Robert Mason - Chickenhawk - Back in the World - Life After Vietnam

An hour later we were under sail, heading for Colombia.

CHAPTER 16

A twenty-knot wind sped us toward the Guarjira Peninsula. It was like being sucked down a whirlpool, faster and faster as we got closer to oblivion.

This was the first time we’d sailed downwind; running with the wind, it’s called. John had us attach a pole to the end of the staysail and push it out starboard to catch the wind. We put on a large jib and let it billow out on the opposite side. We sheeted out the mainsail until it was nearly perpendicular to the hull. The Namaste fairly flew before the wind. I decided to experiment with the old way of figuring your speed, the knotted string. I tied a knot every fifty feet in a hundred-yard length of twine. I threw one end overboard, tied to a board. I counted seven knots going through my fingers in thirty seconds—three hundred fifty feet in thirty seconds equals seven hundred feet per minute, equals forty-two thousand feet per hour. Divide by six thousand eighty feet—one nautical mile—and it equals just about exactly seven nautical miles per hour. I made sun shots and calculated our speed with modern instruments—seven knots. Those old guys knew what they were doing.

The sea was rough, but since we sailed up the smooth incline of the waves behind the crests, the ride was smooth. John pointed out that coming back, beating against the same sea would be a much different story.

The sky was clear, the sun bright and hot. Saint Thomas is at the twenty-first parallel. Sailing south, almost to the ninth—only nine degrees from the equator—we’d feel the sun from nearly directly overhead. I wondered if we would be able to see the Southern Cross from that latitude. I’d never been this far south before.

Rosalinda steered—her wind vane pointing backward into the wind—while the three of us climbed all over the boat caulking the rails with silicone. There weren’t any visible cracks, but we knew it leaked because the lockers under the bunks had flooded in the storms on the way down. We smeared the whole seam where the deck joins the hull from bow to stem. After the caulking job, the three of us sat around in the cockpit—sporting tropical print nylon briefs we’d bought in Saint Thomas—sipping cold beer and enjoying the ride, telling sailing stories.

John told us he and his buddy Mitford had sailed to Saint Thomas on a trial run on the boat he’d just built—the one he used to cross the Atlantic. They saw some people skin-diving from their yacht near Thatch Cay, near where we’d keel-hauled the Namaste. “We pull up alongside to say howdy and ahoy,” John said. “Their wives, nice-looking ladies, were on the deck of this teak and brass fifty-five-foot motor yacht, sunning themselves in these string bikinis, you know? They smile. The guys are splashing around diving for conch, and when they see us, they climb out of the water and invite us on board for drinks. We drink frozen daiquiris at ten in the morning. We shoot the shit. The women—one’s a blond, the other’s a brunette—are super friendly. They were in their early forties, you know, homy as hell. The two guys jump back in the water, and Mitford, who’s been bragging how he cooks conch, goes in with them. I’m watching them diving and then I feel a hand reach up between my legs and grab my cock!”

“You’re shitting,” Ireland said, laughing.

“No. I’m serious as a heart attack. The blonde has me by the root and she pulls me down next to her. She’s taken off her bikini bottom and she’s on her hands and knees, wiggling that thing at me while she’s reaching back and squeezing my schlong.” John giggles like a kid. So do we. “I say, ‘Hey, what about your old man? I mean, he’s right fucking there!’ She says he’s looking for conch. Tonight he’ll be so drunk he couldn’t get it up with a crane. She’s rubbing my dick while she’s talking and I’ve got a hard-on. Then her friend, the brunette, grins at us and goes and sits on the transom and talks to the guys when they surface. She looks back at us and gives us a thumbs- up. She’s keeping watch for us! I say, what the hell? and mount this bitch. I’m pumping away fast—you know, before I get caught—and she says, ‘Relax, captain, slow down, there’s no rush.’ No rush? Her old man is twenty feet away blubbering he’s found a herd of conch down there. ‘He’ll be busy for hours,’ she says. ‘Just got his skin-diving gear. He’s like a kid with a new toy.’ So I’m fucking her right there in front of her friend, nice and slow as I can, watching her husband splashing around. It was weird.”

“C’mon, Juan,” Ireland said. “Nobody’s that dumb.”

“I shit you not. That’s the way it happened,” John said, crossing his heart. “Then her friend, the lookout? Well, she comes back when I’m finished and says I should go tell Mitford to come up and get his share. I jump in and when Mitford comes up from a dive, I tell him, ‘Man, I think you should go get on their boat. That lady has something for you.’ He looks up, sees the brunette smiling her biggest, brightest fuck-me smile. He says, ‘What? What’s she got?’ Mitford is really into this conch hunt. I say, ‘You’ll recognize it when you see it.’ He shrugs in the water, doesn’t know what’s going on, climbs on deck. In a minute, my party-punch, the blonde, is sitting on the transom as lookout, cheering on her husband and his dufus friend, glancing over her shoulder now and then to check out the action. You should’ve seen her smile. Scary how women can be so damn deceptive.”

“Didn’t these guys ever catch on?” I said.

“Nope. They’re soused. We have lunch, drink some more, and repeat the whole thing that afternoon, switching around, until Mitford and me are too wobbly to wiggle.

“The women say, ‘It was wonderful meeting you,’ with honey voices, when we’re leaving. The guys shake our hands and say, ‘Yeah. Let’s do it again sometime.’ Those two women were grinning like girls. I’ll never forget it.”

I looked at Ireland. “What’d you think? Elephantshit?”

Ireland made a skeptical face and nodded. “Trying to impress us.”

“No!” John said. “It’s true. I swear to God! Ask Mitford.”

“Yeah?” Ireland said. “Dammy! Why doesn’t stuff like that ever happen to me?”

After lunch, John said we were going to remove the toilet from the head. “Thing takes up room,” he said. “One extra bale is another fifteen thousand dollars.” I went below, got a box of wrenches, and went to the head. I wasn’t going to miss the commode; we never used it, used a bucket instead, but it cost over a thousand dollars and it seemed wasteful to just toss it overboard. I got it undone and hauled it on deck. John grabbed it by its pump handle and swung it overboard. Made a big splash. Ireland suggested a possible threat to the world by our actions: “What if some fish hits that handle?” Ireland said. “Gurgle, gurgle, gone. Whole fucking Atlantic, down the drain.”

Two dolphins came over and played with the bow. I suppose they were scouts because five minutes after they arrived, a whole herd swam over to us, adults and babies. Nearly fifty dolphins surrounded us, diving and blowing, coming to within three feet of the boat. I’d never been so near these animals. Up close and alive, they’re beautiful to see. I went out on the bow pulpit with my camera and watched them dart back and forth in front of the bow. Now and then, one would swim on its side and stare back at me. I took close-ups of dolphins staring at me with their built-in smiles that come from a hundred thousand years of laughing. The whole world, most of it anyway, is home to dolphins. What a life. No mortgages, no traffic jams, always plenty of fresh food swimming around. Get laid whenever you want—if you’re a dolphin. They spend more time fucking than people do. The guys have bright red retractable dicks and they fuck on the fly. I saw a couple of the guys roll over and flip me a dick. Same as the finger? Maybe. They’re smart enough. They’d developed their language before we figured out that vines were for swinging. I envied them their freedom. A dolphin, gliding effortlessly through the water beneath me, stared me right in the eyes for a while, saying, Yeah that’s an interesting thing you’re on, but what happens to you when it sinks? You don’t look like you can swim too good. You’ve got weird-looking flippers. Yeah? I said. Well you can’t drive a car or fly a plane; don’t even know what the hell they are. True, said the dolphin. Do you?