Luke Rhinehart - Long Voyage Back

“They even seem to want their wars bigger these days,” he went on, turning back to his work, “settin’ up there in Moscow and Washington calculatin’ how they can build a real big elephantlike war that’ll flatten the earth like a pancake so the gods can use it for a Frisbee…”

As Olly lowered his tongs back into the water Chris allowed himself an unaccustomed pause in his work.

“There ain’t gonna be a war, is there, pop?” he asked.

“Well, now, you know I never predict what the rake’ll bring up,” he snapped back automatically, “but I got to say that imagination ain’t created the stupid terrible thing which man ain’t fool enough to up and do.”

“They ain’t fighting yet,” Chris commented, pausing to light a fresh cigarette.

“The way I figure it is the only reason they ain’t made a Frisbee of earth before this is that they got a lot of smaller terrible things they want to do first.” Olly spat over the side of the boat into the bay. That’s my great hope for mankind, he thought. Man’s got so many little sins he’s got the hots for, he’ll never get around to the big one.

“You think so?” his son asked after a pause.

“Course I don’t think so,” Captain Olly snapped back irritably, again wiping his sweaty forehead with his thick-veined right arm. “You know I don’t like to do any thinking.” He chuckled. “Whenever I think—get a really deep thought, you know?—I always have to take a crap.” He paused and glared at his son, his eyes twinkling. “Standing at the helm alone in a blow, I got to watch my mind like a cat, be sure no deep thoughts come, cause taking a crap on a bouncy ship when you’re alone at the helm and it’s all you can do just standing, much less squatting, over a pail on a roller coaster while you’re watching the compass and sail and handling the wheel is a trick I done once but don’t hanker to do again.”

He paused and frowned in concentration.

“The deep thought I had that time was ‘Time will tell.’ See? Deep thoughts just ain’t worth the fuss and bother.”

As he looked with mock severity at his son, who grinned back at him, Olly remembered that sail: in the old Chesapeake Bay skipjack that he’d owned and captained, dragging for oysters in those days instead of fiddling around with these tiny rakes. But he couldn’t afford a skipjack now and couldn’t pull his weight as crew, so he’d settled for Lucy Mae. It kept him alive, but barely.

Shit, he thought, as he had to pause again, I wish to hell I’d just get it over with and croak. Not much sense in living if you can’t work and can’t fuck. Nowadays, when he’d go into restaurants or bars and flirt with the cute little taut-butted waitresses, they’d either be shocked at him or treat him like a harmless child. When a man couldn’t turn on a woman, it was time to cash in his chips. Women used to always be pestering him, first for his cock and then for his deep thoughts; he wished one was pestering him now.

“Women are always asking what I’m thinking.” He spoke aloud, watching three seagulls fly noisily around the stern of Lucy Mae and then plop expectantly into the bay. “But after four wives I finally figured how to handle ’em. I always say I’m thinking about the wind and weather and repairing my dinghy and how much I love her ass. Well, every woman I’ve known will frown and frown and frown until I get to my deep thoughts about her ass, and then everything’s jolly. A man who limits his deep thoughts to his woman’s ass is a sober man, trustworthy and true, and likely to stay out of trouble.”

Chris was smiling as he worked, but Olly’s face was as stern as a Baptist preacher’s. He paused and took a long drink of water from the glass on the deckhouse shelf. He damn well wished he had a lady these days whose ass he could praise, even if her ass was flatter than an ironing board.

“Gettin’ late, pop,” Chris said, making him suddenly aware he was leaning on his rake again.

“Late!” Olly snapped back. “We just begun.” But he began to clean out his rake with a sense of relief. “I been talkin’ so much today I’m pooped,” he added.

I do love talking, he thought as he emptied his last load into the boat. Especially my own talking. As Chris’s mother once said, I think it was his mother, could’ve been someone else’s, “Olly, I never know’d a man who listened to hisself as good as you do.” He smiled.

“Cal Markham said this morning the radio makes it sound like war,” Chris suddenly said as if it had been on his mind much of the day. Olly looked at him in surprise.

“Son, you got to stop listening to people who babble,” he said firmly. “Course there’s gonna be a war. They ain’t keepin’ all those jets dancing across the sky just for skywriting forever, you know. A gov’ment is a business, and sooner or later the gov’ment is gonna want its money’s worth.”

His son looked at him with youthful seriousness.

“What you gonna do, pop, when that happens?” he asked.

Captain Olly tossed his empty tongs into the forward cabin with a sense of relief and then stared out across the water.

“I’m gonna run, son,” he said with a sigh. “That’s why I’m gonna take up jogging. I would have taken it up years ago, but I ain’t learned how to do it on water yet. Christ knows the Chesapeake’s got enough mud in it to support a man three times my weight, but somehow I just can’t get the hang of it.”

He wouldn’t run though. He would almost welcome it if it came, especially if the war would just take him and let Chris live to enjoy asses for another forty years as he had done. He’d always hated seeing old geezers sitting around in front of the general store, useless and unneeded, and although he was probably now a geezer, he wasn’t gonna be a sitter.

No, he wouldn’t run—unless he figured there was a live lady up the road a ways, or a solid bit of honest work he could do. Then maybe he’d stick around. Take up jogging.

Lethargically Jeanne gathered up and packed her clothes and sleeping bags for the cruise aboard Vagabond. She had no heart for the trip, no heart, really, for anything these days. She was packing only for herself, Lisa, and Skip, since Bob had telephoned at three that afternoon to tell her that the Defense Department had asked everyone over the level of G-2 to work over the weekend. He couldn’t sail with them in the Chesapeake. He would be coming home only to eat and get a change of clothes.

As she moved around Skippy’s bedroom and then her own, Jeanne was close to tears. It was anger and frustration at the insane way the Americans and Russians were stumbling toward war, frustration at her own incapacity to do anything, anger at Bob’s failure even to see what was happening, anger that she was married to him. Normally lithe, catlike, and intense, she moved dully, her long dark hair hanging limply down her back instead of bouncing as it usually did when she moved. She felt she had married the wrong man and was living only half a life. As she carefully closed her suitcase she imagined Bob’s superior, ironic smile at such a cliché. He would assure her that, of course, she had married the wrong man, everybody did, but that was no reason to be miserable.

Lisa came into her bedroom to ask if she could go visit her girl friend Nancy before dinner, and Jeanne had to focus her eyes for a moment to see her daughter clearly. Framed in the doorway, Lisa held her tall, budding fifteen-year-old body with that strange, stiff dignity she’d adopted over the last two years to show she was no longer a child. It irritated Jeanne, reminding her of the worst of the Forester family stuffiness. Compared to Lisa, round, energetic, happy-faced Skippy still seemed, at five, spontaneous and free.