced that we were leaving on the second anyway. “They’ll have it figured out by the time we get there.”

Patience and John’s wife, Alice, came to the marina in the morning. Patience brought my old flight bag, the same one I’d used in Vietnam. It was appropriate; I used to pack it when we stayed out in the boonies for a month at a time. She’d packed it with most of my clothes: four pairs of Levi’s, four sweatshirts, and one change of clean street clothes and loafers—for the drive back home. She showed me a packet of letters, each one dated; she said I should open them on those days. Patience likes to write. She’d also packed my Nikonos camera, a Vietnam talisman I was happy to have with me, my Texas Instruments programmable calculator I’d bought in New York when I was an executive, and my Swiss Army knife that Patience’s mother had given me. I had all my best and luckiest things to take with me.

We spent the day sailing the Namaste around the Saint Johns River. John showed off his sailing abilities by taking on challenges from other yachts and did really well considering the Namaste was such a tub. We practiced tacking, John yelling “Hard a lee!” when he was ready to make the turn, and got used to ducking the big main boom that swept across the cockpit when we came about. The jib had to be pulled over during the tack, but the staysail was self-tending, swinging across by itself when we came about. During this shakedown cruise, John showed us how his rigging worked. He’d run the halyards and down-hauls that controlled the sails, aft through guides on the deck, and into the cockpit, allowing us to control the sails and stay out of the weather. John used the same layout when he did his solo Atlantic crossings.

That afternoon we had a picnic on the boat back at the marina. I couldn’t taste the food. Patience was wide-eyed and distracted with nervousness, but she, too, had come to believe this trip was our only option.

Today was our seventeenth wedding anniversary. We went below and made love on the forward bunks—the only compartment with a door.

At sunset John came back after one last call. The scam master, in California, was still undecided about when we should leave. We agreed with John that we should just get the hell out of here and see what happened. People at the marina were getting to know us; asked more and more questions. We were antsy to be moving.

Patience and Alice stood on the dock waving. I could feel a filament of attachment stretching to keep me there on that dock, but it got longer and longer and finally snapped. I waved until Patience was almost invisible, a tiny dark figure against the red sky.

CHAPTER 14

Wind gusts swirled among the buildings, buffeting us from random directions as we motored through the narrow shipping channels that go through Jacksonville. We honked our portable gas horn at a couple of drawbridges to make them raise them so the Namaste could get under. John had the weather radio on and we could hear that the seas outside were fifteen feet, winds thirty-five knots and increasing; but it seemed fairly peaceful in the channels that meandered through the city. John set Bob and me running around securing loose equipment. I tied the cabinet door handles together, which seemed unnecessary. I’d been living on the Namaste for a month and had become accustomed to her being a level and stable platform. I knew she would heel over in the ocean, but I couldn’t imagine her leaning far enough that stuff would fall out of the cabinets.

John asked me to crank up the loran. I went below and opened the electronics cabinet at the back of the counter where the loran was, next to the single-sideband radio—a radio that can communicate over very long distances. I tuned the loran and got a readout. I plotted the readout on our chart and found our position matched reality—Jacksonville inlet, right next to the Mayport Naval Station. I told John it was working fine. The loran was our primary navigational tool. These radios monitor transmissions from a bunch of shore stations and can pinpoint your position to within a hundred feet. They are truly marvels of technology.

We had an outgoing tide. When we hit the mouth of the inlet, the rushing water twisted into huge rolling furrows and the Namaste began bucking and yawing in the turbulence.

When we got clear of the inlet, the wind was howling at thirty-five knots. The Namaste bucked into huge breakers, shuddering like she’d run aground. The wind shrieked through the stays and shrouds. About two miles offshore, John announced it was time to set sail. Bob and I manned the mainsail and staysail winches under the dodger and John winched the jib halyard beside us. John let the boat weather-vane into the wind while we hoisted sail. The empty sails snapped and popped in the gale like big flags, sounding like bullwhips. You could feel the boat quiver with the shocks. It took less than a minute to get the sails up. John shut down the engine and let the Namaste fall off the wind. The sails filled and she heeled over, so fast that I thought she was going to be knocked down. The starboard gunwale went underwater and the Namaste lurched ahead, crashing through the surf. It was like a roller-coaster ride. John said that cruising with the gunwale underwater was called “putting the rail under.” For a neophyte, though, seeing the side of the boat go underwater was alarming.

John showed us how to adjust the sails. When you took up slack, pulled the sails tighter to the boat with the sheets, it was called sheeting in. Let them out, sheeting out. So John watched the sails and the rail and called, “Sheet out.” By sheeting out the sails, we took off some of the sideward pressure and got the rail out of the water, on average. The bigger waves crashed across the deck and poured into the cockpit. The sea was a fury of shoving dark shapes and we were in their way. We couldn’t see anything in the pitch-black night, just the water within a few feet of the boat that our dim red and green position lights illuminated. Waves crashed across the deck and slammed into the dodger. The dodger was just canvas and the only thing keeping water from cascading down the hatch. John tugged Rosalinda’s control lines, clicking the vane ratchet until the Namaste came to a course of about a hundred degrees east-southeast. We gave Rosalinda a little cheer as she held the Namaste on course against such massive forces.

We were soaking wet, crowded under the dodger. John asked me to check our position on the loran. I went below.

Above, in the cockpit, the rolling and wallowing hadn’t bothered me. It was difficult below decks. I began to feel nauseous immediately. The loran was on, its power light showed it was on, but the position readout lights were blank. I reset it and punched the readout button. Nothing. I went up and told John, over the howl of the sea, that the loran wasn’t telling me shit. Maybe he could get something out of it. He cursed the maker, Texas Instruments, and went below.

The cabin lights coming through the hatch made Ireland’s yellow slicker glisten. He cupped a joint against the wind and jutted his chin to the back of the boat. “That Rosalinda. How ‘bout that girl?”

I nodded. “Be hell having to man the tiller in weather like this.”

“Shit, Ali, manning the tiller is a drag in any kind of weather. You just sit there for hours pushing that stick back and forth to keep the fucking compass on track. I’ve tried lashing them down to hold a course, but that only works for a few minutes at a time. I’m real glad John insisted on getting her.” He blew a kiss at the autopilot. “I loooove you, Rosalinda!”

“Bob,” John yelled. We both looked. “I mean, Ali. I can’t get anything, either. See what you can do. You know more about electronic shit than I do.”

“Me? I’ve never even seen a loran before.”

John nodded. “See what you can do.”

As I went below, I saw Ireland lean over the side, barfing. The Namaste was plunging down huge water valleys that put my stomach in my throat and then crashing up the other side with a surge that stretched my scrotum. But I’d been in storms at sea before. My dad and I went through a hurricane in his forty-two-foot fishing boat when I was a kid. I’d spent a month on the USS Croatan on the way to Vietnam. I knew how long I could last before I puked. Below, without the reference of the dim horizon, there were no outside clues as to what was happening. The cabin was a grotesquely tilted room with shifting, unpredictable gravity. One instant I was pressed against the counter, the next I was flung against the stove. The wooden parts of the boat—the cabinets, the bulkheads, and the deck—creaked as the fiberglass hull flexed. I swallowed bile and clung to the chart counter, flipping every switch on the loran. I had it do a self-check, which said everything was okay. Everything was okay except that it wouldn’t give a position readout.

I went back up just as I was about to throw up. The wind and the spray washed the sickness away. I told John, “The fucker’s broken, John. Maybe when it calms down I can go into the engine compartment and check the antenna connections. That might be the problem.”

John nodded. “No problem.”

“No problem?” I said.

“Right. The most we’ll travel in a day is a hundred miles. This is a very big ocean, Bob. We steer this course for two days anyway. You can get it working tomorrow.”

I nodded. Maybe.

Nobody wanted to go below because it made you sick. We’d drawn straws for the watches—or rather, Ireland and I had drawn straws. John wanted the four-to-eight watch so he could catch the sunrise for navigation. Ireland got the twelve-to-four, leaving me with the eight-to-twelve. The watches were four hours on, eight hours off, twice a day. I’d gotten the easy watch: eight to twelve in the morning, eight to twelve at night. We’d stick to that pattern for the whole trip. It was eight o’clock, my watch for another four hours, but John and Ireland stayed in the cockpit.

The wind was picking up. The rail was farther underwater and waves were breaching the cockpit coaming. We sheeted out the sails as far as practical, but the Namaste still heeled too far over. John decided that we had to reef the sails. Then Rosalinda broke.

We didn’t realize Rosalinda had let go until the Namaste came up into the wind and the sails began to flap with thunderous cracks. John jumped onto the tiller and got us back on course. “Ali, you hold her on this course, just off the wind, keep it loose, while Ramon and I reef the sails.” I sat back beside the tiller and held on. Waves bashed against my jacket. It took both hands to wrestle the forces shoving the Namaste around. John switched on the overhead deck lights and we could see the roiling, thrashing sea all around our bobbing cork of an island. John and Ireland put on safety harnesses—we only had two—and John yelled to me, “If anybody gets washed overboard, Ali, just turn about, sail in a circle. Drop the sails, crank up the engine. Just go in a circle and get the searchlight.” He climbed between a safety line stanchion and the dodger and out on the deck. Ireland followed, low like a spider, clutching the mast, sheets, halyards, stays, downhauls, shrouds, rail, anything he could get his hands on. They got to the safety cable and snapped their harness lines to it. I watched them struggling to keep their footing and wondered how you turn sailboats in circles. What happens to the sails when you turn? If I let go of the tiller to let the sails down, where would the Namaste go? Do they ever find people who go overboard?

I downhauled the staysail and they wrestled with the loose cloth for fifteen minutes, trying to gather it together to lash it to its boom with short pieces of rope called hanks through grommeted holes in the sail called reef points. The staysail secured, they made their way to the mainsail amid crashing waves. When they grabbed hold of the swinging mainsail boom, John made a cranking motion, a signal to let the sail down a little. I let the tiller go, grabbed the mainsail winch, let the halyard out, and pulled the downhaul in. Then I grabbed the tiller and got back on course. John and Ireland, battered by waves, tried ten times at least before they could capture the flapping slack in the sail and gather it up. They tied the folded slack to the boom with hanks put through the reef points. When they finished, the jib was up, the staysail was down, and the mainsail was about half its normal size. John told me to let the boat fall off the wind. I pulled the tiller and the Namaste heeled over, but not as far as before. The rail rode out of the water. John and Ireland staggered aft and unhooked their safety lines. As they made their way the last few feet to the cockpit, a wave buried them and rolled up over the dodger. They completely disappeared. Then, when the water receded, I saw them flat on the deck, hanging on to ropes. They got up and with a lot of effort got past the dodger and back into the cockpit.

“What’s so hard about that?” John said, laughing, soaked to the skin.

“Dammy. Elephant weather,” Ireland said.

We laughed.

We spent an hour tying Rosalinda’s broken pulley to the boat with ropes. The patch worked and Rosalinda freed us from having to sit out in the weather. The rest of the night was without emergencies. The only problem was seasickness. John and Ireland were throwing up. John did it on purpose. “No use fighting it, Ali, just let it rip,” he said as he leaned over the side. When it was my turn to go below to sleep, I felt myself getting sick as I tried to get to the bunk across the tilted, pitching cabin. I grabbed the bunk, pulled myself in, and the feeling vanished. I had to hang on to the sides of the bunk to stay in, but I soon fell asleep.

It wasn’t any calmer the next morning, but at least daylight made the rolling mountains of water through which the Namaste plunged visible.

Every so often a particularly monumental wave spewed across the deck and into the dodger. The dodger was amazingly resilient. It just drummed when a wave hit it and bent with the force, shrugged, and sprang back in position. John was right about the dodger. He was also right about the low cabin profile. The waves had very little to hit against—the forward cabin bulkhead was only eighteen inches above the deck. I came to think of the Namaste as being very tough, and of John as being a master sailor.

While we sipped hot coffee, we watched a sea gull, sitting in the ferocious water preening itself contentedly while it rose and fell twenty feet with the waves. Anywhere is home to a sea gull.

After coffee, John and I considered making Rosalinda’s repairs more permanent, but decided it was just too rough to be messing around trying to drill new holes for the pulley mount. The rope was holding okay; we’d tied it through a drain port in the gunwale and through the ring of one of Rosalinda’s pulleys that guided a tiller control line. We’d fix it better when it got calmer. I went below and puzzled with the loran.

During the night I had become more tolerant of the evil motion below decks. It took longer for me to feel sick. I unhooked the hatch ladder and laid it on the deck so I could get to the engine compartment doors. I opened the doors and squeezed in. This engine room was not designed for standing people. It was designed for crawling people. I had to squeeze past the engine on my side. Not past it, precisely. Sometimes I was beside it, sometimes on the bulkhead opposite it, sometimes on top of it, depending on the motion of the Namaste. I had a flashlight and some tools—pliers in my pocket, a screwdriver in my teeth. I wedged myself against the engine with my head back in the stem, under the cockpit, where the antenna connections were. The loran used a specially isolated section of the stainless steel backstay as an antenna. The antenna lead came through the hull and under the cockpit. The connection looked okay, but I undid it and scraped the wires clean with my knife. I reconnected the lead and wriggled back past the engine. We were on a tack that had the chart counter on the low side, so instead of trying to claw my way to the loran, I lay across the front of the counter. I switched it on, got the ready light, hit the position check. Nothing. Recycled it. Nothing. I got the instruction manual for the thing and went on deck.

They could read my face. “No worky?” Ireland said.

“Nope. Nothing. I can’t understand it. Worked fine when we installed it. Worked fine right up until we got into the ocean—”

“Sounds like a loose connection,” John said.

“I know. I checked the antenna. It’s tight. The radio’s getting power. It might be something on the circuit board that’s loose, but that’s beyond my talents, messing with the circuit board.”

John got up and stepped into the hatchway. “We’ll have it fixed in the Virgins,” he said, and went below. He came back in a minute carrying his sextant. “Want to learn celestial navigation?” He asked us.

On the third day, the storm died. The sky was clear, the wind steady. I sat in one of the lawn chairs we had lashed under the dodger and watched Rosalinda steering. We’d replaced her broken pulley mount and she worked flawlessly—the compass was locked on course.

“Ready?” John said. He sat beside the tiller making a sun shot with the sextant. His body leaned in all directions as he tried to keep himself vertical. He swung the sextant from side to side while he adjusted the micrometer drum that moved the index arm along the arc. I watched the seconds tick on the Casio wristwatch we’d bought as a chronometer. “Mark,” John said.

I said, “Eleven thirty-seven, twenty-two seconds.”

John nodded. He held the sextant down and read the degrees off the arc scale and the fractional parts of a degree—minutes and seconds—off the micrometer drum. He wrote the measurement—the altitude of the sun above the horizon—and the time I’d called on a pad. “Okay. We need two more to make a good plot. We’ll do it again in fifteen minutes.”

I nodded, smiling. I felt good. The ocean was beautiful. Steel-blue waves moved past us, looking solid as granite. If it were a movie, and you froze a frame, you’d think you were on a glassy, volcanic, primeval plain that went to infinity. The horizon encircled us; we really were in the center of the universe. The Namaste leaned into her trek and, as tubby as she was, cut a fine swath through the sea. She was alive. Creaking wood sounds came from below deck. Wind sang through the stays and shrouds. She paused as the bow pierced the waves, raised herself, and pushed ahead against a cobalt mound, the top of which boiled across her bow. After cresting the wave she rushed down the other side and you could feel the joy of success in the relief of the rigging and the surge of acceleration.

I studied the sails that were capturing the power. They were full, perfect arcs, taut as drumheads and trimmed to perfection—not one wrinkle or tremor. People have spent centuries making up names for the parts of sails. There’s the head at the top, the leech at the trailing edge, the clew at the end of the boom, the foot on the boom, the tack at the mast. They call the interior of the sail the luff. To make the whole thing stiffer and less inclined to flap around, they invented yardstick-sized sticks, called battens, and stuffed them into batten pockets they sewed in the leech. I never knew a piece of cloth could be so complicated. These are airfoils, I thought, wings. They just have a lot more names than airplane wings. The Namaste is flying just like a plane, except it’s flying on its edge.

I’m a pilot. Understanding how wings work is part of my nature. I used to wonder where I’d gotten the desire, the obsession, to fly. The first dreams I can recall were about flying. I was born in 1942; not very likely I’d been an airplane pilot in a previous life. I don’t believe in reincarnation, but if I did, I’d have to think I might’ve been a sailor, or a bird.

Ireland came up from below, where he’d been napping. He had a cup of steaming coffee in his hand. He watched John swinging the sextant and looked at me. “Buenas mornings, Ali. We know where the fucky we are?”

“Not yet,” I said. “We’re—”

“Ready?” John said.

“Ready.” I checked the watch.

“Mark.”

“Eleven forty-six and thirty-one seconds,” I said.

“Now we know, si?” Ireland grinned.

“Yes,” I said. “Now we know.”

“Where?”

I pointed to the sun and said, “We are north of the sun, in the Atlantic Ocean.”

“So.” Ireland grinned and nodded. “Elephant navigator.”

John came up under the dodger with us. He put the pad down on the ledge next to the hatch. “We’ve got two shots. You can fix your position with two, but it’s better to have three. Four, even. Least one of them is going to be fucked up. Trying to put the sun on the horizon from a pitching deck ain’t easy. Wanna try?” He held the sextant out to me.

I went back beside the tiller with the sextant. I’d done this the day before, so I knew the principle. John was right; it’s hard to do. The sextant has a small telescopic sight which you look through. On top of the sextant is a small mirror, an index mirror, that reflects the image of the sun onto another mirror, a horizon mirror, and finally into one half of the split image you see when you look through the telescope. The idea is to sight the horizon through the telescope and then adjust the sextant until you see the sun in one side of the split image. When the sun’s image is close to the horizon, you adjust the mircrometer knob until the image of the the sun’s disk just kisses the horizon. The trouble is the pitching deck makes it nearly impossible to hold the sight steady. I got the sun close to the horizon and then swung the sextant vertically in a small arc, making the image of the sun swing back and forth over the sea. The bottom of the arc of the swing is straight down, something that’s otherwise impossible to know on a moving boat. I called, “Ready?”

John said, “Ready.”

I swung the sextant and twisted the micrometer knob. I nudged the sun until it just kissed the horizon. Got it. “Mark.”

“Twelve oh one, seventeen seconds,” John said. I went back under the dodger as he wrote it down. “What’d you get?”

