Long Voyage Back (3 page)

`Hi, Jeannie. Sure,' he replied, smiling at nothing. 'Only I've had to change my travel plans about getting to the boat.'

Àre you still coming here this evening?'

`No, that's just it. I can't get a flight into Washington, but I got one to the Eastern Shore, to Salisbury, and I'm meeting the boat at Crisfield - that's just across the bay on the eastern side.'

Ì know. You want us all to meet you there?'

'No no. We'll sail over to Point Lookout and pick you up. Unless something goes wrong we should still get there late this evening.'

`That's great. I'm sorry you're not going to be here though.'

Frank felt himself flush with pleasure. 'We'll see so much of each other in the next ten days you'll probably remember with great fondness your last evening without me.'

Jeanne laughed. 'I like you, Frank,' she countered, 'but I

confess I'm a little nervous about spending that much time on the Bay. I prefer water in a glass or a bathtub.'

`Baloney.'

`No, it's true. Now that you've finally got me to sail with you I'm going to be the worst sort of landlubber.'

`You're a terrific swimmer,' said Frank.

Ònly when I can see both the bottom and other end of the pool,' she commented. 'Hold it a sec,' she added, and her next words were spoken to someone in the room with her. `

What's that, Rita? No. In the second drawer, I think. With the clippings from the Post . . . Sorry, Frank, where were we?'

`What was all that about?'

`My anti-nuke group is meeting here today,' she answered. Èmergency meeting because of the Arabian mess.'

Òh, yeah, right,' said Frank, made uncomfortable by the subject. Jeannie became too emotional about any kind of war scare. He thought of making a joke about her group's being sure to stop the war for at least ten more days so they could finish their cruise, but stopped himself. 'It's a tough situation,' he finally said lamely. Ì've lost heart,' she replied with unexpected weariness. `We haven't achieved anything in these four years. And now it's really hopeless. I feel like a fool for even trying.'

`Well, maybe that's good,' Frank said. 'Shows you need a vacation.'

Ì suppose so,' she replied after a pause. 'Some of my friends think I'm going off to fiddle while Rome burns.'

`No, you don't,' he said firmly. 'You've promised me. Let Rome burn.'

Ì know, Frank, I'll be there. Tonight I hope, or tomorrow morning at the latest.'

Àt Point Lookout.'

`Fine. What, Rita? . . . Okay. Frank, look, I guess I've got to go. I'm looking forward to the sail and . . . I've got to go.' `Sure, Jeannie. See you soon.'

`Bye, Frank.'

Frank lowered the receiver slowly back into its cradle and sighed, feeling that ridiculous tingling she somehow created in him. Then he shook his head and grunted. Why did she bother with that stuff? Peace groups had been marching and protesting for five years but they'd never stopped a war and never would. They only weakened the poor nation that let them get too influential.

Sighing, he leaned back in his chair, rocking slightly, looking out at the sky above the harbour past the Twin Trade Towers. He had finally got her to go sailing with him, though. In the past he'd invited her and her husband Bob and always ended up being stuck with just Bob. It was strange. An outdoorsy woman like her, good swimmer, tennis player, hiker - why the resistance to water? Was it her way of resisting him? He knew that he liked her a lot more than was probably wise for either of them, but he wasn't doing anything about it. And now for ten days they'd be together on Vagabond. His intercom buzzed and Rosie's crisp voice informed him that his wife was on the line. He remembered he'd promised to call her.

`Hi, sweetheart,' he boomed out when he heard her soft musical voice on the phone. '

Yep. Everything's go for this afternoon. I I. . . What? . . . Oh, don't be silly, it's just a war scare. Like the last time. A lot of sound and fury signifying . . .' Frank frowned and grimaced as he listened.

`No, no, no,' he finally interrupted. 'It's going to be all right. Bob Forester says it's all just a big bluff, the Pentagon and the Russians know exactly what they're doing . . Again he listened for a while, and then broke in.

