Роберт Мейсон - Chickenhawk - Back in the World - Life After Vietnam

At dusk we rowed back to the docks and went to the Islander.

The Islander was the kind of place they keep dirty on purpose. The ceiling was fishnets tacked to beams with dusty seashells and starfish drooping down in the nets at odd places. A stuffed sailfish nailed to a driftwood plank had cobwebs in his open mouth. We sat at a table on an upstairs balcony, with a good view of the harbor.

It was sunset, and the island was beginning to look good. Lights flickered along the harbor’s edge, ringing the dark water like a glittering necklace on velvet. Two hundred yachts basked in a calm harbor. We decided that the Namaste was one of the best-looking boats in the basin.

I sipped a beer, my second, and began to think of Saint Thomas as a pretty nice place to be. After a while, you barely noticed the trash and stopped trying to be friendly with the natives. And the weather was terrific. Here it was, the middle of December, yet the breeze was soft and warm, balmy. Perfect weather.

I had a bowl of conch chowder and another beer.

Ireland and I stayed out on the boat the next day, cleaning and making repairs, while John rowed in to phone the scam master and find a place to fix the loran. He’d taken the radio with him.

John came back after lunch. No luck getting the radio fixed. It’d have to be sent to the states for repair—weeks. We could buy a new one on the island, but loran sets cost fifteen hundred dollars, and John told us we were down to less than a thousand. The scam master, the money man, was coming in two days, but John doubted he’d spring for a new radio because John was way over budget already. Who cares? he said. We were doing fine with the sextant and the wristwatch. We were here, weren’t we? True enough. We’d crossed thirteen hundred miles of open sea, storms, drifting becalmed, motoring, and we’d hit Saint Thomas dead on without the loran.

John decided we should find a place to haul the Namaste .

When we sailed east around Red Hook and north, up the Leeward Pass, I saw scores of beautiful houses set on the hillsides of the island. This seemed to be what Saint Thomas was for: a place to perch one’s house and take in the view. And hell, I imagined a mansion owner saying, labor is cheap, if somewhat sullen. Let them make their own fortunes.

It took less than two hours to get to a suitable cove at Thatch Cay. It was high tide, but according to John’s tide tables, that was only a foot or so in this area. We dropped sail in a lagoon that looked like it was out of a movie—blue water, white beaches, palms and sea-grape trees crowded right up to the water. We motored slowly, crawling toward the beach. We dropped an anchor off the starboard side when we were within two hundred yards of shore. This would be the anchor we would be pulling against later. We crept toward shore, paying out the anchor line, until we felt the keel bump the sandy bottom. John stopped the engine. We put the anchor line around a winch and pulled ourselves back out a few feet to where we figured the Namaste ’s keel was hovering just a couple of feet off the bottom. When the tide went out, she’d be almost aground. John didn’t want to actually ground her; he was afraid she’d get stuck. We dropped another anchor to keep us where we were.

By the time we got this far, it was getting late. John said that it would take half a day to roll the Namaste over and drill the hole for the depth finder. Might as well look around. We rowed the dingy ashore to explore the island.

We splashed through warm, clear water, felt hot sand on our feet. We sat down on the beach and just looked. The sun was low, golden. Coconut palms arched over the sand and crystal-clear waves lapped the white beach. Fiddler crabs scurried through the driftwood and seaweed looking for food, turning cocky and aggressive when they bumped into other fiddlers. I took some pictures. I framed a shot with palms drooping over the water, Ireland and John lying on the dazzling beach, the Namaste gleaming white against a cobalt sky. I walked to them and sat down. “Wow!” Ireland said. “This is right out of a cigarette ad. It’s perfect. Why don’t people live here?”

John agreed. “This is beautiful, no two ways about it. Fucking lovely.”

I turned around and stared into the tropical jungle behind us. A hundred feet into the vines and undergrowth, it got very dark. A little spooky. Didn’t know what was in the shadows.

When the sun dropped behind the ridge of Saint Thomas Island, we found out why people didn’t live here. We were assaulted by swarms of sand flies thick enough to cast shadows. Some people call them no-see-ums, because they’re so tiny. They are very tiny bugs, true, but each one packs one helluva bite and they attack by the thousands. These things are goddamn flying piranhas. We jumped into the dingy and splashed back out to the boat. That stopped them for a while, but as soon as it got darker, they swarmed aboard, though not as thick as on shore. We sat around with towels wrapped around our heads, being miserable, while the sand flies fed. Ireland offered the theory that the sand flies used this beautiful tropical island as bait for humans.

At dawn we got to work.

Ireland and I rowed ashore with a big spool of line. We tied one end of the line to a big tree trunk and then rowed the other end back to the Namaste . John tied it to the mainsail halyard so that when we cranked the winch on the mast, instead of raising the sail, we’d pull on the two hundred feet of line attached to the tree. The idea was simple: the line from the anchor we dropped as we came in went through a drain port in the gunwale amidships and back to a winch in the cockpit. When we winched in the two lines, the Namaste should lean over. And she did, for a while. The problem was that the pulley at the masthead was embedded in the mast, the perfect position for raising and lowering the sail. Now, though, the halyard, pulled way off to the side, was binding against the slot in the masthead. The farther over the Namaste leaned, the tighter the line jammed, and the harder it was to crank the winch. When it took two of us, hanging on the handle, to move it an inch, John said there was something wrong. The Namaste listed over about forty-five degrees, but we needed another twenty.

I suggested we had two problems: the pulley at the masthead was oriented wrong, and the anchor line was set up wrong.

“What the hell do you know about this?” John said. He was covered in sweat from the effort of winching. He was frustrated. He knew it wasn’t working like it was supposed to. He was thinking about it; and now the know-it-all dinger was offering unsolicited criticism again.

“Nothing about this, specifically,” I said. “But I can see what you’re trying to do, and all we have to do—”

“Look, Bob. We almost got it. Need another push at it, is all. Catch my breath.”

“Nope. Won’t work,” I said, my voice tinged with authority. “When you lower the top of the mast, John, you’re raising the keel. What is it? Eight tons of lead? You need to move the point where the anchor line is tied lower, below the center of gravity.”

“Lower?” John looked at Ireland, who shrugged. “Where? You can’t get any lower than the gunwale.”

“It’s simple, John,” I said too smugly. “You’ve got it rigged wrong. All we have to do is take the anchor line and run it in the opposite direction. Pull it over the other side and down under the keel. Then when we pull against it, we’re pulling from under the keel and the keel’s weight helps pull the Namaste over. But you still need to—”

“I don’t see how that would make a bit of difference.” John was plainly irritated. “Let’s get back to work.”