George Bartram - Under the Freeze

Tarp went down the sun-whitened wooden stairs as carefully as if they were paved with gulls’ eggs. He walked erect. Two buckets hung from his hands as if their weight were trying to pull him through the planking and into the scummy water underneath. In the buckets were dead fish, the last two loads he would have to carry aboard the Scipio before heading out into the Gulf. It was not yet seven in the morning, yet he was streaming with sweat and the sun was like an accusing finger that jabbed at him from the sky.

He set the buckets down and took a breath, and then he swung one leg over the rail of the sportfisherman, leaning far forward as he pulled a bucket after and then put it on the deck. He reached back for the other and then straightened, looking all the way around him as if he expected to find an enemy, his fingers digging across his palms to ease the hurt of the buckets’ weight. There were birds circling over the bait barrels on the dock a hundred yards away, and farther out in the Gulf a line of pelicans lumbered along above the water. Fish made little swirls close in. Lady fish , he thought, but he was not sure.

He stepped over into the boat and it rocked just a little under his weight, the way an elevator rocks when it comes to the end of its ride, slowly and heavily. Up on the flying bridge a piece of electronic gear crackled, saying nothing; forward on the platform, which was small and almost not a platform at all but simply a railed place forward where somebody could stand with a harpoon if he was that crazy, a gull had landed on the white neoprene-covered rail. It curled its cruel feet around the tubing and looked at him with its head over on one side, the eye calculating, hungry; and as it looked him over it let a stream of droppings fall, missing the platform and landing in the water below.

“Thanks for being so thoughtful,” Tarp growled. He moved forward but the bird did not fly. It had its greedy eye now on the bait buckets. Tarp stepped down into the shaded cool of the cabin. As he moved forward he saw the shadow of the gull pass across a port, heading for the bait. We’re all the same , he thought. Taking targets of opportunity . There was a half-finished cup of coffee, cold now, on the galley sink; he drank most of it, threw the dregs away. He got a bait knife and a big cutting board and a section of yesterday’s Miami newspaper, which he folded and put under his arm so that the word NUCLEAR was visible in black letters but the rest of the headline (FREEZE OPPOSED) was hidden; he went up to the deck again, squeezing through the passage that separated his cramped bunk on the right from the storage lockers where there were charts and foul-weather gear and his few clothes and a twelve-gauge pump and a Weatherby .375 and, concealed behind a bulkhead, an AR-15 with the retaining spur removed.

Now there were two gulls on the bait buckets and half a dozen more coming in. “Go away,” Tarp said quietly. He headed toward the buckets and they flew off, each with a piece of fish. He slid the buckets along the deck to the transom, clipped the cutting board into its holders, and began to slice the plump, smelly, red-sided fish into chunks, cleaning the knife on the newspaper. Fish or cut bait . Me , just now , I’m cutting bait . Most of the fish would be ground up for chum, and he dropped the chunks into the wire basket of the chopper, all but the big, meaty pieces, which went into an ice chest for bait.

He was still cutting bait some minutes later when a shadow fell over the deck. He had not heard anybody come, and he knew that nobody had come out along the dock while he had been cutting the fish because he could see it all the way to the gas pumps. His grip on the fish knife shifted.

Tarp swiveled his head slowly to the left. The sun was there, with the newcomer in front of it. Rays of brilliance shot out around the head and shoulders like the aura of a cheap plaster Christ.

“Going fishing?”

Tarp knew that voice. It sounded English but he knew that it was not. He knew that the voice was being faked somehow and that it was really deeper and harsher. But he was distracted by the sound of an engine as a boat swung out toward the Gulf. He remembered hearing a boat come in sometime earlier, just after dawn.

“This isn’t a charter boat,” he said. He always tried to be polite, although polite people never found him so.

“May I come aboard, please?”

The voice had dropped a couple of notes and there was definite slippage in the English accent, especially on the word please . Tarp knew who it was now. “Are you alone?” he said quietly.

“Of course.”

“Nobody on you?”

“I am tourist! Who would be on me?” A rich laugh erupted from the sunburst, and Tarp, still unable to see the face, imagined the old man’s mouth opening, rather soft, almost flaccid, the small eyes crinkling in their setting of fat and wrinkles.

“Come aboard.”

The Scipio swayed a little again, for the old man weighed as much as Tarp although he was much shorter. He was clumsy in a boat, and he had to get his balance again before he could stand on the deck.

“Want to go below?”

The laughed rolled again. “‘Go below’! How very nautical! You sound, if you please, like Jack London. What is ‘below’? Some crowded little place full of dead fish’s stuffings? No. I sit here in the sun. I am tourist. I come for sunshine.” He moved to the big fighting chair in the stern. “What is this throne?”

“It’s a barber chair. I do razor cuts on the side.”

His Russian accent fully intact now, the old man glowered. “What is this razor cut? Is way that black Negroes are fighting in Harlem, yes?”

Tarp almost smiled. “Russians aren’t supposed to be racists. Want coffee?”

“Vodka.”

“I don’t keep vodka on hand, and anyway it’s too early. I’ve got Scotch, if you have to have it.”

“Coffee is bad for liver. Scotch is good. Bring the bottle, my friend!”

Tarp went below and got a bottle of Laphroaig and one glass; he washed his hands at the galley sink, but he was in a hurry and so a lot of the dried fish blood stayed on him. Coming out past the lockers he reached under a slicker and took out a battered little .22 Woodsman in a scarred holster and carried it up with him. He put down the bottle and the glass next to the fighting chair and put the pistol in the ice chest, then picked up the hose that ran from the water connection on the dock and began to hose down his hands and arms with a trickle of blood-warm water.

“So, Repin,” he said quietly, “what are you doing here?”

The old man was pouring himself a full glass of the malt Scotch. “I am tourist,” he said amiably. He drank off the whiskey neat, smacked his loose old lips, raised his eyebrows in an atheist’s parody of a saint’s ecstasy, and grinned. “Very good. Very, very good!” He poured himself another glass. “I was in neighborhood, I thought I drop in.” He laughed merrily. Tarp threw the few remaining uncut fish overboard and the gulls came screaming down; then he hosed the knife and the table and the deck and wiped the knife and the board with the newspaper. “Cuba?” he said.

“The neighborhood. I was in the neighborhood.”

“Bit of a risk.”

“Why? If U.S. Coast Guard catches me, I tell him I am freedom-loving refugee from tyranny of Fidel Castro.” He laughed some more and poured some more.

“I don’t think they’d like finding a KGB officer in Florida.”

“KGB? Ahh! Was a long time ago. All that, a very long time ago. I have not been to Dzerzhinsky Square in — seven years. Eight!” He waved the glass happily. “This is nice place, Tarp. I like it here!” He sipped, looked down into the glass. “Seven years, the body changes completely, eh? I am new man — no more the Repin of old days. All that is history.”