Crackdown (6 page)

“What offer?” Ellen asked icily when McIllvanney was out of earshot. “And what senator?”

So, just as McIllvanney had intended, I was forced to tell Ellen and Thessy about George Crowninshield’s offer, and how the senator was willing to pay above the odds if we would all abandon our summer plans and take his precious kids to sea for three months. I tried to make the prospect unattractive, but McIllvanney’s vision of money had dazzled both Ellen and Thessy.

“Why the hell did you say no?” Ellen demanded angrily.

“I didn’t say no. I just said I couldn’t go myself! But I told McIllvanney that Sammy Meredith could go instead of me.”

Ellen did not like that suggestion. Sammy was a competent skipper, but he could not keep his hands to himself when Ellen was close. Sammy was presently delivering one of our Nautor Swans to its Massachusetts owner; many of the charter yachts were privately owned and only leased into Cutwater’s care on condition that we delivered them back to their owners for the northern summer. I assumed McIllvanney had sent a message to Massachusetts asking Sammy to telephone as soon as he reached port, and I was certain that Sammy would jump at the chance of three months’ extra salary, and if he did then Ellen and Thessy would similarly earn their small fortunes.

“But Mr McIllvanney said the senator vants you, Nick,” Thessy said unhappily.

“He just wants someone to give his two spoilt brats a holiday. He doesn’t care who skippers the boat!”

“But maybe he does,” Thessy insisted sadly, and both he and Ellen stared reproachfully at me as though I was risking all their future prosperity.

“For God’s sake,” I said angrily, “you’ll both get your money. Sammy Meredith will jump at the chance of three months’ work. I can’t do it, OK? I’ve got a boat to mend.” The two of them still gazed at me with resentful misunderstanding. Damn McIllvanney, I thought, and damn his blackmail. I turned away from my crew to demonstrate that I would not discuss the Crowninshield charter any further. “Thessy? Put up the flags.”

The flags were our final welcoming touch.
Wavebreaker
was registered in the Channel Islands, and thus sailed under a defaced British red ensign with the Bahamian flag flying as a courtesy ensign from the main spreaders, but I always greeted arriving charter guests with their own country’s flag—though such a gesture was considered bad flag etiquette by nautical purists, it was good for our final tip—and so Thessy now hoisted the Stars and Stripes to the mainmast’s spreaders and a smaller Stars and Bars just beneath. The Confederate flag had been Ellen’s idea, to be unfurled whenever we had charterers from the deep South, and this week’s guests were three married couples from Georgia. I watched the two handsome flags uncurl to the warm wind, then went on my own tour of inspection.
Wavebreaker
looked good, and we, her crew, looked just as good in our matching blue and white clothes.

We were ready, even to the pitcher of orange juice, bucket of champagne and iced flask of vodka that waited on a table Ellen had carried up to the cockpit. The wind lifted the snow-white tablecloth and stirred the handsome red ensign at
Wavebreaker’s
stern. “She looks good,” I told my crew, “well done.”

“But suppose Crowninshield won’t accept anyone but you as
Wavebreaker’s
captain?” Ellen, refusing to be sidetracked from her lost dollars, asked in a sulky and defiant voice.

The question annoyed me. “I’m supposed to abandon
Masquerade
just to give his spoilt bloody kids a holiday?”

“No, you’re supposed to abandon
Masquerade
just so I can earn a few thousand dollars.” Ellen smiled very sweetly at me. “And if I don’t earn those few thousand dollars then I am sure as hell not going to sail away with you. As the psalmist says, dear Nicholas,” and Ellen’s smile became even sweeter, “you can blow that dream right up your ass.”

Thessy gasped at such blasphemy, while I scowled at Ellen’s blackmail. “You can earn your money with Sammy Meredith,” I insisted, “then sail away with me.”

“I can’t if the senator demands you,” Ellen said stubbornly, then turned away as Cutwater’s courtesy taxi arrived from the airport in a salvo of backfires and black smoke. Thessy slid down the companionway, took the cassette from the rack, and waited by the boat’s sound system for my signal.

