Robert Jones - Blood Tide

“Remember to go shopping tomorrow,” Miranda said. “I took the last of the fruit and vegetables and that package of hamburger.”

“Mmmnh.”

“Hand me your glass.” She refilled it.

“I wrote Washington a couple weeks ago to deposit your pension check in the bank at Albion,” she said. “Here’s a checkbook I got for you.” Miranda handed it to him, and he tried to stuff it into his shirt pocket. She put it in for him. “It’ll be easier for you this way; you won’t have to wait in line at the bank to cash it, and you won’t be so likely to forget you even got it.”

“Yeah.”

“The Datsun’s low on gas, so get some tomorrow. I covered it with that tarp last night to keep the salt air off it. You ought to do that every night you’ve used it. It’s starting to rust out back there by the tailpipe.

“Mnnmph.”

“Give me your glass. This is good rum, isn’t it? They don’t make rum like this anymore.”

“Nuh.”

“Hey, hand me that screwdriver over there next to the binnacle. I forgot to stow it.”

He got up, staggered heavily to starboard, overcorrected to port, and sprawled against the cockpit coaming. Then he lurched toward the binnacle, and Miranda stuck her foot out. He hit the deck limp, rolled on his back, and started snoring. She looked at the chronometer on the bulkhead in the companionway: 1805. The tide was sucking weakly at the schooner’s hull. She dragged Culdee down the ladder and into the mate’s cabin, rolled him into the bunk, pulled the checkbook from his pocket, took off his shoes, covered him with a blanket, then stepped out and locked the door behind her. She went quickly up to the house, shut off the main fuse switch, tightened the water taps, left a forwarding address for the mailman, and then secured the heavy shutters over all the windows. She locked the doors. That was it. Tomorrow the sheriff would begin his watch, checking the place randomly three or four times a week to guard against break-ins. She’d had to pay him extra for that, but it would be worth it.

When she got back to the dock, the tide was drawing strong, black water racing seaward and straining the mooring lines. She ran forward and cast off, then ran back and loosed the mainsheet. The schooner groaned and shivered as the mainsail filled, the stern line grew taut and throbbed. She threw it off the mooring bit and jumped with it into the cockpit, grabbed the wheel, and spun it amidships as the dock dropped astern. Venganza heeled sharply to starboard as the wind caught the full reach of main and jib. The bowsprit bucked and soared to the lift of the first offshore waves, and the wake lined out astern, ghostly white in the evening gloom. She could hear Culdee snoring over the hiss of the sea. The whole ship seemed happy.

By God, she’d done it! How many daughters ever shanghaied their own father?

ELEVEN

Sometimes the water gods smile on even the vilest of sinners. By the time Culdee sobered up, he was well past the point of no return. When he crawled up the companionway ladder that morning and the warm wind struck him flush in the face, he knew they were in the trades. Miranda was asleep in a corner of the cockpit, one bare foot on the lashed wheel. Overhead the mainsail bellied full on the port tack. Her face was sunburned, her cheekbones blistering, and she’d painted her nose with zinc oxide, an odd contrast to the purple half-moons under her eyes. He hauled himself upright on the coaming and stumbled to the leeward taffrail. Dry heaves, his stomach sore and pumping, bile in the back of his nostrils . . .

Up forward, a flying fish skimmed off the top of the bow wave; another two followed it. When his eyes cleared, Culdee looked at the binnacle: south and a half west. The wind was strong and steady, and he figured they must be turning eight knots or better. He had noticed the logbook on the bulkhead in the saloon, but he didn’t want to read it. He slipped back behind the wheel and unlashed the tie-down. If he jibed her hard over and came about . . . But that would wake Miranda; she’d fight him, and he didn’t have the strength for it anyway. The kick of the king spoke in his hand felt good. He let it pound through him, shaking loose the crud and cobwebs that clogged his body. All the booze he’d drunk all these years must have eaten a tunnel through his brain, earhole to earhole, and he imagined the filth blowing out, trailing like frayed commission pennants from his ear-lobe. He focused hard on the lubber’s line of the compass, trying to hold the helm steady on course. Venganza could fly.

Miranda’s foot was threatening to slip off the wheel. He lifted it gently and swung it over onto the banquette. She rolled on her side and mumbled something, then curled up tight and dropped back to sleep. He had to laugh, and would have if it didn’t hurt so much. She’d really impressed him, in the seventeenth-century sense of the word. A one-woman press gang. Damn her—but he’d figure a way to escape.

A flying fish hit the leech of the mainsail and bounced clopping into the cockpit. Culdee scooped it up and brained it on a wheel spoke, then laid it out in the portside shade. When Miranda opened her eyes an hour or so later, he had three of them there, cool and fading and neatly lined up.

“There’s breakfast,” he said. “If you haven’t eaten yet.”

She got up, yawned and stretched, checked the binnacle and the telltales, then looked at him warily.

“You aren’t mad?”

“What could I do about it if I was?”

“Okay,” she said. “I’m going forward and set the mizzen. Time’s awastin’, and so’s the wind. Hold her steady. Then I’ll get us some breakfast.”

They ate in the wash of the wind, fried flying fish, hardtack, marmalade, and steaming black tea. But he was coming around, the molecules of his brain close enough together now to wave and yell “Hi!” In a little while they’d be quarreling, though, and next he knew, throwing punches. That would hurt, and after the pain came the hook rats. What he needed now, before it was too late . . .

“Maybe a slosh of rum in this tea to choke it down easier?”

“All gone, Boats. You swallowed the last of it day before yesterday.”

“Shit.”

“There it is.”

“When do we hit port?”

“A long time from now. Too long for it to make any difference.”

He started cursing in a low, deep rumble, and Miranda went forward to fake down some lines and trim the headsails. After that she pumped the bilges—anything to keep her busy, out of his range. She didn’t want to resort to the belaying pin, but she would if she had to. It was a dirty trick, all right, and she knew she’d been lucky so far. The worst was yet to come—in a week or so, when the booze had really worn off. Cold turkey was tough meat. She’d eaten it once herself, two weeks of hell in the Pacific—on a little motu off Upolu in Western Samoa, where Effredio found her stash and sixed it.

“Coke is bad stuff,” he’d said.

“Not if you can handle it,” she’d replied.

“Nobody can handle it; all they can be is handled.”

“But you didn’t have to dump it,” she’d said.

“Fuck I didn’t.”

“What about the fish? Isn’t it bad for them?”

“There’s more fish than there is Mirandas,” he’d said.

“Fuck you,” she’d said. “You’re a fucking Commie.”

He’d thrown her overboard and kept her swimming around for two hours, fending her off with a boathook every time she tried to come aboard. Finally she swam to the motu and crawled ashore over poisonous coral. She swelled up like an elephantiasis victim, lived on coconut milk and land crabs for the next two weeks, tried to hang herself from a palm tree with her T-shirt, but it ripped, and then all she had was a sore neck and a sprained ankle for her troubles. But Freddie brought her back aboard in the Avon and fed her vitamins and OJ and spent a lot of time just holding her close until she was straight.