I read the scale. “Seventy-five degrees, thirty minutes, six seconds, give or take a few seconds.” John nodded and wrote that down next to the time.

“All right. Now we can calculate.” He got the Air Almanac from the clutter—books, cigarettes, my camera, a jar of Skippy’s, and a box of Ritz crackers—we kept behind the windshield and paged to the date. There’s also the Nautical Almanac, but John liked this one; they’re essentially the same. The Air Almanac is a book of tables, updated annually, that show where the sun is for any time of day, relative to Greenwich, England. You have to convert your local time to Greenwich Mean Time and then calculate at what latitude you would have to be to see the sun at the elevation you measured at the time you measured it. It takes a good five minutes to do this by hand, and any small arithmetic errors can put you off by hundreds of miles. I figured I could program my calculator to do most of the math, when I understood how to do it on paper.

When you’ve got the numbers, you draw an arc with a compass on a universal charting sheet, centered from the guessed position you marked on the sheet. I’m leaving out some nitpicking details, but essentially, where the arcs cross is your location—plus or minus a mile or so. John went below and drew the arcs. He came back up with the charting sheet. The arcs all crossed, but not at one point. The intersections made a triangle big enough for a dime. The space was the margin of error, about two miles, and ours was about as good as it gets on a small boat in a rough sea. “Here,” John said, pointing proudly at the chart. “We’re here. In this little fucking triangle!” We marked the spot on our map—about two hundred miles off the coast of Florida.

“Ali was right!” Ireland said. “We’re north of the sun, in the Atlantic ocean! What instincts, Ali.”

I grinned. “Guess I’m a natural navigator.”

By late that afternoon, the sea was calming. The winds were still pretty strong and the Namaste cruised smartly through the smooth sea at about five or six knots, fast for her. Knots, as I’d discovered reading the sailing books John had brought, meant exactly that. A hundred years before, sailors used to tie regularly spaced knots in a string, put a float on the end of it, and toss the float overboard. As the string played out, the sailors counted the knots that slipped through their fingers for one minute, and that would be how many knots they were going. Knots means nautical miles per hour, and we got it by timing ourselves between one position fix and the next. I wanted to try the counting-knots-on-a-string method, though.

Bob had cooked some chicken and rice on the alcohol stove. We had no designated cook. We took turns at irregular intervals, whenever the mood struck us. I cooked often—something Patience would have been amazed to know—because I enjoyed the challenge of making a meal against the adversity of the rolling and pitching boat. In a real storm it could take hours making a meal, but sailing provides lots of hours.

We sat in the cockpit at sunset and watched the sun sink into the sea. The red glow shimmered, a million flecks of red from a million moving facets on the sea. We checked the time when the top of the sun’s disk intersected the horizon, a free sighting we could use. As we ate, sunset became dusk. Night fell. The stars, following Venus’s lead, seemed to pop out of the sky. Before we finished eating, a brilliant dome of stars hovered over us. I stood up and looked around. The faint line of the horizon was a circle around us, the edge of a disk, the edge of the world floating in space. I sat down.

“What the hell’s that?” Ireland said, pointing west.

John and I looked. A green oblong shape hovered twenty degrees above the horizon.

“Hey,” Ireland said, “I don’t believe in these things, but what—”

“Yeah,” John said. “Look at that. It’s moving.”

It was growing larger, looking very much like it was approaching us. I watched it, thinking there was something familiar about it. It suddenly moved back, getting smaller.

“Jesus,” Ireland said.

“It’s not a UFO,” I said. “I mean it is—UFO means it’s unidentified—but it’s not a ship, a spaceship, or anything—”

“Why are you always such a fucking cynic?” John said. “Big, bright green thing, hovering, comes at us, goes back, and you know it’s not a fucking flying saucer. Why?”

“Because it doesn’t act like a spaceship—”

“Oh,” John said, turning to Ireland. “Doesn’t act like a spaceship, Ramon.” Then he turned back to me. “What the hell you talking about?” John said, disgusted.

“She’s coming again,” said Ireland.

The shape seemed to rush toward us, getting huge. You still couldn’t see a surface or a clean edge, but the fact was, it was something coming our way. I really wanted it to be a spaceship. It dropped lower and seemed to be rushing us at low level, like a fighter on a strafing run. Then it changed course and swooped north, disappearing up among the stars in just seconds. I could feel John and Ireland staring at me. “Still,” I said. “There’s something not right about the way it flies.”

“Awww,” they groaned.

“So que is it?” Ireland said.

“I’m not sure. But it started out due west, right over Cape Canaveral.”

“It wasn’t a fucking rocket, Bob,” John said.

“No. But maybe they were testing something. Maybe they let some kind of gas out real high up, to check dispersion or something, I don’t know. But it looked like a gas cloud to me. It wasn’t moving, it was just getting bigger and smaller—”

“And then it rushed us—” John said, laughing.

“And then it got real big and finally collapsed,” I said. “It looked like it shot away, but it would look the same if it was a gas cloud that just shrank to nothing.”

“Awww,” they groaned.

We were listening to the news on a Miami radio station the next morning when we heard that John Lennon had been murdered. That put us all in a funk, pissed that weirdos like his killer were allowed to live at all; made us wonder at the fact that some people weren’t people, they just looked like people. We listened while they played “Imagine.”

A while later, we heard that NASA had released some weird green gas in the upper atmosphere over the cape, causing hundreds of UFO sighting reports. Ireland and John looked at me and said, “Awww.”

“Elephantshit!” Ireland yelled. “That’s what they always say.” We laughed.

By noon the winds were dying. The sea was sagging from riotous mountains to gentle dunes. John spent a lot of time trimming the sails, trying to coax as much energy as he could from the little wind that remained. The Namaste was doing two knots—a slow walk, and slowing.

“This is sailing,” John said. “One minute you’re on the verge of being sunk in a fucking storm, don’t know whether to shit or go blind, the next minute you’re looking for oars.”

As the wind died, Rosalinda became less effective. By sunset, Rosalinda’s wind vane flopped around uselessly and we steered by hand. Watching bits of seaweed crawl by, John said, “Well, fuck it. Let’s crank up the engine. That’s what it’s for.”

We dropped the sails and John started the engine. It ground a bit and finally caught. It was a Cummings thirty-horsepower diesel. The Namaste grumbled. I felt she did not like being pushed by a motor, but she cruised ahead anyway, muttering and vibrating. We could feel the breeze in our faces. It was a relief to be moving.

Under power, Rosalinda was completely useless. The relative wind she used as a reference to steer by was always coming from straight ahead, no matter what direction we motored. Rosalinda would just steer us in random directions, so we had to man the tiller during our watches. Sitting beside that big stick for four hours at a time, moving nitpick left, nitpick right, trying to keep the compass on the mark, made you really appreciate autopilots. John said that if he owned this boat, he’d have an electric autopilot installed for when he had to motor.

I woke Ireland at midnight for his watch. I went back on deck and waited by the tiller. So far, this trip was a pleasurable adventure. But I felt a chill when I thought about arriving at Saint Thomas. End of the cruise; beginning of the raid. Saint Thomas was the initial point, as we called it in Vietnam.

We’d drop low over the initial point, twenty of us—twenty helicopters—each carrying eight grunts. We flew at a hundred knots, but the Viet Cong almost always seemed to know our routes and would be there spraying red tracers into the flight. I heard: “Preacher Six, Preacher Red One. Red Two just went down. Two is down.” And Preacher Six, Major Rogers, said, “Roger. Mark the coordinates.” The pilot called in the coordinates where Red Two lay wrecked and we sped on, dodging palm trees, some of us thinking—me, for one—we were actually dodging the bullets; watching villagers, who we thought we were helping, shooting. Shooting at us.

Ireland came up through the hatch. I jerked, suddenly aware of where I was. I wondered if trying to write about Vietnam was such a good idea after all. Bad memories. So far, on the boat, I was sleeping well. I think the distractions of keeping the Namaste under way and the actual physical stress of the work were responsible.

Ireland sat beside me and asked how it was going. I looked at the compass and came right the ten degrees I’d dropped off, plus another five to make up for the loss. Luckily, the Namaste was slow. Minor course changes don’t mean much to a sailboat motoring at five knots. The engine vibrated my ass, the wake lapped along the hull, the prop wash fanned out behind the stem, glowing faintly with excited phosphorescent sea life being sucked through the propeller. The stars hovered so close I could touch them. Vietnam was so long ago, yet I could hear Preacher Six just then. I heard him.

The next morning, the engine quit.

“Fuel?” Ireland asked. “We out of fuel?”

“Naw,” John said. “We have fucking two hundred gallons in the tank.”

John pumped the throttle lever and pushed the starter button. Groan. Groan. Nothing. “Shit,” John said. “It’s a brand-new Cummings, goddammit.”

Ireland stayed on deck while John and I went below and removed the ladder so we could get to the engine compartment doors. We crawled in with a flashlight and stared at the engine. It was as big as a car engine. It was gray. It had lots of things sticking off it. John reached in and pressed a lever sticking off a mug-sized thing he said was the fuel pump. “Might’ve lost its prime,” he said, pumping the lever. He sat back on the cabin deck, grabbed his beer, and swigged. He yelled, “Give it a try, Ramon”

Groan. Groan. Spit. Growl. The engine chugged to life. We closed the doors, put the ladder back, and went above. John brought a couple of extra beers and Ireland and I lit up a joint. No engine means you drift around helpless for as long as God wants. It was a relief to hear the chugging and feel the vibration beneath our feet.

An hour later we heard: Sputter. Sputter. Sigh. Pop. Quit.

John leaned against the dodger frame and shook his head with his eyes closed. Ireland and I looked at each other and shrugged. The Namaste coasted and stopped. No wind. No waves. There were swells, though, probably leftover energy from the storm, and the Namaste rolled back and forth sickeningly. John had us raise the sails and pull them taut, to dampen the rolling. Now and then you could feel a whiff of breeze, but the weather vane on the masthead just swung and twirled as the boat rolled.

John and I went below and looked at the engine again. Still very large and gray with lots of things sticking out of it. John pumped the fuel pump again. Ireland cranked. Groan. Chugga. Chugga. Pow. It started, but you could hear the starter grinding; the battery was getting weak.

The engine ran for half an hour. Got it going again. Ran fifteen minutes more. The next time we tried starting it, we got: Chugga. Chugga. Nothing. The battery was so weak from the repeated starting that the engine was barely turning over. We had to fix the engine.

We sat in the cockpit pooling our knowledge of diesel engines. When we were done, you could’ve put what we knew about these things on a piece of paper with plenty of room left over to write an insurance contract. John had the only real experience among us. He said air must be getting into the fuel pump, causing it to lose its prime. How? “Maybe it gets in at the seal where it’s mounted to the engine. Maybe it gets in at some little pinhole in the fuel line. I dunno.”

We had a lunch of peanut butter sandwiches and beer. I even drank one. The weather was getting hot—ninety degrees. We were four hundred miles from Saint Thomas, out of the cold latitudes. We took to wearing nothing.

After lunch, John and I crawled back in to the engine and, with much grunting, twisting, wrenching, and knuckle bruising in the tight space, we managed to get the fuel pump off. We brought it up on deck and stared at it. Looked like a fuel pump. Had a diaphragm thingy, here, must be pushed up and down by that cam whatsit, there. Yep. You push the priming lever and it pumps fuel into the pump. John pushed the lever and we saw a few drops of diesel fuel squirt out. Promising, eh? We did the only thing we knew how: we took out all the parts we could get loose, wiped them clean, and put them back in. It was now very clean, like it was before we took it apart. John and I went down and bolted it back on and primed it. Ireland pushed the starter. Groan. Grind. Rumble. Growl.

Yea!

The Namaste surged ahead, once again under way. We drank some more beer and told jokes for an hour. Then the engine quit. The breeze died as the Namaste stopped. The sun beat down. The sea was listless, stagnant.

John got up. “This is bullshit!” He grabbed a coil of rope, tied one end to the stem pulpit rail, and flung the coil over the stem. The Namaste was moving enough that the rope trailed behind. Then John jumped overboard. We watched him splashing around in the water, yelling, laughing. “What we need is a fucking break! C’mon. Cool off!”

Ireland and I jumped in. It was like three naked boys at the old swimming hole, except the water in this swimming hole was almost a mile deep.

When the Namaste drifted too far ahead, we’d swim to the line and pull ourselves up to the boat. I got back on board and fetched a diving mask and my camera and went back in. It was exhilarating. When I put the mask on and looked underwater, it felt like I was suspended in space. The crystal-clear water got darker, turning deep blue hundreds of feet down. Somewhere down there was the bottom. I bet this is like being in orbit, in freefall, I thought. Flickering shafts of sunlight pierced the water and converged at infinity. I dove down and within seconds lost track of which way was up. I had a strange urge to keep swimming down, down to where the shifting light beams met. When I stopped swimming, I floated slowly back up. That’s where up is in sea-space. Not from where you fall, but to where you float.

The next day, the Namaste sat motionless in a vast wasteland. The water was thick with seaweed and trash. The place is called the Sargasso Sea—which we immediately changed to the Elephant Sea—where several currents converge and swirl together, keeping the seaweed in huge mats. It’s a unique kind of seaweed called sargassum which is native to sea currents. Branches of the plant are called fronds, inhabited by unique animals like the sargassum frog fish and sea slugs. The seaweed was alive with little fish that looked like they were made of seaweed, little silvery darting ones, and baby jellyfish. They say baby sea turtles live here until they get big enough to survive open water. The trash—six-pack rings, Styrofoam cups, bread bags, light bulbs, bottles, tin cans—was obscene. We were hundreds of miles from any land, and here was a trash dump that covered many square miles. “It’s like the world is a bunch of rednecks,” Ireland said.

We waited for wind. I sat below reading the Air Almanac. In the back of the book there’s a section that describes the process of plotting your position from your sighting—in case you’re on a bombing raid and can’t remember how to do it and the captain’s yelling, “Where the fuck are we?” I read that and worked the sample problems.

I went above with the sextant and made sun shots and plotted our position every hour. We were moving at less than one mile an hour. We had the radio on, listening to an evangelical show from Puerto Rico, the only station we could get clearly. I wanted to hear them pitch the autographed picture of Jesus Christ with eyes that glow in the dark, but they were just asking for money. Ireland was drawing a picture of the Namaste. John was reading a Captain Homblower book (who, along with Errol Flynn, was one of his heroes). At lunchtime I made some beans and rice.

After lunch I went below and pulled the ladder away from the engine hatch and crawled in. I studied this fuel pump thing. You could see the copper tubing that fed it coming from two places on the fuel tank above. There were five junctions in the tubing where air could be leaking in. Or the seal at the pump itself could have an invisible pinhole. Start with the obvious. I took the pump off and took it on deck. John and Ireland glanced over as I wiped the seal with a rag. The rubber gasket was immaculate, but I smeared it with a layer of silicon rubber, for insurance, and went below and bolted the pump back in place with the silicon wet. A couple hours later, I suggested we try it again.

The batteries were very low from trying to start the engine for the last two days, but the engine caught. We had been through this enough to know not to get crazy about the fact that the fucking engine ran, so we just sat where we were and waited. She died in less than five minutes. I nodded. John got back into his book. Ireland drew.

I went back into the engine compartment and stared at the fuel pump. It was stifling in the small place because of the heat of the day, and now the engine was hot from its little workout.

So, if you prime the pump full, it works—the engine runs until the fuel in the pump is gone. I knew the seal was tight; they use silicon to seal fish tanks. Obviously, the lines feeding the pump must have a leak. I looked at the tubing. Air could get in at a connection, or in through a pinhole in the tubing itself. It could be anywhere. There wasn’t a hint of fuel leaking out, so it was so small that only air leaked in. I took the fuel pump off again and studied the primer pump mechanism. The lever pushed a piston which squeezed out fuel. I pressed it until all the fuel squirted out. Then it just hissed as it pumped air. It pumps air. Idea jumped into my brain. What if I put the pump back on backwards? Then when I primed the pump, I’d be pumping air, under pressure, into the fuel line. Brilliant.

I went below and reversed the connections. I let the pump hang loose beside the engine. I attached the pump’s outlet to the fuel line.

I went into the cabin and got some Joy detergent, put some in a coffee cup, and mixed it with water. I got a rag and crawled back under the cockpit, next to the engine. I swabbed the soap mixture on each joint, one at a time, and pumped the fuel pump. If the problem really was an air leak, then I should see bubbles at the hole. At the last junction, a T-connector mounted on the engine compartment bulkhead, I saw foam.

“Hey!” I yelled. I was standing inside with my head out the hatch. “I found the fucking problem!”

“No shit?” John said.

“What’s it ees, Ali?” Ireland said.

“We got an air leak in a coupling. C’mon.” I waved. “C’mon, I’ll show you.” I was practically giggling. John crawled in with me, and Ireland squatted on the cabin deck. “Watch,” I said, pumping the fuel pump.

“Son of a bitch!” John yelled. “That’s it! That little fucking leak is all it takes!”

“Right. All we have to do is epoxy the joint, seal it up. That’ll fix it. At least well enough to get us cruising again.”

“Right,” John said, laughing. “We can put on a new fitting in Saint Thomas.”

We had lots of epoxy resin. It’s used to make repairs on fiberglass boats. John mixed up a few ounces of the stuff and smeared the goo all around the fitting. Nothing would ever leak in that coupling again. I put the fuel pump back on the right way and we went on deck to wait for the epoxy to cure.

John was beside himself with happiness. He drank two beers in quick succession. We were due in Saint Thomas in a week. He’d had a radio message on the single-sideband that we would be met there by the scam master himself, who’d bring us money. The transmission was encoded as usual: it sounded like a transmission between a home office and a freighter. The conversation was mumbo-jumbo about cargo, spare parts we needed, part numbers, and consignment numbers. Lots of numbers. The numbers were the message. John read some part numbers he said we needed that gave the scam master our position. The scam master sent changes to shipping order numbers that included the date and time he was going to meet us in Saint Thomas. So if this fuel-line patch worked, we would be on our way, and maybe even on time.

Near sunset, we figured the epoxy was set. We went below and pecked at the stuff with a screwdriver. Hard as a rock. I primed the fuel pump.

“Okay,” John said to Ireland, “give it a crank.”

Groan. Kapock. Sigh. The batteries were too weak to turn the engine.

“Goddammy!” Ireland yelled. “It’s always fucking something!”

John nodded, and slid out the tool drawer under the chart counter. He dumped a bunch of tools—Snap-On sockets, Vise-Grips, screwdrivers, torque wrenches—on the deck and fished out a long metal rod, bent in two places, with a socket at one end. He fit the socket onto the end of the engine’s crankshaft. “Okay. We can start this thing manually. I’ve done it before.”

