Cage's Bend (35 page)

Rain plops on the canopy. It’s dry underneath. There’s a towel on one of the cushions. Synchronicity,
mon amis
. I wipe off the guitar. Emma dances around in the rain, laughing, then climbs on board drenched, her hair stuck to her cheeks. I throw her the towel and say, “Maybe there’s another one around here.”

The door to the cabin is unbolted. I am the man they warned you about when they told you to keep your doors locked. Stepping down inside, I paw blindly until I find the switch to three low-voltage bulbs at intervals along the ceiling. Inside it’s shipshape. There are ramen noodles and canned soups above the gas stove, a closet full of storm gear. Emma comes into the weak light, stands dripping just inside the door, and looks around, turning her head in slow motion. I pull off her Prada cashmere sweater and T-shirt and wrap a dry towel around her. She flops onto the narrow bunk built against the port hull at chair level. The rain on the deck overhead sounds like galloping horses. Stretching out on the starboard, I find the bunk’s too short for my boots. The intricacies of the wood grain are a world of dimensions and hue.

“Cage.”

“Yes.”

“Sail us someplace.”

“How’d you know I can sail?”

“You look like the sailor who fell from grace with the sea.” Emma laughs.

“That movie was definitely
B.E.
”

“Cable seems to be
A.C.
” Emma laughs.

“Like Kris Kristofferson?”

“Yeah. You look like him. A young him.”

“You said I looked like Jeff Bridges.”

“You do!” Emma laughs. “Except when you’re on acid. Then you look like the sailor who fell from grace with the sea.”

She crosses the cabin, letting the towel fall, and leans over me, her small breasts more triangular as they hang down. “Come on, Captain Cage. The gods have sent us here. We’re supposed to sail somewhere. It’s our destiny.”

“Hello, gorgeous.” I stroke her cheek. “You know, LSD turns off my libido like flicking a switch. Maybe it’s fear . . . while you’re fucking, your partner might transmogrify into a large reptile.”

“Fuck your libido.” Emma’s eyes burn like little gas flames. “Who’s talking about libidos? Let’s go for a cruise.”

“Where do you want to go?”

“Back to San Francisco.”

“I’ve done a lot of stupid things in my life, but I’m not going to steal a sailboat.” Swinging my body under her chest, I manage to stand up. “Sorry, I was suddenly claustrophobic.” I bend over, pick up the towel, drape it around her thin shoulders. “You don’t want to get too cold. I doubt your immune system is operating at peak efficiency.”

“Let’s sail back to the city.”

“I don’t have charts. I’ve never sailed in the Pacific, which is a different ocean than the Atlantic entirely.”

“Brilliant observation.” Emma is very pale, her face bluish around the lips. She’s probably getting hypothermia and doesn’t feel it.

“You know what I mean.” I search the drawers below the bunks until I find a polypropylene shirt, which I pull over Emma’s head. “Put your arms in those sleeves. You’re acting like a four-year-old.”

“I’m sure there’s a chart of the coast. There’s everything else in this boat.”

“No way, Emma.”

“Listen.” She cocks her ear toward the ceiling.

“The rain’s stopped.”

She smiles. “Another sign.”

“You’ve got a death wish, little girl.”

“Another brilliant deduction.”

“Well, I’m not going to be the vessel of your destruction.” I put my hands on her shoulders and shake her gently. “I’m trying to help you.”

“Baby,” she sings, “you’ll never be the one who saves me.”

I let her go and leave the cabin. Outside, the passing storm took the fog with it. The moon splashes mercury across the surface of the harbor, which is starting to rise with a swell. A ten-knot wind rattles the lines. I haven’t sailed since I sort of soloed from Nantucket to Martha’s Vineyard. Jack Ransom was on board but he sat back and let me make every move. Ten years ago to the month. A sign? The wind is perfect. How nice it would be to tack across the wind, the boat heeling at a steep angle, nothing but water in every direction.

Without saying anything Emma comes up and wrings water from her sweater onto the deck, then hangs it on a line to dry in the wind. She turns and holds out a key attached to a small yellow float like Eve with the apple.

“Tell you what.” I take the key. “If she starts, we’ll take
Day Tripper
out for a run in the moonlight and have her back here before dawn.”

Emma claps her hands together in delight just like a little girl.

The engine turns over a couple of times and catches.

“Untie us from the starboard cleats.” I unhitch the lines on the port, then leap off the stern to unclip from the dock and jump back on board with the rope, wind it in a figure eight around my hand and elbow, then tuck the coil under the deck. “All set?”