`Hey, more good news. You should be proud of me. I made over eight thousand dollars on my shorts today . . . No . . . no, not that kind of shorts . . . stocks, selling stocks short, you know . . . He's fine. Captain Loken just told me he was a great sailor. Brought the ship single-handed through a

terrific storm. When the sail . . . What? . . . No no no, there was no storm . . . I was just exaggera . . . He's fine I tell you. I bet he looks like a bronze Greek god. He's so goodlooking, he's obscene. Girls will be in heat all over the Chesapeake .. . Damn it, no. If there was going to be a war they would have told me in the Wall Street Journal ... Yeah, yeah, right, sweetheart. Look, I got to get going to the airport . . . Ten days . . . Oh sure, don't worry . . . Goodbye, honey . . . Right ... You too ... So long.'

Frowning, Frank hung up. In the last year or two Norah seemed to be all fears, mostly about Jimmy, her 'baby', but sometimes about everything. Maybe that's where Jimmy got his panic from. He was glad Susan was home from college and staying there while he and Jimmy were off cruising. Norah needed company these days but couldn't join them in the Chesapeake until the last weekend.

Rosie buzzed again.

`Mr Tyler on the line.'

Tut him on,' said Frank, reaching for the phone to speak to George Tyler, a partner on several real estate ventures.

`Well, Frank, it was no go,' Tyler's voice announced loudly as if all important news had to be shouted. 'I'm afraid Mulweather called and gave me a cock-and-bull story which boils down to the fact that his clients are considering backing out on the West 80th Street deal.'

`What the hell. Why?' Frank countered.

`My guess is that his clients decided that an apartment house, no matter how attractive, tends to lose its cash flow when reduced to rubble.'

Frank didn't reply, stunned by the sardonic comment.

`Well,' Frank said after a pause, 'I don't think cash or stocks sitting at Chase Manhattan are going to retain much value either when they're drifting down over the Atlantic in a million pieces.'

Ì know,' said Tyler with incongruous cheerfulness, 'but what are we going to do?

Mulweather found a clause in our

preliminary agreement and he can back out. In this climate I think everyone's more interested in vacationing in Tierra del Fuego than in conducting any new business.'

Frank could feel himself becoming unreasonably angry at Mulweather and his clients for being panicked out of a deal that would make both parties good money. He stared gloomily at his desk.

Òkay, George, keep after it,' he said finally with a sigh. `Make them feel like they're being chicken or something. Maybe they'll change their minds next week.'

After Tyler had hung up, Frank felt depressed. Worse, it was getting late. What time was it? Almost four. Jesus, he had to be at La Guardia by five for his flight to Salisbury, so he'd have to hurry it.

He made one last call to his broker and learned that the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down something like fifty-one points, the high speed ticker still almost twenty minutes behind. When he hung up, even though he'd made good money on his short selling, he was even more depressed. As he rose and began to gather his things for the boat he remembered his own favourite axiom with a strange sense of irritation .. .

`The stock market never lies ..

By late afternoon the Chesapeake had become as still as a pond. Only the tiniest breaths of wind occasionally hinted at movement, while Captain 0lly and his son Chris worked steadily in the clear sunshine, enjoying the luxury of the calm water. They were working their last oyster bed, using the long wooden shafts of their rake-like metal tongs with practised ease. Both Captain 0lly, a small wizened old man, wrinkled and bald, and his twenty-year-old son, a thickset, husky youth, had huge forearms and biceps from their years of working the oyster beds. Their twenty-six foot fishing smack, the Lucy Mae, with only a small deckhouse forward and a huge area aft for depositing the oysters, was old and paint-chipped and heeled groggily as both men worked. The two men had been at the beds since one o'clock that afternoon, starting a couple of hours before the three P.M. low tide and planning to quit a couple of hours after the tide turned. In all that time their work proceeded in a casual persistent rhythm, 011y talking away occasionally in seemingly free-association monologues, Chris, quiet, steady, always puffing on a cigarette, now and then grunting a comment or asking a question. When 011y would lapse into silence or lean on his rake, Chris would continue his oystering, working the heavy long tongs until he could feel them full, then raising them to the surface and depositing the contents on to the aft deck. Most of the sorting would come later. 0lly's monologues and silences succeeded each other in a mood as relaxed as the becalmed bay. Chris would occasionally down a bottle of beer, his father a glass of water, sometimes 'coloured' with a dash of whisky. They never had to speak about their work; they knew their routine so thoroughly they could have oystered efficiently from dawn to dusk and not uttered a word. Smith Island, their home, lay to the east of them, Tangier Island to the south and Point Lookout and the wide mouth of the Potomac River to the west.

