Joe Lansdale - Captains Outrageous

We chatted with our table partners. One of the men was wearing neither coat nor proper tie. He was a big white-haired Texas guy with a Western shirt and bolo tie. Fit the stereotype. So did his wife, who was about fifty, maybe ten or fifteen years younger than he was. She wore a kind of Western-cut dress, which didn’t look bad on her. She was attractive in a plastic surgery kind of way. Her hair looked like a beehive wrapped in a bleached blond sweater. They looked rich. Their names were Bill – he went by Big Bill – and Wilamena. Right out of Central Casting, both of them. I liked them immediately, even if he was a little loud. I asked him how he had gotten past the coat-and-tie Nazi.

“I gave him five dollars. I figured it wasn’t worth five dollars to walk back to the room.”

“They haven’t got the right to keep you out anyway,” Leonard said.

“Yeah, but five dollars keeps him happy, me happy, and no animosity.”

“This here is our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary,” Wilamena said, “and we ain’t gonna let no suit-and-tie monkey throw it, ain’t that right, Big Bill?”

“That’s right, honey.”

A plump matronly looking lady with glasses said, “The ship has Argentine papers, so they’re allowed to sail in Cuban waters. We’re going to go right by Cuba. Won’t that be interesting?”

We agreed it would. Bill said, “We can buy Cuban cigars too, in Mexico and Jamaica, but we got to smoke ’em on board.”

“Frankly,” Leonard said, “I ain’t buyin’ nothing from them commies.”

Things went quiet for a moment, then Big Bill, who obviously wanted to defend Cuban cigars but didn’t want to be thought a commie or mess up a wedding anniversary, said to me: “Pass that wine bottle, will you, son?”

After dinner, on the way out the door, Leonard leaned over to White Coat, said, “You work cheap. Five dollars is no kind of money. I think you ought to go up to six-fifty, and give a blow job with it.”

White Coat did not respond. He just looked as if he had eaten a persimmon and it was caught tight in his bowels.

Down the hall on the way to our room, I said, “Commies?”

“Did I sound like Joe McCarthy?”

“A little.”

“Well, you know what, Cuba is a communist country. They haven’t ever given us anything but the back of their hand. Fuck them and their goddamn cigars.”

We went back to the room. It had been made up in that short time. The TV was on the floor.

“Why’s that?” Leonard said.

“Guess he dusted and forgot to put it back.”

I put it back and we watched The Postman for a while. It put Leonard to sleep. I got up and took off his shoes and covered him, turned off that Flying Dutchman of a movie, undressed, and went to bed.

I lay there for a while and looked at the ceiling and thought about Brett. I thought about other women in my past, two of them dead. I certainly had the touch.

About midnight the ship began to pitch and I realized why the TV had been placed on the floor.

Leonard and I were up at the same time. I flicked on the light.

Leonard said, “Oh God,” and dashed for the toilet. I heard him in there upchucking, which prompted me to do the same. I let fly into a trash can all my bad lobster, wine, and culinary accoutrements. It wasn’t all that good going in, but it certainly had smelled better than it did now, and it had looked better too.

The ship leaned way port and I felt as if it would never right itself. I let out with an involuntary cry. I heard Leonard yell in the bathroom, then I heard him upchucking again.

The ship came up high and went starboard and it was all I could do to hold the trash can so the contents didn’t slop out.

A little later the commode flushed and Leonard came out and lay on his bed and moaned.

He said, “Oh, God, kill me. Kill me now.”

“Fuck the seasickness,” I said. “I’m scared to death.”

I managed to set the TV on the floor, and by bouncing off the wall, I made it to the bathroom where I poured the glorious contents of the trash can into the commode and flushed it. I sat the trash can in the little shower stall, but it rolled out and I hit the wall and banged the back of my knee against the commode.

I lodged the trash can between the wall and the commode and tried to make it back to my bed. I understood what was meant by sea legs now. I didn’t have some. In fact, I’d have given anything for us to have run up on a spit of land, a reef, any damn thing solid.

I just knew we were going to flop so far to one side we’d never right ourselves. I kept thinking about that movie The Poseidon Adventure, where the ship turned over and trapped people underwater.

I swear, at times it felt as if that damn ship were actually lying completely on its side, then it would fling itself upright and go the other way. You could hear the ocean banging on the sides of the ship. It made you realize how fragile, what a paper cup the thing was, and it made you realize even more how fragile you were as a collection of blood and bone. All I could think about, after that realization, was just how dark and deep the goddamn ocean was.

I managed to wobble, fall, and crawl over to the closet, reach in a side pocket of my suitcase, and pull out Dramamine tablets. I punched a couple out of the aluminum side and gave Leonard one. I took the other. No less than two minutes later Leonard said, “Hell, give me another one of them sonsabitches.”

I did. I took another. It wasn’t easy swallowing them dry, but now that I had found my bed again, and was clinging to it like a raft, I couldn’t bring myself to let go and make for the bathroom.

Frank truth of it was, I was scared blind, shitless, and paralyzed. No argument. When it comes to the baddest sonofabitch on the block, nature wins hands down every time. Well, nature and that eighteen-year-old guy I had fought.

It wasn’t until early morning that the ship ceased to pitch. I had felt horrible all night, slept fitfully, even whimpered a bit. Leonard had whimpered too, so I felt better about it. My manhood was still intact, because he wouldn’t tell if I didn’t.

Leonard slept while I washed up, brushed my teeth, and started for the deck. On the way up, I discovered a middle-aged woman and two children sleeping on the landing near the hatch door that led outside. The woman sat up from the pallet she had made and looked at me as I reached the door.

“We nearly sank last night,” she said. “I thought it would be better if we were close to the lifeboats.”

“It was scary,” I said, “but not that bad.” I was braver, now that it was all over.

“Oh, yes it was,” she said.

One of the children, a little girl, lifted up on an elbow. A teddy bear tumbled out of her covers. She looked about nine. She said, “Mama said fuck.”

“Dear,” the woman said. “Ssshhhhh.”

“I said it several times last night myself,” I said. “Some other things too.”

The woman gave me a nervous grin. The little girl smiled. The other kid, girl or boy, I couldn’t tell way the kid was wrapped up in the covers, didn’t wake up. I went out on deck.

It was clear now. The water was bright blue and so was the sky and the sun was a great fat wafer of burning gold. The shadow of the ship lay on the clear water like an organized coat of oil. It fled with us as we pushed onward, probably running about twenty-two knots.

There were others on the deck, leaning against the rail like me, and there were some in lawn chairs against the wall of the deck, and there was a young couple with chairs close together, kissing, looking as if at any moment they might strip and go for broke. No one looked as if anything had been out of the ordinary last night. And truthfully, it probably had not. For a landlubber like me, a big wave seen at a distance is frightening enough, let alone knocking and swinging about a ship I’m in. For all I knew, the crew might well have found it relaxing, like a rocking chair.