It was a miserable New York three-day rain, repetitious and relentless weather flicked off by some no-name junior hurricane pinwheeling 400 miles at sea. The wet air had an unfamiliar sweet scent, peaches-jasmine-ganja--was it Georgia air, or Jamaica air, clocking up the coast? He was slip-steering his old BMW up the rainy Hutchinson parkway to Connecticut, steering more with the rear wheels than the front.
Loose ball joints supplied the oscillation, a predictable waggle he could work with. Two fingers on the wheel at six o'clock. Pop the gas, drift right. Tap the brake, drift left. Cool. The rain was pelting, foggy, drizzling, driving, round and round again, a tedium of grim variety, like the Variety Kel-Bowl-Paks of a jailhouse breakfast. The car came to rest at the yacht club, but Adam continued in the controlled skid of the sailor he was, in his deck shoes, from parking lot to ramp to puddled dock to rainy boat deck.
He waggled his boat-gift as he climbed down into the yacht's salon, a pound of fair-trade, organic Columbian coffee, smelling like chocolate but with a dark little dig. His yellow Helly jacket, short curly brown hair, and sunny smile all said, You, Captain, supply the three-hundred-thousand-dollar racing sailboat, but I, Crew, bring twenty-dollar coffee.
Actually what Adam brought to the boat was speed. The young reflexes that a racing captain counts on to win. But the captain had never mentioned that.
The teak-and-holly, brass-accented, navy-blue-cushioned cabin was perfectly squared away, but dank, with the sharp-sweet warm-lettuce smell that was algae advancing from the bilge, and of mold crossly wafting off the rubber and canvas of soaked foul weather gear and deck shoes. Captain Dennis, fifty--twenty-five years older than Adam--was damp and cross too, but never disheveled. Now, like a knight flipping down his visor, he flipped on a silver-hair, blue-eyed smile of welcome-and-almost-kindness. That barbed twinkle.
Grrr-rattle, zing, went the little Braun grinder. Dennis's visor slipped up unawares, to reveal him glaring horribly through the clear top, at the amber waves of grinds.
--Watch the decanter, it's Baccarat.
--Got it, Cap.
Dennis was never called Captain, only Dennis. Or Cap, in mild rebuke, as when warning that his irritability was threatening to de-tune the crew, when it could cost a race.
Mostly Adam ignored the captain's sarcasm and insults, because in a sport where six miles an hour is fast, folks get tense, and where a fifteen-ton machine must be assisted in a pretty pirouette, folks get busy. But Dennis was tense and they had't even gotten under way.
Adam had spotted the decanter on the table, and it irritated him. Extra weight above the water line, especially unsecured glass, on a racing boat! A racer should be stripped down to fighting weight. Serious captains jettisoned the cushions and toilets. But Dennis used his boat for other tasks between races, "entertaining" clients, as he put it, aboard. Or their administrative assistants. The Baccarat decanter was a prop. A power prop. Adam thought of his dad's 400-horsepower Sea-Ray. A power boat, a stinkpot. Ouch.
As Dennis turned to make the coffee Adam reached down to lift the hatch on the boat's wine locker, to stow the rum. This rum was a beautiful liquid, not brown, not gold, a color much better than the ones God had made, dropped in your first Crayola box. Probably it was Goslings, or an even more expensive brand he had never heard of. The 38-foot Beneteau had the wine locker in the deck, between the table and the engine, at the exact center of gravity of the boat, to minimize the pitch and roll that causes wine bruising. Where most nations put sick bay, the French put the wine.
Down in the locker, occupying the teak cutout where the decanter belonged, was a heavy, clear plastic bag, oil-streaked from the inside, sitting on a machinist's rag, Bridgeport blue with a red hemstitch, and in the bag was a black .38. Not the neglected stainless steel anti-pirate cannon you might find in the bottom of a locker on any cruiser, but a street weapon, prepped for immediate use.
More crew arrived, and their thumping on deck--you should never hear a step on deck, because a deck is a living thing--rattled Adam, but it also covered the clack of the wine locker closing empty, and the bump as he replaced the decanter back on the table. Dennis set out coffee cups and swept the decanter behind a galley rail. He may have sensed the warmth of Adam's hand on the heavy crystal neck, but he gave no sign.
Win tumble-danced down the steps into the cabin in Breton red shorts and red SOSpenders, those wearable airbags of the sea.
--Touch the spinnaker, and I am going to shoot you, said Dennis. Dale's on foredeck.
