68 Knots (24 page)

“BillFi,” Arthur said. “When you said this person could help us, what did you mean? We don't need any help right now. Do you think something's going to happen—something that will make us need his help?”

BillFi shrugged. “Don't know,” he said. “I don't know how he'll help us. But he will. He will. He'll help us get through something. I don't know what. Just something. Maybe everything. I don't know.”

“Bill's my friend,” Jesse said. “He's always right about these things.”

Arthur nodded. “I'm beginning to get that,” he said.

Marietta laughed loudly, then stopped when she realized that Arthur meant what he said. “I'm beginning to understand it, too,” she said with a serious expression.

Arthur stood up. “I think it's time I went to bed,” he said.

“Goodnight, Arthur,” Marietta said. “Sleep well.”

“Goodnight, everyone,” Arthur said to Dawn. He entered the captain's quarters by himself and closed the door behind him.

Jesse was the last to head for bed. He sat at the table in his underwear, drawing permanent-marker tattoos across his chest. His body was mostly covered now—both feet, both legs up to his upper thighs, his left and right arms from the biceps down—and he found a strange delight in the power that the body art gave him. He had always been strong, but the tattoos, he thought, gave him a presence that he had never felt before. He had worked so hard his whole life to be invisible,
to be alone, to be enduring, that he had never noticed how exhausting that effort could be. With the tattoos, though, invisibility was impossible. He had no choice but to let people know that he thought for himself.

When the intricate lines and corners and curves across his chest had advanced to his satisfaction, Jesse tucked the markers under his mattress and returned with his bent and ragged copy of
Moby Dick
. A piece of torn cardboard marked his place more than halfway through the thick book. It was his third lap; each time through, as soon as he reached that last sentence, he turned to the front and began again. He was captivated by the descriptions of the South Pacific and the powerful intensity of the Maori warriors. He escaped into the descriptions of the whales and the ship and the sea, even with a real ship and sea all around him. He could feel the pull of adventure grip his heart as he read. The shelter in the Bronx seemed especially far away when he was reading the book.

Jesse put the book on the table and walked, naked except for his underwear and the swirling colors that covered his body, to the kitchen. He dug a can of tuna out of the deep shelves and opened it.

The sound brought Ishmael skittering out from underneath a bunk. The kitten, plumper now and overflowing with energy, scrambled across the galley floor and hurled headlong between Jesse's ankles. Jesse poured the juice from the tuna can into a paper bowl, pried out a few chunks of meat with his finger, and bound the can in plastic wrap. He carried the bowl back to the dining table, taking careful steps as Ishmael darted under and between his feet, mewing hoarsely.

Ishmael jumped onto the table with a burst of awkward kitten grace, and she lapped at the beige liquid in the bowl.
Jesse ran his hand down Ishmael's thin but sturdy spine. “You're welcome,” he said softly, petting the kitten with a gentleness that contradicted his size and the tight tendons in his forearms and legs. “Feel like reading?” The kitten responded with a little kitten sneeze.

Jesse opened
Moby Dick
and began reading out loud, in a quiet whisper, to the kitten. Ishmael finished off the tuna and sat between Jesse's arms, licking her paws and cleaning her face. She dug her sharp little claws affectionately into Jesse's muscular arm. Jesse smiled and kept on reading.

In her bunk across from Jesse, Joy looked up from her Bible. In her heart, she knew that God was on this ship, bringing love and small reassuring islands of peace from time to time. She vowed to remember this moment, this feeling, and never forget that she couldn't have experienced it—couldn't have helped bring it about—if she had quit. Dawn lay in the bunk above Joy, chanting quietly and thanking the Goddess of the Sea for the gentle rocking and cool fresh air that made sleep so pleasant.

And alone in the captain's quarters, Arthur took off his shoes and reached toward the wall. He untied another knot from his calendar ropes, and he noticed that even though the summer was still young, it was clipping along at a good pace. Eventually he would be down to his last rope, that final knot growing closer and closer. He wasn't at all sure what he would do once it arrived.

He blew out the oil lamp and slid into the broad chilly bed.

Crystal woke everyone early the next morning. She had just come back from her sunrise swim; her short blond hair was
wet, and she had a towel wrapped around her shoulders for warmth. Her thin muscled legs bristled with goosebumps in the chilly morning air. “Hey, everybody,” she said. “We're not alone. Get the fuck up! There's another boat here. It might be the guy BillFi was talking about.”

It took the crew little time to leap out of their sleeping bags and scramble up the gangway. The morning was thick with silvery fog, and everyone blinked and strained their eyes to cut through the murky air. Tucked up close to the beach was a small dark-green sloop with rust-colored sails. The boat had a tiny cabin—not much longer than a bed—and the rails were cut low to the water.

On the beach was a woman dressed in ragged khaki shorts and a faded blue chambray shirt. She was thin and fit, her skin the color of mahogany and her gray-and-black hair loose and coarse. She was tending to a small smoky fire. She looked up at the
Dreadnought
, nodded a stiff greeting to the eight onlookers standing on deck, and turned her attention to a black frying pan resting on the sand. She squatted next to the pan, sitting on her bare heels, and scraped something out of a tin can. She put the pan on the fire and began breaking driftwood into more kindling.

“Is that the ‘guy' you were thinking about, BillFi?” Crystal asked, putting her hands on her hips.

“It must be,” BillFi said. “It has to be her. There's no one else around. It has to be her.”

