The Beach Girls (2 page)

It was nice there, opening a beer once in a while, having a lazy argument about nothing at all, watching the night come on. The car lights were on over the other side of the Inland Waterway, going north and south on A-1-A, going back and forth across the hump-back bridge over Elihu Inlet. There wasn’t much boat traffic up and down
the Waterway, and not much in the big Stebbins’ Marina basin, just kids and old fellas running in to tie up their outboards over at A Dock where they keep the small stuff. On the other side of us, beyond the rickety old marina buildings, traffic moved slick and fast, whispering by north and south on Broward Boulevard. It made D Dock like an island, a special quiet place, water licking gently at the hulls of the tied-up boats.

I was looking out toward the Waterway when I saw the old Higgins Sedan, coming down slow from the north, make the turn in between the rickety markers on either side of the entrance to the basin. I saw right away that he was cutting the north marker too tight. It’s silted-up there. You have to give it a lot of room, just like you do the black nun-buoys on your way out Elihu Inlet on anything less than half tide. I sucked in my breath and held it the way you do watching anybody about to go aground, but somehow he eased over and came on into the basin dead slow, heading for the T at the end of C Dock where the gas pumps are.

Everybody had stopped talking. We were all watching him. Old Billy Looby, who’s been dockboy ever since 1919 when Jess Stebbins had bought the land and started out renting boats and selling bait, went trotting on out the length of C Dock past the cruisers of the winter residents who store them at the marina over the hot months.

The fella at the wheel of the Higgins give it a little reverse power on both engines to stop himself, then cut both engines. Sound carried good. We heard Billy yell, “You want gas?”

“No thanks. I’d like to tie up.”

“For how long? Overnight?”

“Longer than that. Maybe a month.”

Billy turned and stared over toward us and then yelled in his shrill old-man’s voice, “Alice, this here fella—”

“I heard him,” Alice bellowed. When she wants to let go you can hear her over on the public beach. “Put him in D-13.”

“D-13?” Billy repeated blankly. He was as surprised as we were.

“Show him where it is and tell him to back it in.”

As Billy was pointing and explaining, Joe Rykler said,
“Alice, you are dumping an inept stranger into our little community. What’s wrong with B Dock where he can be happy with the rest of the tourists?”

“Rotten pilings which got to be replaced, busted dock boards which got to be replaced, and a creosote and cu-prinol job. I got to have Billy and Bunny Beeman move what’s already there. And who is running this god-damn marina anyhow?”

“You are, Alice. You are,” Joe said.

There are fifteen slips along D Dock. Ten boats moored there. The permanent residents. Even though D-13 was the last one out toward the end—right next to Rex Rigsby’s Bahamian ketch,
The Angel
—we all felt a sort of resentment that Alice was moving somebody in with us.

Billy had trotted back to shore and he went loping out D Dock to help the stranger with the lines. We get hardly any tide movement inside the basin, but I had a hunch the wind was going to bother the guy when he backed into the narrow slip between the pilings. Maybe there was somebody below to help him with the bow lines and fend the Higgins off the pilings, but I had another hunch he was alone.

I saw him ease around and make his swing. He made it too late. Just before he banged his transom into a piling, he went out again and started from further upwind. But he didn’t have the smallest idea of how to use his props and rudders to swing the rear end of that boat. Billy was yelling instructions the guy couldn’t hear over the sound of his engines. Billy is a mean little old son of a bitch, and I knew Billy would enjoy to see him foul up good. Give him something to feel superior about. So I got up and went on out to see if I could give him a hand.

He came in too fast, staring back over his shoulder. He gave the starboard piling a hell of a thump. I ran out the narrow walkway between the slips, made a flying leap and landed sprawling in the cockpit just as the man, un-nerved by the thump, shoved the shift levers forward and moved back out again.

“Let me have it,” I said. “Get the bow lines.”

He gave up the controls willingly and went forward. The port engine was running ragged, and I could tell by the feel of the wheel the steering cable was frayed. I eased
it back in, swung the bow left and right so he could slip a loop over both pilings, moved it back to the dock, yelled to him when to make the bow lines fast. I cut the engines. Billy and I rigged the two stern lines.

