Robert Jones - Blood Tide

Well, there were no motus around here. No Freddie either.

The hook rats came in the midwatch. Culdee could hear their scales rattling as they slid down the ladder, the drag of their barbed tails on the risers. He couldn’t go aft and he couldn’t go forward because they’d already set fire to the engine room, and when he tried to yell, Major Bui would tell Puddles on him and the B-52s wouldn’t make it to the checkpoint. Now he could hear them knocking on the stateroom door. Maybe it was just room service, but he knew it wasn’t. He reached for the buzzer to call the nurse, but he couldn’t find it in the dark. The pistol was under his pillow. He grabbed it, but it went soft and sticky, Silly Putty covered with floor hair.

They were in the room now, snuffling and scratching, hunting him like retrievers through the tules looking for a wounded duck. All he could do was lie quiet, but his sweat would give him away. It didn’t help to scream. That only made them hungrier. But maybe Miranda would hear. She was up there on the deck, at the wheel, singing her songs, oblivious . . .

One of them found him. He felt it climb up on the rack, scaly nose touching his toes, checking them out. He could smell it, foul as the bilges, then feel it crawling up along the blanket until it reached his chest. Its eyes glowed like Saint Elmo’s fire, tiny at first, piggy, then growing, ballooning until they filled the darkness—like blazing sewer gas. The heavy weight was crushing his chest.

He screamed.

Then Miranda was there with a lantern.

“Get out of here, Rance!” she yelled and swung the lantern at the rat. It lurched off the bunk and pelted through the hatchway. Not a hook rat at all, just a common ship rat. A big one, ugly as sin, but not a hook rat. No barbs, no scales. Culdee couldn’t stop shaking.

“You gotta get me a drink,” he said.

“There isn’t any.”

“That thing’ll be back. He’ll bring the others.”

“He won’t,” she said. “He’s the only rat aboard. He’s a pet. He just wanted to say hello.”

“I’ll kill the bastard next time I see him.”

“No, you won’t. He’s too quick for you. And anyway, he’s my friend. He keeps me company during the night watches.” She lit Culdee’s kerosene lamp. “He likes my singing, and I tell him sea stories. Now why don’t you read awhile, and maybe you’ll fall asleep. I’ll check on you now and then. There’s nothing to worry about. No hook rats. Rance won’t stand for competition.”

Each day, at noon and sunset, Miranda broke out her sextant and shot the stars or the sun. Culdee helped her with stopwatch and star tables. Then they bent over the chart table and corrected their dead reckoning track. The wind held strong, twenty to thirty knots during the day, sometimes falling off after sunset. Once they had to run the engine, but only for ten hours. They were reeling off close to two hundred miles a day, a fast passage.

Rance spent the nights now in Culdee’s cabin, curled up at the foot of the bed. Kind of a guard rat, Miranda said. His presence helped Culdee sleep. The more they fed him, the tamer he got. Finally one day Miranda had him sitting on her shoulder while she steered. The only problem was his dreadful smell, but as he spent more and more time topside, sluiced by the odd wave and washed by the trade wind, the stench began fading. Either that, or Miranda and Culdee were getting used to it.

One morning Miranda noticed a flock of small white terns working furiously, low over the water ahead of the schooner. They dipped and soared, backed their wings, dipped again. The sea beneath them churned and boiled.

“ Ahi birds,” she yelled and raced below, emerging moments later with a heavy, twelve-foot bamboo pole. It was rigged with an equal length of thick monofilament, and she quickly tied on a mother-of-pearl lure she’d cut and finished from an abalone shell. The lure had tufts of white mono projecting on each side like the wings of a flying fish. “Yellowfin tuna,” she told Culdee. “They’re moving from right to left. Try and run down through the school, and steer to stay with it if they don’t sound. Sashimi time!”

The school was dead ahead now, and Culdee could see the baitfish breaking and jumping, the flash of heavier bodies beneath them. The water glittered with hundreds of tiny loose scales. Miranda slung the lure into the boil, skittering it over the surface with the rod butt braced hard against her hip. Something big flashed green and gold, and the bamboo bent nearly in half. Miranda heaved and swung the fish aboard. It thumped heavily on the cockpit deck, drumming spray from its tail. The barbless hook fell free, and she flipped it overboard again.

“Coldcock that sucker with a belaying pin,” she yelled over her shoulder to Culdee. “Don’t worry about blood.” Culdee whacked it twice, three times. Then Miranda swung another aboard. Then a third and a fourth. The school sounded.

“ Ahi ,” she said, breathing hard. “Small ones, thank God. Twenty, thirty pounds. They run up to two or three hundred. But this is plenty for us. Ahi means “wall of fire” in Hawaiian. Taka said they call it that because in the old days the Kanakas used to handline them from their canoes. They’d bend the line over the gunwale to brake it, and the yellowfin would pull so hard that the wood started smoking. The wall of the canoe caught fire.”

She filleted one of the fish, skinned it, and sliced a fillet into thin, long strips. From the galley she brought up two roots. “ Wasabi and sh ō nzu ,” she said, grating them into a dish. Then she poured dark soy sauce over the shavings. “Horseradish and fresh ginger. Dig in.”

The dark red meat was cold as the sea, fiery with the bite of the sauce. Miranda found some cold rice in the evaporator cooler she’d rigged from coarse-woven canvas and kept wet with seawater in the wind and shade. “Now we’re in my part of the world,” she said.

Two weeks out they raised Mauna Kea. At first it was just another cloud mass on the western horizon, but the clouds hung steady. An hour later, through the binoculars, Miranda could make out the purple of solid rock, and as the day wore on, the big island of Hawaii slowly heaved itself out of the sea. There was traffic now, liners, tankers, another schooner—the first ships they’d met since California—and half a dozen times they saw jet contrails creeping across the sky. Culdee was acting uneasy. He wouldn’t look her in the eye, hardly talked all afternoon. She heard him rummaging around in his cabin, muttering to himself. Then he came topside.

“Where’s that checkbook you gave me?” he asked. “We’re going to need it once we get ashore. I can’t find it in my clothes or anywhere.”

“I don’t know,” Miranda lied. “But don’t worry. I’ll write the bank for more, and I’ve still got enough cash to top off the fuel tanks and buy any supplies we need. We’ll anchor out so there won’t be any docking fees, and I’m bound to find some people I know in Honolulu. I’m good for a touch with them.”

The checkbook was hidden up forward in the lazaret. She knew he was thinking about giving her the slip and hightailing it to the airport. Tough luck.

They shot through the Alenuihaha Channel on a broad reach with the big island to port and Maui sliding abeam to starboard, its beaches and slopes studded with condos. Then Kahoolawe on the starboard bow, bare and pockmarked from the megatons of explosives that had pounded it since the navy took over the island in 1953 as a gunfire and bombing range. Culdee remembered how it smelled, the drift of burned powder over the water mixing with the aroma of flowers on the offshore breeze from Maui, cruisers and cans puffing perfect smoke rings as they heeled to their broadsides, plumes of fire and dust where the shells slammed the island. He liked it best when the LSMRs went into their act—a column of the little rocket ships scuffling past like empty gray combat boots inshore of the heavies. When they unloaded, they disappeared in a hissing white cloud. Instant sea smoke. The whole battered, knobby island jumped upward as the five-inch rockets hit, and the roar of the explosion shivered signal flags a mile to seaward . . .