Red Tide (4 page)

“It’s a little early,” I said.

She wiped a river of sweat off her forehead. “So?”

She had a point. “Sure. Thanks.”

Betty went down the hatch and I followed. It was even hotter below with no air moving through it and after the bright glare of the sun it seemed dark. Betty took two bottles of Molson’s Ice from a small refrigerator under a counter and handed me one, angling her head at the small table. “Sit,” she said. I sat, taking an experimental pull on the beer. It tasted okay, even this early. Maybe it was the heat. Maybe it was because I was about to crash and burn.

“What’s up, Betty?”

She turned on a small fan and sat down across from me and took a long pull on her beer. “I need a hand,” she said.

I stared at her in astonishment.

“I can pay,” she added quickly. “You’re not doing any fishing and I thought you could maybe use some extra money.” She looked so defensive I didn’t know what to say. “Besides, Nancy can’t miss you if you’re hanging around.”

I’ve never known how the marina grapevine worked so quickly. But every now and then I got my nose rubbed in the fact that it did. The guy on the next boat probably knew more about your wife’s feelings for you than you did. “Maybe you’re right,” I said. “But I need to talk to her first.”

She turned her head and looked at me, really looked me over the way only a woman can look—thoroughly, disinterestedly, and without missing anything.

She shook her head. “Your problem is you want to suffocate a woman. You get into a relationship and you think everything is settled.”

“I thought it was.”

“It’s never settled, Billy. Nothing’s ever settled. A relationship is alive. It needs to breathe, to grow and change.”

“And end?”

She shrugged. “If that’s what happens.”

“I thought Nancy wanted something steady. I thought that’s what most women wanted.”

“Sure—if it’s on their terms. But if it’s coming from you she’ll feel crowded, trapped, pushed into something that isn’t to her advantage. A woman has to feel liberated now, and that means free to choose, and that means the traditional options are all suspect.”

I took a long pull from the beer and set the bottle down empty. “Pretty deep.”

“You mean for a leathery old broad who lives on a boat? Yeah, I know. But I studied it. Right after Howie-the-son-of-a-bitch left me I went to the community college. I don’t know what I was thinking, just kill some God damned time. Maybe learn to paint or something. Instead, I ran into this woman teaching the Women’s Studies classes. We had coffee. She seemed nice. I took her classes. I started thinking about that kind of thing. Women’s issues.” She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong.”

The small fan on the wall behind her was turning back and forth, blowing a steady stream of hot air that hit me in the face and made me blink every twelve seconds. I blinked again. I didn’t know what to say. Betty had asked me to stop by and suddenly we were talking about me. It was not something I was good at.

“You said you needed a hand,” I said finally.

Now she blinked. “That’s right. I’ve got a couple of sailboats over at Dinner Key in Miami. Salvage jobs from Andrew. I need to bring ’em down.” She raised her bottle in an ironic toast to herself. “My new charter fleet.”

“I’m not a great sailor, Betty.”

She waved that off. “You’re a great 
boater
. These boats have engines. You want to motor the whole way that’s fine.”

“I don’t know.”

“Fifty bucks a day, plus expenses.”

“If I can do it, I’ll do it for free.”

“Fifty bucks a day, Billy, that’s final.”

“I don’t need the money.”

“You’ll take the damn money.”

“God damn it, I won’t.”

“Then I will find somebody who 
will
!”

Betty’s face was flushing to a dark red. So was mine. She slammed down her bottle. The sound was very loud in the small cabin.

“Betty, for Christ’s sake, it’s not about money.”

“Then take the fucking money!”

“God damn it, can’t I just do you a 
favor
?”

“No! I don’t need your favors! Not from you, not from anybody!”

I opened my mouth—and then, for once that miserable August, I did something smart. I closed it again. I took a long pull on my beer. I took a deep breath. “I need a favor from you.”

She glared at me suspiciously. “What’s that?”

“Key West is closing in on me. Everybody’s mad at me and I can’t concentrate. I need to get out of town for a few days.”

“Billy—”

“The thing is, I have to get away, think things through with no distractions. If there was any way in the world you could let me have a sailboat for a few days it would save my life.”

“God damn it, Billy—”

“I’ll pay whatever you think is fair.”

“You son of a bitch—”

In the end we settled on Betty paying expenses.

