Robert Jones - Blood Tide

“What is this?” Culdee asked.

“Article 31, Uniform Code of Military Justice,” the lieutenant said. “I’m reading you your rights.”

“My rights?” Culdee was stunned. “What the hell for . . . , sir?”

Culdee stood accused of collaboration with the enemy. Hadn’t he been instrumental in setting up the failed prison break at Brigadune? Hadn’t he received special treatment from the camp’s second in command—candy, extra rations, a comfortable cell? Hadn’t he given military information of a sensitive nature to the enemy, in direct contravention of the code of conduct?

“Yeah,” Culdee said. “I told them what a fid was. If you consider a ten- or twelve-word definition of an implement that’s been in use in the navies and merchant fleets of the world since the days of Christopher Columbus to be ‘military information of a sensitive nature,’ sure. But I doubt it won the war for them.”

“So you go on record as believing that the DRVN won the war?” The lieutenant wrote that down on a legal pad. “Nonetheless, you gave your captors information beyond that permissible under the code of conduct—name, rank, serial number, and age. You violated your oath. Do you admit that freely?”

“No. Yes. I mean, you had to be there. Yes, I broke in a way; we all broke. But we got stronger later and made them break us again. We made it as tough for them as we could—”

“All right, moving right along now,” the lieutenant said. “What influence did your ex-wife have in extenuation or mitigation of your willingness to collaborate? The divorce must have come as something of a shock to you.”

Culdee sat openmouthed. This had to be some kind of nightmare—either that or he’d gone crazy.

“My ex-wife? Divorce?”

“Yes, in her letter to you.”

“I didn’t get any letters from her. Or from anyone, for that matter. What do you mean, divorce?”

“Oh, come on, Culdee,” the lieutenant said wearily. He consulted his folder. “Vivian Culdee began divorce proceedings against you for desertion four years ago. The decree was granted late last year. You mean you didn’t know any of this?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, you may have repressed it, I guess,” the lieutenant said, visibly worried now. He flipped through the pages of his folder, stalling for time. Then he focused on Culdee.

“Look, sailor,” he said. “The navy doesn’t want to make a federal case of this. Bad publicity, a POW with a previously good record suddenly going ratty on his pals. You have twenty-four years in service. We’ll retire you as an E7, honorably, to avoid the scandal. Fair’s fair. All you have to do is sign the papers.”

He flapped the documents on the desk and offered Culdee his ballpoint.

Numbed, the room reeling around him, Culdee signed. There was no sense fighting it. His career was over. All he wanted now was rest.

“Good, that’s very good, sailor,” said the lieutenant, rising. He smiled a tight little smile. “The marines will show you to your temporary quarters. We’ll have you back Stateside day after tomorrow.”

Culdee stood up, shaky in the knees.

“Just one question, sir,” he said. “Where did you get all this dope about the Dune? Not a word of it is true, not a bit of it.”

The lieutenant flipped open the dossier.

“From an Office of Naval Intelligence debriefing,” he said. “The subject was a former POW released a few years ago, fellow name of Turner. Timothy N. Turner, gunner’s mate second.”

So Culdee returned to the land of his birth, a sailor bereft of the sea. Sitting in the captain’s chair on the deck of his shiplike house, he watched the surf pound on the hard beach below. For a while the pounding waves said, “Turner, Turner, Turner.” But finally even that sound faded.

All he could hear was his sorrow . . .

Then Miranda came back into his life.

Part Two

MIRANDA

SIX

Smooth sailing can be rough, Miranda realized. It gives a person too much time to think. All morning the wind had blown from the southwest quadrant, ideal for her destination. At dawn the Point Reyes light had flashed good morning from her starboard beam, and since then all she’d had to do was hold a steady course. That and worry about her arrival. Will he be there? And if he is, will he be glad to see me? Will he even remember me? More than sixteen years now, closer to twenty . . .

She eased the starboard sheet to broaden the sail’s reach, and the blue-hulled catboat kicked up its heels to the freshening wind. Blowing fifteen knots or better, she calculated, looking up at the faded red telltales whipping from the stays. Squadrons of white horses cantered toward the beach. She smiled wryly at the image: she loved those old-time metaphors of the sea and often repeated them to herself when she was single-handing, bored in the long watches, dredging up from memory whole chapters of the books she’d read as a girl. When the plots failed her, she made up her own. This one even had a title that rhymed: Miranda Culdee Comes Home from the Sea . She wondered whether it had a happy ending.

She’d forgotten how ominous this shoreline could feel. Muscular bulges of granite rose sheer from a cold, green surf in places where tentacles of kelp swayed like beckoning yellow arms. Now and then the head of a sea otter popped up through the kelp and gazed at her. The bluffs were crowned with tall, wind-bent firs and crooked encinas that needed only a dangling corpse or two to complete the hanging-tree image. A grim coast all right. Even the houses, few and far between, had a no-nonsense look to them, a New England look out of place in California: solid, white, fretted with obsessively intricate Victorian band-saw work, usually with a flagpole out front and a glider on the porch. Tidy boathouses stood on pilings alongside docks, and bluff-bowed workboats bounced at their moorings.

She’d encountered little traffic since passing Port Albion early that morning—a few squat, square-shouldered salmon trollers dragging their gear astern; a big, heavily laden container ship nearly hull down on the horizon, plugging southeast toward Oakland or San Pedro. She passed close aboard a lobster boat, and the crew waved when they saw a girl at the catboat’s tiller. They looked odd in their yellow slickers and Oakland A’s baseball caps. She was used to dark brown fishermen who worked shirtless and hatless, except perhaps for a rough wreath of palm fronds around their heads and a red and white pareu to guard their groins from flying hooks. These California fishermen probably took her for some college girl out for a day’s adventure in Daddy’s toy boat. She laughed. Let them think what they wished. Miranda Culdee had already logged more blue-water miles under her keel than these inshore watermen would see in a lifetime of lobstering.

Culdee blood, she thought. There are tides in it that draw you out to sea, like it or not. And she’d liked it as far back as she could remember. Even in the best of times, before her father disappeared from her life, he was rarely home—he was always at sea. But when he did come back, he was full of stories. Her mother never cared for them; she would listen with a knowing, cynical smirk while he reeled off his tales of storms at sea, monumental brawls ashore, the oddball loners he’d served with in the big, gray navy ships, and the even odder places they’d visited. When there were boats available, he took Miranda sailing—just the two of them, for her mother no longer cared for the movements of the sea—and he taught her the rudiments of seamanship. To tie working knots and the points of sail, to read the weather and dodge the worst of it, to use the currents and tides rather than battle them—he taught her everything from scrimshaw to celestial navigation. Then came Vietnam, and he was gone, a prisoner in the north. Her mother didn’t consult her about the divorce, didn’t even tell her about it until a month after the papers came through.