Blood Tide Read online

  Later he learned that they hadn’t even made it to the seawall. What’s more, there never had been any Russian PT boats in the basin. And Turner—cheerful, happy-go-lucky Turner, Culdee’s good buddy and roommate, the man who’d looked up to him with such respect—Turner had been released to an American peace delegation in Hanoi a week after the breakout failed.

  He’d been slimy all along.

  It was another five years before Culdee learned the extent of Turner’s betrayal. By then the war was over, at least the American part of it. Culdee returned to the world on the first Starlifter flight of American POWs from Gia Lam Aiport in Hanoi to Clark Field in the Philippines. Each returning POW was met on the hardstand by an officer or enlisted man of equivalent rank or rate, whose job it was to “escort” the returnee through the trauma of reentry. Culdee was met by a lieutenant from the judge advocate general’s office and two Marine Corps guards. They hustled him into a small office, and the lieutenant began reading something from a handbook.

  “What is this?” Culdee asked.

  “Article 31, Uniform Code of Military Justice,” the lieutenant said. “I’m reading you your rights.”

  “My rights?” Culdee was stunned. “What the hell for . . . , sir?”

  Culdee stood accused of collaboration with the enemy. Hadn’t he been instrumental in setting up the failed prison break at Brigadune? Hadn’t he received special treatment from the camp’s second in command—candy, extra rations, a comfortable cell? Hadn’t he given military information of a sensitive nature to the enemy, in direct contravention of the code of conduct?

  “Yeah,” Culdee said. “I told them what a fid was. If you consider a ten- or twelve-word definition of an implement that’s been in use in the navies and merchant fleets of the world since the days of Christopher Columbus to be ‘military information of a sensitive nature,’ sure. But I doubt it won the war for them.”

  “So you go on record as believing that the DRVN won the war?” The lieutenant wrote that down on a legal pad. “Nonetheless, you gave your captors information beyond that permissible under the code of conduct—name, rank, serial number, and age. You violated your oath. Do you admit that freely?”

  “No. Yes. I mean, you had to be there. Yes, I broke in a way; we all broke. But we got stronger later and made them break us again. We made it as tough for them as we could—”

  “All right, moving right along now,” the lieutenant said. “What influence did your ex-wife have in extenuation or mitigation of your willingness to collaborate? The divorce must have come as something of a shock to you.”

  Culdee sat openmouthed. This had to be some kind of nightmare—either that or he’d gone crazy.

  “My ex-wife? Divorce?”

  “Yes, in her letter to you.”

  “I didn’t get any letters from her. Or from anyone, for that matter. What do you mean, divorce?”

  “Oh, come on, Culdee,” the lieutenant said wearily. He consulted his folder. “Vivian Culdee began divorce proceedings against you for desertion four years ago. The decree was granted late last year. You mean you didn’t know any of this?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well, you may have repressed it, I guess,” the lieutenant said, visibly worried now. He flipped through the pages of his folder, stalling for time. Then he focused on Culdee.

  “Look, sailor,” he said. “The navy doesn’t want to make a federal case of this. Bad publicity, a POW with a previously good record suddenly going ratty on his pals. You have twenty-four years in service. We’ll retire you as an E7, honorably, to avoid the scandal. Fair’s fair. All you have to do is sign the papers.”

  He flapped the documents on the desk and offered Culdee his ballpoint.

  Numbed, the room reeling around him, Culdee signed. There was no sense fighting it. His career was over. All he wanted now was rest.

  “Good, that’s very good, sailor,” said the lieutenant, rising. He smiled a tight little smile. “The marines will show you to your temporary quarters. We’ll have you back Stateside day after tomorrow.”

  Culdee stood up, shaky in the knees.

  “Just one question, sir,” he said. “Where did you get all this dope about the Dune? Not a word of it is true, not a bit of it.”

  The lieutenant flipped open the dossier.

  “From an Office of Naval Intelligence debriefing,” he said. “The subject was a former POW released a few years ago, fellow name of Turner. Timothy N. Turner, gunner’s mate second.”