As Captain Olly neared the end of his working day he was feeling depressed at how tired he felt. After less than four hours work his back ached, and if he didn't stop and lean on his rake handle every five minutes or so he got winded. It embarrassed him, and he knew that even if he tried to pretend to be so fascinated with his own monologues that he couldn't work, Chris could tell he was shirking.

Ever since Ellen had run off to Florida two years ago with Cap'n Smithers, his life had been downhill. It was the first time since he was fourteen he hadn't had a woman reg'lar and he felt his health was deteriorating fast as a result. The main reason he went oystering with Chris most every day was so he wouldn't be stuck alone in his house watching the TV. A man could go nuts watching those game shows and soaps. Ì don't know, son,' he found himself saying in an effort to cheer himself up, 'seems to me some of these oysters must have meningitis. Seem sorta stunted. We may have to sell 'em to the circus as midgets.' He had deposited a load of oysters and muck on to the deck and was staring at it with exaggerated gloom. 'Though I s'pose midgets ain't in fashion any more even in the circus. People these days want things big: big money, big boats, big tits.

'

As he wiped the sweat from his bald top he squinted south at a couple of sailboats sitting like cement monuments in the bay. That'll teach 'em, he thought vaguely, the rich playboy good-for-nothings.

`They even seem to want their wars bigger these days,' he went on, turning back to his work, `sittin' up there in Moscow and Washington calculatin' how they can build a real big elephant-like-war that'll flatten the earth like a pancake so the gods can use it as a frisbee . .

As 011y lowered his tongs back into the water, Chris made an unaccustomed halt to his work.

`There ain't gonna be a war, is there, Pop?' he asked.

`Well now you know I never predict what the rake'll bring up,' 011y snapped back automatically, 'but I got to say that imagination ain't created the stupid terrible thing which man ain't fool enough to up and do.'

`They ain't fightin' yet,' Chris commented, pausing to light a fresh cigarette.

`The way I figure it is the only reason they ain't made a frisbee of Earth before this is that they got a lot of smaller terrible things they want to do first.' 011y spat over the side of the boat into the bay. That's my great hope for mankind, he thought: man's got so many little sins he's got the hots for, he'll never get around to the big one.

`You think so?' his son asked after, a pause.

"Course I don't think so,' 011y snapped back irritably, again wiping his sweaty forehead with his thick-veined right arm. 'You know I don't like to do any thinking.' He chuckled. '

Whenever I think - get a really deep thought, you know? - I always have to take a crap.'

He paused and glared at his son, his eyes twinkling. 'Standing at the helm alone in a blow I gotta watch my mind like a cat, be sure no deep thoughts come, 'cause taking a crap on a bouncy ship when you're alone at the helm and havin' all you can do just standing much less squatting over a pail on a roller coaster while watching the compass and sail and handling the wheel is a trick I done once but don't hanker to do again.'

He paused and frowned in concentration.

`The deep thought I had that time was, "Time will tell." See? Deep thoughts just ain't worth the fuss and bother.'

As he looked with mock severity at his son, who grinned

back at him, 011y remembered that sail: in his old

Chesapeake Bay skipjack that he'd owned and captained,

dragging for oysters in those days instead of fiddling around with these tiny rakes. But he couldn't afford a skipjack now and couldn't pull his weight as crew so he'd settled for the Lucy Mae. It kept him alive, but barely.

Shit, he thought, as he had to pause again, I wish to hell I'd just get it over with and croak. Not much sense in living if you can't work and can't fuck. Nowadays whenever he went into restaurants or bars and flirted with the cute little taut-butted waitresses they'd either be shocked at him or treat him like a harmless child. When a man couldn't turn a woman on it was time to cash in his chips. Women used to always be pestering him, first for his cock and then for his deep thoughts; he wished one were pestering him now.

`Women are always asking what I'm thinkin',' he began saying aloud, watching three seagulls fly noisily around the stern of the Lucy Mae and then plop expectantly in the water. `But after four wives I finally figured how to handle 'em. I always say I'm thinking about the wind and weather and repairing my dinghy and how much I love her ass. Well, every woman I've known will frown and frown and frown until I get to my deep thoughts about her ass and then everything's jolly. A man who limits his deep thoughts to his woman's ass is a sober man, trustworthy and true, and likely to stay out of trouble.'