68 Knots (13 page)

She went down into the galley and spent almost two hours banging pots and struggling with the kerosene stove. She emerged at last with lobsters in an herb-and-Szechwan-pepper
butter sauce, boiled potatoes, and pesto pasta. Logan opened a bottle of dark red wine. Even Arthur enjoyed the meal.

After dinner, Arthur gathered the sailors around the table once again. He knew they didn't want to think about the reality that faced them, but as their leader he had a duty to anticipate the future.

“This is hard,” he said, locking his hazel eyes on each sailor in turn. “Stealing lobsters is wrong. We can't believe it isn't. We also can't eat lobster for every single meal. But if we don't get food somehow, we're going to have to quit and go home. None of us wants to do that.”

Marietta looked up and scowled. “Oh, I don't know—”

“Okay,
most
of us don't want to quit,” Arthur said. “So we have to think of some way to get food. We can still take some lobsters every now and then, but we'll have to figure out something else too. Is there anything we can do—anything that's legal—to earn some money or get food somehow?”

“We could take turns, like, getting jobs and stuff,” Logan said. “Nowhere fancy, just McDonald's or something. Maybe four of us at a time could get jobs for two or three weeks, you know, and earn as much money as possible, and then, like, quit.”

Arthur shook his head. “I thought of that,” he said. “But to save any money at all, the workers would still have to live on the
Dreadnought
. We couldn't afford to rent an apartment or hotel room or anything. And if the workers were going to work every day and come home to the ship, that would mean we couldn't sail anywhere. Suddenly, instead of cruising and exploring the coast of Maine, we'd be sitting in a harbor somewhere. The
Dreadnought
would just be a floating apartment, and this summer would be a lot like all the others. Besides, we'd get caught eventually.”

The crew was silent for a while, sipping wine and soda and thinking.

Suddenly Logan smiled. “I've got it!” he said. The others leaned close around the table to hear his plan. “When I was in, like, sixth grade, my family took a trip to the Caribbean. We totally stayed at some resort on Antigua, you know, the kind with the pink cinderblock balconies along the beach. It was an absolutely great place. “Day–O!” and all that stuff. They had a rec room there, with, like, a ping-pong table, and one evening my sister and I were playing ping-pong when this guy walked in. He was maybe seventeen years old, and even though it was totally hot and humid out, he wore a black velvet vest and black velvet pants. He was from England, and he was totally cool. My sister fell for him right away. For the rest of the evening, they kept trying to get rid of me. They sent me out to check on the constellations for them, and they—”

“Is there a point to this?” interrupted Marietta.

Logan's pudgy body sagged like it had been deflated. “Well, yes,” he said. “One day, while we were on the island, a couple of people came up to us on the beach and handed us a piece of paper. It was a flyer for the sailing yacht
Aurora
, a schooner—you know, a lot like this one—that these people had sailed across the Atlantic from Sweden. It was a totally great old ship, and the people on board were trying to sail it around the world. The flyer explained that they were on their way to the Panama Canal, and that to raise money for the trip—ta da!—they were offering people a chance to spend a day on board, sailing around Antigua, having a shish-kebob lunch on a secluded beach, and all that stuff. My dad jumped at the chance. He thought it sounded adventurous and romantic.

“So we all shipped out the next day and went sailing on the
Aurora
. We even got these, like, souvenir T-shirts from the trip. I don't know what it cost, but I'll bet it was pretty steep. “I think we could do the same thing with the
Dreadnought
, right here in Freeport, letting people take rides for a day, help out with the sailing and all that enchanted tourist stuff. We could charge a bundle for it, and some people would be totally happy to pay it.”

“Become a tour boat?” Crystal asked with a sneer. “That's disgusting. What would we do—get cute little uniforms and sing little nautical songs on deck while we sailed around in circles?”

“No,” Logan said, “nothing like that. We just take people out for a day on the water and, you know, like a nice lunch on a beach somewhere. It would mean keeping the ship pretty clean for a little while, but I think we could make some totally good money pretty quickly.”

Crystal shrugged. “Your idea—your project,” she said. “Personally, I'd rather steal lobsters.”

The next day, Logan made his flyer:

SPEND THE DAY ON THE HIGH SEAS!

Try Your Hand at Sailing a Two-Masted Schooner!
Enjoy a scrumptious lunch on a secluded beach!

Sound good? Sound fun?
If so, stop by the main docks at 9:00
A.M
.
tomorrow morning.
Bring plenty of sunscreen, a hearty appetite,
and lots of film!

Just $50.00 per person.
Children under 10 just $10.00.

He had the flyers copied, and he walked for three hours, passing them out to the shorts-and-T-shirt tourists crowding the streets of Freeport.

