The Crimes of Jordan Wise (11 page)

At one point during the evening, while the women were in the ladies' room, Verriker asked me if I played handball. I said no, nor tennis or golf, explaining it by saying I'd been too busy making a living to get involved in sports.

"Great game, handball," he said. "Keeps you fit. I could teach you the basics in one session, if you're interested."

I wasn't, but I said, "Sure, I'd like that."

"Members have unlimited use of the courts whenever they're free. All the other facilities, too. How would you and Annalise like to join?"

I pretended to be flattered and asked casually what becoming members entailed, if there was some sort of screening process. No, he said, the club wasn't that exclusive. Strictly social. There were no hard and fast rules for membership; financial status and background were of no importance. As long as you were able to pay the yearly dues of $500, and had the sponsorship of a member, your acceptance was pretty much a given. And he'd be glad to sponsor us.

So I accepted with a show of gratitude. The more firmly entrenched we became in island society, the less likely our new identities would ever be questioned or breached.

That first sailing experience had just the opposite effect on me. I took to it immediately, as I'd been sure I would. Had my sea legs from the start. From my reading I'd already internalized much of the basic information and language of the sea. I knew that sloops and catamarans had a single mast, ketches and yawls two masts, and that most modern sailboats were Marconi rigged. That's a triangular rigging with the sails spread by two spars, with a lower boom that extends past the mast and a second that runs at an angle from the forward end of the boom to the masthead; Depression-era sailors gave it the Marconi name because the stays and shrouds holding up the mast reminded them of the first radio towers set up by the Italian inventor. I knew the names of all the sails, the meaning of such terms as luff and kedge and reef points, and I could define jibstay, lapstrake, burgee, spinnaker, genoa, freeboard, lubber line. I knew that a boat will sail in three basic ways—before the wind on a run, with the wind abeam on a reach, and close-hauled or toward the wind; that the wind fills the sails from both sides, on either a starboard tack or a port tack. I knew a lot of facts about sailing, or thought I did, but I didn't know a damn thing until I learned the working application of those terms and principles.

Scanlon was a fairly good small-craft sailor, though he'd only been at it about four years, and those day cruises were more exhilarating than anything I'd done except for the Amthor crime and making love with Annalise. Standing on
Manjack's
deck, hanging onto one of the stays while she ran with the wind, the sea creaming up around the bow and back along the hull, the wind singing in the sails . . . I'd had no other experience quite like it.

I learned a few rudimentary lessons from watching Scanlon and following his instructions. The first time he let me trim the jib, I did it without hesitation or mistake. But he wasn't much of a teacher overall because he was still learning himself, and because he was a day sailor and a twenty-four-foot sloop was all he ever aspired to own and operate. He wasn't offended when I asked him if he could recommend someone more knowledgeable and more experienced I could pay for private lessons.

You think of rum as being light or dark, with varying degrees of alcohol content, and mainly as an ingredient in mixed drinks. I did, anyway, until that day. But there are a lot of different varieties, each with characteristics as distinctive as those separating single-malt Scotches. Rum has been made in the Caribbean since the seventeenth century, from fermented molasses, cane syrup, or fresh sugar-cane juice derived from a multitude of species and hybrids of cane. Originally it was distilled in clay pots, then in single-pot stills that look like teakettles with long spouts, and finally in single-, double-, and mutiple-column continuous stills. Some blends are rich and heavy, others carbon filtered to produce a clear spirit; some are aged for up to four years, others not aged at all. The taste of each depends on the raw ingredients, the bottled strength, its barrel time or lack of it, the distillation purity and the length of fermentation. A rum drinker's preference is highly individualistic. There are no universal standards or measures for judgment.

The Potters gave a little lecture that included this information (and later I did some studying of the subject on my own) and then proceeded to demonstrate. They had more than sixty varieties arranged on sideboards around their big living room. From Puerto Rico, the British Virgins, Martinique, Barbados, St. Lucia, Marie-Galante. Well-known labels such as Bacardi and Pusser's, and obscure brands like Buccaneer, Blackbeard's Five-Star, Cockspur, Jack Iron, and Rhum Vieux du Pere Labat. Various potencies, light and dark, from Mount Gay Eclipse's 154-proof, 80 percent alcohol rocket fuel down to the milder 80-proof, 40 percent alcohol content types. There was water and ice and cane syrup, as most distilleries provided in their tasting rooms, but we were encouraged to try at least a few of the rums straight for a better evaluation of the flavor.

We were also encouraged to follow a little ritual on each tasting. Read the label first, to determine how strong the rum was and how long it had been aged and what it was distilled from. Pour a little into a glass and hold the glass up to the light so as to judge the color or clearness. Swirl the rum in the bottom of the glass. Take a deep breath, exhale, then lift the glass to the nose to assess the delicate flavors in the aroma. Repeat the process if you liked what you smelled the first time; if you didn't like it, you probably wouldn't care for the taste, so just move on to the next. Sip a little and roll it on the tongue, then savor it and mentally compare your impression of the taste with the aroma.

