Buried At Sea (7 page)

"Hong Kong's the best place in the world to get a bargain on a boat." The old man had emerged from his paralyzing depression and seemed to have forgotten the fear that had driven him to change course. He was, this evening, in one of his talkative moods. So talk, Jim thought. You talk, and I'll ask questions till I nudge you around to "they."

"Why are boats cheap in Hong Kong?"

"That's how far couples sailing around the world to save their marriages get before they admit it was a lousy idea," Will said.

"Sailing or the marriage?"

Will grinned. "Both

don't get me started on marriage. I know you asked Shannon

to marry you."

Jim regretted going into it, but Will had gotten him talking one night. Will's grin broadened, exposing remarkably straight teeth. "I won't be the naysayer. You poor deluded fool. Fact is, Hong Kong was the only place I could afford to buy. These days, every time you turn around there're newer, richer new-rich parvenus crawling out of the woodwork, driving prices up. And I was broke."

Jim had worked for a number of well-off clients, but he was sure that Will was the richest man he had ever met. Will's kind of broke had nothing to do with how to pay next month's rent.

"My last divorce had really wiped me out. Ruinous—though worth every penny." Jim looked away, irritated by the bluster. Aging macho man Will, with his faded Marine Corps tattoos and "manly"

proclamations, was acting like an Ernest Hemingway retread.

"Am I offending you?" Will asked.

"Like you said, I was hoping to get married. I'm looking at the upside."

"Actually, I'm curious. Why'd she say no? Good-looking guy, sleepy eyes girls go for, and all them muscles . . . Did you tell me your parents were divorced?"

"No!"

Will gave him a quizzical look. "Something tells me—stop me if I'm wrong—they should have been. A long time ago."

"Why do you say that?"

"You're a nice kid. You're very polite. You have good manners. But you dislike older people. I'm guessing they put you through the wringer."

Jim stood up and climbed out of the cockpit. Crouching low and gripping the safety lines that fenced the decks, he headed forward.

"Hey, relax," Will called after him. "Forget I said that. Nobody knows about anybody else's marriage, especially their parents'. Inge had it right: The Dark at the Top of the Stairs."

Jim kept going. Timing the roll of the boat—he was finally getting used to it—he swung through the narrow alley between the mast and the thick wire stays that guyed it—the shrouds, the side stays were called shrouds—and worked his way along the foredeck. At the bow he propped himself within the rails of the pulpit and gripped the forestay, which was thrumming with the press of the wind on the jib, and stared down at the water the hull was cleaving.

It wasn't that he hated older people. He didn't hate anybody. But he did carry baggage—

Shannon's word—filled with his mother's frustrated longings and his father's inability to do anything about them. In reaction, he had learned from watching his mother not to want too much. While from his father, he feared, he had learned not to hope for too much and not to try too hard. So in a way, Will had guessed right.

He had always equated age with discouragement, disappointment, and deceit, and he had dreamed that when he left home the world would be a sunnier place. For some reason, he had ended up commuting to college, not moving out until graduation. And after three longish relationships with gloomy, troubled women he had begun to question whether he deliberately sought out disappointment. Then he met Shannon. She was sunny enough for both of them, baggage and all. His and hers.

"You can't fix my legs," she had said when her father brought Jim into her bedroom. Somehow--perhaps guessing that she had been a cheerful soul before the accident—he had known to answer, "I don't do legs. I'm here for the flabby arms." She stared, stung, her gaze flicking to her sagging arms. "You'd be flabby, too, if you were stuck in bed for a year."

"This is what I would do if I were stuck in bed for a year." Where he had gotten the nerve he would never know, but he had startled the heck out of her, himself, and her father by lying down on the bed beside her and curling ten reps of a five-pound dumbbell. They had held eye contact for the full ten reps of the right hand, and ten more of his left.

As they lay face-to-face on the sheets, six inches apart, her father gaping like a guy at a zoo, Jim had thought, God, what a pretty girl, and a smile had begun to light her blue eyes.

With their eyes still locked, Jim had rolled on his side, balanced on his hand, and started one-arm push-ups. The smile had traveled over her face and she said, still holding Jim's gaze, "Daddy, go away."