  So Culdee returned to the land of his birth, a sailor bereft of the sea. Sitting in the captain’s chair on the deck of his shiplike house, he watched the surf pound on the hard beach below. For a while the pounding waves said, “Turner, Turner, Turner.” But finally even that sound faded.

  All he could hear was his sorrow . . .

  Then Miranda came back into his life.

  Part Two

  MIRANDA

  SIX

  Smooth sailing can be rough, Miranda realized. It gives a person too much time to think. All morning the wind had blown from the southwest quadrant, ideal for her destination. At dawn the Point Reyes light had flashed good morning from her starboard beam, and since then all she’d had to do was hold a steady course. That and worry about her arrival. Will he be there? And if he is, will he be glad to see me? Will he even remember me? More than sixteen years now, closer to twenty . . .

  She eased the starboard sheet to broaden the sail’s reach, and the blue-hulled catboat kicked up its heels to the freshening wind. Blowing fifteen knots or better, she calculated, looking up at the faded red telltales whipping from the stays. Squadrons of white horses cantered toward the beach. She smiled wryly at the image: she loved those old-time metaphors of the sea and often repeated them to herself when she was single-handing, bored in the long watches, dredging up from memory whole chapters of the books she’d read as a girl. When the plots failed her, she made up her own. This one even had a title that rhymed: Miranda Culdee Comes Home from the Sea. She wondered whether it had a happy ending.

  She’d forgotten how ominous this shoreline could feel. Muscular bulges of granite rose sheer from a cold, green surf in places where tentacles of kelp swayed like beckoning yellow arms. Now and then the head of a sea otter popped up through the kelp and gazed at her. The bluffs were crowned with tall, wind-bent firs and crooked encinas that needed only a dangling corpse or two to complete the hanging-tree image. A grim coast all right. Even the houses, few and far between, had a no-nonsense look to them, a New England look out of place in California: solid, white, fretted with obsessively intricate Victorian band-saw work, usually with a flagpole out front and a glider on the porch. Tidy boathouses stood on pilings alongside docks, and bluff-bowed workboats bounced at their moorings.

  She’d encountered little traffic since passing Port Albion early that morning—a few squat, square-shouldered salmon trollers dragging their gear astern; a big, heavily laden container ship nearly hull down on the horizon, plugging southeast toward Oakland or San Pedro. She passed close aboard a lobster boat, and the crew waved when they saw a girl at the catboat’s tiller. They looked odd in their yellow slickers and Oakland A’s baseball caps. She was used to dark brown fishermen who worked shirtless and hatless, except perhaps for a rough wreath of palm fronds around their heads and a red and white pareu to guard their groins from flying hooks. These California fishermen probably took her for some college girl out for a day’s adventure in Daddy’s toy boat. She laughed. Let them think what they wished. Miranda Culdee had already logged more blue-water miles under her keel than these inshore watermen would see in a lifetime of lobstering.

  Culdee blood, she thought. There are tides in it that draw you out to sea, like it or not. And she’d liked it as far back as she could remember. Even in the best of times, before her father disappeared from her life, he was rarely home—he was always at sea. But when he did come back, he was full of stories. Her mother never cared for them; she would listen with a knowing, c
ynical smirk while he reeled off his tales of storms at sea, monumental brawls ashore, the oddball loners he’d served with in the big, gray navy ships, and the even odder places they’d visited. When there were boats available, he took Miranda sailing—just the two of them, for her mother no longer cared for the movements of the sea—and he taught her the rudiments of seamanship. To tie working knots and the points of sail, to read the weather and dodge the worst of it, to use the currents and tides rather than battle them—he taught her everything from scrimshaw to celestial navigation. Then came Vietnam, and he was gone, a prisoner in the north. Her mother didn’t consult her about the divorce, didn’t even tell her about it until a month after the papers came through.

  Miranda had just turned eighteen then. Her mother wanted her to go to San Diego State for a business degree, then come to work in the bank where she was now a rising star in the loan department. “Money is the lifeblood of the world,” her mother said. But Miranda’s lifeblood was the sea. She was legally an adult now, free to choose her own course in life. She signed up as a deckhand on a tuna clipper heading down the South American coast.

