White Cargo

1

Wendell Catledge sat up and squinted at the smudge on the horizon. It should not have been a surprise, he thought, but it was. The boat slid smoothly along in the light wind, and even the slight movement made it hard to focus on the shape, but it wasn’t a ship or an oil rig, and in the early morning light, it seemed to be pink. He pulled at his beard and ran a hand through his hair, which was a good six months overdue for cutting. Hell, it just might be, it just might be what he guessed it was.

He glanced at the sails, left the autopilot in charge, and climbed down the companionway ladder to the navigation station. As he slid into the chart table seat he allowed himself yet another look at his instrument array. It was all there — full Brookes & Gatehouse electronics, VHF and SSB radios, loran, Satnav, Weatherfax, a compact personal computer, and his own brainchild and namesake, the Cat One printer. That little machine had brought him all this — the yacht, the gear, and the time to sail. Cat had waked up one morning and realized that, after nearly thirty years in electronics, he was an overnight success. He gave the printer a fatherly pat and turned to his chart of the southern Caribbean.

He pushed a button on the loran and got a readout of longitude and latitude, then plotted the coordinates on his chart and confirmed his suspicion. They were south of their course from Antigua to Panama and the Canal, and the smudge on the horizon wasn’t all that far off the rhumb line. A tiny thrill ran through him. This is what it’s all about, he thought, that little thrill of discovery, pushing back the boundaries, punching through the envelope. He laughed aloud to himself, then he banged his flat palm onto the chart table.

“All hands on deck!” he shouted, grabbing the binoculars and starting for the companionway ladder. “All hands on deck!” he yelled again, pausing in the hatchway, “Come on, everybody, shake it!” There was a rustling noise from the after cabin and a loud thump from the forepeak. He raised the glasses and focused on the distant, pink smudge. It was. It was, indeed.

Katie was the first into the cockpit, rubbing her eyes. Jinx was a step or two behind, having paused long enough to find a life jacket. “What is it, Cat? What’s wrong?” his wife demanded.

“What’s going on, Daddy?” Jinx yelled, wide-eyed.

He was pleased that, in her excitement, Jinx had forgotten to call him Cat. When she addressed him as an equal, it reminded him she was growing up — had grown up. “Right over there,” he said, pointing at the smudge.

Both women squinted at the horizon, shielding their eyes from the sun, which was now just above the horizon, big and hot.

“What is it?” Jinx demanded. “I can only see sort of a smudge.”

“That’s South America, kid,” he replied. “Never let it be said your old man didn’t show you South America.”

She turned to him, a look of astonished disgust spreading over her face. “You mean you got me out of the sack for that?” She turned to her mother and shrugged, spreading her hands.

“For Christ’s sake, Cat,” his wife said, “I thought we were sinking.” Both women turned back toward the companionway.

“Hey, wait a minute, guys,” Cat said, thrusting the chart toward them, “that smudge is the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, a little mountain range that goes up to nearly nineteen thousand feet; that’s the La Guajira Peninsula of Colombia out there; just south of it is the fabled Venezuelan port of Maracaibo. Doesn’t that name send a chill right through you?”

“It sends a yawn right through me,” Jinx said, yawning.

“No, wait a minute, kitten,” Katie said to her daughter. “Look at it through the glasses. Your father didn’t bring us all this way to miss this sort of thing.”

Jinx took the binoculars and looked through them at the smudge. “Gee,” she said, flatly, “you’re right, it’s a mountain. I’ve never seen a mountain before.” She handed the glasses back to her mother.

Katie raised the glasses to her eyes. “You’re right, it’s a mountain. I’ve never seen a mountain before, either. Wow.” She handed the binoculars back to Cat. “Can we go back to bed now?”

“Aw, listen, I know it’s early, but you’ve got to get into the spirit. How would you like to have lunch in Colombia? How about that for a little unscheduled adventure?”

“I thought you were anxious to get through the Canal,” Katie replied.

“Well, what the hell? It’s not much out of the way, and we need to get that alternator fixed, you know. No more showers or microwave or hair dryer until we can charge the batteries again, and all that stuff in the freezer is going to go, too.” The alternator had been down for two days, and they didn’t have a spare. “Take a look here, both of you,” Cat said, spreading the chart on a cockpit seat. “Here’s Santa Marta, just down here. It’s a commercial port, and they’re bound to have some sort of electrical repair place there.”

“Listen, I don’t like what I hear about Colombia,” Katie said. “All I hear is pickpockets and drugs and stuff. Sounds like a pretty rough place to me.”

“Don’t believe everything you read in the papers,” Cat replied. “Hell, lots of people go there all the time. It’s just like any other place; a few of them get ripped off, sure. We’ve been in neighborhoods in Atlanta that were probably as dangerous as anything in Santa Marta.”

“I don’t know, Cat.”

“Listen, Mom,” Jinx broke in, “I don’t mind getting ripped off if I can use the shower pump again. My hair is terminally dirty.”

“Come on, Katie,” Cat cajoled, “we’ll be there in time for lunch, we’ll get the alternator fixed, and we’ll be back at sea again by dinnertime. What do you say?”

Katie shrugged. “Well, okay,” she said, reluctantly, “I guess I could use a shower, myself.”

“You’re on,” Cat said, switching off the autopilot. “Showers for everybody. Stand by to come about.” He put the helm over, tacked the boat, sheeted in the headsail, and, using his palm across the compass rose on the chart, set a rough course for Santa Marta. The women started below.