He held the crank handle steady with his left hand and cranked with his right. He could turn the engine over, but, as strong as John was, it was too slow. A diesel builds up much more compression in its cylinders than does a regular gasoline engine. I grabbed the crank from the other side and together we tried again. Yank, push. Kathunk, kathunk, pow! We were puffing at the effort. It was like trying to spin a top in sand: there’s no momentum to it; it’s all brute force. Kathunk. Kathunk. Pow! Growl!

John yanked the cranking rod free of the engine and everybody cheered.

After four hours of listening to every little click, clack, pop, belch, and whirr that came out of the engine compartment, we began to relax. The engine ran perfectly. The Namaste was under way.

We celebrated that night by breaking out one of the freeze-dried dinners we’d brought. We only had a dozen of them. We got out the pork chops. They looked like cardboard disks, but when you soaked them and boiled them, damned if they didn’t turn into genuine pork loin chops. We served up freeze-dried peas and about a gallon of egg noodles. This sailing life is fine.

Ireland woke me up at eight a.m. I blinked at him in the dim morning light coming through the clear hatch in the roof of the cabin. “Where’s John?” I asked. He was out of cycle. Bob wakes John; John wakes me; it’s the cycle. Ireland shook his head. “John wouldn’t wake up.” He smiled. “Too much fun, eh?”

“Yeah, but that means you took his watch, Ramon.”

He nodded and crawled into his bunk across the cabin.

I sat at the tiller angry as hell. The captain of a boat should never miss his watch. I was looking for perfection here. I was remembering how if one guy in the team fucks up, the team gets wasted. We had assholes like that in the Cav. We had a captain in our company, a guy we called Daisy, who’d always go into the fetal position in his seat during the assaults. He’d hear the pilots yelling on the radios about taking hits, see the tracer bullets, and then he’d squinch down in the seat, pull up his feet, and try to hide behind his chicken-plate (what we called the bulletproof chest armor). You can’t fly while you’re cowering in the seat. If the other pilot got wounded or killed, nobody would be on the controls. When you let go of the controls of a helicopter, it goes eight directions at once, apeshit wild. That captain didn’t seem to understand that if the ship went, he went. He was too overcome with fear to think.

Somehow, I equated that captain’s dereliction of duty with John’s, and it made me mad. The two men got mixed in my mind until John’s missing his watch became a fuckup with life-or-death consequences.

When John came on deck at lunchtime, I told him what I thought.

“John, do you know that Bob had to stand your watch last night?”

John looked at me, suddenly angry. “What about it?”

“What about it? That means he’s up eight hours. It means he’s likely to fall asleep on watch and we’d never know if we were going to hit a freighter, go off course, or something. That’s what.”

John glared—probably thinking, you should never hire friends. I turned and went below, sat on my bunk, and got out the Air Almanac and started reading.

John came down, staggering. He’d already put down a couple of six-packs. He was madder than I’d ever seen him before. He leaned up close to my face and said, “Look, Mason. I’m the captain here. You’re the dinger. Don’t you ever call me down again.” He glared. “You do, and I’ll set you straight. Get it?”

I’m not the fighting type. At least not physically—especially not when it comes to getting into it with a guy that can tie me in knots. I’d need a gun to make it even. I looked back at John’s face, watched the anger pouring out of him. Part of the anger was from his drinking. I knew about that from my own life as a boozer. Part of it was just embarrassment. I nodded. “Okay, John. I get it.” I looked down at my book and saw him turn and climb back up on deck.

I couldn’t read what I was looking at. I was mad, getting really jumpy. I needed to know the team knew what the fuck they were doing. I didn’t want to trust my life to fucking amateurs. I simmered for a while. I considered jumping ship at Saint Thomas.

Two days later, the wind came back. We saw a huge black wall in the sky approaching us all day. On the radio, the Coast Guard talked about a huge storm, and this was it. We had hours to prepare. As the breeze picked up, we shut down the engine and rigged the sails for the approaching tempest.

When it hit, we were ready. The Namaste heeled way over. Huge waves crashed over us. But we had been through this drill before. We pitched, wallowed, creaked, and groaned, but the Namaste was up to the task and forged ahead. I was beginning to love this boat. She was stalwart.

“What does Namaste mean, anyway?” I asked while we huddled under the dodger sharing a can of cold Del Monte beef stew. Rosalinda was back on the job, holding our course to within a degree or two.

“I haven’t got the slightest idea,” John said. He was friendly, the argument forgotten. He had not missed a watch since.

“Maybe it means Pot Smugglers,’” Ireland said. “Coast Guard probably sold this boat to Ray.” We laughed.

“I’d like to get a boat like this someday,” I said.

“You like this sailing shit, eh?” John said.

“Yeah. Patience and I could fit it out with a couple of desks. Go where we wanted. Write.”

“Not me,” Ireland said. “When I get my money, I’m going to buy some land. Build a little house. The only sailing I want to do is on a windsurfer. On a lake.”

The next day, the storm was past and the wind was strong and steady. The Namaste cruised at five knots. I came up on deck and saw John sitting in the cockpit, naked. A plastic bucket by his side, he was lathering himself with Joy. Lemon Joy is the only detergent that makes suds in seawater, so I’m told. The sight made me cringe. I’ve always had this phobia about letting salt water dry on my skin. I used to spend half my life playing in the surf as a kid in Delray Beach, but we had public showers at the beach to rinse off the salt water. If I didn’t rinse

off, the drying salt water would tighten my skin and leave a crust of salt that clung to my clothes when I got dressed and made me itch. I scratched the back of my neck. I was risking my life and my freedom on this trip, but getting sticky was my big fear at the moment.

“Hey, Bob,” John said as he stood up. “I don’t mean to get personal, but you haven’t bathed since we left. That swim was it. What’s that? Four, five days ago?” He wrinkled his nose. I watched him hold the bucket over his head and rinse himself off with seawater. He tossed the empty bucket overboard and pulled it back in with the rope tied to the handle and repeated the process.

“Yeah, I know. I can’t even stand myself,” I said.

So when John finished, I stripped off my shorts, got a bucket of water, and gave myself a bath in the cockpit. I rinsed, went below, and dried off with a towel. Then I waited for the stickiness to set in. I put on clean jeans and a T-shirt and went on deck. When I put my hand in one of the pockets, I felt a piece of paper. A note from Patience: “I love you, the Phantom Phantom.” I saw she’d drawn a little-girl face with a big smile. I smiled, picturing my phantom. Fifteen minutes later I didn’t feel my skin clinging to my clothes. A half hour later, I’d forgotten my revulsion. I felt fresh and clean. Maybe it was the Lemon Joy.

We had two fishing lines out, hooked to lures we’d made from frayed nylon rope. The ends of the lines were tied to short boards we used for reels. The boards were anchored, jammed against the winches, but the lines were held on to the safety lines with clothespins so that if we got a strike, a clothespin would let the line go and we’d know we had something on. The clothespins let go now and then. Usually it was seaweed. I saw a clothespin snap off the railing and grabbed a board. I yelled that we had something and wound the line onto the board, like a kid with a kite. Two hundred feet behind us, a giant tuna leapt out of the water. Really huge: this… big. His skin shimmered like a rainbow in the sun. He leapt clear of the water, shuddering with fury, trying to shake the hook. I held on to the board, not winding, just trying to keep hold of it. John and Ireland were running around looking for a gaff hook. When I felt a slack, I wound on more line. John grabbed my camera and took pictures of the fight. About a half hour later, we had a goddamn big tuna whipping around at the stern of the boat and under the boat, swimming in small circles, tangling the line on the prop. We couldn’t get him in, so we waited until he got tired and stopped struggling. When we dragged him on board, we saw he was about four feet long, weighed maybe forty pounds. He flopped around on deck while I tried to stab a knife into his brain. Thunk. Thunk. Quiver. Dead. Lots of blood.

“Wow!” Ireland said. “We eaty fishy tonight, no?”

“No shit!” John said.

I felt sad watching the tuna’s rainbow skin fade as it died. I said a thank-you to his spirit, something I’d picked up reading about Indians. This was something special here, a life. I was taking a life to nourish my own. I forget that when I order tuna at a restaurant.

Unfortunately, the sea picked up while I cleaned the fish. I’d chopped him into thick steaks—damn big steaks that’d cost you twenty bucks apiece on shore—put the steaks in a pan, basted them with lemon juice and butter, and put them in the stove to broil. The bottom of the gimbaled stove leaned into the aisle because we were sailing with the rail underwater. The Namaste pitched and wallowed as the storm picked up. It was a real challenge cooking the steaks, but just the smell of them broiling made it worth the effort. By the time I’d finished, though, both Ireland and John were feeling the sea and didn’t want to eat.

I sat under the dodger, on my watch, and ate the best tuna I’d ever tasted. John and Ireland stayed below, weathering their stomachs.

CHAPTER 15

We sighted land at dusk of the fifteenth day. Before it got dark, we could make out El Yunque, a thirty-five-hundred-foot mountain on the west end of Puerto Rico, and across from it, the fifteen-hundred-foot peak of Crown Mountain, which is what Saint Thomas is—a mountain sticking out of the sea. Land lights flickered through the sea air and I wanted to be ashore. I wanted a hot shower. I wanted Patience.

The wind was strong, the sea rough. I noticed that we all walked around on deck as if on land, a big difference from when we started two weeks before. I guess we’d developed what they call sea legs. The Namaste closed the distance to Saint Thomas about an hour after we sighted land. John was below checking the charts. Ireland and I joked about island girls and whatnot. We were free of worry. We had nothing to hide, nothing on board anybody wanted. The trip down was like a rich man’s cruise. From now on, things would be different. Saint Thomas was the initial point on the sortie to Colombia. That’s how I saw it. Part of a mission. With teamwork, timing, strategy, luck, it could work. Just getting to Saint Thomas, through those storms, was impressive to me. The Namaste was tough and so were we. Two weeks in a rough sea will tighten up every loose muscle you have. My stomach was steel outside, jelly inside.

John checked his chart and pointed out the channel markers as we motored close to land. He used the spotlight he’d bought for the trip to sight the channel markers. The thing lit up half the world when he switched it on. He said we’d come in on the west side of the island, get out of the wind. The wind diminished to lazy breezes as we sailed into the island’s lee. We dropped sail and, with fingers crossed, cranked the engine. Started right up. We cruised into a cove near David Point, far from the lights we’d seen on the north side. Bob went forward and got the anchor ready. When John gave the word, Bob tossed in the anchor. John switched off the engine. The anchor line tightened. The Namaste swung around, aligning herself with the breeze. She rocked gently, contented, I thought.

We dragged out the inflatable dingy. Bob pronounced it stressing the g. Din-GEE. “Blowing up the din-GEE,” he said. “The dingers blow up the din-GEE.” Didn’t take long: we had a foot-powered air pump. Got the thing inflated and threw it overboard. John said Ireland should stay on board while he and I went ashore to get provisions. He meant he wanted to get some beers. He’d been out for two days. He was sober, joked around less, talked less doublespeak.

We were only a couple of hundred yards off, and it didn’t take long to row ashore. John rowed. “Tomorrow we go around to the south side, to the main harbor. I don’t like to come in around all those boats at night,” he said, stroking.

“There’s lots of boats there?”

“You won’t believe it.”

“What’s here?” I said, pointing to the moonlit beach.

“I don’t know. Never been this side of the island before. But I think those lights are maybe a marina or something. Maybe they have some cold fucking beer.”

“Say, John, do you mean, ‘cold fucking beer’ or ‘fucking cold beer’?” I said, laughing.

“Yes,” John said. “That’s what I mean: Budweisers with ice sticking to the cans; brew so cold your scrotum will shrivel.”

We saw a dock, a big house, but no marina. John rowed up to the beach and we jumped out and pulled the dingy up on dry land. The ground felt like it was moving and I almost fell over. When we let go of the dingy, I stood up with my arms out, like I was balancing on a tightrope. I laughed. “They’re right! Sea legs,” I said.

We stumbled across the sand and came to the house. I was laughing. I just couldn’t get over it. I could not convince my body that I was on land. The ground seemed to pitch and roll, like the sea. I walked stooped over, like I might fall off the earth. The house was a clubhouse, I think. We walked all around it. Nobody there. We walked through the club’s landscaped grounds until we came to a gravel road. We stood on the road and looked toward the only lights around, about a quarter mile away. The trouble was, neither of us had thought to bring shoes, and the gravel hurt. “John, you really must want a beer, to go through this torture.”

“Ice cold, freeze your nuts off,” John said, laughing. “Besides, isn’t this fun? Shore leave. Wanting; having.”

The lights were at a garage and it was closed. We seemed to be in a part of the island that closed up early. John was pissed, “Dammy! Wanting; but no having?” John was picking up Ireland’s manner of speech; so was I. I was saying din-GEE as soon as I heard it. John shrugged and said he’d make up for it tomorrow. We tenderfooted back down the road to our dingy.

There had to be two hundred sailing yachts in Saint Thomas Harbor. I was astounded. Where’d they all come from? What were they doing here?

“Some of them—a lot of them—are here for the same reason we are, Bob,” John said.

I think he was right. As we threaded our way among the anchored boats, I saw mostly men on board. Mostly three men on each boat, just like ours. They waved, we waved. When we got within six hundred yards of the docks, we found a spot big enough to anchor the Namaste. I went forward and dropped anchor at John’s command. The Namaste settled back against the anchor line. John stood up on the deck and looked at our neighbors. “Good. We’re clear all around. When she swings around with the wind, and they swing around with the wind, she won’t hit anybody.” Glad he thought of that; I sure hadn’t.

We put on clean clothes. A note Patience had stuck in the crotch of my underwear said: “Use it and lose it!” The little girl smiled, holding a knife. Damn, Patience, I’m not like that… then I remembered she had every reason to believe I was. We flopped the dingy overboard and jumped in. Bob and I decided I’d row in; he’d row back out. As we passed by the boats, we got questions: “Where you from?” “Jacksonville?” “Got some weather, eh?”

We passed a houseboat, or rather a house on floats. It was a rundown two-story shanty. You could see that it was built to be a cheap place to live; there was no fee to anchor off in the harbor. A woman on the front porch was hanging up clothes. “Lots of these people live in the harbor,” John said. “See that guy out there with the big windmill on his boat?” I looked and nodded. “He was here last time. Lives there, generates his own electricity with that windmill, distills his own water in a solar still, catches fish to eat; only comes ashore to sniff out women when he gets tired of jerking off. Neat guy, Mason. You have a lot in common with him. Oughta go meet him.”

“Yeah,” I said. “You make him sound real glamorous, John.” Actually, I did want to meet the guy. This was just a tourist stop, wasn’t it? I wasn’t a pot smuggler yet.

The docks where we tied up the dingy were shared by the Islander, an island-rustic bar and restaurant, and the Harbor View, a large, modern hotel. We blended into the tourist traffic—mostly people sightseeing off cruise ships—looking in the shops that ringed the plaza between the hotel and restaurant. They sold tropical T-shirts, palm frond hats, conch-shell lamps, ice cream—tourist geegaws and whatnots. I was looking for a pair of sandals and a place to develop some slides I’d taken. I found a photo shop and asked the guy where I could use a phone. He said the hotel had pay phones. We found the phones. John and I called our wives; Ireland called his girlfriend.

“I miss you,” Patience said.

“Me, too. How’s Jack?” Jack thought I was just working as a sailor.

“Oh. He came in second. Cross-country race.”

“That’s great,” I said. I’d seen Jack run in two races. A lot of fathers were at every race. Now one of the fathers was on a pot run. There was one way out of this trip, but Patience hadn’t mentioned it. I asked anyway. “Heard anything from Knox?”

“No. That last letter from Norton was it.” An editor at Norton had said he thought my manuscript was very well written, BUT: the usual stuff about no one wanting to read about Vietnam.

We didn’t talk long. I told her a little about the storms and stuff, said we’d be home in a couple of weeks; I’d call before we left Saint Thomas.

Outside the hotel compound, Saint Thomas was pretty scruffy. We walked along a busy, litter-strewn street to a place John said served great hamburgers. We’d been talking about hamburgers for days. The street reminded me of the crummier neighborhoods in Brooklyn. I was really impressed by this. Saint Thomas was a tropical paradise, yet the citizens buried it in trash. Also, no one smiled. If you tried smiling at someone, you got a sullen stare back.

We got our hamburgers and fries and milk shakes and sat down at a table covered with catsup, pieces of dried onions, relish, and a hundred flies.

“Man, what a dump,” I said. “Why’s everything so dirty?”

“The people don’t give a shit,” John said. “They’re all on welfare and they’re pissed off at those white people living up on the hills.” He pointed to a mansion that hung out on a cantilevered deck off the side of Crown Mountain. “They’re pissed off at them because they’re rich, and if you’re a white tourist they’re pissed off at you because you’re white and, since you’re a tourist, probably rich, too.”

“Hot dammy!” Ireland said, flicking his eyebrows at the hamburger he held in two hands. “Living good, Juan!” He bit into the hamburger, squishing out catsup, smiling as he chewed.

While we ate, John said we would spend a couple of days getting supplies, and then sail to Thatch Cay, just to the east of Saint Thomas, to keel-haul the boat and install the depth finder. We needed the depth finder because we were going close to shore in Colombia, and the last thing we needed was to be pinned there, waiting for the Colombian navy.

We walked to a grocery store and bought four bags of groceries, six cases of beer, a case of Cruzin rum, and ten cartons of Winstons. We filled a cab with the stuff and drove back to the docks. John had Ireland wait with the supplies while John and I went into a marine supply store and bought a new fitting for the fuel line, plus spares

We loaded up the dingy and rowed back to the Namaste.

That afternoon I replaced the fuel-line fitting and then just loafed around the boat watching life in the harbor. Some people sunned themselves on the decks of their boats; others polished brass, painted bright work. Everybody was laid back. I wasn’t laid back. I was plagued with doubt, tense with worry. I wondered if I was really able to go through with the scam.

At dusk we rowed back to the docks and went to the Islander.

The Islander was the kind of place they keep dirty on purpose. The ceiling was fishnets tacked to beams with dusty seashells and starfish drooping down in the nets at odd places. A stuffed sailfish nailed to a driftwood plank had cobwebs in his open mouth. We sat at a table on an upstairs balcony, with a good view of the harbor.