“It's a bit foggy—BOOOO-oooo—” Logan said, giving his best impression of a foghorn, “but can I, like, interest you all in breakfast on the beach?”

Two quick dinghy-trips later, the crew was on the beach. As Logan built a fire and cracked eggs against the edge of a
battered frying pan, Arthur stepped forward and introduced himself to the woman in the ragged shorts.

“Bonnie,” the woman said, shaking Arthur's hand briefly and turning back to her cooking. She was frying some pancakes in the pan, and she had pushed another tin can into the near edge of the fire. She had ashes in her hair and black streaks of soot on her hands. Around the second toe on her right foot was a diamond ring, and around the same toe on her left foot was a golden band; both rings were wrapped with string to make them fit. “I only have enough food for me.”

“That's okay,” Arthur said. “We have plenty. In fact, we were wondering if you'd like to join us.”

Bonnie looked straight into Arthur's hazel eyes, unimpressed. “I don't mind eating with you,” she said, “but I'll eat my own food. I don't take anything from anybody unless I can replace it.” She turned back to her cooking without a word.

Dawn shrugged and helped Logan with the sausage. They worked quickly, and by the time Bonnie's pancakes were dark brown and littered with bits of sand and ash, Logan had served the
Dreadnought
crew sausage and eggs, cereal with powdered milk, biscuits he had made by winding thick dough around a stick and heating it over the fire, and grapefruit juice. Bonnie peeled her pancakes from the pan, and she pulled the tin can, bubbling with a thick seafood stew, out of the fire with her fingers.

“So what brings you out here?” Arthur asked.

“Wind, mostly,” Bonnie answered. She shoved half a pancake into her mouth and stared out at the ocean while she chewed.

“No, I mean, are you sailing around here for fun, or are you doing something?” Arthur asked again.

“I'm always doing something.”

Arthur smiled. He straightened his back, leaned forward, and looked Bonnie right in the eye.

“Hey, Bonnie,” he said in a deep but gentle voice, “we've been out here for weeks. A little conversation won't kill you.”

“There's nothing to tell,” she said. “Nothing that would matter, anyway. Not everybody has a story that—” She cut herself off. Then she shrugged and shook her head. “Oh, what the hell. Maybe you kids can learn something from it.” A trio of black flies buzzed around her face, but she paid them no attention. Eventually they swooped over to bother Logan.

The
Dreadnought
crew ate silently as Bonnie talked.

“Hell, it's probably been three years or so, but I used to be a marketing executive. For a big appliance company in New York,” she said, scratching the back of her neck. “I didn't live in New York—never could stand the city. No, I lived with my husband and twin sons in a real nice house near the beach in southern Connecticut. The job paid well, you see. And I was good at it. We made dishwashers, toaster ovens, dehumidifiers—all sorts of things. And I could direct the marketing so well that our sales force barely had to work at all. The orders just came pouring in.”

She drank a deep swig of the steaming stew, swallowed quickly without chewing, and continued. “I took the train into the city every morning at six forty-five, and I rode it back home again at six-thirty in the evening. I'd go home, take my shoes off, pour myself a vodka tonic, and spend the evening sitting in a chair, reading the
Times
, and trying to breathe normally.

“Our nanny was doing a good job of raising our kids, we had a housecleaner and cook who kept the place neat and made all our meals, so I would just sit back and relax. Let my
pupils dilate. Loosen the muscles in my jaw. My forehead. My ribs. And I'd do nothing. I guess that's what the problem was. If I wasn't in the office, I wasn't doing anything. I wasn't being anything. Just drinking myself to sleep and trying to recover for another big day of pushing microwaves.

“I started to get scared. I began to think that maybe life was just gliding by, and that someday I'd wake up—and I'd be old. I'd be retired from work, my kids would be grown and gone, and I'd be sitting at home with my husband and nothing to do, nothing to remember but a long series of signed purchase contracts. My life would have passed me by, and I wouldn't remember any of it. I'd pray and dream and hope, I'd exercise and travel and cry—but nothing would work. My life would be over, and it wouldn't have mattered at all.
I
wouldn't have mattered at all. I guess that thought just got a little intense for me.”

She accepted the mug of grapefruit juice that Joy offered her “in exchange for the story.”

“So one day, I just did it. Just changed tack, you might say. I was waiting in line for the train one morning—it was a Wednesday, I think, early in the spring. Kind of chilly. Anyway, all of a sudden, I just stepped out of line. It seems like a small thing, I know, but you have to understand what it meant.
I stepped out of line
. I wasn't going to play the game anymore. Suddenly nothing was the same. I walked back to my car, drove home, and freed myself from my pantyhose and my push-up bra and my killer business suit. I changed into jeans and an old flannel shirt I found deep in the back of my closet. Then I took a big black marker, I picked up my beige briefcase, and I wrote ‘I QUIT' in block letters on the side. Mailed it to my office. Then I drove to the bank and took out
all our money. We had saved some, but not a lot. It was enough, though, for a down payment on a 52-foot sailboat that was strong enough to take me and my family all the way around the world.”

Arthur grinned. The freedom of this summer's adventure was thrilling, and he could appreciate others wanting that experience.

“It was going to be great,” Bonnie continued. “We would sail east to Ireland, all around Great Britain, then down along the European coast toward the Mediterranean. We'd stop a lot, see things, do things together, learn some languages, maybe get jobs here and there to bring in some money. I figured we could survive just fine. We'd go all the way around the world like that. Just me and Malcolm and the boys. It was going to be great.”