I'd drunk rum before that day, but it wasn't until I began sampling and comparing that I began to really appreciate it. It was all good, but I preferred the mature, dark types. Most of the women were partial to the light and clear. And most of the men, predictably, preferred the 151-proof Cruzan and 154-proof Mount Gay Eclipse. I agreed with them, more or less, though I had yet to find one I really liked until I came to the bottle of Arundel Cane Rum.

The label said it was distilled from pure cane juice and aged in oak casks. That it had been distilled and blended by the Callwood family in the Caribbean's oldest continuously operating pot distillery in Cane Garden Bay, Tortola. The first sniff hooked me; two more confirmed its character. The taste was as close to ambrosial as anything I'd ever had. Nobody else seemed to find it as special as I did, which proved the dictum about personal preference.

Potter told me Arundel Estate had been in operation for four hundred years, the last two hundred in the hands of the Callwood family. It was the only distiliery still operating on Tortola, the only licensed one in the eastern Caribbean that used a single-pot still, and one of the few that made rum directly from sugar-cane juice from locally grown green cane. They manufactured both white and dark, the light kind mainly for local islanders. The thick, rich dark was what I'd tasted.

The next day I went to one of the larger liquor stores in Charlotte Amalie and bought six bottles of dark Arundel Cane, all they had in stock.

From the day of the Potters' tasting in 1979, I've never willingly drunk any other kind of rum. Iced usually, straight or with a little water occasionally. And never, never in punches or Collinses or any other concoction that would dilute and spoil the flavor.

I felt I'd learned pretty well what little seamanship I'd been given, but I wasn't satisfied with the quality or content of the instruction. Practical enough, but dry and basic, lacking in detail and lore—skimpy value for the money I laid out. They paid Up service to my ability to absorb information and put it to use, but not for a moment did either of them act as though I had the makings of an equal. They treated me with the disdain, the thinly concealed contempt commercial boatmen have for the idle rich. Deaf ears when I tried to tell them I had no interest in racing cutters or sport cats or any other kind of craft, or in being a day sailor like Jack Scanlon or one of the aimlessly cruising weekend yacht owners more interested in partying than seamanship. Mocking little smiles when I said I wanted to be more than a hobby sailor, to eventually single hand my own ketch or yawl. And eyes that looked through me most of the time we were together, the way people had once looked through Jordan Wise.

So I went looking for someone reliable who'd teach me as I wanted to be taught. I'd been to a couple of the boatyards in the Red Hook area, to soak up the atmosphere and to look at the boats they had for sale, and the owner of Marsten Marine, Dick Marsten, had been friendly and unpatronizing. I solight him out. He didn't hesitate when I asked him for a recommendation.

"Bone's the man you want," he said.

"Who's he?"

"Fellow who works for me now and then. Does odd jobs, takes on day charters and gives lessons when the mood suits him."

'' Temperamental?

"Too strong a word," Marsten said. "He's his own man, marches to his own drummer. And there's no better sailor in this part of the world."

"Where can I find him?"

"He rents a slip at the Sub Base harbor marina. Ask anybody over there. They all know him."

"Bone," I said. "His last name?"

"His only name, far as I know. Just Bone."

The Sub Base harbor area, west of Frenchtown and named for the submarine base that had operated there during the Second World War, wasn't half as picturesque as the Charlotte Amalie or Frenchtown harbors. The Water Island ferry was located there, but for the most part what you saw were tramp steamers and charter fishing boats and sloops and schooners and ketches of various sizes and condition. Bone's boat was a forty-foot gaff-rigged ketch, old but well-maintained, humorlessly named
Conch Out.
C-o-n-c-h, like the shellfish. That was where I found him, on his ketch, giving the deck a coat of gray nonskid paint.

I don't know why I was surprised when I first saw him. His name, maybe. A bone is white, and I guess I expected a white man. He was black. The color of milk chocolate, actually. A Bahamian native, I found out later, from Nassau Island. Big man, not so much tall as broad and solid, beefy through the shoulders and torso and across the hips, with short legs and heavy thighs, like a tree split at the crotch into a pair of thick boles. There were flecks of gray in the grizzled beard he wore; otherwise you wouldn't have had a clue as to his age. His skin was smooth and unlined except for a few sun wrinkles around his eyes. He had two gold-crowned teeth, one upper and one lower, that glinted whenever he smiled. Which wasn't often, and not at all on our first meeting. Mostly his expression was flat and unreadable. I took this to be the usual stoic native reserve until I got to know him. In fact, he was neither stoic nor reserved; the expression masked an almost fierce dignity. Bone was an intensely proud man, and smarter than ninety-nine percent of the white men circumstances now and then forced him to serve.