It was sunset, and the island was beginning to look good. Lights flickered along the harbor’s edge, ringing the dark water like a glittering necklace on velvet. Two hundred yachts basked in a calm harbor. We decided that the Namaste was one of the best-looking boats in the basin.

I sipped a beer, my second, and began to think of Saint Thomas as a pretty nice place to be. After a while, you barely noticed the trash and stopped trying to be friendly with the natives. And the weather was terrific. Here it was, the middle of December, yet the breeze was soft and warm, balmy. Perfect weather.

I had a bowl of conch chowder and another beer.

Ireland and I stayed out on the boat the next day, cleaning and making repairs, while John rowed in to phone the scam master and find a place to fix the loran. He’d taken the radio with him.

John came back after lunch. No luck getting the radio fixed. It’d have to be sent to the states for repair—weeks. We could buy a new one on the island, but loran sets cost fifteen hundred dollars, and John told us we were down to less than a thousand. The scam master, the money man, was coming in two days, but John doubted he’d spring for a new radio because John was way over budget already. Who cares? he said. We were doing fine with the sextant and the wristwatch. We were here, weren’t we? True enough. We’d crossed thirteen hundred miles of open sea, storms, drifting becalmed, motoring, and we’d hit Saint Thomas dead on without the loran.

John decided we should find a place to haul the Namaste.

When we sailed east around Red Hook and north, up the Leeward Pass, I saw scores of beautiful houses set on the hillsides of the island. This seemed to be what Saint Thomas was for: a place to perch one’s house and take in the view. And hell, I imagined a mansion owner saying, labor is cheap, if somewhat sullen. Let them make their own fortunes.

It took less than two hours to get to a suitable cove at Thatch Cay. It was high tide, but according to John’s tide tables, that was only a foot or so in this area. We dropped sail in a lagoon that looked like it was out of a movie—blue water, white beaches, palms and sea-grape trees crowded right up to the water. We motored slowly, crawling toward the beach. We dropped an anchor off the starboard side when we were within two hundred yards of shore. This would be the anchor we would be pulling against later. We crept toward shore, paying out the anchor line, until we felt the keel bump the sandy bottom. John stopped the engine. We put the anchor line around a winch and pulled ourselves back out a few feet to where we figured the Namaste’s keel was hovering just a couple of feet off the bottom. When the tide went out, she’d be almost aground. John didn’t want to actually ground her; he was afraid she’d get stuck. We dropped another anchor to keep us where we were.

By the time we got this far, it was getting late. John said that it would take half a day to roll the Namaste over and drill the hole for the depth finder. Might as well look around. We rowed the dingy ashore to explore the island.

We splashed through warm, clear water, felt hot sand on our feet. We sat down on the beach and just looked. The sun was low, golden. Coconut palms arched over the sand and crystal-clear waves lapped the white beach. Fiddler crabs scurried through the driftwood and seaweed looking for food, turning cocky and aggressive when they bumped into other fiddlers. I took some pictures. I framed a shot with palms drooping over the water, Ireland and John lying on the dazzling beach, the Namaste gleaming white against a cobalt sky. I walked to them and sat down. “Wow!” Ireland said. “This is right out of a cigarette ad. It’s perfect. Why don’t people live here?”

John agreed. “This is beautiful, no two ways about it. Fucking lovely.”

I turned around and stared into the tropical jungle behind us. A hundred feet into the vines and undergrowth, it got very dark. A little spooky. Didn’t know what was in the shadows.

When the sun dropped behind the ridge of Saint Thomas Island, we found out why people didn’t live here. We were assaulted by swarms of sand flies thick enough to cast shadows. Some people call them no-see-ums, because they’re so tiny. They are very tiny bugs, true, but each one packs one helluva bite and they attack by the thousands. These things are goddamn flying piranhas. We jumped into the dingy and splashed back out to the boat. That stopped them for a while, but as soon as it got darker, they swarmed aboard, though not as thick as on shore. We sat around with towels wrapped around our heads, being miserable, while the sand flies fed. Ireland offered the theory that the sand flies used this beautiful tropical island as bait for humans.

At dawn we got to work.

Ireland and I rowed ashore with a big spool of line. We tied one end of the line to a big tree trunk and then rowed the other end back to the Namaste. John tied it to the mainsail halyard so that when we cranked the winch on the mast, instead of raising the sail, we’d pull on the two hundred feet of line attached to the tree. The idea was simple: the line from the anchor we dropped as we came in went through a drain port in the gunwale amidships and back to a winch in the cockpit. When we winched in the two lines, the Namaste should lean over. And she did, for a while. The problem was that the pulley at the masthead was embedded in the mast, the perfect position for raising and lowering the sail. Now, though, the halyard, pulled way off to the side, was binding against the slot in the masthead. The farther over the Namaste leaned, the tighter the line jammed, and the harder it was to crank the winch. When it took two of us, hanging on the handle, to move it an inch, John said there was something wrong. The Namaste listed over about forty-five degrees, but we needed another twenty.

I suggested we had two problems: the pulley at the masthead was oriented wrong, and the anchor line was set up wrong.

“What the hell do you know about this?” John said. He was covered in sweat from the effort of winching. He was frustrated. He knew it wasn’t working like it was supposed to. He was thinking about it; and now the know-it-all dinger was offering unsolicited criticism again.

“Nothing about this, specifically,” I said. “But I can see what you’re trying to do, and all we have to do—”

“Look, Bob. We almost got it. Need another push at it, is all. Catch my breath.”

“Nope. Won’t work,” I said, my voice tinged with authority. “When you lower the top of the mast, John, you’re raising the keel. What is it? Eight tons of lead? You need to move the point where the anchor line is tied lower, below the center of gravity.”

“Lower?” John looked at Ireland, who shrugged. “Where? You can’t get any lower than the gunwale.”

“It’s simple, John,” I said too smugly. “You’ve got it rigged wrong. All we have to do is take the anchor line and run it in the opposite direction. Pull it over the other side and down under the keel. Then when we pull against it, we’re pulling from under the keel and the keel’s weight helps pull the Namaste over. But you still need to—”

“I don’t see how that would make a bit of difference.” John was plainly irritated. “Let’s get back to work.”

Ireland and I winched in the mainsail halyard, John winched in the anchor line. The Namaste twisted between the two opposing forces until she achieved equilibrium—about forty-five degrees. You could not make her lean another degree. We crawled up the deck and hung over the gunwale. The spot we wanted to install the depth finder was still two feet underwater.

John said we should all get on the mainsail winch. More force was the answer. The three of us hung on the handle, jerking down with all our might. We even made the thick bronze handle bend, but the Namaste did not budge.

I got a piece of paper, drew my plan, and showed it to John. I spoke quietly, trying not to sound superior about it. “See, John. Most of the weight of the boat is in the keel, and the way you’ve got it now, we’re trying to raise the keel out of the water. If the keel was touching the bottom, it would work. I know, you don’t want to be on the bottom because we might not get her off. Fine. So we have to make her think she’s on the bottom. That’s what will happen if we run the line under the keel.”

John nodded reluctantly. “That’ll do it, you think?”

“Yes, if we re-rig the masthead pulley, too. It’s got way too much friction with the line going the wrong way.”

“We’ll try moving the anchor line,” John said. “We’ll see what happens.”

“But—”

“We’ll re-rig the anchor line. Bob,” John announced.

Bob and I let out the mainsail line and the Namaste was once again standing bolt upright. It was getting close to ten o’clock. I undid the anchor line and Bob swam it under the keel and up on the other side. I pulled it through a guide and into a deck winch and took up the slack.

We winched the top over again. The Namaste leaned farther over than before, but as the line left the mast at ever increasing angles, the friction at the masthead increased.

“I didn’t think it would work,” John said, going below for a beer.

I followed him down. “John,” I said as he reached into the cooler. “I know this’ll work.” I tapped my drawing. “We know your way won’t. We can winch on that fucking thing until the line breaks—it’s cinched up tight as a knot. It’s not going to work and you know it.”

“You know my way won’t work?” John glared at me. “I’m the fucking sailor here, Bob. I’ve done this before.”

“It doesn’t matter, John. It’s simple physics.”

John shook his head angrily. “Physics? Shit. I fucking hate it when goddamn academics try to take on the real world.”

“I’m not an academic, John. I’m good at this stuff.”

“Not an academic? Not an academic? You’re a fucking writer.”

“Really? Seen any of my books? I was a farm kid, John. Had to invent all kinds of gadgets to get out of doing chores. Then the Army: helicopters—ever seen anything more complicated than a helicopter? Then the mirror business—invented all kinds of machines there. I see what we have to do. That’s all.”

“That’s not all,” John said, swigging from his beer. He swallowed and said, “You know what your problem is, Mason?”

“No, John. What is my problem?”

“You want to be the fucking captain.”

I didn’t want to be the captain. As it was, I was the worst crewman you could imagine: an argumentative know-it-all sailor on his first trip in a sailboat.

We went on deck and ate some peanut butter sandwiches for lunch. John stared at the island while I explained to Ireland, for John’s benefit, my plan. Ireland nodded, but refused to take sides. I asked him if he thought it would work. “Don’t know, Ali. I’m just a dinger,” he said, looking worried.

After lunch John said, “We could just haul a pulley block up to the masthead with the mainsail halyard. Then we could run the beach line through that pulley and down to one of the winches. That should work.”

“That’ll work great,” I said.

Once the decision was made, things brightened up. Ireland and I rowed back to the beach and untied the line so John could pull in enough slack to make the changes. John put the beach line through a big pulley block he’d found in our spare-parts drawer and hooked the block to the mainsail halyard. By the time we got back, he’d run the beach line through the pulley and wrapped the end around a winch. He was raising the pulley, with the beach line through it, up to the masthead as we climbed aboard.

Ireland and I cranked the beach line through a winch in the cockpit and John winched the anchor line tight next to us. The mast went over, the keel flipped up. The Namaste leaned over until the port gunwale went underwater. We got the side of the keel to the surface, probably could’ve laid the boat flat with the leverage we had.

We spent another hour drilling a two-inch hole in the bottom of the hull. John and Ireland worked outside, sitting in the dingy. Ireland held the dingy against the hull with a line tied to the safety rail while John drilled a hole where he wanted the transducer for the depth finder. When the pilot hole came through, I drilled from inside with a two-inch hole-saw set in a brace. Took about twenty minutes to grind through the hull, which was two inches thick on the bottom. The plug fell out and I could see John and Ireland smiling outside. We set the depth finder’s transducer in the hole in a bed of epoxy.

The Namaste lay cocked on its side for four hours while the epoxy set. We played with the dingy and skin-dived.

Late in the afternoon, we let the Namaste back upright. I ran a wire from the transducer to the depth-finder dial we’d installed next to the compass in the cockpit. We flipped on the power and, sure enough, the thing said two feet. Watching the finder tell us the water was getting deeper as we pulled ourselves out to the anchor was fun.

We anchored out far from shore, out of range of the sand flies, and broiled three big steaks. We toasted our success with beer, told jokes, and yelled insults at the sand flies. It felt like we’d really done something.

The next morning we sailed back to Saint Thomas Basin to finish provisioning the boat. And to meet the scam master.

John brought him out to the Namaste in the dingy the day after we got back to the harbor. His name was Dave, and he’d brought his wife, Nancy, with him. They looked just like any other couple on a weekend jaunt. They climbed aboard, to a thoroughly spiffed-up Namaste. Ireland and I had been cleaning up the boat all morning. John introduced us and I found out that Dave was a Vietnam vet, too. He’d been a grunt in 1969, earned a Purple Heart. That made me feel a little better. Most grunts I knew were good at keeping cool under pressure. I’d learned, from John, that Dave had made this his mission by pushing out the usual scam master. Dave had put this whole deal together and had a point to prove to the boss—that he was as good as the other scam master. Dave was clawing his way up the corporate ladder.

We talked for a while in the cockpit. Dave was impressed that I’d been a helicopter pilot; loved helicopter pilots because they’d saved his ass a bunch of times.

Nancy pulled from her purse a brown-paper package the size of a thick novel and handed it to John. John tore it open like it was Christmas morning. Inside were twenty-five rubber-banded bundles of money. Twenty-five thousand dollars. They excused Ireland and me while they talked business. Dave had all the codes and times for the pickup and wanted to brief John. Ireland and I went forward, sat against the cabin bulkhead on the foredeck, and smoked pot. “That money isn’t for the pot, is it?” I said.

“I don’t think so,” Ireland said. “We’re picking up probably a hundred and fifty thousand worth. That’s probably just the buyer’s fee.”

A half hour later, John called us back and said Dave was taking us all out to dinner.

The next morning, John announced this would be our last day in Saint Thomas. We could use the time to tie up loose ends, make our last phone calls. We went ashore. I helped John shop for a box of silicon sealant he wanted to caulk the gunwales with. We’d detected some leakage: the lockers under the bunks were sloshing with water.

I got my slides back from the camera shop and mailed them home. I called Patience and told her we were ready for the next leg of the trip. She knew what that meant and her voice sounded fearful. So did mine, I guess. I was jumpy, nervous, abrupt. I just wanted to get it over with. “I’ll be seeing you in a couple of weeks,” I said.

“I love you,” she said, her voice breaking. “Be careful.”

“I love you, too. Two weeks; maybe three. I’ll be home.”

We met Ireland back at the dingy. It was five in the afternoon, so we went into the Islander and had some beers. I ordered chowder.

While I was waiting for the food, I spotted somebody I knew. Impossible! I tried to slink down in the chair, but he saw me and walked over. It was Cal Fisher, a guy I went to art school with. He and I had been pretty good friends back then. Patience and I met him and his wife when we lived at married student housing. His daughter, Carol, and Jack had played together. He sat down on the bench next to me and I introduced him to John and Ireland. I could hardly talk. John picked up on my panic and told Cal how we were down here delivering a yacht to some rich dude, taking another one back up. Cal nodded. I could tell by the way he looked at John that he knew what we were really doing. The Islander was crawling with pot smugglers. Even I could tell who they were. We had a lame conversation for a few minutes. He was working in real estate. He got up to leave. He said good-bye to John and Ireland. When I stood up, Cal moved close to me and whispered, “Bob, what are you doing here?” He gave me a knowing smile and left.

I thought, what am I doing here? I could’ve gone into real estate, too.

John announced that we were going to have one last party before we left. A fucking tie-one-on party. I said maybe we should be cool, unobtrusive.

Even Ireland thought I was being paranoid. It ended up that I took the dingy back to the boat with the stuff we’d bought and John and Ireland stayed to party. They said they’d come down to the beach, close to the Namaste, when they finished, and yell for me to row out and get them. Fine.

I sat in the cockpit of the Namaste, alone for the first time in weeks. I watched the boat next to us, a legitimate yacht. I wondered what people did to get that much money legally. We had seen a two-hundred-foot yacht moored by the fuel pumps manned by a crew of twenty sailors, all wearing beige uniforms. One of them told us the owner lived on the boat by himself. A Bell Long Ranger helicopter, painted to match the beige and brown trim of the yacht, perched on the fantail of the boat. Now, how does one man get that much money? Just the helicopter cost more than a million dollars. I wasn’t jealous; I was just bewildered. I thought I was a pretty smart guy, but making money just seemed to be beyond my talents. These people, the yachts, the big houses, intimidated me. I thought I was getting a taste of what the blacks on the island felt.

I made some tuna fish salad and ate in the cockpit. I lay in a lawn chair, chewing my sandwich, staring at the stars. They weren’t as bright in the yacht basin as they were when we were out to sea. Too many lights.

At about ten, I heard hoots and yells in the darkness over at the beach; had to be John and Ireland. I climbed into the dingy and rowed over. I heard a lot of laughing. They were thoroughly drunk. When the dingy got close enough, Ireland jumped in. John leapt, too, but he missed and fell in the water. We pulled him in, sopping, over the side.

John sprawled across the dingy, laughing, having a really good time.

Ireland was staring up the beach. “C’mon, Ali, let’s go!” he said.

“What’s the problem?” I said.

“Aw. This Juan.” Ireland sighed. “He started a fight at the bar. Hurt a guy.”

“Fucker damn well deserved it!” John yelled. Then he laughed.

Ireland kept staring up the beach, toward the hotel.

“Police?” I said.

“Maybe,” Ireland said. “I don’t think anybody knows where we went, though. We ran out through the hotel and circled back.”

“Jesus,” I said. “What a fuckup. Our last night, and you get in a fight?”

“Hey, Ali.” John laughed. “Best night to fuck up is the last night.”

I stayed awake long after John and Ireland were asleep. This was getting too nutty. He misses his watch. He starts fights. He’s too stubborn to admit that he’s wrong when he is. Cal Fisher knows what we’re up to—how do I know Cal’s not a cop? Or knows a cop? How the fuck can we keep making so many mistakes and pull this off?

I’m leaving. Tomorrow. Then a pang of guilt hits me.

Who’ll stand my watch?

Who’ll stand my watch! Are you kidding? Who cares! You could hire a chimp to do what I’m doing. It’s not my fucking problem. Tomorrow, I’m calling Patience and telling her to send a plane ticket.

What’s she going to use for money?

Borrow it from somebody.

Who? The only guy who’d lend you money is on this boat with you.

Somebody will.

Okay. You quit. Then what? Go home and look for work?

My book. Books. I’m working on two.

Your books are a waste of time. Mental masturbation. Be real. You’re no writer. You’re as much a writer as Elliott is a fucking rancher. No one’s going to buy your book. Can’t you read between the lines of those polite fucking rejection letters? You’re not a writer; you’re not anything. You’ll be lucky to get a job mowing yards, pumping gas. And then John and Ireland will cruise through High Springs in a few weeks; maybe they’ll stop and let you pump gas for them, pockets bulging with cash, saying, Too bad, Bob. They gave us each a fifty-thousand bonus, too. Dammy! Wanting; having. Here, take this—they stuff a couple of twenties in your pocket—little something for you, Bob. Buy some shoes or something, eh? Bye, Bob. They hustle off in new Corvettes, leaving ten dollars’ worth of rubber on the road, loose bills fluttering out the windows.

Better poor than poor and in jail, I say to the other voice that lives in my head and argues with me. Tomorrow I’m leaving. I’m no fool.

The other voice laughs.

I was grim as death the next morning. John noticed, but thought I was just pissed at him for last night. He said he’d been an asshole. I nodded.

We hauled the anchor and motored over to the fuel pumps to top off. I jumped on the dock while John and Ireland helped the fuel guy get the hose to the Namaste’s tank. I wandered over to the two-hundred-foot yacht and stared at the bow. A few chips of paint were missing and silvery metal gleamed through. This was a stainless-steel hull? Two hundred feet of stainless steel cake with a helicopter topping. I hated this man.