--Yup, grinned Win.
Last race, Win had been too slow in dowsing the new spinnaker, that big pink triangle of downwind lingerie, and ended up under it, instead of on top of it. That had cost precious time turning round the mark, a buoy, one apex of that day's triangular race course. Win would abide in the doghouse, and master the new rig in time.
Win had a big brown-red birthmark on this left thigh, which he considered port-wine-colored, and he slapped it whenever he said "port." When he said "starboard," he didn't, he just smiled. He was a patrician electrician, a rare working man from the upper class, and a good sailor, because when his brain came up empty he just switched to another part of his body. Born to social mastery, of parents degenerated from true wealth into the professions, themselves born of prodigal grandparents who idled in wealthy circles invisible to Adam, no mastery he sought was beyond him, given time, his legacy. Win could stand on deck in a cold rain and remain pleasant for hours.
Win clearly felt superior to everyone aboard, but calling him a snob would be like calling a fish wet. He would have no idea what you were talking about, and he might feel hurt. Besides, he was a working electrician, which was pretty democratic, and he was nice, or at least very polite. He seemed always to put the other person's feelings first. Dennis was fascinated with him, fawned on him a bit, but got nowhere. Adam knew Win could watch any one of them die without getting ruffled. He admired that, himself being no vegetarian. He admired the philosophical consistency of it. But Adam looked to Dennis, the senior man, for direction, as a young man will.
Dale descended the ladder. Perfect shoes, with the fine boat tread called razor-sipes, brass eyelets, clean, buttery waterproofed leather, delicate ankles, long slim tan legs. Who said the shape of a leg carries a promise of more wonderful curves aloft? But then down dropped a curtain of sturdy white cotton: loose preppy shorts, thick navy blue sweater, then long brown neck, Hepburn chin and cheekbones, gray eyes, eyes that smiled, and blond hair in a knot behind a Mount Gay baseball hat, her sole concession to frivolity. She was, of course, Connecticut-born.
Adam didn't know her age, but she felt senior to him, without it being uncomfortable. He could sense a connection between her and Dennis, but a long slack one, like an invisible fishing line that had sunk the hook but not reeled in the catch. He couldn't tell which end the hook was in. At first he had thought in her, but maybe not. Relationships could be like that. The two of them sometimes let him see these delicate things openly, and then dazzled him back to blind.
Next came Frank, a once pretty beach boy with cuddly muscles now drooping toward fat slabs, big curly red hair, and a very winning smile--with a flickering micro-expression of a snarl. Adam's reaction to Frank was to be very friendly, and a little afraid, until he got tired of it, and then switched to just plain wary. Frank was a motor boater, who loved to go fast, fish, fix his engine, dig clams, drink beer and bake in the sun with half-naked women. Some said he used to be a cop. Adam grasped that he was crewing on the sailboat for political reasons.
Frank was a provisional member of the yacht club, up for election to Full Member. The club was half power, and half sail, a little world like the Morlocks and Eloi of Orwell. Dennis was the only board member who could blackball Frank for full membership. Frank had political skills. All the powerboat board members owed Frank either tools or alcohol. The remaining, sail members had taken the cowardly view that friendship with Frank would be less trouble than enmity. He had everybody lined up where he wanted them, except Dennis.
Once he became a Full Member, Frank could be as crazy as he liked, with impunity for the rest of his life. There were no expulsions: the only ways out of the club were death, or sixty days arrears. Matter of fact, lunacy was appreciated in a fresh member, even prized, because it gave cover to everyone else. There was not a dull personality in the club. Adam had heard on Connecticut Public Radio that any ordinary group has fifteen percent strong personalities, whether PTA, Marine Corps, or rain-forest hunter-gatherers. But In the yacht club it was 100%. So everybody needed cover, and recruitment was cordial. Initially.
Naturally they were prudent about he kinds of lunacy they selected. There were the police to think about, and the safety of children, the Coast Guard, and New York liability lawyers, always cruising inshore. Hence the two-year provisional period before full membership, to "avoid future damage below the waterline," as the Commodore put it.
Frank had volunteered to crew because he had sniffed out Dennis's antipathy, and surmised the secret Blackball Rule. He had it right. Any board member could quietly veto full membership of a provisional member, for any reason, or no reason. Maybe because of the way the provisional looked at a spouse. Or the way the spouse looked back. Or because his political views weakened the insecure cohesion of the majority. Anything, cut of one’s jib. But Frank needed the club badly, because he had just been divorced and lost his house, and needed to live aboard, to be in town and near his business, to stay on top of it during rough economic times.
