It Takes Two (8 page)

The hotel’s boat was a classic 38-footer built by the Wheeler Brothers in Brooklyn, New York, in the decade before the war. Low and wide-beamed, she had a flying bridge for spotting game fish and an open afterdeck with outriggers and fighting chairs. The original owners were well-to-do Germans who wintered in Palm Beach. After Pearl Harbor, the Coast Guard commandeered the vessel, used her as a submarine hunter around the Florida Keys, and declared her surplus when the absent owners failed to immediately reclaim her at war’s end.

Casting off from the hotel dock right after breakfast the next Sunday morning, Bud and I were rolling through moderate Gulf chop an hour later. We rode on the fly bridge up top, and from there the view of the tree-lined shore and the open horizon was great. I steered. Bud grinned like a boy, flattening his hand in the wind and flying it like a dive bomber as the boat pitched up and over the swells.

When the wind from the northwest dropped, I headed the boat into it, set the throttle to trolling speed, fixed the rope yoke Emma Mae had rigged for the wheel—the devices together formed a primitive autopilot—and led Bud down to the afterdeck.

After years of turning raw sailors into mess men and supply clerks, I knew better than to merely bait a hook for him, drop the line overboard and let him jiggle the pole until a fish wandered by. Instead, I walked him through as much as I could remember of what my Uncle Bob taught me. I explained when to use an outrigger and how to rig it, how to let a fighting chair and a sturdy reel wear down a big tuna, and the subtle nip-and-bob signals ocean fish inadvertently display when going after bait. We talked about gaffs, nets, wire leaders and weights, not to mention how to kill the motor if the captain should accidentally fall overboard.

At the end of the short seminar, after he’d asked about a dozen questions, Bud went inside the cabin, stripped off his shoes and socks, and exchanged his creased denim jeans for a pair of cutoff khakis. When he returned and settled down in the port side fighting chair, the cuffs of his white boxers formed a border around the inside of his loose cotton shorts. I have to admit the sight was hard to ignore.

I’d already stripped to T-shirt and bathing trunks. Once Bud got a fishing pole in his hands and carefully swung the baited lure overboard, I stepped behind him, raised the heavy metal and wood lid of the ice chest and pulled out three long-necked Regal beers. Popping them open, I handed one to Bud, slid another into a cutout groove in the arm of the starboard chair and poured the contents of the third into the roiling wake behind us.

“Lures fish,” I explained. “Draws ’em just like blood draws…sharks. They can smell it a mile away.”

“Who taught you that?” Bud wrinkled his eyebrows.

I flipped the empty away from the boat. It skipped lightly from wave top to wave top, then dug in, splashed and bobbed to a stop. “My uncle in Tampa says this is the secret to catching big-ass fish.”

“God damn!” Bud replied. He stood, carefully balancing the rod and reel in one hand. “Let me try it. I’m learning something now.” Tipping the bottle up with his other hand, he swigged deeply, then emptied the remaining brew into the wake. Deftly side-handing the empty bottle overboard, he sat back down—and a hungry, sizeable dolphin immediately struck his hook, snapping the tip of the pole and ripping out line.

“Fuck me to kingdom come!” he shouted. “Your uncle must be the best goddamn fisherman on the coast.”

Bud jerked the rod up to set the hook and began to reel in line, pulling and relaxing like a natural. I quickly set my rod in the holding cup and got behind him to offer suggestions, few of which he actually needed.

Within ten minutes, his eight-pound fish was gaffed and iced down. We trolled north along the coast for another hour but didn’t get a second bite. At Boca Grande, I headed the boat back to the southeast, keeping the wind behind us. Three more Regals offered to the waves helped only a little. Bud landed a kingfish and I took two small but eating-size black sea bass at the fish hole Emma Mae had noted on the charts. And that was it—not a washout, but no big haul either.

Still, it was clear I’d made a convert. After I put the captured bass to bed, Bud leaned back and said, “This is better than I expected. Fucking better. And not only because we got us a fish or two.”

Nodding, I sucked on my beer and let him talk.

“Because you know,” he said, you remind me of a man back home, my baseball coach at La Belle High School. He looked kind of like you—that light red hair you got, and you’re both on the weedy side, like runners.”