Why’re you stalling? My bicameral companion said.

I’m going. Just have to say good-bye first. Just pissed at this rich guy. Two hundred feet of—

“What’s up, Bob?” John said behind me.

“Nothing.”

He must have read my mind. “You know, Bob, this is the point of no return. When we leave here, we won’t touch land again until we get home. This is it.”

What’s he think? I’m scared? I may be leaving, but I’m not scared. “I know. Just woke up feeling shitty, is all. I’m—”

John nodded and went into the dockmaster’s office to pay for the diesel fuel. I stared at Ireland, my mouth muttering, “Gonna quit.” He shrugged and glanced down at the water. John came out of the office and jumped aboard the Namaste. They looked at me, heads cocked. I looked at them.

I walked over to tell them, Sorry, I’ve had it; I’m quitting this stupid mission. You guys’ll need my share for new tires anyway—

I stared at John. I remembered the things he’d done for me, like buying me the typewriter—everyone deserves the right tool, he’d said—lending me his car or truck in the middle of the night and never complaining, lending me money and never mentioning it. I watched Ireland pulling in the bow line. He turned and looked at me expectantly. I could hear him saying, Whaty wrong, Ali? He was hardworking, funny. He was loyal.

An hour later we were under sail, heading for Colombia.

CHAPTER 16

A twenty-knot wind sped us toward the Guarjira Peninsula. It was like being sucked down a whirlpool, faster and faster as we got closer to oblivion.

This was the first time we’d sailed downwind; running with the wind, it’s called. John had us attach a pole to the end of the staysail and push it out starboard to catch the wind. We put on a large jib and let it billow out on the opposite side. We sheeted out the mainsail until it was nearly perpendicular to the hull. The Namaste fairly flew before the wind. I decided to experiment with the old way of figuring your speed, the knotted string. I tied a knot every fifty feet in a hundred-yard length of twine. I threw one end overboard, tied to a board. I counted seven knots going through my fingers in thirty seconds—three hundred fifty feet in thirty seconds equals seven hundred feet per minute, equals forty-two thousand feet per hour. Divide by six thousand eighty feet—one nautical mile—and it equals just about exactly seven nautical miles per hour. I made sun shots and calculated our speed with modern instruments—seven knots. Those old guys knew what they were doing.

The sea was rough, but since we sailed up the smooth incline of the waves behind the crests, the ride was smooth. John pointed out that coming back, beating against the same sea would be a much different story.

The sky was clear, the sun bright and hot. Saint Thomas is at the twenty-first parallel. Sailing south, almost to the ninth—only nine degrees from the equator—we’d feel the sun from nearly directly overhead. I wondered if we would be able to see the Southern Cross from that latitude. I’d never been this far south before.

Rosalinda steered—her wind vane pointing backward into the wind—while the three of us climbed all over the boat caulking the rails with silicone. There weren’t any visible cracks, but we knew it leaked because the lockers under the bunks had flooded in the storms on the way down. We smeared the whole seam where the deck joins the hull from bow to stem. After the caulking job, the three of us sat around in the cockpit—sporting tropical print nylon briefs we’d bought in Saint Thomas—sipping cold beer and enjoying the ride, telling sailing stories.

John told us he and his buddy Mitford had sailed to Saint Thomas on a trial run on the boat he’d just built—the one he used to cross the Atlantic. They saw some people skin-diving from their yacht near Thatch Cay, near where we’d keel-hauled the Namaste. “We pull up alongside to say howdy and ahoy,” John said. “Their wives, nice-looking ladies, were on the deck of this teak and brass fifty-five-foot motor yacht, sunning themselves in these string bikinis, you know? They smile. The guys are splashing around diving for conch, and when they see us, they climb out of the water and invite us on board for drinks. We drink frozen daiquiris at ten in the morning. We shoot the shit. The women—one’s a blond, the other’s a brunette—are super friendly. They were in their early forties, you know, homy as hell. The two guys jump back in the water, and Mitford, who’s been bragging how he cooks conch, goes in with them. I’m watching them diving and then I feel a hand reach up between my legs and grab my cock!”

“You’re shitting,” Ireland said, laughing.

“No. I’m serious as a heart attack. The blonde has me by the root and she pulls me down next to her. She’s taken off her bikini bottom and she’s on her hands and knees, wiggling that thing at me while she’s reaching back and squeezing my schlong.” John giggles like a kid. So do we. “I say, ‘Hey, what about your old man? I mean, he’s right fucking there!’ She says he’s looking for conch. Tonight he’ll be so drunk he couldn’t get it up with a crane. She’s rubbing my dick while she’s talking and I’ve got a hard-on. Then her friend, the brunette, grins at us and goes and sits on the transom and talks to the guys when they surface. She looks back at us and gives us a thumbs-up. She’s keeping watch for us! I say, what the hell? and mount this bitch. I’m pumping away fast—you know, before I get caught—and she says, ‘Relax, captain, slow down, there’s no rush.’ No rush? Her old man is twenty feet away blubbering he’s found a herd of conch down there. ‘He’ll be busy for hours,’ she says. ‘Just got his skin-diving gear. He’s like a kid with a new toy.’ So I’m fucking her right there in front of her friend, nice and slow as I can, watching her husband splashing around. It was weird.”

“C’mon, Juan,” Ireland said. “Nobody’s that dumb.”

“I shit you not. That’s the way it happened,” John said, crossing his heart. “Then her friend, the lookout? Well, she comes back when I’m finished and says I should go tell Mitford to come up and get his share. I jump in and when Mitford comes up from a dive, I tell him, ‘Man, I think you should go get on their boat. That lady has something for you.’ He looks up, sees the brunette smiling her biggest, brightest fuck-me smile. He says, ‘What? What’s she got?’ Mitford is really into this conch hunt. I say, ‘You’ll recognize it when you see it.’ He shrugs in the water, doesn’t know what’s going on, climbs on deck. In a minute, my party-punch, the blonde, is sitting on the transom as lookout, cheering on her husband and his dufus friend, glancing over her shoulder now and then to check out the action. You should’ve seen her smile. Scary how women can be so damn deceptive.”

“Didn’t these guys ever catch on?” I said.

“Nope. They’re soused. We have lunch, drink some more, and repeat the whole thing that afternoon, switching around, until Mitford and me are too wobbly to wiggle.

“The women say, ‘It was wonderful meeting you,’ with honey voices, when we’re leaving. The guys shake our hands and say, ‘Yeah. Let’s do it again sometime.’ Those two women were grinning like girls. I’ll never forget it.”

I looked at Ireland. “What’d you think? Elephantshit?”

Ireland made a skeptical face and nodded. “Trying to impress us.”

“No!” John said. “It’s true. I swear to God! Ask Mitford.”

“Yeah?” Ireland said. “Dammy! Why doesn’t stuff like that ever happen to me?”

After lunch, John said we were going to remove the toilet from the head. “Thing takes up room,” he said. “One extra bale is another fifteen thousand dollars.” I went below, got a box of wrenches, and went to the head. I wasn’t going to miss the commode; we never used it, used a bucket instead, but it cost over a thousand dollars and it seemed wasteful to just toss it overboard. I got it undone and hauled it on deck. John grabbed it by its pump handle and swung it overboard. Made a big splash. Ireland suggested a possible threat to the world by our actions: “What if some fish hits that handle?” Ireland said. “Gurgle, gurgle, gone. Whole fucking Atlantic, down the drain.”

Two dolphins came over and played with the bow. I suppose they were scouts because five minutes after they arrived, a whole herd swam over to us, adults and babies. Nearly fifty dolphins surrounded us, diving and blowing, coming to within three feet of the boat. I’d never been so near these animals. Up close and alive, they’re beautiful to see. I went out on the bow pulpit with my camera and watched them dart back and forth in front of the bow. Now and then, one would swim on its side and stare back at me. I took close-ups of dolphins staring at me with their built-in smiles that come from a hundred thousand years of laughing. The whole world, most of it anyway, is home to dolphins. What a life. No mortgages, no traffic jams, always plenty of fresh food swimming around. Get laid whenever you want—if you’re a dolphin. They spend more time fucking than people do. The guys have bright red retractable dicks and they fuck on the fly. I saw a couple of the guys roll over and flip me a dick. Same as the finger? Maybe. They’re smart enough. They’d developed their language before we figured out that vines were for swinging. I envied them their freedom. A dolphin, gliding effortlessly through the water beneath me, stared me right in the eyes for a while, saying, Yeah that’s an interesting thing you’re on, but what happens to you when it sinks? You don’t look like you can swim too good. You’ve got weird-looking flippers. Yeah? I said. Well you can’t drive a car or fly a plane; don’t even know what the hell they are. True, said the dolphin. Do you?

The dolphins stayed with us for half a day and moved off toward the southeast, to wherever they’d been going before they met us. I had the feeling we had been a kind of dolphin tourist attraction, a diversion on a long trip.

At sunset, a cruise ship passed us, coming to within a hundred yards of the Namaste. I got out the binoculars and watched a young couple standing at the railing, dressed in their cocktail-hour clothes, holding drinks. The guy waved, the girl looked at us with concern. We must have looked awfully tiny to them. We certainly felt tiny. Each of their twenty lifeboats was twice as big as the Namaste. The Love-Boaters walked around on their gyro-stabilized, speeding behemoth like they were partying on the front lawn of a country estate—tent pavilions, strings of glittering lights, waiters, guests sipping martinis and chattering about business and sex. We were sailing at seven knots, but the cruise ship passed us like we were anchored. “Dammy,” Ireland said. “How does something that big move that fast?”

The wind held steady and strong for two days before it began to slacken. We slowed to three or four knots in the middle of the Caribbean. Still running with the wind, the relative wind—the breeze we felt—was almost gone. The sun began to fry us. It was difficult to believe that just two weeks earlier we were freezing in Jacksonville. Now we were trying to stay cool wearing swimsuits or nothing. The resulting sunburns made us feel even hotter.

On Christmas day, we made a special meal: noodles, peas, and canned chicken. I read the letter Patience had dated for Christmas:

Yeah. Christmas in Vietnam. Now this. The two events seemed related. Both were in the tropics; both happened while I was on missions I didn’t want to be doing. I felt lonely for Patience and Jack. I felt like a failure. If I was any kind of provider, I thought, I wouldn’t have to make them put up with brainstorms like this one. I resolved that I’d make up for it after the trip.

The trip was my panacea. Every problem I had was going to be solved with thirty thousand dollars. I’d have time to write; we’d be able to pay off the car; I could add on a small addition to the cabin so Jack would have his own room; we needed a new well. Thirty thousand would cover all that with plenty left over. The scammers kept saying: Wanting; having. I wanted lots of things; I was going to have them; if we could just make this work.

Early the next morning I was alone on watch. I stood on the rail amidships, holding on to a stay, leaning over the sea. Warm water splashed my feet. I was naked, and the sun was already hot on my skin. I was brown now, acclimated. I felt like I was born to live here. It was a glorious feeling, bare sun-browned skin caressed by tropical winds, sprinkled with sea spray. I felt like a dolphin must feel—the sea moved by fast, foaming, and I felt like I was swimming, gliding effortlessly through the water. I was part of it—the water, the sky, everything. It was spiritual. I felt a golden glow flood through me and, suddenly, I had an erection. Like those dolphin guys had the day before—a hard-on for life, I guess. The thing just popped up, jutting out in the breeze, wavering over the sea. A couple of quick strokes was all it took. I watched my froth fall back as the Namaste sailed onward. I looked at the spot for a while, expecting to see Venus rising from the sea, standing on a giant clamshell, wrapped in golden hair, her hand postured modestly. She never did. You have to be Zeus to pull that one off.

By the fourth day out of Saint Thomas, John was getting jumpier. He took to scanning the horizon with the binoculars much of the time. He was Captain Ahab looking for Moby Dick. In the afternoon he called out that he saw a ship. As we got closer, we could see it was a three-hundred-foot rusty freighter cruising across our path, sailing northwest. As we watched, though, it changed course abruptly and began coming toward us.

“I don’t like that shit,” John said. He went below and fetched the Winchester.

When John came back up with the rifle, he levered a round into the chamber. “Who do you think they are?” I asked.

“Don’t know. But I don’t like the way he changed course all of a sudden. Pirates use boats like that.”

Pirates. That got my attention. We stood on deck, hanging on to stays, and stared at the boat coming our way. It was steel, long as a football field. How on earth could you defend yourself against that? One rifle against a steel ship? That’s like pissing on a forest fire. “Should we go overboard if they attack?” Ireland asked.

“Wouldn’t do any good, Ramon,” John said. “They’d either shoot you in the water or just leave you to die.”

I see us firing a few ineffectual shots against their hull to warn them off. Ping. Pong. They open up with a fusillade of rifle and automatic weapons fire. We duck below and lie on the deck as the bullets crash through the cabin. Then it’s quiet and we know they’re alongside, getting a line on us. We feel the Namaste bump against their hull. We hear them jump on deck. Footsteps run fore and aft. A shadow appears at the hatch. John blows one of them away as he comes down the ladder. Pow! The guy screams. We hear a loud shout and some angry muttering. There’s a long silence. Then we hear the forward hatch opening. We have two entrances to cover and one gun. Then a shotgun pokes in through the cabin skylight above us. I feel weak as it explodes.

Ireland and I looked at each other. The ship now bore down on us, closing the distance between us, fast. I felt the butterflies of fear fluttering in my stomach. I’d gotten shot at a lot in my life. I didn’t like it. And out here, no door gunners, no help available, I felt naked. I looked down. I was naked. I went below and put on my jeans so I’d at least not be humiliated as well as killed. I came back up and stared at the ship. It was near enough to see that no one had painted it in years. It was solid rust. A bilge pump worked hard, pouring a constant stream of water out the side, just above the waterline. The ship was close enough to see a name on the bow, but there was no name. John might be right.

“Can’t we call them and make a deal?” I asked.

“These guys don’t make deals, Ali. They don’t have to.”

“This is about the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen,” I said.

“What do you mean?” John said.

“We come down here. We know there’re pirates everywhere. And we have no way to defend ourselves? What kind of plan is that?”

John glared at me and looked back at the freighter. We saw a crewman waving from the bow of the ship. He wasn’t waving for us to stop, he was just waving. The ship continued past us without slowing. When we hit its wake, the Namaste bucked and we started laughing.

“False alarm,” John said.

“I wonder why they did that. Change course all of a sudden.” I said.

“They were pirates,” Ireland said. “But then they got up close enough to see the awesome Ali and the mean Ramon and the beeg fucking Juan! Scared shitless! Waity, say the pirate capitan, too much for us pirate guys. We boogie, find easier pickings up north.”

Since he had the gun loaded, John decided to start shooting at stuff in the water. He tossed empty beer cans ahead of the Namaste and blasted them with the rifle as they came back past us. We all took turns, killing bottles, cans, anything loose. Blam! Blam! What fun. Bring on those fucking pirates! We shot up about thirty rounds before John put the rifle back in its case and stowed it under his mattress.

While I put our evening meal together, I designed a real smuggling sailboat. It had a fifteen-hundred-horsepower turbine engine—like the one in the Huey I used to fly—mounted below deck. My boat had hydrofoils under the hull and a deck-mounted 20mm cannon. When things looked grim, we’d drop sails on my boat, give ’em a few blasts with the cannon for fun, ka-pow! and then we’d kick in the turbine and blast away on the hydrofoils at sixty knots. Fuck you, pirates. Fuck you, Coast Guard.

When we sighted land at sunset on the fifth day, we changed course slightly to keep our distance. Our new concern was the Colombian navy.

We sailed parallel to the west coast of the Guaijira Peninsula, scanning the coast, looking for landmarks with the binoculars. Using landmarks, like a big power plant and a mountain peak we could see on shore and locate on the map, we could triangulate our position.

John began calling our contact. “Ike. Ike. This is Tina. This is Tina. Over,” he said. He repeated the message for five minutes. We heard nothing but static.

Two hours later, we saw lights popping to life on the coast as darkness set in. We usually ate about now, but no one was cooking. We passed the binoculars around, looking for trouble in all directions.

John tried the radio again. “Ike. Ike. This is Tina. This is Tina. Over.”

“Hello, Tina. This is Ike.”

“Son of a bitch!” John said to Ireland and me. “He’s there!”

“Glad to hear you,” John said. “We’re about fifteen miles from rendezvous. Over.”

“Roger, Tina. We’re ready. Let me know when you’re within a mile or so. I’ll put the lights on.”

“Roger, Ike. What about the yacht club?” John radioed. I didn’t know what that meant.

Ike laughed on the radio. “Don’t worry about the yacht club, Tina. The regatta’s over.”

“Roger, Ike. See you in about three. Tina out.” John put the microphone down, smiling.

“What’s the yacht club? Put what lights on?” I said.

“The ‘yacht club’ means the Colombian navy. They’re not around. And Ike’s got a Land Rover on the beach. He’ll park it facing the water. When we’re closer, he’ll turn the lights on.”

“Who’s this guy, Ike?” I asked. Ireland had gone below.

“He’s another Nam vet,” John said. “Seem to be a lot of us in this business. Guess we have the proper training.”

“Maybe,” I said. “I still think most of this mission is based on fucking blind luck.”

“You call this luck? We hit our target on the dot. We’re right on time. Luck? The damn navy is nowhere to be seen. You call that luck?” John shook his head like a guy trying to talk sense to an idiot. “Bob,” John said quietly, “we’ve done this before.”

He was right. I was arguing from ignorance. “You took care of the navy?”

“Ike did. That’s part of his job.”

“How’d he do that? How do you take care of a whole navy?”

“You’ll be meeting him in a few hours. Why don’t you ask him yourself?”

Ireland came up from below with a pot of coffee. We made peanut butter and Ritz cracker sandwiches and ate while we kept a nervous vigil. Ike said he’d taken care of the navy, but people boast.

CHAPTER 17

“Ike, this is Tina. Over,” John radioed. According to our plots on the map, we should have been close to the pickup point.

“Hear you, Tina. Do you see me?”

We looked along the dark coast and saw car headlights blaze out through the humid air. It looked like we were about a mile away.

“Roger, Ike. I see you. We’ll move in closer.”

“Okay, Tina. Just watch your depth; gets shallow quick around here.”