  It was hard work on a cold sea. The captain, a former shipmate of her father’s, treated her no better or worse than he did the rest of the crew but saw to it that the men didn’t try to mess with her. She swabbed decks, polished brightwork, and mended rigging with the best of them, learned to gut hundred-pound yellowfin tuna with one slash of the knife. Often at night she left her shipmates in the fo’c’sle and climbed the rigging to sit shivering in the tuna tower, watching the moon on the distant snowcaps of the Andes. She could feel the whales blowing out there, the shoals of tuna rolling as they fed, and the bone-dry, far-off mountains. Fish scales whirled off her hands like snowflakes in the wind. She earned her sea legs on that cruise.

  In Hawaii, later, she crewed on gypsy charter boats for a while, then signed on a racing yacht as a grinder. A girl on the winches was good public relations for the millionaire who owned the boat. She was strong—nearly six feet tall, as wide-shouldered as most men, with short-cropped black hair bleached at the ends by the sun, and big, hard hands and callused feet. In the tropic heat and rain her face and bare arms had tanned as dark as a Polynesian’s. Her eyes, though, were sea green and bright as coral water, with island flecks of brown in them. She had a hawklike profile thanks to a broken nose. Down near Viti Levu in the Fijis, during a transpacific race, a winch exploded on her one night, the boom came across at once, and she caught a glancing blow as she wrestled with the runaway sheet.

  The accident left her jobless, in the clinic at Suva with a concussion, and with very little money. The racers sailed on. Down at the docks, once she’d healed, she met a skipper named Taka, a big, dark, grave man from Tongatapu who owned a trading schooner that worked regularly from Samoa down to New Zealand and back. She sailed with him for a year, working her way up to mate. It taught her more of the ways of the working sea, as opposed to the racing one, with all its glitz and glamour. Taka hauled pigs and chickens, copra and gas drums and diesel engines. His canvas sails weighed a ton compared with the light synthetic ones on the yachts. The schooner’s wooden hull demanded a lot of care. They holystoned her teak deck once a week with sand and firebricks and sluiced the planks with buckets of seawater until the sun bleached them bone white. They careened the schooner from time to time in shallow lagoons to scrape the barnacles from her hull and slap on antifouling paint to foil the shipworms. They rove new rigging, mended blown sails, fought a nonstop war against verdigris, termites, and cockroaches.

  Topside, Miranda became adept with sextant and chronometer, charts and star tables, compass, dividers, and parallel rules. She learned to read the tropical sky and the sea in all their swirling complexities—tides, winds, currents, clouds, set and drift, haze and spindrift and rings around the moon; rocks and shoals, shifting on up through the color spectrum as the keel neared danger, from blue through green and yellow to hull-gutting brown. She learned to tell good holding ground from bad in any anchorage and the places where you had to settle for bad if you didn’t want to get eaten alive by sand fleas or mosquitoes. She learned to find a hurricane hole in a hurry when she needed one and, if she couldn’t, to ride out the storm at sea. That sort of lesson, once learned, she hoped she’d never have to repeat.

  Along the way she saved her wages, and with them, finally, she bought a thirty-six-foot ketch from a broker in Auckland. The ketch was named Seamark. It was white-hulled and weatherly, fast on the wind. In her Miranda sailed the web of the central Pacific, from Tahiti and Mooréa on up to Hawaii, through the Tuamotus and the Fijis and Samoa, on across to the Marshalls and the Gilberts, once even as far as Rabaul. Where there were resorts she stopped for a while and earned her keep by taking tourists for day sails or picnics with maitais on deserted motus or for morning outings to dive over some safe reef. Where there were no resorts she hauled freight, as Taka had taught her to do.

