Flotilla (8 page)

"If you're free, how about a paid gig this time?"

"Really?" I was shocked. Dad was actually talking money this time.

"Sure," I got you a gig on the
Phoenix
Grill with a friend - you'll be working for him starting tomorrow."

I brightened a bit - the grill was a popular spot and I had stopped by for a burger once. I didn't know that Dad was friends with the people who ran it or that he was working on getting me a job there but it didn't matter. I mean, obviously, it had something do with Dad and his scams. That was the only reason I was working at the
Gun Range
. Dad was trying to get something going with Miguel but he refused to say what it was. Dad told me one time that his scams were based on the 'pickle test' method of business development.

"It's like this, Jim," he said, picking up a couple of pickle chips from the counter where we were making burgers one night. He flipped both pickles straight out where they smacked against the window. Slowly, they began to slide downward.

"You take an idea and throw it against the wall," Dad continued. "If it sticks or it slides down, that tells you how good it is. If it's a good idea - you go with it. If it isn't, you let it go and pick something else." Grabbing the pickles before they hit the sill, he popped them into his mouth and then cleaned the window with the front of his t-shirt.

"That's disgusting," I said.

"That's economics." He went on to describe some of the schemes he had been involved in. Dad and Miguel would occasionally run supplies in from the mainland. Other times people would abandon their stuff sometimes and head for shore - he would go through it, sell off the interesting items and dump the rest.

"Remember that guy who collects the rainwater? You saw him your first day." I nodded. "He has to get that water before anyone else does and make sure that it's drinkable. Not a big profit margin.

"There are easier dollars to be made," Dad explained. "But they're usually illegal. I try to avoid that ... it's never worth the hassle. It's a lot easier to make money if you already have it. You can do stuff like invest in other boats and buy stock in the Pacific Fisheries company." Dad grinned weakly. "I don't have that kind of capital to throw around."

Dad's plans seemed to be centered on his friends: Miguel, Marie the Plant Lady and his fat Hawaiian friend. It didn't make a lot of sense to me but then, not much about this place did. His little lecture was probably designed to make everything clear to me but everything actually made less sense after that. Did everything have to be so dramatic, Dad? Skip the prop-comic act and just tell me what we're doing out here, please.

I admit: I wanted to come out here. But from the second I hit the deck here until now, I've been rolling from one zany misadventure to the next. Not exactly what I would call a stable atmosphere. I was out here because I didn't have any choice - what was Dad's excuse?

Dad, being the joker he is, told me that you started at the Grill as 'cabin slave' and slowly worked your way up. The next morning I walked into the Grill, ready for some hard work to find a fat Mexican kid smoking and reading a girlie mag at the cash register.

He was nonchalantly leafing through a truly hideous photo spread - trashy blondes with bad skin - while looking out at the roiling mass of the colony going through another day. I could smell a dozen cook fires and grills going - mixed with the salt air, barbeque smells wonderful. "Um, hi," I said uncertainly. He looked up, bewildered. "I'm Jim...I guess I work here." The kid's response was to fart. Loud.

"I'm Riley," he said. "First off...oh, geeze!" He ran toward me as if pursued by monsters. I was a little slow to respond until it hit me...the worst fart I had ever smelled. Gagging, I ran for the fresh air.

"It wasn't me!" Riley said indignantly. "The sewer main is backed up again!"

"I've heard that before," a voice behind me said, making me jump. A small white guy was standing there with a cigarette butt dangling perilously from his lower lip. I hadn't heard anyone come from behind me - usually the iron deck vibrates with footfalls and noise all day long. He was skinny and looked like someone who belonged on the Megan's Law database. He stepped inside the grill and immediately opened the refrigerator. He studied the cans of beer inside and then checked a tally chart next to the cash register. Satisfied that any missing cans were paid for by customers, he popped one open.

"Ever worked a grill before?" he punctuated his question with a burp.

"We grill all the time on the boat," I replied.

"Fine. You're the grill man, then," he said. To the Mexican kid, Riley, he said, "I guess you're free, then." The kid smiled happily and busied himself with prepping the front. What made him so happy?

"You're Jim, right?" he asked. I nodded. He took a sweat-stained painter's cap off of his head and ran a cheap black comb through what was left of his gray hair. "Jeb Francis," he introduced himself. "The walking stink over there is Riley."

Riley bristled. "Mom said you weren't supposed to call me that!"

"She says a lot of things," Jeb replied. He opened the door and stood well clear, allowing the air to circulate. His not-so-friendly eyes gave the horizon another sweep. "Your dad said you know how to work. Hope he's right." Having decided that it was safe enough, or maybe that time was wasting, Jeb began the job training.

The orientation lasted five whole minutes. "Clean this. Stock that. Register works like this. Don't give me any crap - I can get five kids to replace you. Any questions?" He hadn't looked at me once since he arrived and even then, I wish he didn't. Like I said, he didn't look friendly. I shook my head. Jeb nodded and disappeared through the flip-up section of the counter. He sauntered off in search of another pack of cigarettes.

"What's up with him?" I asked.

"He's a jerk," Riley said. "Only reason I work here is 'cause he's my step-dad. I can't quit and he can't fire me." He brightened. "I keep waiting for him to fall overboard 'cause then I'd own the place." He started slicing onions while I looked around a bit.