We’d already dropped the sails and were motoring. Our wake was alive with glittering phosphorescent sea life emitting an eerie green light a hundred times brighter than we’d seen before. The water around the Namaste looked like it was lit by underwater lamps in the hull. The bright green prop wash extended back hundreds of yards. As John stood in the cockpit steering the Namaste, I watched the depth finder and Ireland stood out on the bow pulpit checking for obstacles—rocks, logs, canoes. It was a moonless night, but you could see well enough in the starlight to spot large objects if they got close enough.

“Fifty feet,” I said.

“Okay. Tell me when it gets to fifteen.” The Namaste had a six-foot draft.

John steered parallel to the shore until he came abreast of the car lights. He turned toward shore and throttled down to a crawl.

“Looking good,” Ike radioed.

Apparently Ike could see us, but we could only see his headlights. When we got closer, I could see flashlights bobbing around the car. The depth finder showed the water getting shallow fast. “Fifteen feet.” John put the engine in neutral. We drifted closer.

About two hundred yards offshore, I called out, “Ten feet, closing on eight real fast.” John shut down the engine and yelled to Ireland to drop anchor. The anchor hit the water with a green explosion, making an effervescent, iridescent green path to the bottom like a stream of glowing champagne. I went forward with some tools. Ireland and I undid the safety line on the starboard side so it wouldn’t get in the way when we loaded the bales.

The Namaste tugged against the anchor line and gradually aligned herself with the slow current. We saw the phosphorescent wake of a canoe heading out to us. On the beach we saw flashlights jerking around while the Indians got the load together.

We stood on deck and watched the canoe approach. A dark shape against the eerie glow of the water, it looked like it was floating in space. When the canoe came alongside, we could see that it was a huge dugout, twenty-five feet long and about five feet wide, carved from a mahogany tree. Indians chattered and laughed. The dugout was piled with bales of marijuana. When they reached out and grabbed the Namaste, a man jumped on board.

“Hey, John. Long way from home, eh?” the man said.

“Hi, Pete. Good to see you, man!” Ike’s name was Pete. John and Pete shook hands.

Pete turned around, called four of the Indians aboard—his cargo crew—and told them in Spanish to start unloading. The four Indians in the canoe tossed bales on deck. We all helped, grabbing the bales as they tossed them aboard. I grabbed one. Weighed about forty or fifty pounds, was cube-shaped, about eighteen inches on a side, wrapped in burlap. The bales varied in size, ranging from thirty pounds to sixty pounds. Pete called out the weights as they came aboard and John wrote them down, keeping a tally of what we loaded. I wrestled a bale to the forward hatch and dumped it below. I saw a dark man smiling up at me. He said, “Bonita, no? Beautiful, huh?” I smiled and said yes. In the lights below deck I could see the bales had boldly printed on the sides: product of Colombia.

In ten minutes the first canoe was unloaded and on its way back to shore for more. We could see another canoe drifting toward us on a phosphorescent cloud. I went back to the cockpit. John and Pete were sitting on the lawn chairs talking. “Product of Colombia?” I said. “They print that up for the pot?”

“Naw,” Pete said, laughing. “They make the wrappings out of coffee-bean sacks.”

“Pete,” John said, “this is Bob, a friend of mine. He’s a Nam vet, too.”

Pete sat in the shadows under the dodger and it was hard to make him out. I saw he was clean-shaven, wore casual tourist-style clothes—short-sleeved shirt, jeans—but I couldn’t make out his features well enough to describe.

As the second canoe approached, we heard the paddlers singing a native song. “Happy bunch,” I said.

“That’s right, Bob,” Pete said. “This is a fucking major event for them. This is payday. There’ll be big parties all night tonight, my friend.”

“This is what they do? I mean, all that they do?”

“You got it. Keeping marijuana illegal in the States is the best thing that ever happened to these people. Life’s never been better. They got refrigerators now, TVs, cars, trucks—putting money aside for the kids’ educations. They’re even buying up the land they used to work for the rich dudes who’ve been keeping them in poverty for the last couple of centuries. Tell the folks back home to smoke mo’ pot.” We laughed. The canoe came alongside and I went forward to help. John looked below and yelled to the Indians in Spanish to pack the stuff neater, it was taking up too much space. His Spanish sounded perfect. John and the head Indian jabbered about how to pack it so we could stuff more pot on board. We were going to take on as many bales as we could squeeze into every compartment except the galley. John told Pete we might be able to pack four thousand pounds into the Namaste, but it’d be tight. The Namaste could carry twice that weight, but marijuana, even compressed in bales, is bulky stuff and volume was the limiting factor.

Bob and I helped the Indians wrestle the bales to the forward hatch. Everybody was having fun. Much kidding, laughing, singing. During the next lull between canoes, I went back to the cockpit.

“John says you take care of the Colombian navy. How do—”

“I don’t do shit. Bob.” Pete struck a match to light a cigarette. I could see him in the light. His face was lean, smooth, friendly. He had close-cropped hair. He looked like a college kid working on his master’s degree in English. “Not a thing. These fuckers do it.” He swept his arm toward shore. “Their navy, any navy, has one critical link in its organization. The sailors. Most Colombian sailors are conscripts who come from villages just like this one. These guys just cut them in—pay ’em about what they’d make in a whole year, just to keep the navy out of our way for one night. Never see the Colombian navy during the pickups.”

“How they do that?” I said.

“Easy. The sailors are the dingers that do the work, right? They keep the engines running—or not running. The engines don’t work when they don’t want them to. Sugar accidentally falls into gas tanks, stuff like that. They’re very resourceful.” Pete laughed. “The only other people they have to buy are the local cops. One of them is on shore right now, working for a little extra pay. These guys and the cop will make a hundred bucks apiece tonight just for an hour’s work.”

“There’s a cop on shore right now, watching this?” I said.

“Yep. Fredrico. Wife has a baby on the way; needs the cash.”

“They don’t talk?”

“Nope. Shit, Bob. Like I said, this is the best thing that’s ever happened to these people. They can’t believe we pay serious money for stuff that just pops out of the ground. They smoke pot, too, but it’s just a fun weed to them; grows wild, always been free. They say, ‘What the hell. Crazy gringos pay mucho dinero for these weeds, who are we to argue?’”

An hour later, the Namaste was filled from the bow compartment back to the galley, four and five feet deep. The only place we could stand below decks was in the ten square feet next to the stove and navigation counter. The bunks were buried under mounds of variously sized and crookedly packed bales of pot. There was only two feet of crawl space between the cargo and the top of the cabin.

Ireland and I hooked the safety line back up and went back to the cockpit with John and Pete.

John had given Pete the package of money and he was counting it as Ireland and I swung around the dodger. The canoes were all back on shore, and I wondered how Pete was going to get back.

“They’re sending a canoe out in a few minutes. They got some stuff for you guys—jugs of fuel, a whole bunch of fresh fruit and vegetables, canned food, stuff like that,” he said.

Pete finished counting the money and stuffed it into a canvas knapsack slung from his shoulder. He said to John, “Well, too bad you didn’t get a bigger boat, Ace. We have plenty more.”

John nodded and looked at the tally sheet. “Yeah,” he said. “Thirty-five hundred pounds. Shit, this barge could carry five thousand if we could fit it in, no problem.”

I saw a canoe drifting out on a cloud of light from the dark shore. When the Indians pulled up alongside, they began handing us five-gallon, basket-wrapped, corked glass jugs of diesel fuel, bunches of bananas, and cardboard boxes of canned food and fresh fruit. When the canoe had been emptied, Pete jumped in. He said “Have a safe trip” and waved. He sat down in the canoe and we watched him being paddled away. His mission was over; he was home safe. Ours was just beginning.

“Okay, guys,” John said. “Let’s boogie!”

We cranked up the engine, hauled anchor, and were under way in five minutes.

At midnight we were under sail and clear of the Guaijira Peninsula, out of the glittery water. Apparently the area just off the coast of the peninsula is one of the few places in the world that sees such bright displays of phosphorescent excitement.

We were all awake, sitting under the dodger. The adrenaline rush was still with us and nobody wanted to sleep. It felt like we were in the process of making a speedy getaway. We knew we had two thousand miles to go, but that hadn’t sunk in yet.

When we were out of sight of land, John said we should smoke some of the product to see how good it was. Ireland and I cut into a bale and yanked out a handful of the compressed weed. The whole boat reeked of the pungent, stale smell of the stuff. We rolled a joint and smoked it.

“Tastes a little stale, John,” Ireland said. John nodded and held a pinch up to his nose. “We gotta make sure this stuff stays dry. Stale pot doesn’t get much money.”

I sucked down a lungful, held it, and let it out. It wasn’t very strong stuff.

“What d’you think?” John asked.

“It’s not the kind of stuff I’d buy,” I said. “Smokes like New York street weed. Nothing like home-grown.”

“Good. That’s fine. That’s where this stuff is going. What do they know of home-grown in Brooklyn?”

I looked down the hatch at the wall of pot. “What’s all this worth? I mean, back in the States.”

“Right now we’re getting about three-forty a pound, wholesale. What’s that? Thirty-five hundred times three-forty—little over a million bucks?”

I shook my head and laughed. This was about as artificial an economy as I could imagine. The scammers buy bales of compressed weeds in Colombia where they give it little value and now they figure it’s worth a million dollars? Free enterprise.

“It’s ridiculous, isn’t it?” I said. “This stuff is basically worthless. I mean, yeah, it’s hemp, maybe worth, what? A hundred dollars as rope-making material? A million dollars to you guys? It’s obscene.”

“Hey,” John said. “Who are you to question world economics?” He laughed. “Supply and demand is the name of the game; and the government sets the prices. Life couldn’t be better.”

“Man,” Bob said. “They should just legalize the stuff.”

“Wash your mouth out, Ramon. They legalize this stuff and a whole economic sector is put out on the street. I mean, what happens to the importers and all their employees? What happens to those poor villagers? And what about us hardworking smugglers?” John laughed. “Let’s see, now; if it was legal, priced what it’s worth, your share of the deal would come to about two bucks.”

Ireland laughed. “Two bucks? Elephant wages!”

We heard thunder and saw lightning to the east. In a half hour, the storm hit. The Namaste leaned into the wind and plunged against the building sea. John was right. Going against the sea was much tougher. Waves as big as the ones we’d cut through smoothly coming down now bashed the bow and washed the decks.

I went below and crawled up on top of the pile of pot and lay down. I slept on a pungent, lumpy, million-dollar bed.

The next morning the storm was gone, but the wind was still strong. Daylight showed what a mess we had below decks. The helter-skelter bales had to be repacked just to give us a couple of level places to lie down. The stale marijuana smell, which had been overpowering the night before, was now barely noticeable as we got used to it. I smelled something else, a faint odor of fuel. Maybe gasoline? I made some coffee and went on deck. A light rain drummed the dodger. I saw a bird sitting on the safety line. Looked like a heron, a freshwater bird. What was he doing a hundred miles away from land?

“Probably got blown out during the storm last night,” John said. “I’ve seen it before.”

I leaned out of the dodger and the bird flew fifty yards away, paralleling us.

“The poor bastard can’t fly back home,” John said. “And he can’t land in the water like a gull—soak up and sink like a feather duster. He’s fucked.”

We watched the bird flying for half an hour. He was getting tired, flying lower and lower. Finally he flew back to the boat and landed on the starboard safety line, jerked back and forth to get his balance, cocked his head, and eyed us suspiciously.

Ireland came up, singing, “I’m Popeye the sailor man—” John and I shushed him. “Quiet, Ramon,” John said. He nodded to our mascot, hunched over on the safety line, dripping wet in the rain. “Dumb bird will fly out and drown.”

“Dammy,” Ireland said, looking at the bird with concern on his face. “Maybe we should catch it and let it go when we get near the Virgins.”

John nodded skeptically. “Help yourself.”

Ireland spent a half hour stalking the heron while the bird watched every move he made. When Ireland got too close, it launched itself back over the sea and fluttered weakly nearby.

The sky cleared and we beat north through rough seas, the wind whistling through the Namaste’s rigging. The heron spent the day flying out, almost out of sight, looking for home, and returning, more exhausted each time, to his perch on the safety line. He’d rest for an hour and repeat the search for his flock. It was depressing. I made an entry in my notebook about, if the bird could think, how easy it would be for him to just decide to sit on the deck and wait until we got close to land and fly ashore. But then, he’d never see home again that way, either.

The next morning the heron was gone. Now and then we saw birds flying around, but they were gulls. The heron was fish food. At sunset we saw another storm approaching. A nasty one. We had to reef the sails. Spent the night wondering if the Namaste was coming apart. Had to go out and tighten a loose turnbuckle on the port shroud. The cable had stretched.

I woke up with a headache. The Namaste was being tossed extra hard; how could the storm get any worse? I felt nauseous. The gasoline smell, or something petroleum, volatile, was really strong. We figured it was spilled fuel from trying to top off the fuel tank from glass jugs on a rocking boat. But diesel fuel smells like kerosene. I’d had lots of experience with solvents in the silk-screen process when I made mirrors, and the smell was familiar. I hate solvents. I went above with John and Ireland under the dodger.

“We’ve got to find where those fumes are coming from, John. It’s getting real bad,” I said. “That stuff will eat your brains out.”

“I know,” John said. “I’ve smelled this stuff before, but I can’t place it. We’ll find it.”

We went below. Just the minute or so I’d spent on deck was enough fresh air to flush out my lungs. The chemical stench below was overpowering, sickening. We couldn’t open the overhead cabin vent because waves were bashing over the decks. Ireland and I crawled all over the load sniffing like bloodhounds. The odor was equally strong wherever we looked. Somewhere, under thirty-five hundred pounds of marijuana, was the source of the gas that was poisoning us.

We spent a couple of hours moving bales from the left side of the cabin, stuffing them forward and to the right, to get to the locker under the bunk on the port side. It was slow and heavy work in a stifling, cramped, rolling space. We’d shove a bale up to the top of the pile and it’d roll back when the Namaste lurched. Eventually we uncovered the locker. Ireland and I pried up the cover. Seawater sloshed over some spare ropes and tools, but we didn’t see anything that could be the source of the gas. Disgusted, we took a break under the dodger.

“That stuff makes me see spots,” Ireland said. He lit a cigarette and sucked deeply. “Ah. That’s better!”

An hour later, we wrestled all the bales back to the port side and burrowed our way down to the starboard locker. We could get to the latch, but there were still too many bales wedging it shut. Took another hour to shift the load clear. We pried up the locker cover. This was the low side of the boat, and the water was deep in the locker. Apparently the silicon caulking had missed the real leaks. We saw the problem: paint cans. The seawater had eaten through the three steel gallon cans of paint and a gallon of paint thinner that everybody’d forgotten about. The paint and solvent were sloshing around in the water, raising an invisible cloud of noxious gas.

Overcome by the fresh blast of fumes, we ran out under the dodger to get fresh air. It was maddening. If we weren’t in this storm, we’d be able to open some hatches and vent some of the gas away, but the storm was worse than ever. Waves crashed onto the dodger. We were taking water through the overhead cabin vent, and it was screwed down tight. We tried to talk the problem away. Maybe we could just live out under the dodger for a few days? That was nuts; must be the gas. We shrugged and went below.

We formed a bucket brigade, scooped up the foul goo in pans, and passed them back to John to pour overboard. I could see stars in my eyes; my head throbbed. We got most of the slop out and began passing up coils of rope saturated with the shit, which John threw overboard. We passed up two boxes of rusted, paint-covered tools and John stashed them in the cockpit. Then Ireland and I wiped the locker clean with rags. By sunset the locker was clear and the bales repacked. We were so exhausted and sick, we just drank coffee for dinner. We sat around, groggy and stupid, and stared at the waves crashing over us. This smuggling racket was getting to be very much like real work.

On the morning of the fifth day since we made the pickup, I was alone, standing on the deck next to the cockpit with my arms folded, relishing the sea legs I’d acquired. The sky was clear. The Namaste was pitching, waves were washing across the deck, but I was able to keep my balance without thinking about it. I stood there, the wind rushing through my hair, taking deep breaths, flushing out the nagging residue of the previous night, savoring the moment, when I saw land. I called down the hatch for John.

“Puerto Rico,” John said. “We have to head farther east, stay away from land.” He pulled Rosalinda’s lines and the boat headed off on a course parallel to the coast. We were ten miles out, and John was worried that the Coast Guard might see us and want to investigate. Coming down we hadn’t worried about the Coast Guard; we were just another yacht then. Now we were a nice prize for a Coast Guard cutter’s crew. We would definitely make their day.

That night we kept in sight of the land lights from Puerto Rico and then Saint Croix, working our way toward the Anegada Passage between Virgin Gorda and Sombrero Island.

A huge Lykes freighter came within a mile of us and John hailed it on the radio, requesting a position check. Their loran worked. The radio operator told us our position. John checked the chart. We would make the passage by dawn, if we didn’t get stopped.

CHAPTER 18

The sea changed when we sailed through the passage, as though we had entered a different land. The difference was more a coincidence of weather than a geographical change. The wind was dying, and the Atlantic was filled with huge swells instead of the choppy seas of the Caribbean. We felt good. Not only was it New Year’s Eve 1981, but we’d gotten across the Caribbean, past the pirates, into the Atlantic. The Caribbean was small, constraining—hell, it had only taken us five days to cross. The Atlantic was wide-open territory—home country, it seemed. We headed due north, away from all land, far away from the usual traffic, and, we hoped, far away from the Coast Guard. That night we broke out a bottle of Cruzin rum and had a party. It was the first hard stuff I’d drunk in four years. Two drinks made me stagger. I was reminded of earlier days and I didn’t like it.

I wasn’t living without aids on this trip—I just wasn’t drinking. I was smoking pot every day. Marijuana made me feel comfortably lazy. It was meditative, relaxing. It was a crutch, but I still needed one. So far, it was working. The physical exertion on the trip and not drinking were actually making me fitter than I’d been in years. I was sleeping better at sea than I ever had on land. I could really get into this sailing life if Patience could overcome her seasickness.

The radio traffic between us and the scam master was now a daily routine. Management wanted to know where we were every day. The calls usually came at night, when the reception on the single-sideband radio was best. John and the scam master, Dave, traded part numbers and other ersatz figures in the coded conversations. John estimated that we’d be arriving at the drop-off point in two weeks, somewhere around the fifteenth of January. I couldn’t get used to how long things took on a sailboat. In Vietnam, I used to give ETAs (estimated time of arrival) like, I’ll be over your position in thirty-five minutes. Sometimes I’d have ETAs of three hours on long flights from An Khe, in the boonies, to Saigon, say. Two weeks? Sailing is slow. Baseball is faster.