  Most of her crew and all of her mates, over the years, were island boys. She found them harder working, better sailors, and more fun than Americans or even Australians. She could learn from them—local languages, like the beche-de-mer of the Solomons, or pidgin, which changed almost island by island, or the dark, staccato French of Polynesia; the lore of shark gods and kahunas and the Great World-Builder, Maui, who yanked the islands one by one from the bottom of the endless sea with a bone fish-hook; and practical fishing as well, like how to bend a mullet or a flying fish to a long-shanked trolling hook of stainless steel so that it wouldn’t slide off; or the best way to cook pig in an umu, the oven dug into the earth and lined with hot stones and taro or plantain leaves in which island chefs steamed their suppers and, not so long ago, their enemies. That dish was called pua’a oa—long pig. The best parts of a human being, an old Tuamotuan mate of hers named Jean-Claude Marama had told her, were the buttocks and the soles of the feet. “Vraiment,” he said. “Très agréable.”

  “How do you know when they’re done right?” she’d asked him.

  “When ze steam comes out from ze eyeballs.”

  Some of the mates became good friends. There was Charlie Tehare from the Tubuais, who could free-dive sixty feet on one huge lungful of air and stay down three minutes to clear a fouled anchor or spear a supper of grouper; and Heinzelmann, the wisecracking Samoan from Apia who could strip, repair, and reassemble any engine known to man in a matter of minutes; and Effredio Pascal from Negros in the Philippines, who taught Miranda everything she wanted to know about sea crocodiles and knife fighting. Pascal was a short, wiry man covered with scars. Didn’t talk much except when he’d been drinking; then you couldn’t shut him up. He’d tell you all about the war and MacArthur and the Moro juramentados of the insurrection, who bound their testicles in wet leather so that when it dried and shrank, the pain would drive them on to commit murder and face death willingly, who when bayoneted would grab the rifle barrel and drive the steel deeper so as to get at the man at the other end. Drunk, Pascal would describe to her the Balbal, a giant flying squirrel from Palawan with the body of a man and long, curved claws with which he loved to rip the thatch from a nipa hut and, with his sticky, snakelike tongue, lick up the people sleeping within. When he’d gotten her all spooked and goose-pimply, he’d suddenly jump to his feet and stare at her with wide, mad eyes. “I’m Effredio!” he’d scream. Then, subsiding to his heels with a warm smile, he’d ask, “Are you effred-a me?” At times like that, she was.

  Some of the mates she slept with, some not. It didn’t really matter. They were all good shipmates. All except the last, an American named Curten. She’d slowly been working her way back east by a series of charters that just happened to break in that direction—from the Marquesas to Pitcairn, then to Easter Island, then up to the Galápagos. Having come that far, she single-handed northward to Mexico, flush now from the earlier charters, to see what the coast had to offer.

  It offered disaster in a smart-ass package. He’d come ankling down the marine dock wh
ere she was moored, at Cape San Lucas, a tall, skinny, loose-limbed guy with a dog at his heels. He wore sloppy, salt-bleached canvas Topsiders with spliced laces, denim cutoffs faded almost white, a rigging knife in a scuffed leather sheath at his hip, a blue chambray shirt worn so thin by saltwater soap that she could see his dark nipples through it, and a sun-bleached bandanna that had once been red, knotted pirate-fashion on his head to contain a sprawl of curly black hair. Boat bum if she ever saw one. She noticed all these details to avoid his impudent grin and the hard, frank stare of his blue eyes. She returned to the job at hand—polishing brightwork on the binnacle.

  “So you’re Captain Bloodblister,” he said finally.

  “What?”

  “That’s what they call you out in the islands,” he said. “Or so I hear. A hard driver. Runs a taut ship. Lady Doom. Admiral Grief. I’ve never been out there much, mostly in the Caribbean and Colombia, but guys I’ve shipped with told me about you.”

  She grunted.

  “Nobody messes with you.”

  She grunted again.

  “I like a driver. I like a taut ship.”

  “So what?”

  “So I need work,” he said. “They said at the office you needed a hand.”

  She put down the rag and screwed the cap back on the can of polish, flipped her hair out of her eyes, and took a pull from a Dos Equis. The beer was warm. She spit it over the side and then spit again after it.

  “That dog come with you?”