Dennis set out the coffee, and the instructions.
--This is not a race. It is a drill, a practice run, on a triangular course we will lay in the Sound. We will put our nose out to see the weather and lay our first course to windward, to some mark. We will then make a broad reach, with the wind over whichever side. By we, I mean I. I will call it. Then we will lay a course to head home, to finish the triangle, before the wind, with a spinnaker set, if the wind holds.
--Dale will be foredeck, tend the jib, and set the spinnaker. I will drive. Adam will trim, and Win is rail meat. Frank will be utility, and follow Win. We will make every move tight and clean, best we can, better, since we don't have the pressure of a real race. When we drop the sails and motor in, we will have lunch and debrief in the cockpit. We will be honest about our mistakes, and we will not defend an error.
He then glanced at Adam.
--The boat is tuned, now we tune the crew.
--Cap, will there be keelhauling? said Dale, brightly.
--No time, says Dennis. We will just shoot, and over they go.
They motored on a vector calculated for maximum distance from Interstate 95, south out of Indian Harbor, and set the sails at Tweed Island, and the clouds parted, and the sun came out, and they confronted the vast blue-and-sparkle of Long Island Sound, a wilderness smack in the center of a watershed of forty million people. Dale muttered the conventional invocation.
--I wonder what the poor people are doing now?
They dug in at Great Captain Island, turning the wheel hard over to fill the sail, southwest toward Execution Rock, where the Brits chained down the Patriots to die on the next tide, because they didn't dare hang them on crowded Broadway. They hardened up their direction to windward to bear on Matinecock Point, but had to fall off a bit and settle for a bearing on Sands Point. Where Perry Como, who mastered show business with an immigrant name, stood smiling in his famous sweater, and, where, calling it East Egg, Scott Fitzgerald mastered the novel of wealth and sex. Half a degree west was Kings Point, where peers of Dennis Connor played hooky from Bronx high schools, racing in sailboats they'd swiped instead of cars.
Just beyond was Elm Point, where Albert Einstein--before the serenity of Princeton airbrushed away his youthful lust--swiped North Shore sailboats too, and usually during storms, from his terrified society hostesses, and thought about the relativity of true wind versus apparent wind on a boat underway. Here too young Walt Whitman, fired yet again from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, sailed with his father, and coaxed him to build row houses together in Brooklyn, to get them both some cash. And on leafy Hunter Island, a nautical mile east, Chief Wampage of the Siwanoy, in 1643, had a prophetic vision of the White Castle on the Bruckner Expressway, and whetted his ax for Anne Hutchinson's neck. The Sound made them all one, those present and those gone before, with its vast, inviting blue glitter.
Dennis "drove," that is, steered by watching the sails only, and by feeling the resistance of the water beneath through his butt. Adam handled the lines, trimming the sails precisely to Dennis's specifications, which were telegraphed by silent gestures of index finger, chin and eyebrows, Dennis being inarticulate when under stress. But Dennis knew how the whole world was turning round the mast of the boat, and Adam felt like Stephen Hawking's best grad student, an interpreter of cerebral delight. Dennis was slip sliding the vectors of wind and water, allowing the boat to slip sideways just enough to amplify the wind ahead and trick it into drawing the boat into it. Like steering down a wet parkway, thought Adam. They fell off three degrees, to leeward, and gathered a knot of speed out of thin air.
Dennis looked up at the sails, only, at their shape, and the angle of the telltale pieces of yarn on them. He would smell something on the wind, and slowly turn the wheel two degrees. He never looked down, not even at the compass, never looked at where he was going, and if they were headed for a rock or another boat, that was your lookout, as crew. Hazards were called out crisply by crew, and always acknowledged, always politely, by the wheel. Not like driving with the family. Jet ski crossing, ten o'clock. Got the jet ski, thank you.
--Puff, three boat lengths, called Win, from his punishment seat on the port rail.
--Got the puff, thank you.
Dennis dipped under the wind shift, moving off course but gaining speed, and turned back on course with fresh impetus packed neatly into the five-ton keel. Very nice, thought Adam, it's like a skateboarder pumping in a dip for speed. They reached the mark Dennis had called, a channel buoy.