“Swimmer,” I corrected him. “Medium to long distance.”

“No shit,” Bud said, sounding impressed. “Who’d you swim for? You set any records?”

I admitted that I’d swum one dual-meet record in high school but won nothing except letters after moving to varsity level. My pair of wartime state records hardly seemed worth mentioning.

“Coach Andy led us to the league championship in 1942,” Bud replied, being careful not to top me. “That was my senior year. He always found the gasoline to get us to games in Myers and Bradenton. I probably wouldn’t of graduated at all except he tutored me some in chemistry and math.”

“He sounds like a good coach.”

“He was. And you been coaching me good too. You explained how the equipment works, what to expect. You’re telling me about things I don’t know. And that’s what Coach Andy did. Shit, I couldn’t catch a fly ball with a butterfly net until he showed me how to lead it with my eye and the top of the mitt. Leading—that was a big chunk of what I learned from him.”

“Nobody expects swimmers to catch anything except the guys in front of you,” I answered. “You’re out in front at the end, and you touch concrete before the other skin-fish does, or you lose.”

White mounds of cumulus were welling up over the mainland. The noon sun was high overhead. Our shirts and shorts were sweat-stained and sodden. Stepping inside, I fetched a couple of towels.

I was mopping my face when Bud pulled off his golf shirt. The long, leather-edged scars that ran from his neck down his side hit me first, even before the understated USMC tattoo on his upper arm, and the dark, curly thicket of hair that ran from his throat to his waist. I didn’t say anything, but my mouth grinned.

“Ran into a door,” he said, touching his side with the towel. “Happened to be a Nip sergeant behind it. His troopers and a bayonet got involved too. Nips came out of it worse than I did, by the way.”

I rubbed my face. “Worse would be some pretty cut-up Nipponese.”

Bud dabbed the scars again. “Thought about taking the Nip sarge’s ear as a keepsake, but the medics were on top of me by then. I put up a fuss, so one of ’em got me the bulls-eye flag out of the sergeant’s pocket. Must be at home in a trunk somewhere.”

I whistled. “Sounds like you didn’t spend the war on a parade ground.”

He shrugged. “You go where they tell you to go.” Then he slapped his knee and grinned. “Have to say this boat is a helluva lot better than any landing craft your fucking Navy ever provided. Your captain that delivered us to Tarawa didn’t put no beer aboard either.”

We were nearing the shallows west of Redfish Pass. Returning to the fly bridge, I cut the motor, moved forward, tossed out the anchor and set it.

“Too hot for fish to bite,” I explained. “I’m gonna get in the water and cool off.” The sight of the nearly naked, scarred-up ex-Marine was raising my temperature. And it seemed like a complication the day didn’t need.

Bud said he thought he’d skip the swim this time. So I turned my back, dropped my shorts, pulled off my T-shirt and dove overboard.

Twenty minutes later, back on board, as I started toweling off, Bud seemed to stare at me; then he brought up his old coach again. “Can’t get over it,” he said. “You even walk like him a little. Voice ain’t the same. He talked loud, and I don’t hear you doing that. And your ears is kind of different. But you got his red-haired chest and green eyes and long cock.”

“Hey, thanks,” I said, still determined to keep the conversation locker-room light. “Don’t remember what any of my old coaches’ ears or hairy cocks even looked like. Guess they had ’em. Swim coaches don’t necessarily shower with the team.”

“Course he was older,” Bud continued, his voice gone low, clearly not caring about my old coaches. “So I guess he looked bigger and hairier to me. I was just a kid.”

The grown kid, I saw when I glanced over at him, was blushing. He was also throwing a first-class boner. His erection, stiff and unmistakable, strained against the thin cotton cloth of his shorts and raised a pup tent along the open right cuff.

“He must’ve been quite a guy,” I said. “For you to remember him this long.”

“Guess I thought of him as my best friend at the time,” Bud explained. “He got me through to graduation. So I kind of hero-worshiped old Coach Andy. Course I see now he probably never even noticed me—as anything more than just one more of his junior Shoeless Joes.”