“Aye aye, Skipper.”

Behind the helm I engage the prop and the boat moves slowly out of the berth into the harbor. Approaching the gap in the barrier walls is like nosing up the Mississippi. I push the throttle lever forward a bit. The foam of the breakers sprays white on top of the rocks, disappears, sprays higher. The storm kicked up a swell and the waves are getting bigger. Emma moves to the bow, leans over the water, a junkie figurehead. I yell, “Hold on!” As we pass through the gap, the waves pound the hull and we ride up the curling face of the breaker that cascades across the deck, then we rush down its back into the trough where another breaker towers above us.

Knocked back on the deck, Emma lies laughing on her back. Stupid of me not to have clipped her in a harness or a life jacket. Too risky to tell her to come back to the cockpit now. “Hold on, Emma!” She doesn’t move. I push the throttle full forward and hold the helm steady as we drive up the steep face. Emma slides backward toward the front cabin windows out of my line of sight, then the bow soars over the top like a leaping whale, momentarily airborne, and plunges down the back of the wave, flinging me to the side of the cockpit as the hull leans suddenly port.

I bang my jaw, scramble to stand, get back to the helm. “Emma!” I have a terrible feeling that she coaxed me out here to die. I struggle with the helm to point the nose dead-on into the wave rising higher overhead. “Emma.” I can’t see her in the chaos and darkness. The wave breaks over the cockpit and we are suddenly surfing down its back side into choppy water.

The dangerous set of breakers behind us, I almost start to relax before my gut contracts into a ball of fear when I don’t see Emma on deck. Grabbing a stay, I stand on the stern rail and search the black water. “Emma! Emma!” Water slaps the hull and the surf behind sounds softer by the second. I race back to the helm, pull the throttle back to a near idle, and jump up on the cabin roof. “Emma!”

With the moon behind a cloud I can’t see a thing. Peering into the darkness, I hope she’s a good swimmer. Shit. What now? Turn around? Shit. “Emma!” I drop down in the cockpit, put the throttle up, and jerk the helm hard to starboard into a long circle to come around. If I don’t see her, I’ll put the boat back and go for help. “Emma!” You were so sweet, really. Pretty fucked up. But full of potential. You had nowhere to go but up. Dammit. I was trying to help you. And you used me to kill you. How dare you? Looking over my shoulder back at the harbor mouth, straining to see in the darkness, I realize that I’m crying. “Emma!”

“Baby, you’ll never be the one to save me.”

Startled, I spin around and see Emma standing by the mast. “Where were you?”

“Up there under that sail bag.” She jerks her head behind her at the jib bag in the bow.

“I could kill you!” I shout.

“You just said you wanted to save me.”

I smile as Emma unties the main from the mast and draws the sheet through the crank.

“You’ve sailed before.”

“A little,” she says. “With my dad.”

Running with the main,
Day Tripper
clips along at eight knots. After the storm swells, the bay is pretty smooth, more of a big lake than the perilous Pacific. It’s almost like daylight under the full moon. With Emma beside me in a yellow slicker I feel like an advertisement in a Peter Storm catalog. The half a hit of acid’s tailing off, burned maybe by the adrenaline of the big waves. They used to say that only Thorazine could shut down a trip. I was a Thorazine tadpole for a couple of days. That tranq could shut down a charging rhino. Suddenly I realize that I’m very tired.

“Coming out of the harbor, that freaky set of big breakers,” I end a calm silence, “I thought about my father telling me not to take my pint-size fishing boat out into the Atlantic. I was thirteen, 1973. South Carolina. He told me to stay in the high-tide inlet between Pawley’s Island and the mainland. I longed to get out into that wide-open space. It was scary out there in the big water. I was never comfortable. I just went for it. Maybe I just wanted to disobey him.”

Emma listens without the usual faint sardonic curl at the corners of her mouth. Maybe our little adventure will wake her from her junkie stupor, the ocean spray wash away some of her pessimism.

“Dad didn’t know that I was going out with my little flat-bottomed skiff and one-horsepower outboard a mile or so offshore. Then I started coming back to the beach instead of the inlet, riding over the breakers to the sand right in front of Mom and Dad and Nick, God rest his soul, and Harper, who was tiny at the time. I don’t remember Dad giving me hell. He must have thought it was pointless to try and stop me, just wanted to keep the peace during his two-week break from the grind.”

Emma nods and puts her arm around my shoulder, one of her rare small gestures of affection. I pray that she can become human again.

“Then one time I got broadside to the wave and it flipped the boat. Ruined the little engine.” I yawn loudly.