The first week on the Atlantic was uneventful. The sea was beautiful and shipping was scarce. The Namaste cut through the smooth sea unhindered, making six and seven knots. I spent most of my time sitting against the cabin on the foredeck writing in my notebook. Memories of what I’d done in Vietnam came to me at odd moments and I’d write them down. Something I’d seen or smelled or heard jogged the memory into existence. This phenomenon really fascinates me. How is it that you can know you know something if you can’t remember it? It would seem you either know it or you don’t. An example given to show how great a computer the brain is, is this question: What is the population of Nepal? You will probably, unless you live there or know the example, say you don’t know. The question is, then, how did you know so fast that you didn’t know it? A standard business computer, given the same question, cannot know it doesn’t know the answer until it has done an exhaustive search of its data base. Somehow, people know they don’t know something right away. I was reading about future technologies that would allow computer memories to more closely match the architecture of brains and be capable of knowing what they know very fast. These new kinds of computers wouldn’t be programmed, they’d learn. They were to be electronic rather than biological brains. This proposed system was called neural networking, which meant that the construction of the electronic brain was patterned after the neural patterns of our own brains. I decided that the robot I was building for my novel would use this technology.

I wrote down ideas about my robot. I jotted down short titles for the things I remembered about Vietnam. My brain ran a search while I was crewing a sailboat smuggling thirty-five hundred pounds of marijuana into the United States.

I wrote, “Daisy gets the Distinguished Flying Cross.”

Captain Daisy, the chicken pilot who hid behind his armor during the assaults, was also the awards officer. They’d lined us up for the monthly awards ceremony. We stood in vague ranks wearing loose jungle fatigues, shifting around like squirmy kids. Pilots hate formations more than shiny boots.

We all got air medals. You got one for every twenty-five hours of combat flight time you logged, the same as did the pilots in World War II. I had five or six by now. Got another one. Then the major and the executive officer got to Daisy. The major started reading his citation, and as he got into it, we started looking at one another. This was not going to be a fucking air medal.

Tom Schall, Daisy’s usual copilot, said, “I was with him on that flight. Fucker disappeared behind his chicken-plate.” The executive officer looked up and glowered. Schall just glared back. Schall wasn’t afraid of anyone, especially the exec. Besides, assault pilots could do just about anything they wanted; they needed us. The major read on about how Daisy had flown a lone ship into LZ X-ray during the battle of la Drang Valley. He flew against a hail of bullets, the major read. He picked up some wounded grunts and saved their lives. What? We’d all been there. No one knew what the major was talking about. Daisy’s own copilot didn’t know what the major was talking about. Everybody knew Daisy hid behind his chicken-plate when the bullets started flying.

When the major finished and we saw he was actually going to pin the DFC on Daisy’s chest, the highest award for valor in the air, the formation broke ranks. Everybody just walked off, muttering nastily. The exec officer yelled, ordered us to come back. Nobody did.

During our second week in the Atlantic it began to get cold. We were back in the northern latitudes and the balmy tropics were just memories. Each day we put on more clothes: from bathing suits to shirts and jeans to sweaters and then insulated jackets. I was no longer able to sit out front and write. I hung around under the dodger instead. As it got colder, the sea grew rougher. The skies were overcast most of the time, making sighting the sun for navigation impossible. We sailed for days at a time without knowing our position.

Days blended together. Each morning looked the same as the morning before. For as far as we could see, all around us, was the horizon. Every day it was the same horizon. Sailing out of sight of land reinforces the fact that we live on a ball in space. You can see the curvature of the earth. At night, if it was clear, the stars looked like they were sitting right there next to me and it seemed that we weren’t moving at all. South Sea islanders believed, as they traveled across hundreds of miles of open sea, that the boat wasn’t going anywhere. Their destination would come to them if they made the right moves. Sitting on the edge of space, alone with the stars, it was easy for me to see where that idea came from.

As we got closer to the States, we got jumpy. Bob dropped his Spanish routine. John was drinking heavily. I smoked pot, made notes in my journal, invented ever more efficient programs to run on my calculator to automate navigation calculations.

We were in common shipping lanes now. We saw as many as half a dozen ships every day, any one of which could’ve been a Coast Guard cutter. I began to think that the chances of sneaking past the Coast Guard were slight. We could hear the Coast Guard on the radio, talking to the freighters, asking them if they’d seen any unusual traffic. Small sailboats in the winter Atlantic are unusual traffic. We kept our binoculars glued on every ship we saw appear on the horizon, breathing sighs of relief when we didn’t see the big red hash stripe the Coast Guard had painted on its ships. The vigil was making us tense as snakes.

As my anxiety rose, I became more critical of John’s plan. One of my objections to his return strategy, one that I reminded him of constantly, was that he insisted we sail without our radar reflector or running lights. I argued that the radar on the Coast Guard ships could pick up the Namaste without the reflector (a skeletal metal ball made with three intersecting metal disks which showed up as a very bright spot on radar), but when we were spotted on radar, our radar print wouldn’t show the telltale bright reflection of a radar reflector on their screens. That would look suspicious as hell. Every ship at sea has radar reflectors to avoid collisions, especially little boats like ours. And, I added, at night they would see us on radar and would not only see no reflector signal, but also would see no running lights when someone looked in our direction, which would make us look doubly suspicious. I said we should look as normal as possible, just like we had on the way down. John said we should try to stay invisible—why didn’t I stop going on and on about it? It always worked before.

Four days from our ETA, we ran out of dry clothes. Endless storms had soaked all our clothes, and we couldn’t get them dry. Sitting on deck during four-hour watches was painful. No one except the man on watch came on deck. The cold wind blowing through our damp clothing chilled us to the bone. My feet got numb inside my deck boots because they’d gotten soaked when I went out to reef the jib one night and never did dry out. My notebook began to swell with schemes about moving back to the tropics if I survived this mission. I could operate a resort; I could run charter sailboats; I could live on a goddamn tropical island and eat sand flies if I had to. I never wanted to be cold again in my life.

Two days to drop-off, we started picking up stateside radio stations. We tried using them for navigation because we hadn’t had a decent sun shot for days. John had a portable radio with a rotating antenna which we could swing back and forth and get an azimuth to a broadcast source. Using the directions to several radio stations, we could get a rough triangulation of our position. When Dave called, John gave our position, said we’d be able to make the drop-off sometime between eight and eleven on the evening of the fifteenth. You could hear the excitement in Dave’s voice as he pretended to be the dispatcher of some shipping company. The shore team had been waiting for this day for over two months. Hearing Dave’s excitement made us feel good, made us feel confident that the shore team had their act together.

The two-thousand-mile trip from Colombia had been too long, too stormy, and too cold. We were weary. We were hypervigilant, filled with anxiety about being caught after coming so far. If we were caught, the scam master (probably not Dave, since this was his scam-mastering debut) would just get another sailboat and crew it with three equally adventurous fools. Us? We’d be in jail.

As we got to within two hundred miles of the drop-off, Dave told John where they’d decided was the best place to make the delivery. Twenty miles north of Charleston. “Five-Fathom Creek,” John said. Ireland had come down from his watch to try to warm up next to the feeble alcohol stove. John had a chart out on the counter. “Here,” John continued, pointing to the map. “We come in at this little bay at Santee Point near McClellanville.” He traced the canal with one point of a divider. “This canal cuts over to the inland waterway. The drop-off point is here,” he said, tapping a spot marked as marsh on the map. Ireland and I looked at the place at the end of a tiny tributary of Five-Fathom Creek and nodded. It certainly looked remote enough to unload a boatload of marijuana without attracting attention.

“I thought we were going in through the port at Charleston,” Ireland said.

“We thought about it,” John said. “This is safer. The only traffic here is shrimpers early in the morning. We come in at night, nobody around.”

“Yeah, but that makes us even more obvious,” I said.

“Dave’s had people out on the creek every night we’ve been gone, Ali. Nobody’s there. Just shrimpers leaving at dawn. This is the perfect spot,” John said.

Fine. What did I know? If we got to the creek, I guessed we’d have made it. I nodded.

“Okay. Now we start getting rid of anything that’d prove we’ve been to Colombia. Any leftover cans of food, the fuel bottles, all our charts. Everything goes.”

We topped off the Namaste’s tank with fuel from the glass bottles, threw the empties overboard, and tossed the remaining full bottles of diesel fuel after them. Ireland and I gathered all the leftover Spanish-labeled cans of food the Indians had given us and threw them overboard while John got reams of nautical charts and universal plotting sheets and tossed them into the sea, where they lay like a trail of pale lily pads going to the horizon. In a few hours, there was nothing on the boat that could be used as evidence we’d been to Colombia—unless of course, you happened to notice the five-foot-deep cargo of marijuana in bales labeled product of Colombia.

We had plans if we were spotted. “If it looks like they want to stop us,” John said, “we dump the bales.”

“The three of us wrestle up seventy-some bales of pot and dump them before a cutter gets to us?” I said.

John was used to this. He’d had forty days of criticism from me. He shook his head sadly. I bet I’d never get another job offer to smuggle pot. “We try, Ali. Besides, we ain’t gonna get caught.”

This part of the mission required dumb luck and blind faith.

On the evening of the fifteenth, our ETA, we hit fog. We’d all been up for thirty hours straight because we figured we’d be sighting land any damn second. We were nervous with anticipation, squinting out over the gray sea for hours, looking for land and the law, and now we were blind. We were on a course John plotted using the azimuths from radio stations we’d gotten from his radio. The azimuths were crude. When you rotated the antenna to get the direction to a radio station, determining the point of maximum signal strength was an art, subject to errors of five to ten degrees. Our plots, made every half hour, often differed by twenty or thirty miles. Now was when we needed the loran. I turned it on and watched the lights blink very nicely and then show us a position of: blank. The loran thought we were nowhere on earth. I wanted to set the chairman of Texas Instruments adrift in a boat equipped with this loran.

When we figured we must be within ten miles of the coast, we still couldn’t see a thing. This was bad. We were depending on sighting lights from which we could make an accurate plot. It’s pretty easy to hit somewhere on the entire East Coast of the United States when you’re sailing west, but that wasn’t good enough. Navigating to the rocky and shallow entrance to Five-Fathom Creek would be difficult under ideal conditions.

John tried using the depth finder to plot our position. He had very accurate depth charts for the region. He’d kept the local charts, even had one marked with course lines and notes that showed we’d sailed down from Maine. If we could match up our depth finder readings with those printed on the charts, we’d have some idea where we were. Unfortunately, the bottom in this area was fairly flat. We could only guess that we were somewhere in a circle about twenty miles in diameter, probably near the United States.

At eight o’clock Ireland called us on deck. He’d spotted some lights. John and I went up. There they were, lights. Good old USA lights. The joy of sighting home was tempered by the fact that we were, at the moment, not welcome.

The lights were confusing. As the fog lifted, we could see shore lights for miles north and south. Where were we? John estimated our position by guessing what the lights were, and sailed to where we should be going from where he thought we were. This is hard to do, even flying.

I got lost one night in a helicopter during flight school in Alabama. I flew from one group of town lights to another, all over southern Alabama, running low on fuel, and never could figure which was which until I happened to bump into Fort Rucker, which was where I was going. If I hadn’t lucked out, though, people at the heliport could’ve found me on radar and told me where I was. I, like most of my fellow students, would’ve found violent death preferable to the humiliation of admitting I was lost—but help was available.

Help was not available now. At ten o’clock, after identifying a couple of unmistakable television towers and using them to plot our position, we discovered our guesses were wrong. We were way off course: twenty miles too far north. John turned back out to sea and then paralleled the coast, heading south. He called Dave and told them we’d be late.

“How late?”

“I figure we’ll see you by two or three.”

“Two or three!” Dave said. I was standing next to the stove, shivering, listening to Dave’s dismay.

“Yeah, best I can figure,” John said. “Two or three. Had some problems. Ran into some fog out here.”

“Maybe we should reschedule the… shipment,” Dave said. “We’re getting real close to seeing daylight, and you know how the unions are.”

John put down the mike. “Shit! He wants us to come in tomorrow night. He doesn’t want to be unloading the boat in daylight.”

“I think he’s making sense, John,” I said.

“Bullshit. We’re here. We made it past the Coast Guard. You want to go back out and cruise around for a day and give those guys another chance?”

I shook my head. “You want to know what I’d do?”

“Do I have a choice?” John said. He was looking very nervous, very agitated. He was out of booze and there was nothing worse than trying to sneak a million dollars worth of pot past the Coast Guard and put up with Mason when what you really needed was a goddamn stiff drink and no advice. But no, Mason had yet another two cents worth. Shit (I read John’s mind), Mason is a goddamn gold mine of ideas. I have the fucking mother lode of opinions about anything on earth, right here in front of me. He shook his head and nodded. “Okay. What would you do?”

“I’d wait until morning. I’d go back out into the fog, just make a lazy trip south toward Charleston. Then in full daylight, I’d just balls-it-out, sail right into the main harbor there. Blend in with the other fools out sailing in this fucking weather. There’ve got to be some. We sail in, hang out on deck, and wave at our fellow yachtsmen. Our waterline looks normal; we look empty. We’re just another sailboat. They’d have no reason to be suspicious; there’s no sign we’ve got this shitload of pot on board.”

John said, “Then what?”

“Well, then I’d anchor out wherever the other yachts do and wait until night. Then we motor up the Intracoastal Waterway to the same place Dave’s picked out—just come in from the opposite direction.” I looked at John. He was considering it. “What d’you think?”

He nodded his head slightly, distracted, working on it. I could tell it violated his notion of smuggling, which was to stay invisible. I agreed; I just figured invisibility could be achieved more realistically by camouflage. “Nope,” John said finally. “I have a bad feeling about that. I trust my guts, Bob. We go. We go in now.”

“Dave said we’re too close to dawn,” I said.

“Fuck Dave.”

I put my hands up against the stove and tried to thaw them out. I felt my whole body getting cold to my core. I had on a sweater and two jackets, but I was shivering. John picked up the microphone and called. “We’re coming in.”

There was a long silence. “You figure you can make it by two? Three, at the latest?” Dave said.

“I’m positive,” John said.

“Okay,” Dave said, his voice filled with doubt. “We’ll be ready. It’s all clear.”

We heard Ireland yelling and went on deck. He was pointing at a buoy. John had him steer toward it and went below and got our brilliant, half-million-candle-power floodlight. As we sailed past, we got the number. John found the buoy on the chart and for the first time in days we had an absolute fix on where we where. John drew a line on his chart, from the buoy to Santee Point, at the entrance of Five-Fathom Creek. We changed course. We were closer than we’d thought, and it looked like we might actually make it by two.

Five miles away from Santee Point, the wind dropped off, becoming too variable and too weak for sailing. John elected to drop sail and motor the rest of the way. I watched him push the starter with anticipation. Everything depended on that engine. Grind. Grind. Growl. The exhaust burbled out from under the stem. John engaged the propeller and the Namaste grumbled ahead. I breathed a sigh of relief that puffed out as a cloud in the frigid air and joined Ireland on the foredeck.

Ireland and I let down all the sails, rolled them up, and tied them with hanks. We made a neat job of it. We wanted the shore team to be impressed at what professional sailors we were. Look, guys. Forty-four days at sea and we’re still cooler than you’ll ever be if you live to be a hundred. Even with the heat of the effort, Ireland and I were shivering by the time we got back to the cockpit. A local radio station said it was thirty-eight degrees, but out on the water it seemed much colder than that. Ireland and I went below to warm up while John piloted.

We hugged the stove.

“You looking worried, Ali,” Ireland said. “You don’t like the plan?”

“You don’t look so confident yourself,” I said. “I guess the plan’s okay. What the fuck do I know about this business? I just have a bad feeling about it, is all. My guts tell me it’s a wrong move.”

“It’ll be fine,” Ireland said. “Twenty of our people are just a few miles away. They’ve got it covered. We get to that fucking creek, Ali, we got it made.”

I smiled. “You should know better’n me. But I guarantee I’ll never do this again, Bob. Too many things can go wrong.”

Ireland nodded. “Me neither. This is my last trip.”

John called us.

He was pointing ahead. “See that light?”

“Yeah,” I said. A light blinked on top of a channel marker.

“That’s it. That’s Santee Point.” John started laughing. “If those motherfuckers want to catch us, they’d better do it in five minutes, ‘cause we’re outta here.” He cupped his hands by his mouth and yelled to the world, “We’re fucking history!”

We motored past Santee Point and into the mouth of Five-Fathom Creek at one-thirty. According to John’s chart, it would take us another two hours to get to the pickup point. I watched the Atlantic disappear into the mist behind us. I heard the waves washing the rocks at Santee Point as a farewell salute. The sea had been my home for six weeks. It was powerful, vast. The sea had put my life in perspective. I missed it as land surrounded us. Someday, I promised, I’ll be back.

A mile into the creek, it narrowed to about a hundred feet. The chart showed that it got narrower. The sides of the creek were berms raised when they dredged the creek through the surrounding marsh. Stars twinkled overhead. They were stars in the sky again; not stars floating next to the planet. The chill of the night entered my bones and I shivered. My breath puffed out in clouds. The only sound was the chuffle-gurgle of the engine. John had Ireland stand out on the deck with the blazing floodlight scanning the side of the channel so he could steer. The light, which seemed adequate at sea, was now overkill, lighting up the night like a flare.

“John, people can see that fucking light for miles.”

“What do you want? You want us to run aground?”

“If you just let your eyes get used to the dark, you can see,” I said. “I can see the damn banks without the thing.”

“I’m not taking any chances. We run aground now, Bob, we’re really fucked.”

John knows what he’s doing, I thought. We’re both listening to our guts. John knows what he’s doing. I’m just jumpy. He’s right, the trip’s almost over. We got past the Coast Guard, the shore team’s cleared the creek. We’re home free. I’ll see Patience tomorrow with thirty thousand in my pockets—a successful hunter home with a bountiful catch. It’ll be great. Happiness is warm money. Then why am I feeling so damn depressed? Maybe I’m just tired. Up thirty-six hours straight. Tired makes you stupid, jumpy over nothing. I used to make terrible landings, made dumb decisions in Vietnam when I got tired. Tired can kill you.

I stood next to John watching the floodlight scanning the banks. “How long before we get there?”

“Hour and a half,” John said.

“Okay. I’m going below to catch a nap.”

“A nap? Now? You can sleep now?”

“Yeah. I used to do it in Nam. You know, between flights. I want to be alert when we get there. There’s nothing for me to do now, right?”