The next morning, Logan waited eagerly on the dock. Joy was with him, helping out as a kind of tour assistant. BillFi and Jesse were on the ship, ready to help with the sails, and Dawn and Arthur stood by at a safe distance, ready to pitch in if things got crazy but otherwise eager to stay out of the way. Marietta had gone into town to “window shop,” and Crystal, once breakfast was finished, declared “I'm out of here” and jumped overboard with a paperback crime novel in her hand. She swam across the bay to a small shelf of rocks, keeping the book and her short blond hair above water the entire time. She lay out across the rocks and lost herself in the pages of the book, paying no attention to the silliness going on under Logan's leadership.

When nine o'clock arrived, the docks were full of people unloading boats, stowing gear, gawking at the yachts, and eating early-morning ice cream. None of them came over to Logan, who held a copy of his flyer hopefully high in the air.

Nothing.

By 9:05, no one had arrived.

At 9:10, someone stopped to ask Joy for directions to the public restrooms.

And at 9:12, a family lumbered down the docks toward Logan and Joy. The gaggle consisted of an enormously overweight man lugging a duffel bag, a thin and nervous woman in a dress she could have worn to church, and four running, stomping, yelling children—two boys and two girls, all under the age of 10. “I'm glad you haven't left yet!” the man said with a smile. “Sounds like fun, doesn't it?” he asked his kids, holding
the flyer, sweaty and rolled up, in his beefy hand. “Sounds like fun, don't you think?” he asked Logan.

Logan wiped his hair out of his eyes and nodded with his best showman smile. “Yes, sir,” he said. “I'm certain it'll be, like, totally awesome.”

No one else seemed to be coming along, so Logan ushered the mother and two of the kids into the dinghy. Two trips later—one for the other two children, and one for the rotund man himself—the clan was on board and the father handed $140 in cash to Logan.

“Let's get this ship a-moving!” the man shouted, dropping the duffel bag on the deck and plopping his weight onto a crate near the gangplank.

The woman smiled tersely. “Children, you behave now, you hear?” she called out to the kids, who had already dispersed throughout the ship in a wild and noisy explosion.

That evening, as the crew of the
Dreadnought
sat on deck beneath a shimmering dark sky filled with stars, Logan defended his idea.

“Okay,” he said, “it was a little rough. But at least we made, like,
some
money.”

“A
little
rough?” BillFi asked, wiping his nose on his arm. “Those kids nearly chewed through our hull! They were horrible. They nearly chewed through our hull.”

“They did not,” Logan said. “They caused a little bit of damage, that's all. They were just, you know, excited to be on board.”

“They threw all our pillows overboard, Logan,” Dawn said.

“And they varnished the toilet lid shut,” Jesse added.

“And they poured ketchup in the cooking oil,” Joy added.

“And they—”

“All right!” Logan shouted, waving his pale arms in the air. “All right. I'm sorry. We totally got the family from hell, and it was miserable. But it wasn't like I got a lot of help from you all, you know.”

“Why didn't the parents control their kids?” Crystal asked, glad to have been absent during the mayhem.

“The father was too sick,” Arthur explained. “We were two minutes away from the dock when he crawled down into the dining room and curled up under the table. He looked like he was going to die.”

“Yeah, but we saved money on his food portion,” Logan argued.

“From the looks of him,” Marietta said, “we saved a
lot
of money.”

“And the mother,” Dawn explained, “scrambled out onto the bowsprit and rode each wave like a bucking bronco. You should have heard her up there, whooping and screaming and having a great time. While she was up there, I don't think she even remembered that she
had
children.”

“Okay, it was totally shitty,” Logan said quietly. “But we got some money, didn't we?” He held up the cash. “We got a hundred and forty bucks, and that'll, you know, buy us a lot of food if we're careful.”

Dawn held up a clipboard. “I hate to break this to you, Logan,” she said, “but we didn't exactly come out a hundred and forty dollars ahead.” She looked at the clipboard. “We have to buy eight new pillows, a new ten-gallon can of cooking oil, and a new toilet seat. After we've paid for all those things, we'll have enough money left over to buy, oh . . . maybe
one large tomato. The Goddess did not smile on this particular project, Logan.”

Logan groaned and handed her the money. “Forget the tomato,” he said. “I totally need some aspirin.”

“Okay, gang,” Crystal said to the crew two days later. Everyone was on deck, leaning against railings or sitting on boxes. They were still trying to figure out how to get food. “This is stupid. There's only one freaking choice, and I think we had better get used to it. We can't get jobs—that's what Arthur said, and he's right. We can't buy food, because we don't have any damn money. That means that unless we can get someone to give us food or money—and I don't think that's very likely—our only choice is to take it. We're going to have to steal food.”

“Not a chance!” Arthur said, straightening to his full height. “There's no way we're going to—”

“It isn't hard,” Crystal continued, her hands on her hips. “I've stolen a lot of things, and it's really easy. Hell, we already stole more than a hundred dollars' worth of lobsters. It wasn't that hard. All we have to do is get good at stealing the other food and stuff we need. Every marina on the coast has expensive yachts full of things we could use. All we have to do is find a way inside and take what we need. It's either that—or we quit. And I'm
not
going to quit.”