The Crimes of Jordan Wise

THERE ISN'T MUCH MORE to tell.

Oh, sure, I know—twenty-one years is a long time, a lifetime. But they were mostly uneventful years. Only a handful of high spots—and low spots—worth mentioning.

I got away with the Annalise crime. It was as perfect as the Amthor crime and the Cotler crime. Perfect.

That is what's important.

Life goes on.

How many times have you heard that, and all its variations? Life is for the living. Take each day as it comes. Live for the moment and don't look back. It's the state of mind people slip into when they've suffered irreparable losses. A refuge for the grief-stricken, the depressed, the unhappy, the emotionally wasted. And the unrefiliably empty.

My refuge, after a while.

I should have been content again. Annalise and the threat of exposure were gone for good. I was safe. The tight, structured little world I'd established for myself on St. Thomas was secure. I could continue to indulge my simple tastes for the rest of my life. I could be at peace.

Only I wasn't. The barrenness remained, like a seared landscape on which nothing that had been there before could be rebuilt and nothing new would grow. The reason for it, most of the reason anyway, was a deep sense of loss and privation that I couldn't shake. It had nothing to do with Annalise. It was Bone, of course, the wrenching away of his friendship, his companionship, his knowledge, his wisdom. And it was something else I'd lost that I cherished as much as Bone.

Windrunner, and all the yawl meant to me.

I don't mean physical loss; I continued to live on her, to take her out now and then. Psychic loss. Spiritual, maybe. The symbiotic connection of boat and man to the sea had been severed somehow and I could not seem to splice it back together. It was as if I'd tainted both Windrunner and my love of sailing beyond repair or redemption, as I'd tainted my relationship with Bone, by using them as instruments in Annalise's destruction.

Over and over I berated myself for not devising a different equation that didn't involve either Bone or the yawl, for rushing ahead with a deficient plan. I could have designed a better one, if I'd invested more time. Instead I'd opted for the quick and easy answer, and for that miscalculation I paid a damn high price.

Nothing was ever the same for me again.

The magic of singlehanding was gone. I still derived some pleasure from the wind, the sea, the night sky, the fast-running tacks and the dead-calm afternoons, but it was never again as intense or as lasting. Even the magic of Laidlaw Cay was gone—something else I lost. The first time I went back there, the terns and frigate birds had abandoned their nesting ground; without them the cay was just another barren sandspit. The second and last time, I discovered that heavy storm seas had diminished it to less than half its original size and all that remained were the reefs and a slender hump of sand strewn with sea wreckage. A dead place.

After a few months, I was sailing infrequently. Not working on Windrunner as much, either; the day-to-day tasks required to maintain upkeep on a yawl her size seemed to have grown tedious. Snorkeling also seemed to require too much effort, so I gave it up. Gave up driving around the island, too, except for shopping trips and an occasional visit to Marsten Marine. The closest I had to a friend now was Dick Marsten, but he was a workaholic and had a family and I saw him only for short periods at the boatyard.

I took up walking. Long walks in the morning and sometimes in the evening, along the winding streets of Frenchtown and the edge of Crown Bay, once all the way down Veterans Drive to Emancipation Garden and back. It was good exercise, it passed the time, and I learned to occupy my mind by concentrating on details of the surroundings.

I lost interest in sitting alone and communing with the night; I craved companionship, the kind I'd had with Bone. So I took to frequenting Harry's Dockside Cafe and some of the other local hangouts. But there was no substitute for Bone, not at the marina or in French-town or anywhere else on the island. I had to settle for the brief, boozy company of natives and of tourists hunting local color, and for meaningless conversations about women, politics, all sorts of topics I pretended to be interested in but wasn't.

I thought about Bone quite a bit that first year. Had he gone back to Nassau to be with his dalighter? Down to St. Lucia or Carriacou or one of the other as yet unspoiled islands in the Windwards or Grenadines? The Turks and Caicos? There were any number of possibilities. I might be able to find out if I tried hard enough, but then what? It was better if I didn't know.

I wondered how much longer he would have stayed on St. Thomas if it hadn't been for what I did. Not long, probably. The commercialism and the overcrowding would have driven him away. Would he have let me tag along with him? Two men, two boats, seeking fresh horizons and a brave new world? Maybe. Maybe not. Better if I didn't know that, either.

Wherever he was, whatever he was doing, I hoped he was happy and that his dalighter would become a marine biologist as planned and make him even happier. He deserved it. He was a good man, he'd never harmed anyone, he'd never committed any crimes or thrown away any of the things that were central to his life. He deserved happiness a hell of a lot more than I did.