Where, Jim still wondered, had he gotten the nerve? How had he sensed that she was ready to emerge from despair? In any case, it had worked.

He could never make her walk normally. No one could. But he could help her get strong. Though that success had led them both to a new form of despair. "I don't want to be your job."

Suddenly the loud-hailer clacked on—Will was doing his "me hearties" voice. "Now hear this. All hands to the galley.

Them that helps bake apple pie gets a slice. Them that don't, starve." Jim stayed on the bow long enough to preserve his dignity, then joined Will below, tempted less by food than by the prospect of any break in the routine. Will did his cooking at night, when the boat was the coolest.

"Hey, there you are," Will greeted him. "You start the crust. Sift two cups of flour into the big mixing bowl. Put the bowl in the sink. Remember what I told you: your only friend in a rolling galley is the sink."

Jim put the bowl on the counter instead and immediately regretted it. Will helped mop up the spilled flour. His crust, Will promised Jim, contained no unhealthy hydrogenized oil and only half a stick of butter for the whole pie. "We're here for apples, not butter." He showed Jim how to cut the butter into the flour with two knives. "Utensils only. Piecrust likes an icy touch." He put half the pastry aside in the cooler.

"Now I'm going to let you in on a secret. Never trust a woman, or a man, for that matter, who covers an apple pie with a top crust. A top crust steams the apples—ruins them. Now I know what you're going to say: your mom makes a little chimney in the middle of the crust, or she pricks it with a fork. Sorry, Mom, you can't vent the steam with pricks and chimneys."

"My mother bought pies at the Grand Union."

"And I suppose your old man never taught you how to change a tire."

"He called Triple A."

"You'd have been better off in a foster home. Your parents robbed you of a hands-on life. It's never too late to change—I told you, you did a good job crimping that head stay.

"

"It was like working on the bike."

"Just remember you're dealing with a thousand times the

loads—all right, half the dough we'll roll out for our bottom

crust. The other half, we'll put aside for our crumb topping." A wine bottle served as Will's rolling pin. He flattened

the dough between sheets of waxed paper. "Note, we're not

handling it too much, not pummeling it over and over, so we

don't make it tough. Find the apples in the freezer—righthand side, halfway down. In and out quick as you can—save the cold—use the flashlight?'

Jim pawed through the Ziploc bags of fresh chickens Will had washed and salted before he froze them, dry-aged strip steaks, pork chops, cooked veal and sausage stews, and legs of lamb. Halfway down on the right he found a plastic bag of sliced apples, brown sugar, quince, cloves, cinnamon, ginger, allspice, and nutmeg—one of a dozen Will had prepared before he set sail.

The weather fax machine in the nav station beeped. "Check it out?" said Will. "See what'

s coming our way."

Jim picked up the paper flowing from the printer. Superimposed across the weather map for the eastern equatorial Atlantic were three lines of computer-generated block print. NO MAN IS AN ISLAND, NOT EVEN A CLOD ON A YACHT. COMMUNICATE.

BEFORE WE CATCH A THIEF.

"What the heck is this?" He recognized the fractured John Donne from Ren Lit. But how had it gotten into a public broadcast of the weather report?

"Will, look at this."

Will scanned it. "Son of a bitch?' he whispered under his breath. Then he read aloud, affecting nonchalance. " `No man is an island, not even a clod on a yacht.' Oh, very clever."

"Who's it from?" asked Jim.

"A poet who didn't know it." Will crumpled the sheet and climbed halfway up the companionway to toss it to the wind.

Jim stared at him, wondering whether Will's explanation about why he couldn't call the cops was bullshit. Was Will the criminal? Were the mysterious "they" the law?

"Sticks and stones will break my bones, but faxes will never hurt me." He slid his hand under the waxed paper, placed the pan upside down over the rolled dough, and flipped it into the pan. Quickly he fluted the edges of the crust, shaping the dough between his thumbs and index fingers.

"But how did that message get into the weather fax?"

"I told you, they are powerful. If it can be done, they can do it. How? Either they hacked their way in or they bribed some underpaid technician to look the other way. Pie filling, please."

"What do they mean, 'communicate'? Could it be an offer to negotiate?"

"If we were to slip this pie in the oven for an hour, we could build an appetite with a spinning class." "Communicate or else?"