Then Bud did something that really surprised me. He stood up, looked me straight in the eye, shucked his shorts and skivvies, stood there a moment with his stubby hard-on bobbing well above horizontal, and said, “Yeah, what the fuck, I guess I had a thing for him.”

Then he jumped into the water feet first, came up shouting at the chill and swam away.

Bud’s hard-on had considerably lessened when he hauled back into the boat. Toweling off fast, he pulled on his pants and shirt while I hoisted the anchor. Though he rode home seated beside me, he refused another beer and kept his mouth shut. When I tried to lighten the situation with a joke about his earlier display—“Glad there weren’t any weasel-eating barracudas out in the Gulf today”—he gave me a sour look.

I was probably out of line there. Then as now, grown men seldom referred to each other’s equipment, much less aimed jokes in that direction—not regular guys, anyway.

And, at that moment, Detective Spencer “Bud” Wright looked like one helluva regular guy. The bone he’d thrown had nothing to do with me, I figured, except that I’d served as some kind of trigger for memories of his boyhood crush.

That was his privilege. Heterosexual men were allowed to remember getting hot and sticky with their high school team-mates and coaches. All they had to do was laugh it off as a phase, then mention the bitches they planned to fuck.

At least I hadn’t made any jokes about Coach Andy—or mentioned the checkered history of my own Mr. Slugger.

Back at the dock, Bud thanked me and said he’d had a pleasant day. But he refused to take any fish. “Got a rented room,” he said, staring down at the wooden planks under his feet. “And I ain’t going to try cooking fish fillets in a coffee percolator. Anyhow, you can probably use ’em at the hotel.”

He also didn’t say anything about wanting a second lesson in the fine art of fishing. So I didn’t offer.

But five days later, I picked up the phone in my office and there he was, sounding friendly and a little out of breath.

“Hey, Coach,” he said. “That boat of yours didn’t sink yet, did it? You got any more fishing trips planned? I probably still got a lot to learn. And I could buy the beer this time. We could waste a whole case of Regal. Catch every dolphin in the fucking Gulf.” We did catch six or seven fish. The day was even hotter and when I suggested another swim to cool off, Bud agreed with a quick nod. After we anchored, he followed my lead when I started pulling off my clothes. When he dropped his shorts, his cock popped up just like the first time, hard as oak.

He tried to shield himself with his hands. “Can’t help it,” he said. “Don’t know what’s got into me.”

He stepped to the gunwale of the boat, ready to jump in.

The sight of him, all of him—not just the muscled frame, snappy crew cut and eager cock, but those badly mended wounds of his—was getting to me. A familiar, icy electricity danced dangerously around my midsection, and a little lower.

Though my pulse was pumping lightly, Mr. Slugger stayed remarkably calm. So this time I felt safe enough to venture a joke I hoped would also be taken as a compliment.

“Some men need wine, women and song to get revved up,” I called. “Looks like fishing does a pretty good job for you.”

Turning, he looked me up and down. “Let’s get in the water, Coach,” he said. “Come on, OK?”

I followed him in and we swam away from the boat. Bud was a surprisingly strong, if ungraceful, swimmer. He took off fast and stayed out front. Stopping after perhaps a hundred yards, he turned, grinned, splashed me in the face, then dived under. Within seconds, I saw and then felt him dart between my legs, pushing my knees apart quickly but hardly touching me further as he passed. He turned, came up behind me and splashed me again.

I went after him, getting an arm around his neck and quickly ducking him. As I pushed him under, he curled back on his shoulders, his knees rising, the water pasting his body hair to the tan skin above his beltline. From the milk-white skin below his waist, Bud’s phallus rose out of the water like a mast.

He came up laughing and spitting water. Diving again, he got me around the waist and pulled us both down. I slipped out of his grip. As he lost his hold, his hand grazed Mr. Slugger, who was now definitely getting interested.

What the hell
, I thought.
If this cop wants to play, he’s found his man
. I dove deep, came up beneath Bud slowly and slid the tips of my fingers along the insides of his knees and thighs. When he clamped his legs shut on me and attempted to paddle backward with his arms, I stayed with him, coming up for a breath and then pulling myself on top of him.