Robert Jones - Blood Tide

From the beamed ceilings in every room, turning slowly in random drafts from the many windows and fireplaces, hung the tiny ships that Miranda carved when she wasn’t sweeping, or dusting, or polishing, or cooking, or reading, or hunting, or fishing, or pulling the crab pots, or sailing her catboat into town for the mail. Ancient vessels, all of them, which she had found described or pictured in her sea library—nefs and cogs, shallops and gundalows, flutes, naviculas, five-masted barkentines and hermaphrodite brigs, a yard-long replica, complete to the last ratline, of Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s pinnace Squirrel , hell-bent for doom north of the Azores in 1583. At night, with the lamps turned low and the fires burned down to coals, tiny balls of Saint Elmo’s fire seemed to glow in the pinnace’s rigging, but Miranda would never say how she achieved that effect.

Some of the models she sold, now and then, along with the surplus fish she caught, to augment their small income. Any cash left over after their meager expenses were taken care of went into a bank account she kept for some undisclosed purpose. The old sailor, as dead to matters of finance as he was to most other things, never asked her about it.

He spent his days in a captain’s chair at the prow of the shiplike house, drinking cup after cup of coffee and watching the movements of the sea. Often—too often—the coffee was spiked with rum. When Miranda came into view, he watched her with the same dispassion he spent on the waves. She was a tall, green-eyed girl with a strong face, broken nose, and dark hair that hung clear down to her shoulders, and in the early morning, before the wild dogs appeared to feed along the sea wrack, she danced on the rocks at the base of the headland, with the sea crashing around her. She danced to some music shaped by the waves thudding and rasping on the shingle, odd rhythms of hissing sand, breaking shells, melting mud, and the cries of seabirds overhead. The fulmar fling. The gannet gavotte. The waltz of the terns and petrels. She wore a white nightgown that swirled around her as she spun and swayed, her hair swinging a beat or two behind.

Culdee watched her strong, bare feet grab the rock, thrust from it, grab again, and spin, sure on the wet, black granite. Sometimes she sang as she danced, old chanteys delved from her ancient sea books:

Heisa, heisa

vorsa, vorsa

wow, wow

one long draft

more might, more might

young bluid, young bluid

more mude, more mude

false flesh

lie aback, lie aback

long swack, long swack

that, that, that, that

there, there, there, there

yellow hair, yellow hair

hips bare, hips bare

tell ’em all, tell ’em all

gallows birds all, gallows birds all

great and small, great and small

one an’ all, one an’ all

heist all, heist all . . .

Down on the beach, the dogs were eating something large and gray. The old sailor did not care any more what it was. He turned his chair from the sea. The fog in his mouth tasted of sea coal.

TWO

Only at sea could Culdee come really alive. The first clank of the anchor chain through the pawls of the wildcat set his heart to singing. He loved it up on the forepeak then, hosing down the ground tackle as it came aboard, sluicing great gray globs of harbor mud off the links and flukes of the anchor and watching them fall in awkward, heavy splashes that clouded the water. He loved to hear the engine bells ringing from the bridge, a profane Angelus of the sea. The Captain’s crisp, dispassionate commands, the helmsman swinging the wheel, the first bite of the rudder when he had the wheel watch—all of these were Culdee’s sacraments. It was like taking a cathedral to sea.

The whole ship shuddered as the wake boiled out behind them—bobbing buoys and winking lighthouses, the slowly sinking hotels and banks and spires of the receding shore, wind over the bridge, gulls wheeling and screaming, all hands to quarters for leaving port, harbor seals gaping from the stone of the breakwater and the first taste of salt as a wave blasted the prow, spray sheeting high over the gunwales, as high as the wheelhouse, wetting even the flag bags on the signal bridge, the seawall behind them falling back, sinking like the city into the sea, and only the empty ocean dead ahead . . .

Another cup of coffee gone cold. He sipped it anyway and watched the waves slide ashore through the fog.

Once they had run independently from Japan back to San Francisco, in fog the whole way. A great circle route that took them up to the Aleutians, then back down in a slow arc past Alaska along the Pacific coast. Only once had they seen land—a brief glimpse of Mount Logan, shining pale and solid through the seasmoke; most of the way you couldn’t see half a mile from the bridge. They passed no other ships, but in midocean whales sometimes broached and blew close at hand, the rotten-fish reek of their breath drifting through on cool, damp air. Porpoises rode the bow wave, and the ship settled into her working routine as if the fog would never break: they might be steaming in one spot forever. All day the sound of paint scrapers rasped from the steel decks, and the smell of fresh red lead washed back into the fabric of the fog. On the messdecks, they ate as though every dawn brought holiday routine—steak and eggs for breakfast (it was Kōbe beef, tender and juicy, hand-massaged by pretty little Japo farm girls with night soil between their toes; the eggs stayed fresh the whole way across). There wasn’t a single fight on deck or in the crew quarters. Not one man was haled to captain’s mast—not even tough little baby-faced Reibald, whose father had been a “chopper in the woods” in Oregon and once got his throat cut in a fight over a girl on the Pike in Long Beach but made it back to the ship so the pharmacist’s mates could stitch him up and he wouldn’t miss movement for WestPac. Even little Reibald, the signalman striker who looked like a choirboy convicted of murder, was full of the milk of human kindness on this cruise. Ed Krueger, the chief electrician and the hairiest man in the navy (except for his bald head; from his lower eyelids down, he was as shaggy as a black bear), raced up the ladder to the bridge one day, spread his arms wide, the fog misting his rimless glasses, and yelled for all to hear, “Every day in the navy’s just like Sunday on the farm!”

Now, dead at heart in the captain’s chair, Culdee realized it had been the Sunday of his life. But that was long ago.

Now even his tattoos were fading.

THREE

In the end it was the land that killed him, a ratty, mangrove-tangled stretch of it on the beach somewhere north of the Ben Hai River. Culdee had his own command then—a fast, hard-hitting, throaty little Swift boat that could turn thirty knots with her twin diesels two-blocked. Their job, part of Operation Market Time, was to patrol the Vietnamese coast near the DMZ, watching for junks and sampans that might be carrying enemy troops or ammo south. When they found one, it usually meant a fight. But the Swift had twin .50s mounted atop the pilothouse, another machine gun and an 81-mm mortar tube aft, and plenty of maneuverability along with her speed. She looked like a cross between an old World War II PT boat and a pilot boat, and she drew only three feet of water.

That came in handy when they ran SEAL teams into North Vietnam, usually in the dead of night and dark of the moon. In a way, though, it was the boat’s shallow draft that lured Culdee to his death. They were running north at dusk, above Quang Tri, just idling along the ten-fathom curve and watching the coastline a thousand yards off the port beam. They were under strict radio silence, and they didn’t have to extract the SEALs until dawn the next day. There had been reports of enemy movement along the coast—maybe some NVA units infiltrating toward Con Thien was the word.