Luke Rhinehart: Long Voyage Back

Sighing again, he leaned back in his chair, rocking slightly, looking out at the sky above the harbor past the twin Trade towers. He had finally gotten her to go sailing with him though. In the past he’d invited her and her husband, Bob, and always ended up getting stuck with just Bob. It was strange. An outdoorsy woman like Jeannie, good swimmer, tennis player, hiker—why the aversion to water? Or was it her way of resisting him? He knew that he liked her a lot more than was good for either of them, but he hadn’t done much about it so far. But now for ten days they’d be together on Vagabond.

His intercom buzzed, and Rosie’s crisp voice informed him that his wife was on the line. He remembered he’d promised to call her.

“Hi, sweetheart,” he boomed out when he heard her soft, musical voice through the phone. “Yep. Everything’s go for this afternoon. I… What?… Oh, don’t be silly, it’s just a war scare. Like the last time. A lot of sound and fury signifying—” Frank frowned and grimaced as he listened.

“No, no, no,” he finally interrupted. “It’s going to be all right. Bob Forester says it’s all just a big bluff, the Pentagon and the Russians know exactly what they’re doing…” Again he listened for a while, and then broke in.

“Hey, more good news. You should be proud of me. I made over eight thousand dollars on my shorts today… No… no, not that kind of shorts… stocks, selling stocks short, you know… He’s fine. Captain Loken just told me he was a great sailor. Brought the ship single-handed through a terrific storm. When the sail… What?… No, no, no, there wasn’t any storm… I was just exaggera— He’s fine, I tell you. I bet he looks like a bronze Greek god. He’s so good-looking, it’s obscene. Girls’ll be coming into heat all over the Chesapeake… Damn it, no. If there was going to be a war, they would have mentioned it in The Wall Street Journal… Yeah, yeah, right, sweetheart. Look, I got to get going to the airport… Ten days… Oh, sure, don’t worry… Good-bye, honey… Right… You too… So long.”

Frowning, Frank hung up. In the last year or two Norah seemed to be all anxiety, mostly about Jimmy, her “baby,” but sometimes about everything. Maybe that’s where Jimmy got his panic from. He was glad Susan was home from college while he and Jimmy were off cruising. Norah needed company these days, but couldn’t join them in the Chesapeake until the last weekend of the cruise.

Rosie buzzed again.

“Mr. Tyler on the line.”

“Put him on,” said Frank, reaching for the phone to speak to George Tyler, a partner in several real estate ventures.

“Well, Frank, it was no go,” Tyler’s voice announced loudly, as if all important news had to be shouted. “I’m afraid Mulweather called and gave me some cock-and-bull story that boils down to the fact that his clients are considering backing out of the West Eightieth Street deal.”

“What the hell. Why?”

“My guess is that his clients decided that an apartment house, no matter how attractive, tends to lose its cash flow when reduced to rubble.”

Frank didn’t reply, stunned by the sardonic comment.

“Well,” he said after a pause. “I don’t think cash or stocks sitting at Chase are going to retain much of their value either when they’re fluttering down over the Atlantic in a million pieces.”

“I know,” said Tyler with incongruous cheerfulness, “but what are we going to do? Mulweather found a clause in our preliminary agreement, and he can back out. In this climate I think everyone’s more interested in vacationing in Tierra del Fuego than in negotiating any new business deals.”

Frank could feel himself becoming unreasonably angry at Mulweather and his clients for being panicked out of a deal that would make good money for all parties concerned. He stared gloomily at his desk.

“Okay, George, keep after it,” he finally said with a sigh. “Make them feel like they’re chicken or something. Maybe they’ll change their minds next week.”

After Tyler had hung up, Frank felt depressed. Worse, it was getting late. What time was it? Almost four. Jesus, he had to be at La Guardia by five for his flight to Salisbury, so he’d have to hurry it.

He made one last call to his broker and learned that the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down something like fifty-one points, the highspeed printer still almost twenty minutes behind. When he hung up, even though he’d made money on his shorting, he was even more depressed. As he rose and began to gather up his things for the boat he remembered his own favorite axiom with a strange sense of irritation. The stock market never lies…

By late afternoon the Chesapeake was as still as a pond. Only the tiniest breaths of wind occasionally hinted at movement, and Captain Olly and his son, Chris, worked steadily in the clear sunshine, enjoying the luxury of the calm water. They were harvesting their last oyster bed, using the long wooden shafts of their rakelike metal tongs with practiced ease. Both Captain Olly, a small, wizened old man, wrinkled and bald, and his twenty-year-old son, a thickset, husky youth, had huge forearms and biceps from their years of working the oyster beds. Their twenty-seven-foot fishing smack, Lucy Mae, with only a small deckhouse forward and a huge well aft for depositing the oysters, was old and paint-chipped and heeled over groggily as both men leaned out over the same side.

The two men had been working the beds since one o’clock that afternoon, starting a couple of hours before the three P.M. low tide. They planned to quit a couple of hours after the tide turned. In all that time their work proceeded in a casual, persistent rhythm, Olly talking away occasionally in what seemed like stream-of-consciousness monologues, Chris, quiet, steady, always puffing on a cigarette, now and then grunting a comment or asking a question. When Olly would lapse into silence or lean on his rake, Chris would continue raking, wielding the heavy tongs until he could feel that he had a full load, then raising them to the surface and depositing their contents on the afterdeck. Most of the sorting would come later. The monologues and silences succeeded each other in a mood as relaxed as the becalmed bay. Chris would occasionally down a bottle of beer, his father a glass of water, sometimes “colored” with a dash of whiskey. They never had to talk about their work; they knew their routine so thoroughly they could have oystered efficiently from dawn to dusk and not uttered a word. Smith Island, their home, lay to the east of them, Tangier Island to the south, and Point Lookout and the wide mouth of the Potomac to the west.

As Captain Olly neared the end of his working day he was feeling depressed by how tired he felt. After less than four hours work his back ached, and if he didn’t stop and lean on his rake handle every five minutes or so, he got winded. This embarrassed him, and he knew that even if he tried to pretend to be so absorbed in his own monologues that he couldn’t work, Chris would be able to tell he was shirking.

Ever since Jill had run off to Florida two years ago with Cap’n Smithers, his life had gone downhill. It was the first time since he was fourteen he hadn’t had a woman reg’lar, and he felt his health was deteriorating fast as a result. The main reason he went oystering with Chris most every day was so he wouldn’t get stuck alone in his house watching the TV. A man could go nuts watching those game shows and soaps.

“I don’t know, son,” he found himself saying in an effort to cheer himself up, “seems to me some of these oysters must have meningitis or something. Seem sorta stunted. We may have to sell them to the circus as midgets.” He had deposited a load of oysters and muck onto the deck and was staring at it with exaggerated gloom. “Though I s’pose midgets ain’t in fashion anymore, even in the circus. People these days want things big: big money, big boats, big tits.” As he wiped the sweat from his bald head he squinted southward at a couple of sailboats sitting like marble monuments in the bay. That’ll teach ’em, he thought vaguely, the rich playboy good-for-nothings.