B rown rented a remarkably ugly and uncomfortable black boat called a Zodiac. A pair of huge inflated black rubber tubes, joined at the front in a crude point, a hard black floor down between these, four high-backed bucket seats mounted on posts, and the largest outboard motor, black, that Milgrim had ever seen. The rental operation, in the marina where the thing was docked, provided each of them with a semirigid flotation jacket, a red nylon garment apparently lined with sheets of only barely flexible foam. Milgrim’s smelled of fish, and chaffed his neck.
Milgrim couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in a boat, and he certainly hadn’t expected to find himself in one today, very nearly the first thing in the morning.
Brown had come in through the door that connected their rooms, that now familiar arrangement, and shaken him awake, though not very forcefully. The gray boxes weren’t on the doors, here, and Milgrim had to assume that Brown had left them in Washington, along with the gun, the large folding knife, and perhaps the flashlight and handcuffs as well. But Brown was wearing his black nylon jacket, today, over a black T-shirt, and Milgrim thought he looked much more at home in it than he did in his suit.
After a silent breakfast of coffee and eggs in the hotel’s restaurant, they’d gone to the underground garage and retrieved the car, a Ford Taurus with a Budget sticker beside the rear license plate. Milgrim had come to prefer a Corolla.
Cities, in Milgrim’s experience, had a way of revealing themselves in the faces of their inhabitants, and particularly on their way to work in the morning. There was a sort of basic fuckedness index to be read, then, in faces that hadn’t yet encountered the reality of whatever they were on their way to do. By this standard, Milgrim thought, scanning faces and body language as Brown drove, this place had an oddly low fuckedness index. Closer to Costa Mesa than San Bernardino, say, at least in this part of town. It did remind him more of California than he would have expected it to, though maybe that was this sunshine, more San Francisco than Los Angeles.
Then he became aware of Brown whistling, under his breath, as he drove. Tunelessly, he thought, but with something akin to cheerfulness, or at any rate a degree of positive excitement. Was he picking up the vibe from this sunny but mildly overcast morning’s crowds? Milgrim doubted that, but it was weird nonetheless.
Twenty minutes later, having had some difficulty finding the place, they were in a parking lot beside a marina. Water, distant mountains, greenish glass towers looking as though they’d been built the night before, boats with white masts, seagulls doing seagull things. Brown was feeding a ticketing machine with large silver-and-gold tokens of some kind.
“What are those?” Milgrim asked.
“Two-dollar coins,” said Brown, whom Milgrim knew to avoid the use of credit cards whenever possible.
“Aren’t twos unlucky?” Milgrim asked, remembering something about racetrack money.
“Lucky they aren’t fucking threes,” said Brown.
Now, the huge outboard roaring, marina and city were both behind them. The Zodiac went pancaking along over very cold-looking gray-green water, a glassy shade not unlike that of the towers overlooking the marina. The flotation jacket, stiff and odorous as it was, was agreeably windproof. The cuffs of Milgrim’s Jos. A. Banks back-to-school trousers were flapping like pennants around his ankles. Brown drove the boat on his feet, leaning forward, only loosely strapped to his seat, the wind pressing unexpected angles into his face. Milgrim doubted Brown was still whistling, but he still seemed to be enjoying this too much. And he hadn’t actually seemed all that familiar with the business of casting off, if that was what it was called. They’d needed help from the rental guy.
The salt wind of their passage stung Milgrim’s eyes.
He looked back and saw an island or peninsula, nothing there but trees, out of which emerged a tall suspension bridge, like the Oakland Bay.
He zipped the floater coat higher, pulling his neck in. He wished that he could pull his arms and legs in. For that matter he wished there were a room in there, large enough for a cot, and that he could stretch out while Brown drove this boat. Like a tent, with semirigid red nylon walls. He could live with the fish smell, just to lie down, out of this wind.
Milgrim looked back at the city, a seaplane lifting out of the water. Ahead, he saw several large ships at varying distances, their hulls bisected with black and red paint, and beyond them what he guessed was a port, where giant orange arms craned in the distance, above a shoreline seemingly solid with the visual complexity of industry.
To their left, on some opposite, more distant shore, stood rows of dark tanks or silos, more cranes, more freighters.
People paid to have experiences like this, he thought, but it didn’t cheer him. This wasn’t the Staten Island Ferry. He was bouncing along at some insane speed on something that reminded him of a creepy folding rubber bathtub that he’d once seen Vladimir Nabokov proudly posing with in an old photograph. Nature, for Milgrim, had always had a way of being too big for comfort. Just too much of it. That whole vista thing. Particularly if there was relatively little within it, within sight, that was man-made.
They were gaining, he saw, on what he at first took to be some kind of floating Cubist sculpture in muted Kandinsky tones. But as they drew closer he saw that it was a ship, but one so burdened, pressed so far down in the water, that the red of its lower hull was submerged, only the black showing. Its black stern, though, stuck up shiplike enough, below the absurdist bulk of boxes, revealing it for what it was. The boxes were the colors of railroad freight cars, a dull brownish red predominating, though others were white, yellow, pale blue. He was almost close enough, now, to read the writing on this ship’s stern, when he was distracted by his discovery of a smaller ship, draped with black tires as if for some eccentric designer’s runway moment, pressing ardently against the tall black stern and churning out a huge V of foamy white water. Brown swung the Zodiac’s wheel suddenly, sending them bouncing double-time across the white water. Milgrim saw the tug’s name, Lion Sun, then looked up at the much taller letters on the back of the ship, their white paint streaked with rust. M/V Jamaica Star, and under that, in slightly smaller white capitals, PANAMA CITY.
Brown killed the engine. They bobbed there, in the sudden absence of the outboard’s roar. Milgrim heard a bell ringing, far off, and what sounded like a train whistle.
Brown removed a fancily printed metal tube from his floater jacket, unscrewed the end, and drew out a cigar. He tossed the tube over the side, nipped the end of the cigar with a shiny little gadget, put the nipped end in his mouth, and lit it with one of those six-inch fake Bics, the kind Korean delis used to sell for lighting crack. He took a long ritual pull on the cigar, then blew out a great cloud of rich blue smoke. “Son of a bitch,” he said, with what Milgrim, amazed at all of this, took to be immense and inexplicable satisfaction. “Look at that son of a bitch.” Looking after the square, floating box-pile that was the freighter Jamaica Star, where Milgrim couldn’t quite make out trademarks on the boxes, though he could see they were there. Slowly receding as the tug patiently shoved it on its way.
Milgrim, definitely not wanting to disturb this special moment, whatever it might be about, sat there, listening to little waves lap against the slick and swollen flank of the black Zodiac.
“Son of a bitch,” said Brown, again, softly, and puffed on his cigar.