The taxi doors opened. We knew very little about these last clients of the season except that they were two attorneys and a proctologist, all from Georgia and all vacationing with their wives, and we also knew that one of the wives was a vegetarian and that the proctologist hated pasta, but beyond that our guests were utter strangers and so we waited nervously to see what kind of people would be our companions and paymasters for the next week. Doubtless the arriving customers were just as anxious about us, and part of our job was to relax them quickly. “You have to remember,” Ellen liked to lecture Thessy and me, “just how absurdly wealthy they all are, and how desperately the wealthy want to be liked because they can’t help feeling guilty about being so rich, so we only have to be obsequious, give them loads of booze, and pretend to be impressed by their entirely predictable and usually jejune opinions, after which they’ll reward us with an outrageously large tip—which is, after all, the sole reason for being nice to the ghastly creatures in the first place.”

The first man out of the Chevrolet was wearing blue and green Bermuda shorts, a pink and scarlet Hawaiian shirt and a blue tennis visor with the words ‘Go Dawgs’ inscribed on its peak. “He must be the proctologist,” Ellen said sweetly.

“Vot’s a proctologist?” Thessy, ever eager to extend his education, asked from the foot of the companionway.

“A proctologist is an asshole doctor, Thessy dear,” Ellen explained, then gave me a smile that would have frozen the heart out of a blast furnace. “Or in Nick’s case,” she added loudly, “a brain surgeon.”

“Now!” I interrupted Thessy’s next earnest question, and he pushed the cassette into the tape deck and a steel band arrangement of ‘Yellow Bird’ thumped and jangled from the cockpit speakers to fill the marina with its bright and jaunty welcome. Bellybutton, a straw hat over his eyes, danced a few ludicrous steps on the deck of the workboat, thus looking for all the world like a simple Bahamian native welcoming the nice white folks from Georgia who now stood blinking in the bright sunlight beside a growing mound of their designer-label luggage. The man with the ‘Go Dawgs’ hat saw our rebel flag at the spreaders and let out an approving yell that sent two gulls squawking up from the garbage cans behind Mclllvanney’s office.

“Asshole,” the Yankee Ellen said scathingly, then, joined by Thessy, we stepped forward to offer our practised and smiling welcome.

My last charter had begun; I had one week to work, then it would be back to
Masquerade,
and then to the long winds of the southern ocean that led to the uttermost ends of the earth, and thus to happiness.

W
avebreaker
, despite her ethereal beauty, was not the most practical boat with which to cruise the Bahamas. She drew too much water, and the Bahamas, for the most part, are a shallow bank dotted with ripsaw coral heads and treacherous shoals where flat-bottomed boats might glide in comparative safety, but where a deep-keeled schooner was forced to creep with painful care. Whenever we reached coral or shoal waters Thessy was forced to spend hours perched at the foremast’s lower spreaders to watch the water’s colour. Deep safe water was a dark royal blue, while over a coral reef the sea shaded to green or, when perilously shallow, to brown, and Thessy, peering ahead, would shout at me to go to port or starboard, or even to go backwards as fast as the motors would catch hold. We tried to avoid such adventures by sticking to the deeper channels and harbours, but some guests demanded we anchor in the shallower lagoons where the rays glided above the bright sand and the grey snappers schooled and the barracudas patrolled. One way to discourage such demands was secretly to salt a shallow anchorage with a bag of rotted chicken heads which would quickly draw a sinuous and evil-looking pack of otherwise harmless sand sharks that would twist menacingly under our keel and persuade the paying customers to seek the deeper darker waters offshore.

Guests who still wanted to explore the lagoons and sea-flats could use
Wavebreaker’s
skiff. Our Georgia guests used the small flat-bottomed craft to go bonefishing one afternoon, and Thessy, well trained by his father, led them unerringly to a sea-flat by a mangrove swamp where, in just a few heart-racing moments, they landed four of the gleaming and elusive fish. None weighed more than three pounds, but the sheer savage strength of the mirror-plated fish astonished our guests. “Hey, beautiful!” the proctologist, back aboard
Wavebreaker
at sunset, called down the companionway steps to where Ellen was tearing apart a lettuce for the evening meal. “Can you cook me a bonefish?”

“I can cook it, doctor, but you won’t want to eat it.” Ellen gave him her sweetest smile, the one calculated to provoke cardiac arrest in a sworn celibate. “Eating bonefish is just like sucking fish-juice off a mouthful of tin-tacks.”

“So what are you doing for my supper, darling?”

“French fries and New York strip steak.”

