The Best American Mystery Stories Part 24

"Them womens kill you, Ricky. Rum has sap all your powers."

"I heard a rumor," says Emmett, "that it happened three days ago. Whitey and Edna."

"No way. He came in just yesterday." Ricky spends so many of his waking hours shooting the s.h.i.t behind the bar that he never has a tan. "About four. Sat at the end, three G and Ts, paid his tab and left."

"You didn't talk with him?"

"There were these Belgian girls, I was feeding them yellow birds- you know, with the amaretto? They were starting to loosen up so I didn't pay much attention to Whitey."

"Whitey always drink his c.o.c.ktail on his boat," says Roderick. "Why is he paying double to you?"

"Psychology's not my field, man. I just pour 'em what they ask for."

"How'd he look?"

"Like he always did. Like he just stepped off that battlewagon of theirs with some twenty-foot sea monster in tow. He had that squinty-lookin' smile -"

"Muriel called him the Ancient Mariner."

"He wasn't so ancient."

"Couple years older than me, and I'm getting on." Emmett turns back to Roderick. "I think as a resident of this marina, I deserve -"

"I give you a groundation and everybody want to ax me same story."

"You tell Emmett here," says Ricky, "and the news will fly."

Roderick just smiles and starts away. "Weat for official story. Then I tell you what part is a lie."

When Emmett last talked with Whitey he'd been fine, upbeat even. They ran into each other at the local grocery, the one a mile walk from the marina but half as expensive as the Captain's Larder at the Ocean Breeze condo complex.

"Only thing she'll eat anymore," said Whitey when he caught Emmett checking out the four loaves of white bread and dozen tins of ham spread in his basket.

"I thought you liked to cook?"

"Used to. Used to do a three-course layout in that little galley of ours. Baked bread, pies. Now, it's just - you know." Whitey shrugged. "It's another meal."

Emmett nodded. "Mine won't have anything to do with fixing dinner. Twenty-five years of feeding the kids -"

"Yeah."

"So I just fire the old hibachi up -"

"Grilled what - was it amberjack last night?"

"You can smell it."

"No problem. Just don't let day man catch you."

"Roderick and I have an understanding." Emmett pushed his items forward on the counter to make room for Whitey's case of bargain gin. "How the fish been treating you?"

"Oh, fair." Whitey and Edna didn't keep much of what they caught, but they went out almost every day. "Punk Loomis got into a bunch of wahoo the other day off the east tip, we might try that."

"What are the locals catching?"

"Infectious diseases."

They laughed. As more kids drifted down from the States there were fewer and fewer locals working in the bars and restaurants, and Ocean Breeze advertised that it had "fully professionalized" its staff, which meant most of the black faces were gone. The little market was one of the few places Emmett still rubbed elbows with people born on the island.

"It had to happen sooner or later," Whitey said. "That 'no problem, mon' thing only goes so far and then you need some service. It's something we thought about a lot before we made our commitment here."

"But the culture -"

"n.o.body comes here for the culture."

There was a carnival once a year that Emmett tried to avoid, people pa.s.sed out in unusual places and a couple local bands that played loud enough to be heard over the water several miles away. What, amazed Emmett most about the island was that it was populated at all, with no fresh water and almost nothing edible grown in the interior. European sailors had tried leaving pigs and goats on it for provision, but they quickly died of thirst, and cane and sisal plantings hadn't done much better. The locals were descended from the workers on these dest.i.tute plantations and escapees from slave ships that ran aground in the early 1800s.

"All dem other crop feel," Roderick liked to say, "but tourist business been very good to we."

"You circle the globe between ten and twenty-five degrees above the equator," said Whitey, laying a sack of limes on top of the gin, "one port isn't much different than the next."

"So you're here for a while."

"Oh, we're here to stay. Like it says in the brochures," Whitey winked at Emmett, "'It's always smooth sailing in our island paradise.'"

The Schmecklers are behind the pilothouse of their big Frers head-sail ketch, spreading engine parts on a tarp. Emmett knows the father and son are Fritz and Stefan but can never remember which is which.

"Part still hasn't come in?"

"Customs," says the father. "They steal it."

"One focking injector." The son stares down at the disa.s.sembled machinery. "They don't know what it is, but they steal it."

They are tall and wide-shouldered, relentlessly enthusiastic, with thick beards bleached by the sun. The first day they sailed in Muriel thought somebody was shooting a beer commercial.

"You were a friend of the diseased?" asks the father.

"Diseased -"

"The one who is dying."

"Deceased. Whitey - yes. They were neighbors, sort of. D Pier."

"Your boat is?"

"The Golden Years? Island Packet cutter?"

"I have seen this."

"Nothing compared to your rig, but we call it home." Mrs. Schmeckler, Greta, smiles as she steps up from the cabin to shake a mat out over the starboard side. "Whitey and Edna were eight or nine slips down from us."

"They were having some problem?"

Emmett considers. "I got the impression they were living their dream. Down here in the sun, chasing fish, nothing on the horizon but more of the same -"

"Our dream now is to circle the world in the Liebenstraum," says the father. "It keeps us moving forward."

"And when you finish?"

"Then we start on another dream," says the son. "You have been to Havana?"

"Havana, Cuba? No, I'm - we're Americans."

"We go there next. "

"Could be some serious weather coming."