“You want some breakfast?” Katie called back.

“Well, as long as you’re up,” Cat grinned.

“Oh, I’m up, all right.”

“So am I,” Jinx echoed. “I’ll give you a hand with the pancakes. You do want pancakes, don’t you, Cat?”

“Need you ask?” Katie said. “He really needs to put on some weight.” They disappeared below.

Cat placed an exploratory hand on his belly. Well, maybe he was getting a little thick about the middle, but hell, he was hungry. He wasn’t sure what he weighed at the moment, but he reckoned it must be at least twenty pounds over his usual two hundred and twenty. He was a tall man, though, six-three in his bare feet; he could carry a few more pounds.

He sat back, steered the boat by hand, and tried to think if he had ever been happier. He had not. He had thought he was too old to be this happy. He’d had the boat built in Finland by Nautor and shipped to Fort Lauderdale, where he had supervised the installation of the electronics himself. Katie and Jinx had joined him, and they’d shaken the boat down, cruising down the islands as far as Antigua before reprovisioning and starting for the Canal. Once through, they would take a few days to haul the boat out, scrub the bottom, and make any last-minute repairs before pointing toward the South Pacific. After that they would have another eighteen months of his two-year leave of absence from the business to circumnavigate the world.

Jinx came up the companionway ladder with orange juice and coffee on a tray and sat beside him, bracing her feet on the cockpit seat opposite. She seemed to be wearing only a T-shirt; the girl rarely bothered with underwear, and it made Cat nervous. Never mind that he had powdered her bottom and changed her a thousand times; at eighteen, she was tall, slender, and full-breasted, just like her mother, and even more beautiful — heart-stoppingly beautiful. Cat was afraid that some movie agent was going to capture her out of a university theater production and whisk her off to be a starlet. Cat had a theory that beautiful women were at a disadvantage in the world, that once their looks opened a few doors, they would be exploited and used up while they were young and left with no better alternative than marriage to the richest and least unattractive man available. He had seen these women in bars and around hotel swimming pools, worrying about the sag of their breasts and the wrinkles at the corners of their eyes, contemplating the latest cosmetic surgery. Jinx was a smart kid, and he wanted her to have a career that would give her some independence and self-esteem. When she had graduated from high school, he’d taken her aside. She had laughed aloud at his concerns.

“Me a cheerleader, entering beauty contests? Come on, Cat, you know me better than that!”

He was glad to postpone her college for a couple of years and show her some of the world. More than that, he was glad to have her close to him for a little while longer before she flew the coop entirely. Cat didn’t know whether she was still a virgin, and he wasn’t about to ask her, but he thought the chances were good that she was. They’d always kept a tight rein on her, and she had usually accepted their judgment with good grace. Not that she had been unduly sheltered; she’d had a full social life in high school, but none of the weekend house parties with fraternity boys three and four years older, none of the drinking and drug use. She expressed contempt for all that. There was a quiet wisdom about Jinx that contrasted sharply with her line of bright patter and her extraordinary, dark beauty. There was also a naïveté — Cat thought she was still not fully aware of the effect her bun-revealing shorts and tiny bikinis had on the opposite sex, not excluding himself. For all her native intelligence, she was still very much the child-woman. These two years of sailing were going to be precious to him — the rare gift of an extension of what had always been a remarkably close father-daughter relationship.

They sailed along quietly for a couple of minutes, then, without any warning, she said, “Daddy, what about Dell?”

Cat’s stomach knotted at the sound of his son’s name. “What about him?”

“Why don’t you call him from Santa Marta and ask him to meet us in Panama? You know what a great crew he is.”

“I don’t think Dell is interested in sailing these days. Besides, he’d probably get arrested going through customs.”

“Cat, you need to patch it up with him,” she said, gravely.

“Wrong, Jinx,” Cat replied, quickly, “Dell needs to patch it up with the world. How can I possibly patch it up with him while he’s doing what he’s doing? Are we going to have big, family Sunday dinners and worry about the cops busting in on us? Am I going to take him sailing through a dozen foreign ports and have to sweat getting busted in customs every time?”

“He needs your help.”

“I’ll give him my help when he’s ready to ask me for it. It’s been rejected too many times.” God knew that was true; he had given up thinking about the number of scrapes he’d gotten the boy out of, the number of new schools and fresh starts he’d financed. In marked contrast to Jinx, Dell had always been rebellious, lazy, and surly.

Katie appeared in the companionway with two plates of pancakes and they both shut up.

Cat grinned at her. “Now I remember why I married you.”

“You want these in your lap, buster?” Katie grinned back.

Jinx patted his belly. “Yeah, you might just as well apply them directly to the paunch. Why go to the trouble of eating them?”

Three hours later, the entrance to the harbor at Santa Marta loomed ahead. The three of them stood in the cockpit and gazed at the land. To their right, a group of high-rise buildings stood behind a fringe of palms. “That’s the beach area,” Cat said. “The port is over there to the left, behind that little island. The main town is at the port.” An older, more Spanish group of buildings could be seen beyond the beach.

Suddenly Katie said, “Cat, let’s don’t go in here. I’ve got a bad feeling about this place.”

Cat didn’t speak for a moment. Katie had had bad feelings about things before, and she was usually right. “Oh, hell, Katie,” he said, finally. “We’re half an hour away from getting the alternator fixed. Showers for everybody!”

Katie said nothing.

Glancing frequently at the chart, Cat held his course for the harbor entrance.