--Coming about! called Dennis, and the heavy boom swept across the deck and the concave jib popped to convex on the foredeck. Dale slipped round the mast, finessing the boom, and Win and Frank slipped under it. What seconds ago was downhill on deck, became uphill, and the two men scrambled up to the starboard rail. But the jib sheet snagged on the rigging, trapping Dale behind it on the foredeck. Frank was closest.
--Take that line off and put it back over here! No, not that line, stupid, that line, near the thing! No, no, that thing! There, dammit, that one! blustered Dennis. Inarticulate in action. Way he was made. Frank was stymied. Win clambered over him.
--Lazy shackle back aft to the starboard car, glossed Win blithely, and made it so. Frank went purple with rage.
Now the freed jib slammed Dale against the lifelines, pinning her in a torrent of bow wave. Frank, unawares of her peril, glared at Dennis, who rushed forward. A strong puff, that nobody saw and nobody called, tilted the boat hard over, and water swept the deck and drowned the port winch. Adam had moved to the wheel, the way a shortstop automatically covers second, and now Win slipped into the cockpit to backfill Adam on trim. The heavy rudder emerged angrily and pivoted uselessly in the air to port. The port jib sheet whipped into the wheel hub, and jammed. Meanwhile Dale was enduring forces of wind and water that can make a fifteen-ton boat into a moth flicked away by Mother Nature.
Dennis rushed the bow with a knife, where Frank was crouched over the anchor. Dennis stepped into a coil of anchor line, which Frank then tugged to lasso Dennis's leg. That line led through a section of the lifelines that fence the deck, and around to the anchor. The life lines had been unclipped. He had rigged a horizontal gallows, on a hair trigger. Dennis's way lay open to the sea. Frank's hand lay on the anchor quick release, a thick finger in the pull ring. Dennis registered condescending admiration. Frank had him over a barrel. With one tug he could put Frank overboard, the anchor making speed for the bottom.
Adam, in the cockpit, missed the setup, distracted by a heavy thud-and-shatter below. Baccarat. But he caught the flash of Frank's murderous grin at Dennis, then spotted the lethal trap. He dove below into the cabin, emerging at the forward hatch with the oily gun in its blue rag, and pointed it at Frank. Dennis with his knife turned and slashed open the belly of the jib. Dale spilled out, born again, this time by Cesarian, and madder than a wet cat.
Dennis tossed the knife, back handle, to Win, and sneered at Frank. Win cut the sheets, and the boat stood up, and stalled, the elegant swan becoming a fluttering goose. Adam waved the pistol nervously, and Frank raised his right hand from the untagged quick-release, slowly, like he was taking an oath. With his left hand he deftly whipped a snake wave down the anchor line, releasing Dennis. Dennis followed Dale aft to the cockpit.
Adam handed the gun to Dennis, glad to be rid of it. From the cockpit Dennis used it to point the prisoner back to rail meat position on the starboard rail, midships. Frank rose from his crouch and obeyed, walking aft of the mast, eye on the gun. A powerful wind shift then jibed the mainsail, swung it over the deck, and the boom clanged against Frank's head, just above the ear, and swept him overboard, through the slack lifelines.
As Frank bobbed along the waterline, Dennis threw the gun in after him. Win, facing aft to start the engine, missed both splashes, big and little, Frank and gun, but got the engine started and in gear. Frank slipped under the hull and was turned to chum by the bronze, bottom-sand-sharpened, crustacean-serrated prop.
With the shortened sheets cleated down and the sails unmaneuverable, Adam motor sailed home, alternately tapping the throttle and braking with the rudder, right and left, slip sliding along, while Dennis distributed sandwiches and debriefed.
--Nobody called the puff. Nobody called the wind shift. Lookouts were distracted by deck action that was beyond their help. I went forward without a safety harness and tether. I failed to spot and replace frayed wire rigging, which caught the jib sail.
--I must also report a fatality to the Commodore. It is a Club rule when a power boater is lost on a sailboat, and vice-versa, of course, when a sailor dies on a powerboat. The rule preserves the balance of sail and power in the Club. It is a good rule. There was no gun, and there was no trap rigged on the deck by Frank.
--Nobody spotted the unfastened life lines in proper time. Adam was observant, often. Very good. Dale was tethered in her harness on the foredeck, Good. I was not. Bad. As you plainly saw. Frank had fabulous line handling, but inattention and emotion caused him to slip overboard. He was unsuitable for full membership. Win, admiring the pink track of our dear chum back there in the sunset, is a fucking upper-class ghoul.