The man came back to the cockpit and, in what was left of daylight, I got my first good look at him. He was about forty, a big lean guy, deeply tanned, with one of those pleasant ugly faces. He wore khaki shorts and he looked as if he was in fine shape. But he didn’t look sure of himself—I mean in more ways than not being able to handle thirty-four feet of boat. Like he’d been gutted. Like some of the running parts had been taken out of him and put back in with string.

He stuck his hand out. The palm was calloused. “I’m Leo Rice,” he said. “I’m grateful to you. I had the feeling I was going to knock the dock over.”

He spoke in a careful, educated way that didn’t go with the calloused hand or the ropy brown muscles in his shoulders.

“Orbie Derr,” I said. “Guess you’re not used to boats.”

“I bought this up in Jacksonville two weeks ago. They gave me a short course in navigation and boat handling. If there’s anything I haven’t done wrong yet, I can’t think of it.”

I didn’t want to tell him that the first thing he did wrong was to buy the boat. I could tell it had had hard use and not much care. Somebody had fixed it up cheap and flashy for a quick sale. Slapped paint over the corrosion.

“Who do I see about arrangements to stay here?” he asked.

Billy spat into the dark water. “You plug in right here for electric. This is your meter. Better wrap your lines or you’ll chafe ’em. Connect your hose here. Garbage can in the dock box there. You want supplies or laundry or ice or anything, you see me and I’ll fix you up. The office is closed. You can check in in the morning. Dollar a day dockage, mister. Pay your own electric. No charge for water.”

Billy and I left him there and walked back along the dock to the group. Billy snagged a beer, uninvited, opened it and took it along with him back to his little room in the end of the storage shed.

“What’ve we got, Orbie?” Christy Yale asked in her funny, husky voice.

“A waterborn damn fool name of Leo Rice in an old crock of a Higgins he got stuck for in Jax. Didn’t change the name. It’s called
Ruthless
. Nice-spoken fella about forty, traveling alone. But he don’t know a winch from a wench.”

“Now that’s one thing I got a strong feeling about,” Lew Burgoyne said.

“You got strong feelings about everything,” Alice Stebbins said.

Lew ignored her. “Man has to have a license to drive a hundred-dollar car, but if he’s got enough money to buy thirty feet of boat, he can go right on out and drown himself free of charge. Like the time that big Chris ran the hell right into me and I find out the guy owned it three days. Came from Kansas. Never saw water before.”

We argued that back and forth. I started the charcoal going. We opened some more beers. It was full night. You could see the neon of the hotels over on the beach.

After a while they started kidding me, giving me a real ride about the next bunch of girls due in on Monday. It’s the one part of the job like to drive me out of my mind. I got to live around boats. I was born down in the Keys. I’m thirty-five. I pretty much go my own way. Spent my life on the water, with a stretch in the Navy. Tried marriage once and didn’t like it, and pulled out soon as I could. She remarried. Caught a rich tourist. Fine-looking woman.

Anyhow, I got this job five years ago, hired captain of the
Lullaby
, forty foot diesel Matthews, about all the boat one man wants to handle. I live in the next-door slip to the
Lullaby
, aboard my own houseboat named
Mine
. Bought her run down and fixed her up neat and pretty. The
Lullaby
is a corporation boat. Owned by the Bitty-Beddy Corporation up in Pennsylvania, biggest maker of cribs, highchairs and toidy seats in the world. It’s a handy place to keep the boat, right here at Stebbins’ Marina at Elihu Beach, Florida. You can run out the pass into the Atlantic in minutes. And the company also owns the Linda Lomas Motel, just four blocks from here, a block off Broward to the west.

It used to be the perfect job. I’d get a letter or a phone call or a wire, and some of the corporation boys and their guests would come down and we’d either use this as a base for fishing, or take a run down to the Keys or to Havana or over to Nassau. About a hundred days of work a year, not counting everyday maintenance.