“My sentiments exactly,” Emma says.

“You had me going,” I say.

“I know,” she says with her old smile.

“I’m exhausted,” I tell her.

“You’ve been up, like, forever. Take a catnap. I’ll keep us on course.”

“Thanks, sweet pea.” I kiss her on the cheek and go down in the cabin, luxuriously exhausted, as if I had just swum the English Channel. It’s a little after one. “Wake me up in a couple of hours.”

I hear myself moan, then see the lights on the cabin ceiling. I’m lying on the floor in several inches of water. Rain pelts the roof like a million fingers. The boat heaves and I fall back onto the bunk, bounce against the ceiling. We are going to capsize. Then I fall farther, curling up instinctively before I bang onto the floor. I crawl to the storm locker, wrest myself up with the handle, pull on a life jacket, grab a smaller one for Emma, and stumble up the steps to the cockpit. She’s not at the helm. “Emma!” The sail luffs. The boat’s trying to come around. “Emma!” A wave washes over the deck. The rain whips in from the aft, then port. The wind’s rotating. A flash of lightning shows Emma in the bow packing a jib back in its sail bag. The boat heaves forty-five degrees, throwing me down, and water splashes in my eyes. Then she rights. With my left hand I steer her into the waves while I sheet in furiously with the right. “Emma, get back here!” I can’t see her, have no idea if she can hear me. A bolt of lightning flashes off port, illuminating black rocks standing tall like the big heads on Easter Island, then the world is howling blackness. The thunder sounds like bombs. “That’s not real.” I paw around for the ignition. That can’t be real. Where the fuck is the key! Calm down. Those weren’t rocks. That was a trick of light, fog, rain. The wind changes direction and carries the sound of surf lashing rocks. I find the key. The engine doesn’t seem to crank up. “Dear God, please help.” We start plowing forward into the waves, so it must be working. I try to steer away from the sound of the surf but there’s no way to be sure in the darkness. Emma’s shadow steps into the cockpit by the Plexiglas windshield. I glance at her, see that she is wearing a life jacket, then stare into the dark, straining to hear the danger.

“Sleep well?” Her voice is nervous.

“Like fifteen minutes?”

“Like hours.”

She’s right. My watch says five. In Memphis, Dad is coming in from his jog and Mom is leaving for her morning swim and in New York, Harper is hungover on his way to work at the World Trade Center, while I’m about to sink a sloop in the Monterey Bay. “Why are you trying to kill us?”

“I thought we were in the middle of the bay,” Emma shouts over the wind. Her voice sounds scared. “You can’t see shit through the rain, no city lights.”

“Blindman’s bluff.” I start to laugh. “With a wall of rocks.” I roar hysterically.

“You’re not helping.”

I manage to stop long enough to blurt out, “Sorry. Just thought of a Conrad line about the merriment men feel when they see that events are about to end in utter disaster.” The laughter doubles me over onto the helm. Our roles have reversed. I find some Shakespeare to express my feelings: “By my troth, I care not. A man can die but once . . . and let it go which way it will!”

“Cage, snap out of it!” Emma grabs my arm. The soft light of the instrument panel lights up her face enough to see real fear in her eyes.

I stop laughing. “Nice to see you care about something besides getting high.” I put her hands on the helm. “Keep us pointed into the waves. Maintain the compass heading. Let’s hope I guessed right. Keep your eyes and ears open.” I pat her on the back and leap onto the deck, start to lash down the mainsail, then decide to leave it loose should we have to come around quickly with the wind in a workable direction. Hugging the mast with one arm, I slowly scan the darkness in a circle around the boat. With only four hours’ sleep, I feel ready for the watch. I yell out into the night, “I’m the king of the world!”

A chilly northwesterly blows the squall from the bay, leaving in its wake gnats’ eggs of light along the coast, the glow of Monterey on the southern curve, the lights of man that obscure the constellations in the opening heavens. Beyond the wall of mountains the sun begins to ascend over the edge of the continent, casting shadows of three hundred million souls haunting the anthill of America. Light brims over the jagged horizon in royal purple, then forty shades of pink, and the escarpment below—shaggy forest tops, bald glades, zigzagging roads and rivers—gathers density and depth. In the darkness to the west the black sea brightens gloamy blue before the night sky begins to lighten. The steady whir of the freeway travels miles across the water in the gaps between the wind, breaking the spell of the Magic Hour. I’m in California, at least its territorial waters. Leaning around the cabin door, I see Emma asleep sprawled facedown on a bunk.