John shook his head. “No. We’re just driving home, Bob.”

I stepped into the hatch. “Wake me when you need me.”

John nodded.

I crawled on top of the marijuana and wrapped myself in two blankets. I was tired, but that wasn’t why I was trying to sleep. I was trying to sleep to get away from the foreboding of doom I was feeling. I couldn’t shake it. Something was wrong with this move. I didn’t know what. It might just be I needed some rest. Needed rest.

Patience and I are standing on the balcony of our new house. She’s happy, beaming like she does, looking like the little drawing she puts on her notes. We can see the river from the deck that comes out from the bedroom. She has a table and two chairs on the balcony. I sit down and put my foot on the railing. Patience pours steaming coffee into two mugs. “I love you,” she says. “You built me a beautiful home, and you did it by writing. I’m so proud of you. I’m so glad you decided not to go on that stupid trip.” She smiles at me. “See? See, asshole, I was right. I knew they’d buy your book.”

“I knew it, too, Patience.”

“You knew they’d buy your book?”

“No, I knew you were right about the trip. I don’t think I could’ve gone through with it anyway. It’s just too damn chancy. They make it by luck and they think it’s because they’re clever. Someday, they’ll wake up.”

CHAPTER 19

“Ali! Wake up!” I heard Ireland, felt him shaking my arm. I figured it was time for my watch, then remembered we were probably ready to unload. My adrenaline shot up and I was wide awake. I could barely see Ireland, but I could see the look of panic on his face in the dim light.

“Call Dave!” he said.

“What?”

“Call Dave. Call Dave.” Ireland’s head jerked toward the hatch. I saw lights wavering across the cockpit. Shore team? Wasn’t Dave with the shore team?

“Call Dave. Tell him we’re busted! We’re busted!”

He turned and climbed up onto the deck.

I could barely breathe. This was no joke. He wasn’t screwing around with me. Ireland wasn’t that good an actor. I climbed down from the marijuana and grabbed the radio mike. I heard a strange voice outside say, “Customs. May we come aboard?” I heard John, trying to seem as calm and as matter-of-fact as possible, say, “Sure, why not?” A shadow moved in the lights above. I peeked up the hatch and saw a man—a man climbing aboard. My heart dropped into my stomach. I felt weak. I put the mike to my mouth and clicked the switch. “Dave. Dave. We’re busted. We’re busted.” I heard his reply overwhelmed with electronic noise. Must be pretty far away. I heard Dave saying, “Crackle. Say. Sssssssst… repeat… rreeeeep… what?”

I repeated the message and put the mike back on its hook. I had to fumble for the hook in the dark, but this was important. If I left the mike loose, it’d fall off the counter and maybe break the cord. As I climbed up the hatch ladder, I heard Dave’s garbled reply coming from the radio. I couldn’t make it out. Probably he still doesn’t know what the fuck was going on, probably never did.

Two men dressed in blue jackets stood by John. One of them held a flashlight pointed at John’s face. The other guy was sniffing. We couldn’t smell the pot anymore, but they probably couldn’t miss it. In the water next to the Namaste, I saw a small skiff with a man wearing a matching blue jacket operating the outboard motor, keeping up with us as the Namaste idled serenely down the creek, her engine chuffling softly. The Namaste only dealt with problems of the sea, but I felt a little let down that she ignored our plight—at least the engine could quit, couldn’t it? I stood in front of the hatch to block the Customs agent’s view. The man flashed his wallet. I saw the glint of a badge. “U.S. Customs,” said the man. “We’d like to see your identity papers.”

“We’re Americans,” John said.

The Customs agent nodded. “I’m sure,” he said. “But it looks to us like you’re coming from beyond the three-mile limit. We saw your light for miles. We have to check your IDs. Do you have driver’s licenses? Passports?”

John nodded and looked at me. All our stuff was down below in a nifty waterproof bag we’d bought at Brasington’s Trail Shop in Gainesville. “Yeah. We do. Stuff’s down below. I’ll go get it.” John turned and walked toward me. Nice try—he figured the agent might just stay where he was until John came back up with our identification. The agent followed him to the hatch. My heart stopped beating. My nuts dropped off. I stepped aside. The agent stood beside me and watched John climb down to the counter and lean across it to get the waterproof bag we’d stuffed in the rack where we kept some books. He flashed his light inside. “Need a light?” the agent said.

“No,” John snapped. “I can see fine.”

“No bother,” the agent said. His light flashed from the counter and illuminated a burlap bale. The agent turned to me and grinned. “Have a little extra? Something to declare?”

I didn’t answer. The agent said, “Roger. Come take a look.”

The other agent came over and saw the marijuana. “My, oh, my. What do we have here?”

The first agent called to the man in the boat. “Sam, call the state police, Coast Guard, local sheriff. Believe we have a little importation violation here.”

“They have pot?” the man called back.

“Oh, yes.” The agent laughed. “Lots of it.”

I heard the guy in the boat, Sam, his voice tinged with glee, as he called every cop within fifty miles. The first agent had gone down below and stood beside John, looking at our papers. The agent nodded, calm and businesslike, as John showed him our passports and the faked ship’s papers that said the Namaste was a leased sailboat.

“Ali,” Ireland called. He was standing in the cockpit, holding the tiller. “Would you steer? I’m not too good at it.”

I nodded and went back to the tiller.

I steered along the channel without lights. I could see the banks just fine. The agent in the boat tied his bowline to our safety line and climbed aboard. He ducked his head into the hatch, whistled, and said, “Everybody’s on the way, Chuck.”

Chuck. The head guy was Chuck. Then there was Rog and Sam. Three guys out working late. Or early. I checked my watch. Three-thirty. The Namaste’s engine chugged gently as we motored up the creek. I could see some buildings about two hundred yards ahead. Sam walked back to me. “Hi,” Sam said, smiling a really big smile. I nodded. He said, “See that wharf up ahead?”

I nodded. A scruffy shrimp boat was tied up next to a dock. The dock was about twelve feet above the water. The tide was out. There were a couple of buildings about fifty feet behind the docks.

“Good. Pull up there, okay?”

“Okay.”

I steered toward the dock. When we were about a hundred feet away, I put the engine in neutral and drifted. “Where you guys coming from?” Sam said. “Colombia?”

“We never left the three-mile limit,” I said.

“Oh.” Sam nodded. “Unloaded from a mother ship, I guess.”

The dock was coming up and I suddenly realized I’d never handled the Namaste under power. All I knew how to do was sail across thousands of miles of stormy seas; I didn’t know how to dock.

“John,” I called. I saw him and Chuck look up. “I don’t know how to do this. You’d better handle it.”

Chuck nodded to John.

John looked grim; the weight of the bust had broken his indomitable spirit. He came up and took the tiller like a zombie. He muttered, “I’m sorry, Bob. I’m really sorry.” I nodded and stood on the deck next to the cockpit. I looked up and down the creek. Not a sign of our shore team. They said they’d be here, in a skiff. Must have seen the intercept, boogied. Thought about that for a while. No. They couldn’t have been around; they would’ve warned us.

John put the engine in reverse and salvaged my rotten approach. Moving like automatons, Ireland and I went fore and aft and tossed our bow and stem lines up over the piers, pulled in the lines, and tied us off. We were numb, working in a dream state—at least I was. John cut the engine and put a bumper between the Namaste and the dock so she wouldn’t get marred.

Sam came to me and asked me to turn around. I stared at the nylon thing he held in his hand. “Cuffs,” he said.

“I thought they were steel,” I said.

“Naw. Everything’s plastic nowadays. Want to turn around? I have to put these on. Regulations.”

I nodded and turned around. Sam put my wrists together and cinched the nylon handcuffs tight. I watched John and Ireland being cuffed.

“Elephant luck, eh, Bob?” I said quietly.

Ireland nodded, looking forlorn, dumbfounded.

We all stood on the rear deck and stared at the dock twelve feet above the water. There was no ladder. Chuck, Rog, Sam, John, Ireland, and I stood there thinking about how we were going to get off the boat. We saw blue lights swinging through the morning mist. In a minute we saw a cop peek over the edge of the dock. “Damn,” he said. “Tide’s real low, ain’t it?”

“Yeah,” Chuck said. “Give us a hand. You got help up there?”

Another cop joined the first one and looked down on us, grinning. “Shit yeah,” said the second cop. “And a bunch on the way.”

The smiley cop lay on the dock and reached down to help Chuck up. They pulled Rog up next, leaving Sam with us. By now there were about six cops standing on the dock, stomping their feet against the cold, lighting cigarettes, shooting the shit.

It was hard for them to get us up because we couldn’t grab anything to help. I said to Sam that they should’ve waited until we got on the dock to cuff us. Sam said I was right, but the cuffs couldn’t be unlocked, they had to be cut. Finally somebody agreed with me. Two cops grabbed me under my arms and Sam held his hands together like a stirrup. “Here,” he said, “use this.”

I put my foot in his hands and stood up. The two cops caught me under my arms and flopped me up on the dock the way we’d brought in my tuna. I rolled over and stood up. A cop pointed to a spot on the boards under a lamp nailed to a post and said, “Have a seat. Right there.”

I sat.

John and Ireland sat across from me. We looked at one another, eyes vacant, saying nothing.

The cops had found a ladder somewhere and tied it to the dock. They were scurrying up and down the ladder, checking out the boat.

I could hear them laughing.

The cuffs were cutting into my wrists. Handcuffs? I wondered what Patience and Jack would think if they could see me now.

“You are advised that anything you may say may be used as evidence against you. You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to an attorney to be present during questioning,” the cop said. He added, shaking his head sadly, “You’re in big trouble, Mr. Mason.” The cop was a detective from the South Carolina State Police. Three other plainclothes cops sat around the table, staring. Yes. I was in big trouble. I nodded. My hands were crammed behind me, numb. I leaned against the back of the chair, but I couldn’t feel it with my fingers. We sat at a table in an office. The owner of the docks had come and unlocked the building so the cops would have a place to do some preliminary interrogation. They’d taken us into the office one at a time. John and Ireland had already been here. I wondered what they’d said.

“We know you were just a crew member,” said the detective. “Your buddy, Tillerman, said he was the captain; said you and Ireland were crew.”

I nodded. John had said that if we were caught, he’d tell them he was the captain. He wanted the responsibility. He figured it came with the job.

“You mind speaking up, Mr. Mason? We have to tape this.”

“Yeah. That’s right.”

“What’s right?”

“Tillerman was the captain.”

“Okay. Now.” The cop looked at his notebook. “Where’d you get the pot?”

I looked at the cop. “I don’t know.”

“Who’s your boss?”

“I told you. Tillerman was the captain.”

“I don’t mean him. Who’s he working for? Who’s the real boss?”

“I don’t know.”

The cop nodded, screwed his mouth up grimly, and leaned across the table. “Look, Mr. Mason. You’re in deep-shit trouble here. You’re looking at twenty-five years in prison. You know that?”

“Twenty-five years?”

“That’s right. Now, if I were you, I’d cooperate with us. We can’t guarantee anything, but we can tell the judge you cooperated. Could help you.”

I nodded.

“So where did you get the pot?”

“Look,” I said, “I don’t want you to get the wrong impression, sir. I really do want to cooperate with you. I don’t know much about this kind of thing, but I think it would be smart for me to have an attorney here.”

“Don’t be stupid, Mason!” the cop yelled. “You won’t have this opportunity again. This is your chance to help us out—and help yourself. Do it and I know it’ll be easier for you. Where’s the rest of the people—the shore team?”

Good question. Probably they were still trying to figure out what happened. I could see the shore team, Dave, Mitford, Wheely, Rangy Jane, all twenty of them, each of them fumbling around trying to find their asses with both hands and missing. “Like I said, I will definitely help you gentlemen. Just as soon as I have an attorney with me.”

The cop slapped the table. “That’s about the dumbest thing you could say, Mason. Now the judge’ll know you were uncooperative when you were arrested. We got you on tape. Goes into the arrest report. Makes you look bad, Mason. He’ll know you’re protecting criminals. And for what? Don’t you think for one minute we won’t find them, your buddies. We have a hundred men out there right now. We’ll find them. We’ll get them anyway, so you have nothing to lose, everything to gain. Where are they, these shore guys?”

I stared at the cop. I had no reason to protect Dave and the band of idiots who were supposed to have the creek under control, who were supposed to clear it for us. All it would’ve taken was a simple radio call, tell us the creek was being watched. No. Their last transmission said everything was clear. John had asked; I heard him when we got to the creek.

“Absolutely. All clear,” Dave had said.

I looked at the head cop, at the three other cops. Everybody was looking as mean and as grim as they could look, like cops are supposed to look when they’re trying to scare the shit out of you. They were all staring at me like I was on my way to death row. I felt like I was on my way to death row.

There was something more important than saving my ass. There was this thing: loyalty. I did the same thing in Vietnam. We were wrong to be there, but I fought the fight. It’s loyalty to the side you’re on. You pick sides, you play the game the best way you know how. When your team fumbles the ball, well, that’s the way it goes. Maybe you work it out after the game. You do nothing to help the other side. “You have my statement on your tape machine, sir.”

The cop shook his head. “Okay, Mason,” he said quietly. “You’ll never be able to say I didn’t give you a chance. You live with that?”

“I’ll have to.”

The cop stood up. “Okay. Let’s go.”

I stood up and walked out to the waiting room where John and Ireland and Chuck and Sam waited. They told me to sit in a chair across from John and Ireland. I sat. The cops went back into the office. I said, “Uh, Chuck.”

“Yeah, Robert?”

“Bob. Just call me Bob,” I said. “Look, Chuck. This fucking plastic piece of shit handcuff you snapped on me is killing my hands. I can’t feel a thing.”

Chuck look concerned, nodded, and came over. I stood up and he looked behind me. I felt him tug the cuffs. “Is a little tight.” He said to Sam, “You got another cuff, Sam?”

“That was it, Chuck,” Sam said, shrugging.

Chuck nodded and said to me, “That was it, Bob.”

“Can’t you just cut the fucking thing off? I mean, where am I going to go, Chuck? I don’t think I deserve to lose my hands over this, do you?”

Chuck shook his head, seemed to be thinking. “Just a minute.” He went into the office where the state cops were talking cop strategy, working the phones, radioing messages to search teams and stuff. A minute later he came out with a new plastic cuff. “They had a spare,” he said, smiling. He fished a pocketknife out of his pants. “Turn around, I’ll fix you up.”

Chuck cut off my cuffs and let me rub my hands together. They were blue, swollen, numb as dead flesh. After a while I could feel them tingle. I put my hands back behind me and Chuck put on the new cuffs and cinched them up loose enough so they didn’t cut my circulation, but tight enough so I couldn’t get them off. “Thanks, Chuck,” I said.

“No problem, Bob.”

I sat down and stared at the posters on the wall. There was going to be some kind of county fair in McClellanville in a couple of weeks. The Clyde Beatty Circus was coming. A big tiger jumped through a flaming hoop. On the other wall was an OSHA safety poster with diagrams showing you that you should not bend over to lift heavy objects; you should squat down, use your legs. Most industrial back injuries, the poster said, are caused by workers using improper lifting techniques. An electric clock over the secretary’s desk said it was five o’clock in the morning. Funny, I wasn’t the least bit tired. Guess it was the nap. I stared at the carpet. What a dingy color, brown with yellow speckles. Probably it was supposed to not show dirt. Nice. You could puke on this carpet and never know it.

“Okay, Chuck,” the state cop said to the Sam and Chuck from the doorway of the office. “You guys can go. The feds want us to take them to Charleston. Boss just said he wants you to know he thinks you and your boys did a great job, Chuck.”

Sam and Chuck smiled. “Hey, it was nothing. All in a day’s work,” Chuck said. “See you at the trial.” Chuck and Sam said good-bye to the cops and to us and left. Friendly guys. I could see the dim glow of dawn outside when they went through the door.

“Okay, let’s go,” the cop said. John and Ireland and I stood up.

One cop held each of us by the arm and they escorted us outside. They led Ireland and John to separate police cars. My cop, a quiet guy who’d been at my interrogation, took me to his car, an unmarked Ford LTD. He opened the passenger door, told me to get in. I sat down on the front seat with my arms wedged behind me. He closed the door and walked around the front of the car, watching me the whole time, like I might gnaw my way through the door with my teeth. He got in behind the wheel.

The cop was silent until we hit the main highway. “You seem like a well-educated guy,” the cop said. “I’d’ve thought you’d be smart enough to cooperate with us. They had to say they can’t guarantee you anything. But I know they’d go easy on you if you told me where you guys came from, who’s on the shore team. They’d be extra-special glad if you told them who you work for.”

“That’s why we’re in separate cars? Give us our last chance to confess?”

“Yeah. That and to prevent you from cooking up a story together.”

I nodded as we joined a stream of commuter traffic. “Yeah. I guess if you left us alone we’d be able to come up with some real clever story—explain away all that fucking pot, all right.”

The cop laughed.

It was almost six-thirty. The highway was packed with commuters on their way to work. The cars moved in slow clots along an artery to the city. I stared into the cars we passed, looking at the people. We stayed beside one guy so long, I got to know him. He looked drowsy, tired, pissed off. He sipped coffee from an insulated plastic mug with a picture of Yogi Bear on it.

I read this man’s mind. He was thinking: What am I doing wrong? I don’t think I can make it through another goddamn day. If shit-for-brains says one more thing about my expenses, I’ll tell him to stuff it. I will. He nods. His mind drifts home: What’s eating Margaret? I can’t figure it out. What does she do all day? The boys are turning into fucking monsters. She’s turning into a surly slob. She always used to keep the place clean, kept herself looking nice, smiled now and then. He shakes his head, sips from Yogi. Can’t figure it out. I do my part. I put up with shit-for-brains for what they pay sewer workers in New York. I mow the yard every Saturday. I take out the garbage Tuesdays and Thursdays. What more does she want? The commuter shakes his head and smiles a cynical smile. On tap for regional manager, my ass. Shit-for-brains keeps saying that so I won’t quit. Sure, you bet. The chances of me getting sales manager over his dimwit brother-in-law are the same as me sprouting another dick.

That’s what the commuter was thinking.

The cop said, “You know, I feel sorry for you, Mason.”

Funny. So did I.

We left the commuter behind. The early morning sun washed his grim face in gold. I nodded at him, telling him not to worry so much; things could be worse. Start your own business; tell Margaret you love her; take the monsters camping. But he didn’t notice me. His mind was working on so many problems he probably didn’t see the road.

I wanted very much to be that commuter.