Riley talked about how many girls he'd met working here and hinted that they didn't just invite him out to their boats for fishing. It was a small place, but set up like a ship's galley - not a spare square inch. The cooking area was the size of a truck bed and most of that space was for the grill. Up front was the cashier/dining area.

The Grill was small but it still had a bar counter with five stools, a front area where we made sandwiches and refreshed a box of cold drinks that lived on a bed of shaved ice. The painted stools were of the home-brew variety; the paint job looked like someone filled their nostrils with different shades and then sneezed on it. From the cashier to the railing was about ten feet of deck and that gave the location plenty of foot traffic. Beyond that I could see the colony spread out almost like a map.

As the day wore on I got started making burgers on the grill and serving them. If you've handled the gas grill at home, there's really not much else to it. Riley had to show me how to work the deep fryer for fries and corn dogs but after that he kept his distance. The heat was murderous in that little shack.

The sun knifed off the water and cooked the corrugated steel roof of the Grill, turning it into an oven. I realized what Riley was so thrilled about when he heard I was going to be the grill man. By two o'clock it was over 115 degrees in that shack and would peg the little lawn thermometer next to the grill out at 120.

Riley gave me a battered Camelbak that he had filled with ice water. After I sucked down the first one, he added some Gatorade powder - it kept me from passing out. At the end of the day, my clothes were soaked and caked with salt. This was a hot, miserable job.

I was so worn out at the end of the day that I collapsed in a sweaty, smelly heap on the couch in the salon. I was supposed to help Dad with Pen Patrol when I got done but I was in no shape to suit up and go swimming. Dad said nothing and did it all by himself. I guess it wasn't that big a deal - he's been caring for these fish long before I got here. I was back at the Grill again the following day.

After about a week, I had the process down. It was still hot and miserable but even hot, miserable jobs can be fun. Good jobs have you focused on what you're doing. A bad job makes you focus on what you can get away with. If there was a 'Good Job' out here, you better believe they weren't wasting it on me. We would take turns hosing off the deck with a saltwater hose but Jeb stopped this after our fifth hose fight. We started had impromptu snowball wars with the leftovers from the shaved ice bin. When girls would cruise by, we'd try and talk with them - we kept score on numbers, email addresses and anything that suggested we might get past first base.

The girl operation was pretty simple - between the two of us we had a sex appeal factor of zero and thus it was more of an obnoxious extreme sport. We thought up the weirdest pickup lines and then dared each other to use them. Some girls laughed, some tried to slap us. I tried one on this hot white chick who was a few years older than us and here visiting with her boyfriend. He got mad and then tried to pick a fight with me after the grill shut. Jeb saw what was going on but refused to give me up.

"If you catch him, he's yours," he said and it was all I needed to hear. The guy had just arrived and it was nothing to lose him in the colony - after you leave the gangplank there's eighteen ways to hide and it just goes from there. I guess you could say that I was learning the lay of the land out here. The guy was a retard, though. He showed up the next day to start some trouble but Jeb told him that the offer expired at midnight.

We ran out of propane for the grills one Tuesday but Jeb refused to let us leave early. Riley had screwed up the cash register and he was pissed off about it. Neither one of us were allowed to go. I was bored out of my mind and re-reading a 20-year-old hunting magazine when I heard something scuffle behind me.

"Heads up!"

I looked up just in time to get a raw squid slapped across my face. The gooey, briny mass slithered off my face and landed on the deck. I immediately stuck my face out of the nearby window and started dry-heaving. Sometimes I kid like that but not this time - I really lost my lunch.

Pranks grew crazier and weirder over time. The only rule we had was: don't get caught. If you get caught, you're on your own - we both agreed to not narc on each other. Riley built a launcher out of some surgical tubing and we'd find leftover fish or other disgusting junk to send out over the water. This led to a formal complaint from the
Phoenix
after two boats reported being pelted with rotting fish.

The more stuff we screwed up on, the angrier Jeb got and the angrier he got, the harder we laughed. Behind his back, that is. Jeb would yell at me, yell at Riley and then yell to my Dad who either ignored Jeb or made me sleep in the cold on the top deck, whichever one he felt like. He yelled at me but he refused to fire me. I didn't understand why until later.

I was finishing up with scraping the grill one afternoon when Riley appeared. All that crap that builds up on the flat cooking surface of our grill filled a 5-gallon bucket by the end of the day. It was every bit as disgusting as you can imagine.

"I have an idea," he announced. Reaching into the bucket of greasy, sooty junk that I just scraped, he grabbed a handful and started painting his face with it. I stared at him - had he finally snapped?

"Now, you," he said. I thought to myself: Why not? I took some and started gingerly dabbing it onto my face, but Riley shook his head. "No, you gotta get serious." He took a handful of sooty grease and smeared it across my forehead.

I gagged on the smell. It was completely nauseating. "That's disgusting!"

"I know, keep going!" He finished his paint job (if you could call it that) and reached for a stack of cheese slices that I used to top the cheeseburgers. He put one or two on top of his head and then put a burger bun that he'd added mayo and mustard to on top of that. "Now you," he said. The race was on to make myself into the grossest food nightmare ever seen on the Colony.

I tried to outdo him but once he saw what I was up to, Riley went back and started adding to his own hamburger. I ended up dabbing long streaks of mayonnaise and mustard to my face, Indian-warpaint-style, topping my 'burger' with tomatoes and lettuce and using the ketchup bottle to paint a nice big smiley-face on my shirt. Soon we were ready for display.