Then last summer some smart guy up there in Pennsylvania decided that in the summer months they could run batches of women from the offices down here to stay two weeks in the motel and have the use of the boat. Real generous. It’s a mess. I got four batches last summer, and this summer it will be five. Six to eight females in each batch. Maybe they’re just fine up there, but they go crazy down here in the summer. They get drunk and they get seasick and they get sunburned so bad they get chills and fever. They run from twenty-five to fifty-five, and they aren’t hired for looks. You should hear them all squeal at once when somebody hooks a fish. The better-looking ones sometimes seem willing enough, but I know damn well that if word ever got back to Pennsylvania that Captain Derr messed around with one of them, good-by job. I did take a chance one time last summer, on a little gal in the last batch, when I was wore down by it all. Red-headed, with hair the exact same shade as mine. She was so scared about me ever saying a word about it, I figured it was safe enough. She snuck aboard
Mine
three times and it was fine. She wrote one long sloppy letter about how she was going to be married three days after the day I got the letter, but I didn’t answer it.

On Monday, the fourth, I was due for a new batch, the third of this season. The boys over in charterboat row think it’s funny as hell telling me how good I have it, and will I change jobs and all that. The hell of it is, I like things neat. And it would make you cry to see what one batch of them can do to the
Lullaby
in just one day of cruising. Women are mostly so damn untidy.

It had been Christy’s turn to buy the groceries, so when it was time she walked up to girl’s town—Joe Rykler had named it that. It’s just two houseboats moored side by side on the shore side of Rex Rigsby’s ketch. Christy lives aboard the
Shifless
with Helen Hass, the sour little brunette job who runs the office and books for Alice Stebbins,
and goes out to classes every night improving herself. Just beyond the
Shifless
is the twin houseboat, the
Alrightee
, where Anne Browder lives with Amy Penworthy.

Christy brought the food back and she and I unwrapped it under one of the feeble dock lights and then started the hamburgers cooking. Meat spitting over the fire, and that
pfisst
sound when a beer can is opened, and quiet talk there in the night.

Old Gus Andorian told us some funny steel mill stories we hadn’t heard before. He’s lived in an old motorless scow tied to D Dock for the past four years. He must be getting close to seventy, but he’s big and thick and solid as a tree. He worked all his life in the mills. His wife died five years ago. From what he tells, she was a little bit of a thing, and she had strong ideas about drinking, swearing, spitting and gambling. She kept the lid on Gus. They raised six daughters, all married, and their first names all begin with A. Proper like their ma, I guess. Every one of them wants Gus to come live with them. And every once in a while one of them will make a trip down to talk him into living on shore. They don’t have any idea how good a time Gus is having. He is making up for the sober years.

And there’s one thing that every one of us regulars knows about, but never hints about. Gus and Alice. Alice Stebbins was Jess Stebbins’ third wife. He buried the other two. He married Alice ten years ago, when she was about forty, I’d say. She’d come down on the insurance money from her husband, killed on a construction job in Ohio. And stayed, like so many do. Married Jess and buried him three years later. Was going to get the marina all fixed up but somehow never got around to it.

So she’s fifty, and you never see her in anything but jeans and a man’s shirt, and she’s big without being soft. But the way she moves, soft and light like a lion, the way she can look at you, you know she’s all woman, more woman than plenty of them half her age. She and Gus bad-mouth each other in public a lot, but there’s a warmth under it. And everybody knows that every so often Gus will sneak up into that cramped old apartment over the marina office, clumsy and sneaky as a bear stealing a picnic, and climb into the big noisy old brass bed. It does no harm. When
she had the bad flu last year, Gus took care of her, gentle as a woman.

“Is coming down now that damned Annabelle,” Gus rumbled. “Maybe next week. I got a card. Husband and kids too. ‘Papa, please come live with us.’ What they want—a baby sitter. Yah.”

We polished off all the groceries and went back to the beer. The ice was all gone and you had to paw around in the ice water to find one of the few cans left. Bud and Ginny Linder were sitting close, as usual. They don’t paw each other in public. But they sure sit close. They live aboard the
Free and Fancy
, a big custom schooner under maybe its fifth ownership. They started out from Maryland to sail her around the world, but about six miles off Elihu Beach, a year and a half ago, a little tornado on a clear day ripped the sticks out of her and smashed everything topside. Bud jury-rigged a spare jib and got her in. They’re good kids. Bud now manages a gas station and Ginny works in an office-supply store. They’ve put every dime and every minute back into the
Free and Fancy
. But now Ginny is a little bit pregnant, so maybe they won’t go around the world the way they still claim they will.