Dick Marsten contacted me in May of '86, to ask if I would consider selling Windrunner. I'd confided to him that I wasn't as keen on keeping her as I'd once been, and he had a buyer who was interested in a secondhand yawl or ketch of her size. I wasn't as keen on Sub Base harbor, either—too many memories, too many changes in the waterfront. I'd been thinking about moving over to Red Hook, maybe trading Windrunner for another, smaller boat. It was possible a different environment and a different craft would rekindle my interest in sailing and the sea.

So Marsten brought the buyer, a chubby, middle-aged Florida transplant, over for a look. The man liked what he saw, made me a generous offer, and I accepted, contingent on Dick finding me an acceptable replacement.

It didn't take long. Within a week, Marsten located a twenty-eight-foot schooner for sale at a reasonable price on St. Croix. I took an in-terisland flight to Christiansted to check out the schooner, Joy leg. She was clean and well maintained, with a new mainmast. The owner and I went out for a half day's sail so I could see how well she handled, and that sold me on her. I told him he had a deal, then notified Dick Marsten to go ahead with the sale of Windrunner.

I returned to St. Thomas to sign the papers and rent slip space at the Red Hook marina, then flew back to Christiansted and sailed Joyleg across. That singlehand voyage was the best I'd been on in the two years since Bone went away. And the ambiance at Red Hook was more like what it had been at Sub Base harbor when I first went there. The change seemed to be what I'd needed, all right. New boat, new environment—new beginning.

The new beginning lasted about a year.

I sanded and painted and varnished until Joyleg was in tiptop shape. Took her out more or less regularly, once on a long sail to Puerto Rico. Adapted well enough to living on her and to Red Hook. I even became the nominal drinking buddy of the ex-navy, ex-charter fisherman who'd once given me sailing lessons; it amused me that he didn't remember me from Adam's off ox and treated me as if I'd never been anything but his equal. I told myself the scars were starting to heal a little, that I'd found a measure of peace again, but of course it wasn't true. The pleasure and the illusion of peace faded along with the newness; I began to lose interest, the way I had with Windrunner and Sub Base harbor.

Thirteen months after I bought Joyleg and moved to Red Hook, I was again spending more time in waterfront bars than I was on the schooner in port or at sea.

In September of '89 the Virgins and Puerto Rico suffered one of the most devastating hurricanes ever to slam through the region. Maybe you remember reading about it. Hurricane Hugo. A howling, snarling, Category 4 monster—torrential rain, 130-mile-an-hour winds, widespread devastation everywhere it ripped across land. More than twenty people died, and tens of thousands were left homeless. The worst carnage was on St. Croix, but St. Thomas took a heavy hit as well. The blow knocked out electrical power and phone service, and caused severe road and marine damage. There was major flooding in low-lying areas; countless trees and plants were uprooted, some beaches badly eroded, some coral reefs ruined.

There was enough advance warning for frightened residents and tourists to flee in droves before the storm battered the island. That left rooms available at high-ground hotels like the Inn at Blackbeard's Castle. I booked one there, and rode out Hugo in flickering candlelight and relative safety behind the inn's storm-shuttered stone walls. At the height of the hurricane, the noise was deafening—thunderous bellows, banshee shrieks, savage wailing glists that literally shook the building. Annalise would have freaked out before it was over. I considered it something of an adventure—until I went down to the Red Hook marina afterward.

Some boats survived relatively unscathed; others were battered beyond recognition. It didn't matter how well they'd been secured by their owners—the effects were a matter of pure random luck either way, good or bad. Joy leg was one of the casualties. Her spars were gone, one side of the deckhouse had been caved in, holes had been torn in her hull in two places above the waterline. She was salvageable, but just barely.

I could have filed an insurance claim, as so many other owners did—insurance is mandatory when you buy and register a boat in the Virgins—but it would have taken months for payment to come through and I was afraid that a claim might trigger a background check on Richard Laidlaw. I could have paid for the repairs out of my own pocket, but it would've cost thousands and I didn't have enough emotional attachment to the schooner to make it worthwhile. Boat living had pretty much lost its appeal for me by then, anyway.

I sold what was left of Joyleg to Dick Marsten, cheap, and moved back onto dry land for good.

The island wasn't the same after Hurricane Hugo. It had been changing before the Big Blow, as Bone and I had lamented often enough; the massive damage, the millions it cost for cleanup and rebuilding, hastened the process and turned St. Thomas from an island paradise into a large-scale commercial enterprise. Fancy mega-resorts to lure more and more tourists. Expensive new villas and condominiums, and new and expanded marinas, to lure more wealthy full-time and part-time residents and yacht owners. Gentrification of districts like Red Hook, Frenchtown, Sub Base harbor. Out with the old, in with the new—the glitzy, gaudy, expensive, hypermodern, bullshit new.

