Robert Jones - Blood Tide

He’d shaved every morning without fail, even on leave. They had a routine when she was a little girl: once he had lathered up—he used a brush and a shaving mug, she remembered—she would demand a kiss. He’d stoop down and grab her to him as if to smear her with the hot, white lather, then stop her just millimeters from collision and brush the tip of her nose with his cheek. It left a feathery blob there, which he would then—very cautiously, as if the act entailed great peril—remove with his straight razor. “Don’t move now, Miranda, or I might slip and shave off your whole nose.” But of course he was using the blunt back side of the straight razor. She knew that, but she didn’t know it—or chose to pretend not to know it. The thrill was delicious. At her demand, when the whole hazardous operation was complete, he would apply a dab of Old Spice to the tip of her nose. It tingled, ice-cold and burning, and for hours afterward she could breathe its exotic, dangerous reek.

Now, as he moved to grab a pile of dirty clothes from the armchair by the front window, she heard his foot kick something that clunked like hollow glass. It rolled away under the chair and tinked against a chair leg. A bottle.

“Have a seat,” he said at last. “I haven’t been much of a housekeeper. Can I get you something? Uh, coffee? I think I’ve got some wine around here somewhere. You want a glass of wine, maybe? Homecoming and all that?”

“No,” she said, trying to smile. “Nothing right now. I want to get my land legs back. I haven’t been ashore since below Dana Point.” She hope that might draw him out, get him asking about where she’d been, where she’d come from. But his eyes remained vague, unwilling to look straight at her.

“Well,” he mumbled, “I could use something.” He walked toward the kitchen. She heard him clanking around, muttering to himself. She stooped down and reached under the armchair. It was a wine bottle. Gallo Thunderbird. Empty.

Now he was cursing in the kitchen, his voice at first low and monotonous, then rising toward the timbres of hysteria. She went in. His eyes, when he turned to her, were red and full of tears. “Fuck it!” he screamed, then turned and smashed a cupboard door with his fist. He was shaking all over, his hands especially. “I can’t find it, I know I had it somewhere in here. Where is it? I wanted to give you a drink for your homecoming. Where is it? I can’t see it . . .” He stood looking at her with his broken hands clenched in lumpy white fists, tears dripping raggedly through the white stubble of his whiskers. His panic reached her like an airborne virus.

“Wait right here,” she said, shaking. “I think I saw it.”

She ran back to the living room, to her seabag, unzipped it, and pulled out the liter of José Cuervo she’d bought in Tijuana on her way north, before clearing Customs and Irritation. It was untapped. She’d meant it, after all, as a house gift.

“Here it is!” He was standing in the kitchen doorway, not looking at her. But still shaking. “Here, Dad, let me pour us one.” Avoiding looking at him, she poured a couple of heavy slugs into two glasses on the coffee table. The glasses were filthy, but the tequila would kill any germs.

He grabbed his glass—“Here’s how”—and belted it back, gagged, shuddered, coughed once, dropped the glass with a clatter back on the table, then launched into a coughing spasm that turned his face red, almost purple, saliva sputtering from the corners of his mouth, eyes watering, sweat starting all over his face. He bolted, hacking, for the kitchen sink. She heard him gag again and again, dry retchings with something gluey rattling at the bottom of them. Then he hawked it up, wet and heavy, and she heard it splat in the sink.

When he came back, the shaking had stopped, and his eyes were back in focus. He smiled crookedly and raised an eyebrow at her. “Cuts the fog, sure enough,” he said, and poured himself another dollop. “Let’s go topside.”

They spent the rest of the afternoon out on the veranda, overlooking the sunlit, rolling sea. While Culdee sipped, slowly now, retopping his glass from time to time and diluting it with water, Miranda told him of her track since they’d seen each other last, trying not to brag of her adventures—storms, lee shores, tight corners—but aware, in her telling and by his few questions, of his growing pride in her seamanship. His eyes glowed whenever she described some smart bit of action. The way she’d rigged and deployed her ground tackle during a big blow in the Tongas. The time she’d given the French patrol boats the slip near Mururoa, where she’d hauled a gang of Greenpeacers to protest the nuclear testing there; the careful piloting, through fog-shrouded coral heads with her kicker crapped out and only the lightest of airs—contrary at that—to bring her safely through the dogleg channel at Nouméa.

But when she came to the part about Curten and the loss of Seamark , he began to glower. “So I bought that little catboat and headed up here, to see if I could find you,” she concluded.

He was out of his captain’s chair now and stalking around on the deck, his glass sloshing over at his ripping turns.

“The bastard,” he grumbled. “The rotten cocksucker.”

She looked out to sea. Well, Curt was anything but that.

“And you don’t know where he went?”

“No.”

“Those drug guys must have some idea. I wouldn’t trust those fuckers—”

“Dad, he could be anywhere. He might already have made a big coke run in my boat and scuttled her somewhere. With what he scored off that, hell, he could be living it up—I don’t know—in Paris or Papeete or, or Montevideo. Anywhere.”

“Or he could be dead.”

“Anyway, I’m not going to worry about it,” she said. “It’s not the end of the world. Right now I just want to get my bearings for a while, up here, and then see what I can do to get back out there.” She gestured to the southwest—the great, rolling, cold blue sweep of the Pacific.

He sat watching her closely, smiling.

“What happened to your nose?”

“Got broke,” she said, embarrassed. She covered it with her hand. “I bobbed when I should’ve weaved.”

“Someone coldcock you?”

“No.” She laughed. “It was my first race to Fiji. The man said ‘Ready about.’ I said, ‘Ready about when?’” They both laughed.

“Why did you run away in the first place?” Culdee asked suddenly.

Miranda could have given him an hour’s worth of reasons—teenage rebellion, counterculture peer pressure, child of a broken home, the only alternative to bulimia, a rampant Electra complex, penis envy sublimated to the imagery of masts and spars. . . . She’d thought about it often enough.

“Hey, look,” she said at last, “every pimply shoe clerk and check-out girl in the world’s got a degree in pop psych. Let’s just say I had to go to sea. Anyway, what about you?”

“Well, nothing much,” Culdee said. “The navy dumped me, you know.” He took another long swallow of the Cuervo, then topped it up neat. “I tried the merchant marine for a bit—freighters, tankers, Ship-Land containers—but it was no good. You had to join a union. Can you believe it? Carpeting on deck, TV in the crew’s quarters, even a swimming pool and a hot tub on one of the supertankers. You work an eight-hour day—one on, two off—and get overtime for extra duty. Up topside it was all SatNav systems and computers and autopilots. Muzak on the flying bridge, guys plugged into Walkmans running the winches in port. Anyway, the merch wasn’t for me. I swallowed the anchor and came back here. With my pension check I have enough to keep me in booze and beans.”

For supper that night they dined on saltines and Hormel chili. Culdee cooked on the grease-caked stove top and ate standing up at the kitchen counter because the table was too full of dirty dishes. Afterward he finished off the Cuervo and passed out on the couch.