“Who strips? You or the beef?” The proctologist whooped with laughter and punched my arm. “Get it, Nick? Who strips? You or the beef? Shee-it, I kill myself sometimes. Was she really a college professor?”

“So she tells me.”

“They didn’t look like that when I was at college. I tell you, Nick, the old bags who lectured us were all spayed before they were allowed near the students.” He chuckled, then held his glass out for a refill of vodka and orange juice. Once the glass was full he held it up to the lantern that hung from the awning’s strut and toasted whichever patient had paid for that afternoon’s bonefishing. All week our doctor and two lawyers had thus credited their clients for their various pleasures. The proctologist drank the toast, then raised his glass once more, this time in tribute to Thessy’s prowess as a bonefish guide. “Is the kid’s name really Thessalonians?”

“It truly is,” I confirmed.

“Weirdest goddamn name I ever did hear.” The proctologist shook his head then turned to look at our private scrap of paradise. The evening was dropping like velvet and the lagoon was fading to a deep dusky richness in which the curving palms were reflected as cleanly as though the water were a dark-silvered looking-glass. We had moored off a deserted cay rimmed with a beach of clear sand above which the first stars were pricking the warm sky, while, beneath
Wavebreaker’s
bimini cover, half-moon ice cubes clinked in crystal glasses. “This is the life.” The proctologist stretched his sunburned legs on the cockpit cushions and rested his head so he could stare past the bimini cover at the stars. “You’re one hell of a lucky guy, Nick. You spend your life with Ellen, while I get to stare up assholes all day.” He grimaced, then rolled his head to look at me. “Why didn’t you become an actor like your dad?”

“I’m no good at it.”

“Ineptitude didn’t stop me becoming an asshole doctor!” The proctologist hooted at his own wit before asking which of my father’s famous wives was my mother. I told him and he shook his head in admiration. “She was some looker, Nick! Wow.”

“Wow,” I agreed. In her time Mother had been almost as famous as Father, but presently she was in a home for inebriates where, on good days, she could remember who she was, but the good days were very rare and getting scarcer. I thought what a snakepit my family was; a snakepit dominated by a genius who knew how to create any illusion—even love.

“It must be pretty great having Sir Thomas as a father.” The proctologist was fishing for gossip.

“It’s wonderful,” I said with suitable sanctimony. “He’s a great man.”

The doctor nodded agreement. “You can tell that just from looking at him.” He was entirely serious, and had adopted a portentous tone suitable for expressing admiration for the Greatest Living Englishman. “Know what I mean, Nick? You look at Sir Tom on the screen and it doesn’t matter what part he’s playing but you can tell he’s a great guy. What’s the word I’m looking for? Help me out here, Nick.” He snapped his fingers. “Integrity!” he said at last. “Your dad’s got integrity.”

Father would not know what integrity was if it sneaked up and bit his backside. “I know,” I said humbly.

The proctologist swirled the ice in his glass. “You’re a lucky fellow, Nick.”

“I know,” I said again, and I was too, but not for the reasons the proctologist believed. I was lucky because I had turned my back on illusion, pursuing instead common-sense reality. I had run away from Sir Tom because I needed to find a bedrock of truth on which to build a life. I had no time for my father’s illusions. Illusion could not fix a position from a sextant reading, nor fight two hundred square feet of heavy flogging wet canvas in a tumbling sea and a rough wind. People envied me my birth and my childhood, but my secret pride was that I had rejected both to make of myself a prosaic and common-sense fellow.

The proctologist was bored with talking about Sir Tom. “You reckon we can go bonefishing again tomorrow?” he asked me instead.

“It’s your charter, doctor. You can do whatever you like.”

“Hey, Ellen!” the doctor shouted down to the galley where Ellen was trying to disguise the fact that the frozen steaks were being thawed in a microwave. “Nick says I can do whatever I like! You want to come skinny-dipping with me tomorrow?”

“I don’t think I could take the excitement, doctor.”

By the week’s end the proctologist was saying that it had been the best goddamned vacation he had ever taken, and as we passed the bunkering moorings near McIllvanney’s yard I saw him take Ellen aside and I guessed he was offering her a job. In the year I had skippered
Wavebreaker
at least half of our married male charterers had either offered Ellen a job or pressed her to visit their offices the next time she passed through their city. It was almost tedious to watch it happen.