But all this took time, and while it was going on I lived in French-town and avoided the commercialization as much as possible. I rented an old-fashioned three-room cottage down a lane off Rue de Gregoire.

It was quiet, it had everything I needed, and it was within easy walking distance of everything else I needed. The Bar had been condemned and torn down before the hurricane, but there were other watering holes and cafes, and the waterfront wasn't far away. I was known in some of the places, and accepted, because of my association with Bone.

Not a week went by my first six months in Frenchtown that somebody didn't ask me about him. What happened to Bone, why did he leave St. Thomas, where did he go, would he ever come back? I don't know where he went, I said, I don't know why he left. Maybe he'll come back, I said, maybe he won't. You know Bone, I said, he's his own man, he goes where he likes and does what he pleases. Good old Bone, I said, he was my best friend. And then we lifted our glasses and we drank to good old Bone.

One night, in one of the watering holes, a slumming Frenchwoman fresh from Martinique decided I would make a worthwhile conquest. My blue eyes, maybe. I'd given up wearing the brown-tinted contacts; enough time had passed, and the aging Richard Laidlaw looked nothing at all like Jordan Wise, so that the risk was negligible. Enough time had passed since Annalise, too, to make me boozily curious if what she'd broken had healed of its own volition. Until that night, I just hadn't cared enough to find out.

So I let the Frenchwoman pick me up, and took her back to my cottage. And the answer to the broken question was no. Nothing the woman did—and she was as much a sexual animal as Annalise had been—produced so much as a quiver. She said something that sounded like "Bah!" and got out of bed and threw her clothes on. Before she went away into the night, she reached down and picked up my cock between her thumb and forefinger and shook it as if it had been a bad Utde boy.

"Quequette mort," she said disglistedly.

Little dead weenie.

I haven't been to bed with a woman since.

Royce Verriker died of a sudden massive coronary in the spring of '91. I read about it in the Virgin Islands Daily News. He'd been playing racquetball at the Royal Bay Club, he'd just made a winning shot and turned to shake hands with his partner, and he fell over dead.

I thought about going to the funeral home where he was laid out for viewing. Not to pay my respects: to spit in his dead face. But of course I didn't do it. I settled for the knowledge that the bastard wouldn't be giving any more men's wives the best fuck they'd ever had.

The new St. Thomas palled on me enough by the early nineties to force me off the island. Frenchtown was turning into a "historic" district filled with trendy restaurants designed to attract the snowbirds and cruise ship passengers. Many of the Cha-Chas had assimilated or moved away, and mainlanders were buying up the old frame buildings and renovating them in what they considered to be quaint Caribbean styles. It was all sham and window dressing, and I couldn't stand to be a part of it.

I thought I might like living on Tortola, so I packed up my meager belongings and moved over there. It wasn't as tourist-ridden; I liked what I'd seen of Kingstown and Cane Garden Bay, and there was the lure of the Arundel distillery. But I didn't feel comfortable there, didn't fit in with the British residents and the island lifestyle. I stayed only about a year.

From there I went to St. Croix—the west end, Frederiksted, a town that had the look and feel of an old-fashioned Caribbean outpost on the five days a week it wasn't being invaded by the cruise ship armada. I rented a cottage near LaGrange Beach, one of a series of beaches perfect for long morning and evening walks. I might still be there if I hadn't come home late one night and walked in on two strangers ransacking the cottage. They beat me up, left me in a bloody heap, and ran off. As far as I know, the local law never cought them. I wouldn't have pressed charges if they had. I considered myself lucky, as it was, that the police didn't think of me as anything more than an unfortunate victim.

The thieves took $200 I had stashed in the cottage, and another $60 out of my wallet. They didn't get my passport and bank books because I keep them in my shoes, but in addition to the cash they stole the brassbound pirate's chest—the last of my possessions that I cared anything about.

When I got out of the hospital, I said to hell with St. Croix, and that was when I moved to St. John.

I've been here seven years now, living in the same south-end saltbox and spending most of my days in Jocko's.

I bought an old VW when I first arrived, drove it up to Coral Bay to shop a couple of times a month and a few times over to Cruz Bay. Once during the first year, on a whim, I rode the ferry from Cruz Bay to Charlotte Amalie, but I didn't go any farther onto St. Thomas than the King's Wharf dock. There were seven or eight cruise ships in the harbor, and the downtown streets were so thick with tourists there might have been a parade going on. I took the next ferry back to St. John and I haven't been over there since. Or to Cruz Bay, for that matter.

The VW died a couple of years ago. I sold it cheap to one of the local natives and he hauled it away. I wasn't driving it much, anyway, by then. The saltbox is only a mile and a half from here, easy walking distance, and Jocko supplies everything I need in the way of food and drink. I don't go anywhere else. I don't have anywhere else to go.

End of the Une.