Robert Jones - Blood Tide

A barrel of kerosene (for the stove, the lamps, and the running lights), a cask of heavy cod-liver oil (to calm both her bowels and storm waters—just a tablespoon or two would solve either problem), three quarts each of marmalade and red-current jam (to go with the hardtack—she boiled them down herself to save expense), a dozen tins of butter and Crisco, dried veggies (mummufied in a drying box she built from a foil-lined cardboard carton and a two-hundred-watt lightbulb), stainless-steel fishhooks and heavy-test monofilament (half a mile of it, for trolling once she got offshore)—on and on and on, until her head was spinning with the fun of it all. Fitting out, fitting out, make all preparations for getting underway. . . .

“You’ll never find him,” Culdee said.

“How’s that?” Miranda was curled up on the bunk in the master’s cabin, her hair all over the place, working up a list of everything she’d stowed. In the light of the kerosene lamps her eyes glowed red out of black and blue circles. A wild woman with a pencil in her mouth.

“Well, look at it. According to that padre fellow’s letter, your old shipmate saw the boat a week before he wrote. But the letter didn’t get here for seven weeks more. You’ve been another four weeks getting your gear together—that’s three months already since the sighting. By the time you get out there, it’ll be six months.”

“Five. I worked it out on the charts already. Five tops, maybe less if the trades are steady.”

“You mean you’re going to cross the Pacific in a sailboat in only two months?”

“Look, it’s 6,223 nautical miles, Great Circle, from San Francisco to Manila. At eight knots—”

“You can’t go Great Circle. You’d be bucking the westerlies most of the way.”

“Well, if I drop down quick to the trades, I’ll only add a couple thousand miles more. At eight knots—”

“It’s more like three thousand. And I’ve been watching you. You can’t push that schooner flat out. You—even you—haven’t got hands and feet enough to bend on full sail. You’ll creep along at five knots tops, and even then you’ll be lucky not to get knocked down, the first big blow that hits you.”

“Then come with me.”

“No way.”

She grew sullen. He stood there in the hatchway, bleeding for her. He didn’t want her to go. He needed her. Without her he’d drink himself to death in a month. There was nothing he could do about it. The hook rats would get him. But he couldn’t go back. The rats out there were even worse.

“Anyway,” he said, “what’s the rush? You’re driving yourself too hard. You’re driving yourself nuts. Take a look in the mirror. Piss holes in the snow.”

She looked, and he was right. Then her face in the mirror started to blur: images through saltwater. She blew out the lamps and went up to her room.

Late that night, prowling around the house dead sober, Culdee heard her tape deck playing behind the bedroom door. A tinny little Japo tape deck, all she could afford. She was playing songs from the sixties, songs she had to tape herself off the FM band because her old boyfriend Curten had stolen all her tapes along with her boat. The songs didn’t mean anything to Culdee—he’d been out of circulation when they were popular—but they meant the world to her: “Paint It Black,” “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” “Baby Love,” “Me & Bobby McGee.” Suddenly he could see her as she was then—a sad, skinny teenybopper whose daddy was in the big joint up north because he’d been a bad boy fighting in a bad war. Even her mother says so. Even her best friends say so. But she doesn’t believe it, doesn’t believe, and she sinks into the beat. “Nothin’ left to lose.”

Well, you better believe it. Culdee shaped his course for the reefer and the rum jug.

For three days, four days, she was down. She slept until noon, danced for a bit on the rocks above the surf, slept some more, played her tapes. She sat next to Culdee on the deck at sundown, looking southwest. Then she went in and slept some more to the music.

On the fifth day another letter arrived from Padre Cotinho. It was short and sweet. He had discovered the magic of the zip code, so it had only taken a week to arrive this time. In it he enclosed a clipping from the Zamboanga Times , dated just three days before he mailed the letter.

PI DOG BITES AGAIN!

BATARAZA, Palawan (AP)—The infamous Pi Dog of Bugsuk Island claimed more soft-hearted victims yesterday. Reports from Rio Tuba described how the Piratical Pooch lured another outrigger load of wealthy tourists to penury and embarrassment.

The curly-haired canine corsair appeared once more—the third time in as many weeks—swimming apparently exhausted in the high seas near Ursula Island, a noted bird-watching Mecca for which the outrigger was bound. Tourists with tears in their eyes begged the boatman to bring the dog aboard. “No sooner did he shake himself off, all over our camera, than he bared his fangs and cornered us in the bow of the boat,” said shutterbug Toribio Banag of Davao. “I made a move at him, and he nearly took my hand off.”

A few minutes later a high-speed inflatable—allegedly an Avon Redshanks 12-footer, according to witnesses at the scene—raced alongside, and the Maritime Mutt’s pirate master leaped aboard. Masked and silent as always, he relieved the passengers at pistol point of an estimated P50,000 in traveler’s checks, cash, cameras and jewelry.

Then cur and cohort reembarked, and the raft sped off in the direction of Bugsuk Island, south of the crime scene.

Cave canem , especially at sea!

Miranda jumped and whirled, grabbed Culdee by the shoulders, and kissed him beard and all. “He’s there! They’re both there! That’s my raft and everything, and that’s the sea dog’s style if I ever saw it. Curt used to leave him on guard when we were in port. One night we came back from a pig roast at the hotel in Mulegé and found Brillo with three Mexican kids cornered in the head. One of the kids needed stitches and a tetanus shot. He’d tried something with a knife. That’s Brillo all right.”

“Surprised no one’s shot him yet.”

“He’s bulletproof,” Miranda said. “Curt swears he can dodge bullets. He’s uncanny.”

“Sounds like you’re more in love with the dog than you are with your boat.”

Her smile faded.

“I’ll get them both back,” she said.

The next day, after stowing ice for her fresh stores and topping off the water tanks, Miranda was ready to sail. Culdee wandered around the house, wanting a drink badly but not enough to let his daughter’s last sight of him be that of a falling-down drunk. Time enough when she was gone. He couldn’t stop her now.

“Tide turns at 1800 or so,” Miranda said after she’d run through her checklist for the last time. “Come on down and help me with the mainsail. Wind ought to be offshore by that time, and if I can sail off I can save some fuel.”

“I don’t know.”

“Aw, come on. I’ll buy you a drink.”

“Well, maybe just one.”

They sat in the schooner’s cockpit, watching the sunset and waiting for the tide. Miranda opened a bottle of medicinal rum and poured Culdee a water glass full. No ice, no mix. He drank it down, in his sadness unable to talk.

“I’ll work well off tonight and catch the current,” she said. “Marine weather says strong northwesterly breezes gusting to thirty knots, so I ought to make good time. It’s part of a big front. Maybe I can get clear of Reyes before it comes around to the south.”

“Mmmnh,” Culdee said.

“Here, let me top off that glass.”

A string of pelicans lumbered past, heading out to the anchovy grounds. High overhead a wedge of geese moved north, yapping like distant beagles and catching the late red light.