Early Monday morning we were at the gate of a big marina in Dinner Key, the small bay front area of Miami’s Coconut Grove. Yes—we. To my surprise, I had brought Nicky along; partly because I couldn’t pry him loose, and partly because I discovered I genuinely wanted company.

When I invited him, he’d screeched out an “EE-hah!”, his version of what cowboys, the only 
real
Americans, sounded like.

“Nicky, we’ll be gone three or four days, maybe more if the weather turns bad on us.”

“Perfect, mate. Ab-so-fuckin’-lutely perfect!”

He almost levitated with excitement. I couldn’t figure it out. “I didn’t think you’d be so happy to leave town,” I said.

“Billy, old-sock-me-lad, I couldn’t be happier. The shop will run itself for a few days, and I am off to sea with a hearty yo-ho!”

I looked at him, suddenly regretting the invitation. “Listen, if you’re going to turn all nautical on me—”

He shook his head, winked. “No worries, chum. No Nelson at Trafalgar imitations. Just three days of cold beer, gentle breezes and working on a world class tan. Half a mo’ while I pack!”

And he raced around his house and grabbed a canvas sport bag, a black plastic box, and two cases of beer.

We took the bus up to Miami and got a cab for the hop to Dinner Key, Nicky wide-eyed at the scenery. I was looking a little hard at Miami myself. I hadn’t been there for a few years and there had been some changes.

For starters, there were still signs of hurricane damage. Last season, a big one had whipped through the Dinner Key boat basin with a 16-foot tidal surge. It had taken thousands of boats moored there and dumped them inland in great untidy heaps.

Many of the heaps were still there a year later. It was startling to see the prow of a 45-foot trawler married to a 50-foot sailboat, or a small Donzi speedboat with a mast coming up through the hatch.

Half a giant cabin cruiser, Italian built, lay on one side. The other half was completely gone, whirled away to Texas by the storm. All around it lay a tangle of cable, cleats, deck chairs, coolers, marine toilets, cushions, bent engine parts, mangled fishing gear, half a fire extinguisher—all the imaginable chunks of every kind of boat, all smashed, twisted, bent double or shattered, laying in their piles as if it was a maniac’s hardware store.

“Holy shit, mate,” Nicky breathed. Australians don’t like to let on that they’re impressed, but the sight of this billion-dollar trash heap was too much for Nicky.

“And then some,” I told him. I moved past the luxury dump and out into the boatyard. Nicky followed, his head swiveling among the busted miracles.

We went through the gate and found Betty’s boat,
Sligo,
a French-built 42-footer, over beside the lift. The storm had picked her up and shoved a dock piling through her side, just behind the forward cabin. She had been a total write-off, tossed on one of the impossibly high heaps of broken toys. A stringy, indignant man named Bert had rescued her.

“Sons-a-bitches just left her,” he fumed at me. “Little hole like that, and they don’t give a shit. Take the insurance money and get a new one, and the sons-a-bitches’ll fuck 
that
 one up, too, and take the insurance money and get 
another
 one. God damn sons-a-bitches.”

Nicky leaned in and laid a hand on the smooth side of the repaired boat. “You’d think the insurance would catch on, eh? Why don’t they just refuse to pay?”

Bert cocked his head and stepped back, looking at Nicky through one squinted eye. “Not from here, are you,” he said.

Nicky shook his head. “Key West,” he said.

Bert spat. “Insurance company sent a fella out to look at 
my
 boat.” He spat again. “Man was from Iowa. Never seen anything more complicated than a rowboat on a duck pond. Flew him in to help out ’cause there was too much work for the regular adjusters.” He nodded at the boat I would be taking home. “Same with that one. Dumb sons-a-bitches.”

Bert took a step back and turned to look at 
Sligo
. She rested in a wooden cradle and Bert led us around the side to admire his work. “Go ahead,” he smirked at me. “Find the patch.”

We walked slowly around the boat one time. I could see nothing. Nicky gave up and wandered over to the fence, staring out again at the landscape of the marine Apocalypse.

I went around the boat again. I ran my hand along the side. One small area forward felt smoother than the rest. I paused and looked at it carefully.

