Джон Сэйлз - Cruisers

“They were having some problem?”

Emmett considers. “I got the impression they were living their dream. Down here in the sun, chasing fish, nothing on the horizon but more of the same —”

“Our dream now is to circle the world in the Liebenstraum,” says the father. “It keeps us moving forward.”

“And when you finish?”

“Then we start on another dream,” says the son. “You have been to Havana?”

“Havana, Cuba? No, I’m — we’re Americans.”

“We go there next. “

“Could be some serious weather coming.”

“If this cylinder is not fixed,” says the father, “we will grow old here. Become native people.”

Emmett thinks it’s a joke, but he’s never sure with the Schmecklers. “There are worse fates.”

“Men have woyage for centuries without a motor,” says the son. “Maybe we go on with only our sails.”

“Don’t think it’s likely you’ll find a Mercedes injector in Havana. Pretty lean times, what with the embargo and all. And berthing this baby without an engine in a strong wind —”

The father smiles. “Sailing is easy, ja? Only the landing is hard.”

~ * ~

It had been another perfect day, maybe two weeks ago, heading northeast in a bracing dance with the wind, hull slicing through the swells, a half-dozen gulls coasting in their wake. Muriel’s feel for trimming the sails was instinctive and they barely spoke, one anticipating the other’s next move, making a leisurely ten knots into a slight breeze.

At first Emmett thought a cloud had drifted in front of the sun— a sudden chill, a dimming. Then he felt the hole inside of him, expanding. There was nothing on the horizon in any direction, nothing. But it wasn’t fear or feeling small in the vast ocean. He had always preferred cruising to somewhere, somewhere they’d at least stay overnight. A destination. Going out and coming back to the same port, no one waiting for them, only the mute variables of tide and weather to define their passage — he felt suddenly disoriented, tempted to let the wheel go, to turn off all the systems, sit back and see what would happen. The feeling didn’t last more than a few minutes. Blood sugar maybe, or just some random fantods. He told Muriel to come about and she gave him a look but didn’t question. The trip home was just as spectacular.

~ * ~

Larry is nestled in a pile of life preservers at the base of the mast on the Zephyr, pecking at his laptop. The power cord loops over his bare feet and disappears down into the cockpit.

“When you wanted to crew a ship in the old days,” he says without looking up, “you hung out at the sailors’ bars till a couple likely ones drank themselves stiff, dragged them off, and threw them in the hold till you were a full day out of port. Now I’m on the fucking Web.”

“What happened to your girls?”

Larry hit the marina three weeks ago with a pair of girls in their twenties he’d introduced to Emmett as his galley slaves.

“Bugged out on me.”

“The both of them?”

“They came as a team. I saw the skinny one, Kim, in town yesterday. Hanging all over one of those boogie-board guys with the blond dreads. Bitch just waves, ‘Hi, Captain Larry!’ like she and her dumpy little pal haven’t totally screwed me.”

Larry is in his early fifties, salt-and-pepper beard, a regular at the Y-Ki-Ki since his Catalina sloop limped down from the Bahamas. He was gradually heading for Tahiti, he said, once he got the right crew onboard.

“You know there’s a couple young fellas on the island know their way around on a boat,” says Emmett cheerfully. “Skip Andersen’s boy there, Nicky, and that one that works at the bait shop — Jay? Jordan? —”

Larry shakes his head. “Only room for one hardtail on this bucket.”

Emmett shrugs. “You’re the skipper.”

“They do that passive-aggressive thing. My wife was the queen of that. She could say ‘Oh, don’t worry, it’s fine,’ so it came out “You blew it again, you insensitive piece of shit.’”

He seems more agitated than usual. At first, from the bile invoked when he spoke of his ex-wife and her evil lawyer, Emmett thought Larry’s divorce must be recent, the wound still raw. But he’d been single a full eight years, cruising for five, a computer-dating Ahab chasing a wet dream.

“Even if they don’t learn jack about sailing,” he says, “these young ones get to practice their routine on me.”

Emmett keeps smiling. “So is there some kind of computer shape-up where all the able-bodied sea ladies advertise?”

“Something like that. But you hire one, they bring their whole damn sorority along. If this wasn’t too much boat to single-hand I’d be off this rock by now.” He looks up to Emmett. “You hear the scuttle on the old couple?”

“Roderick won’t talk.”

“What does Roderick know? He didn’t go inside the boat.”

“You did?”

Larry logs off, closes the laptop, and sets it beside him. Emmett sees now that his eyes are red, his hands trembling slightly.

“I saw the old guy, Whitey, there at Ricky’s place just yesterday afternoon. Then last night I couldn’t sleep, so I get up, take a walk around the jetty —”

“This is late —”

“After three, at least. I get down at their end of D Pier and I hear the radio. Just weather reports and shit, somebody calling in the update on this Cedric.”

“Edna was a real weather junkie,” says Emmett. “We’d be sitting here, she’d tell you it was raining over in the Sea of Cortez.”

“Fairly useless information.”

“She explained the whole hurricane thing to me once. Most people think it’s like straight wind pushing you over? But really you’re being pulled, sucked in to fill a vacuum. Like going down a drain.” Suddenly Emmett doesn’t want to know the details, dreads the responsibility of passing the news to others. “All that noise and activity,” he says, “but inside there’s this big nothing.”

Larry frowns at his hands. “The thing is, it was loud. The radio. I passed by, but on the way back I figure at that hour, not a light shining on the boat, they must have spent the night in town and left it running. So I’m gonna do the Good Samaritan thing.”

Emmett suddenly feels a little dizzy. He looks across the channel. Something, not clouds exactly but a different kind of sky, is coming together in the north.

“You hesitate to step on somebody’s boat without an invitation. Especially the liveaboards.”

“You just don’t do it,” says Emmett, upset. “It’s an invasion of privacy.”

“I’m feeling pretty fucking invaded right now,” says Larry, “if you want to know the truth.”

“We haven’t actually seen Edna for a while,” says Emmett, stalling.

“No. I don’t suppose you have.” Larry wiggles the power cord with his toes, thinking. “You know that shark gun he kept by his chair when they went out for big stuff?”

“Short-barrel forty-four —”

“About as much wallop as you can get from a rifle. You can imagine, point-blank range, not shooting through water — he was just down on the saloon couch, the rifle was still between his knees. And the wife — the blood on the pillow and sheets was all dried. He must’ve caught her sleeping.”

Emmett sees a trio of jellyfish working their way along the pontoon, no color, no edges, just a slight lack of focus in one part of the water. “Was she on her back? Looking up?”

“Yeah —”

“So she could have been awake. Knew it was coming, even.”

“Like some kind of mercy-killing deal?”

“Why not?”

Larry considers this. He is shivering a bit, the shadow of the Lifestyles complex covering them both. He shrugs. “Who knows what the fuck goes on in people’s heads? I figure she was already gone three, four days when I sat with him at Ricky’s. I asked what was new and he said they were thinking about tarpon.”