"Empty threat," said Will. "This poet who doesn't know it is stuck behind a PC

somewhere and we're safe in the middle of the ocean—as long as we keep our eyes peeled for ships. Ships are a threat. They've got their hooks into the big shipping companies, the Russian merchant fleets, the oil company tankers, offshore towing outfits, Taiwanese container ships, the Dutch, the—"

"Every ship in the world?"

"The fleets, where they know the owners. That's why we're keeping our eyes peeled. Spinners on deck, Herr Instructor. Mach schnell!"

They showered the sweat off under the fire hose—pumping warm, salty seawater over each other on the foredeck. The pie, with Breyer's vanilla ice cream from the freezer, tasted like no pie Jim had ever eaten: the apples seemed like an impossible combination of tart and sweet, and the crust was crisp and airy.

I'm like Shannon's cat, he thought. All good things come from Will. If Will opens the door and fills my food dish, I eat. If he freaks out and jumps overboard, I drift until I sink. I either starve or have to go hunting on my own. That's where the analogy breaks down. I don't know how to hunt.

"Where'd you learn your table manners?"

"What?"

"You know how to use a knife and fork. I don't meet many thirty-year-olds who do. Our '

gold rush' economy spawns frontier manners. You have ... habits."

"My mother was a nut for properness. Drove me and my dad nuts with it. 'We may not have money, but we use a proper linen napkin.' That sort of thing."

"Sounds like an old-fashioned upbringing."

"They were older and I think my mother, at least, thought things had been better in the past."

"What did your father think?"

"He didn't say. . . . He thought it was bullshit, but he went along. . . . He was an old hippie. Love and peace at any cost."

"Sounds like Mom was a force to be reckoned with." "Shannon says she was a control freak at home because she couldn't make it in the real world."

"What do you think?"

"I'm still too close to it. But I think Shannon's right. Underneath all her demandingness, my mother was very, very needy." He smiled, suddenly happy. "You won't be surprised to hear that she and Shannon can't stand each other—I'm going to check my e-mail."

"Why not? Maybe Shannon's changed her mind." "Maybe 'they' have changed their minds."

Dear Jim,

Your shark-and-flipper experience sounds a little weird. Is Will a little weird?

Dear Shannon,

Weird, I don't know. Maybe Will was a little cold-blooded, but maybe cold-blooded is what makes him so cool and collected when something goes wrong with the boat. I have to admit that if it happened again, I hope l'd keep my eyes open long enough to really see what's going on before I freak out.

Lloyd McVay, a tall, stooped man in a glen-plaid suit and florid bow tie, telephoned ports up and down the coasts that rimmed the Atlantic Ocean. His reach extended from Brazil to the island of Antigua in the Caribbean, to Miami on the American mainland, to Dakar in Senegal on the great bulge of West Africa; in Freetown, Lagos, Gibraltar, the Azores, and Bermuda, bankers, importers, shipping agents, oilmen, diamond merchants, and diplomats took his calls, eager to please. Val McVay, his daughter and chief grant officer of the McVay Foundation for Humane Science, worked across from him on the other side of their partners desk, e-mailing yacht clubs and marinas on those same coasts. She was a pale woman, dressed all in black; her face was as white as paper, her close-cropped hair was ash-blond, and her wide-open, wide-set eyes were dark. The goals list she kept on a pad beside her included polling a score of charter yacht captains she knew from her sailing days and a hundred scientists, engineers, and academics beholden to the foundation.

Raised a lone child among adults, she had learned early to read faces and eyes: their assistants—three recently minted MBAs in dark suits, white shirts, and bow ties deferentially imitative of her father's signature neckwear—were experiencing real terror; even her father was feeling pressed.

The disaster was writ large on the jumbo high-resolution flat-panel display that showed an electronic chart of the Atlantic Ocean. The red line that marked Will Spark's voyage from Barbados ran out abruptly midocean. The icon that had represented the fast ferry Barcelona was beached, as it were, in the Cape Verde Islands, where Andy Nickels had disembarked. Except for the useless red line and the ferry icon, nine million square miles of seawater depicted on the chart were empty. The enormous circle of blue that marked how far Spark could have sailed in the past week already encompassed an area larger than Europe.