“Shit,” said Bert behind me. “Done it too good.” He stepped in and put his hand where mine had been. “I sanded a little better than they do in the factory. I do it by hand. Can’t help it. Hate to see a sloppy job. Hey, Ramon!”

A stocky muscular kid wearing a black back brace swaggered by, combing his hair. Bert jerked his head at the 
Sligo
, and five minutes later the boat was lowered into the water and tied to the small wooden dock.

Bert showed us where everything was, all the various switches and compartments, always hidden and always different on a boat. Then he hopped up onto the dock, cast off my bow and stern lines, and as I motored slowly out the channel he stood there on the dock watching, head cocked and eye squinted at me, watchful of the boat he had saved.

“Keep to the channel!” he yelled just before we were out of range. “You draw four feet!”

Nicky looked up at me, suddenly anxious. “Is that good, Billy? Drawing four feet?”

“Not in Florida Bay,” I said. “Average depth some places is closer to three.”

“Oh,” he said, looking thoughtful. “So, uh, what. We like, hit the bottom? Get stuck?”

“That’s about right.”

“What happens then?”

I smiled. “We walk home.”

He nodded and popped a beer open. “Good to know, mate,” he said. “Good to know.”

I steered us straight down the channel, past the half-ruined docks of the marina and beyond a small island still littered with chunks of boat. A few people looked to be living on the islands, tarpaulins stretched between the smashed boat hulls.

The Dinner Key Channel runs a good mile out into Biscayne Bay. I kept to the middle, except for six or seven times when large motorboats came straight at us at full throttle. Then I moved to the right side, but twice they still came close enough that I could have leaned out and touched them.

Miami has this problem with its boaters. Some of them are still sane, rational, careful people—perhaps as many as three or four out of every ten thousand of them. The rest act like they escaped from the asylum, drank a bottle of vodka, snorted an ounce of coke, ate 25 or 30 downers and decided to go for a spin. Homicidal, sociopathic maniacs, wildly out of control, with not a clue that other people are actually alive, and interested in keeping it that way. To them, other boats are targets. They get in the boat knowing only two speeds: fast and blast-off.

I mentioned a few of these things to the boats that tried to kill me. I don’t think they could hear me over the engine roar. One of the boats had four giant outboard motors clamped on the back; 250 horsepower each, all going at full throttle no more than six inches from 
Sligo
. If I had put the boom out I would have beheaded the boat’s driver. He might not have noticed.

“To get a driver’s license,” I said to Nicky through gritted teeth, “you have to be sixteen, take a test, and demonstrate minimal skill behind the wheel.”

Nicky was busy fumbling on a bright orange life jacket, fingers trembling, and swearing under his breath.

“To drive a boat—which is just as fast, bigger, and in conditions just as crowded and usually more hazardous—you have to be able to start the motor. That’s all. Just start the motor. There’s something wrong with this picture, Nicky.”

“There is, mate,” he said. “We’re in it. Can you get us out of here?”

My luck was working overtime. We had four more close scrapes—one with a huge Italian-built motor yacht that was 100 feet long, cruising down the center of the channel at a stately thirty knots, but I got us out of the channel alive and undamaged. When I cleared the last two markers and turned into the wind I told Nicky, “Okay. Raise the sails.”

He stared at me for a moment. “Sure. Of course. How?”

It turned out Nicky had never been on a sailboat before. So he held the tiller while I went forward to the mast and ran the sails up. Then I jumped back into the cockpit and killed the engine.

“Home, James,” said Nicky, popping two beers and handing me one. “It’s been a bitch of a morning.”

I took the beer and pointed our bow south.

It was a near-perfect day, with a steady, easy wind coming from the east. We sailed south at a gentle five knots, staring at the scenery. Cape Florida looked strange, embarrassed to be naked. All its trees had been stripped away by the hurricane. Farther south, the stacks of Turkey Point Nuclear Reactor stuck up into the air, visible for miles. It was a wonderful landmark for all the boaters. Just steer thataway, Ray Bob, over there towards all them glowing fishes.

• • •

The weather held. We made it down through the Keys in easy stages, staying the first two nights in small marinas along the way, rising at dawn for a lazy breakfast in the cockpit, then casting off and getting the sails up as quickly as possible. Part of the pure joy of the trip was in the sound of the wind and the lack of any kind of machine noise. We’d agreed to do without the engine whenever we could.