"If this cylinder is not fixed," says the father, "we will grow old here. Become native people."

Emmett thinks it's a joke, but he's never sure with the Schmecklers. "There are worse fates."

"Men have woyage for centuries without a motor," says the son. "Maybe we go on with only our sails."

"Don't think it's likely you'll find a Mercedes injector in Havana. Pretty lean times, what with the embargo and all. And berthing this baby without an engine in a strong wind -"

The father smiles. "Sailing is easy, ja? Only the landing is hard."

It had been another perfect day, maybe two weeks ago, heading northeast in a bracing dance with the wind, hull slicing through the swells, a half-dozen gulls coasting in their wake. Muriel's feel for tr.i.m.m.i.n.g the sails was instinctive and they barely spoke, one antic.i.p.ating the other's next move, making a leisurely ten knots into a slight breeze.

At first Emmett thought a cloud had drifted in front of the sun- a sudden chill, a dimming. Then he felt the hole inside of him, expanding. There was nothing on the horizon in any direction, nothing. But it wasn't fear or feeling small in the vast ocean. He had always preferred cruising to somewhere, somewhere they'd at least stay overnight. A destination. Going out and coming back to the same port, no one waiting for them, only the mute variables of tide and weather to define their pa.s.sage - he felt suddenly disoriented, tempted to let the wheel go, to turn off all the systems, sit back and see what would happen. The feeling didn't last more than a few minutes. Blood sugar maybe, or just some random fantods. He told Muriel to come about and she gave him a look but didn't question. The trip home was just as spectacular.

Larry is nestled in a pile of life preservers at the base of the mast on the Zephyr, pecking at his laptop. The power cord loops over his bare feet and disappears down into the c.o.c.kpit.

"When you wanted to crew a ship in the old days," he says without looking up, "you hung out at the sailors' bars till a couple likely ones drank themselves stiff, dragged them off, and threw them in the hold till you were a full day out of port. Now I'm on the f.u.c.king Web."

"What happened to your girls?"

Larry hit the marina three weeks ago with a pair of girls in their twenties he'd introduced to Emmett as his galley slaves.

"Bugged out on me."

"The both of them?"

"They came as a team. I saw the skinny one, Kim, in town yesterday. Hanging all over one of those boogie-board guys with the blond dreads. b.i.t.c.h just waves, 'Hi, Captain Larry!' like she and her dumpy little pal haven't totally screwed me."

Larry is in his early fifties, salt-and-pepper beard, a regular at the Y-Ki-Ki since his Catalina sloop limped down from the Bahamas. He was gradually heading for Tahiti, he said, once he got the right crew onboard.

"You know there's a couple young fellas on the island know their way around on a boat," says Emmett cheerfully. "Skip Andersen's boy there, Nicky, and that one that works at the bait shop - Jay? Jordan? -"

Larry shakes his head. "Only room for one hardtail on this bucket."

Emmett shrugs. "You're the skipper."

"They do that pa.s.sive-aggressive thing. My wife was the queen of that. She could say 'Oh, don't worry, it's fine,' so it came out "You blew it again, you insensitive piece of s.h.i.t.'"

He seems more agitated than usual. At first, from the bile invoked when he spoke of his ex-wife and her evil lawyer, Emmett thought Larry's divorce must be recent, the wound still raw. But he'd been single a full eight years, cruising for five, a computer-dating Ahab chasing a wet dream.

"Even if they don't learn jack about sailing," he says, "these young ones get to practice their routine on me."

Emmett keeps smiling. "So is there some kind of computer shape-up where all the able-bodied sea ladies advertise?"

"Something like that. But you hire one, they bring their whole d.a.m.n sorority along. If this wasn't too much boat to single-hand I'd be off this rock by now." He looks up to Emmett. "You hear the scuttle on the old couple?"

"Roderick won't talk."

"What does Roderick know? He didn't go inside the boat."

"You did?"

Larry logs off, closes the laptop, and sets it beside him. Emmett sees now that his eyes are red, his hands trembling slightly.

"I saw the old guy, Whitey, there at Ricky's place just yesterday afternoon. Then last night I couldn't sleep, so I get up, take a walk around the jetty -"

"This is late -"

"After three, at least. I get down at their end of D Pier and I hear the radio. Just weather reports and s.h.i.t, somebody calling in the update on this Cedric."

"Edna was a real weather junkie," says Emmett. "We'd be sitting here, she'd tell you it was raining over in the Sea of Cortez."

"Fairly useless information."

"She explained the whole hurricane thing to me once. Most people think it's like straight wind pushing you over? But really you're being pulled, sucked in to fill a vacuum. Like going down a drain." Suddenly Emmett doesn't want to know the details, dreads the responsibility of pa.s.sing the news to others. "All that noise and activity," he says, "but inside there's this big nothing."

Larry frowns at his hands. "The thing is, it was loud. The radio. I pa.s.sed by, but on the way back I figure at that hour, not a light shining on the boat, they must have spent the night in town and left it running. So I'm gonna do the Good Samaritan thing."

Emmett suddenly feels a little dizzy. He looks across the channel. Something, not clouds exactly but a different kind of sky, is coming together in the north.

"You hesitate to step on somebody's boat without an invitation. Especially the liveaboards."

"You just don't do it," says Emmett, upset. "It's an invasion of privacy."