Blood Tide Read online

  They spent the rest of the afternoon out on the veranda, overlooking the sunlit, rolling sea. While Culdee sipped, slowly now, retopping his glass from time to time and diluting it with water, Miranda told him of her track since they’d seen each other last, trying not to brag of her adventures—storms, lee shores, tight corners—but aware, in her telling and by his few questions, of his growing pride in her seamanship. His eyes glowed whenever she described some smart bit of action. The way she’d rigged and deployed her ground tackle during a big blow in the Tongas. The time she’d given the French patrol boats the slip near Mururoa, where she’d hauled a gang of Greenpeacers to protest the nuclear testing there; the careful piloting, through fog-shrouded coral heads with her kicker crapped out and only the lightest of airs—contrary at that—to bring her safely through the dogleg channel at Nouméa.

  But when she came to the part about Curten and the loss of Seamark, he began to glower. “So I bought that little catboat and headed up here, to see if I could find you,” she concluded.

  He was out of his captain’s chair now and stalking around on the deck, his glass sloshing over at his ripping turns.

  “The bastard,” he grumbled. “The rotten cocksucker.”

  She looked out to sea. Well, Curt was anything but that.

  “And you don’t know where he went?”

  “No.”

  “Those drug guys must have some idea. I wouldn’t trust those fuckers—”

  “Dad, he could be anywhere. He might already have made a big coke run in my boat and scuttled her somewhere. With what he scored off that, hell, he could be living it up—I don’t know—in Paris or Papeete or, or Montevideo. Anywhere.”

  “Or he could be dead.”

  “Anyway, I’m not going to worry about it,” she said. “It’s not the end of the world. Right now I just want to get my bearings for a while, up here, and then see what I can do to get back out there.” She gestured to the southwest—the great, rolling, cold blue sweep of the Pacific.

  He sat watching her closely, smiling.

  “What happened to your nose?”

  “Got broke,” she said, embarrassed. She covered it with her hand. “I bobbed when I should’ve weaved.”

  “Someone coldcock you?”

  “No.” She laughed. “It was my first race to Fiji. The man said ‘Ready about.’ I said, ‘Ready about when?’” They both laughed.

  “Why did you run away in the first place?” Culdee asked suddenly.

  Miranda could have given him an hour’s worth of reasons—teenage rebellion, counterculture peer pressure, child of a broken home, the only alternative to bulimia, a rampant Electra complex, penis envy sublimated to the imagery of masts and spars. . . . She’d thought about it often enough.

  “Hey, look,” she said at last, “every pimply shoe clerk and check-out girl in the world’s got a degree in pop psych. Let’s just say I had to go to sea. Anyway, what about you?”

  “Well, nothing much,” Culdee said. “The navy dumped me, you know.” He took another long swallow of the Cuervo, then topped it up neat. “I tried the merchant marine for a bit—freighters, tankers, Ship-Land containers—but it was no good. You had to join a union. Can you believe it? Carpeting on deck, TV in the crew’s quarters, even a swimming pool and a hot tub on one of the supertankers. You work an eight-hour day—one on, two off—and get overtime for extra duty. Up topside it was all SatNav systems and computers and autopilots. Muzak on the flying bridge, guys plugged into Walkmans running the winches in port. Anyway, the merch wasn’t for me. I swallowed the anchor and came back here. With my pension check I have enough to keep me in booze and beans.”

  For supper that night they dined on saltines and Hormel chili. Culdee cooked on the grease-caked stove top and ate standing up at the kitchen counter because the table was too full of dirty dishes. Afterward he finished off the Cuervo and passed out on the couch.

  Miranda turned to at daybreak the next morning. By the time Culdee had slept it off, she’d washed all the dishes, dumped the garbage, polished the kitchen floor. In the head, when he went for his wake-up puke, Culdee found the toilet bowl scrubbed spotless and the towels—fresh ones she must have located in some cupboard unknown to him—neatly folded on the racks. He staggered out onto the veranda and found her holystoning the deck. He hoisted himself into the captain’s chair and stared, frightened, out to sea. Where had his energy gone?

  In a week she had the place shipshape. At times he would hear her at her chores—hammering wind-skewed shingles back onto the roof, rehanging storm shutters, whisking great clouds of dust off the bookshelves; he’d hear the gurgle of linseed oil being poured out and the brush slap as spar varnish was applied. She sailed down to Port Albion in the catboat one day—Culdee’s ancient Datsun pickup wouldn’t start—and came back heavily laden with groceries, cleaning materials, hardware, engine parts. Then she fixed the car. But she hadn’t brought anything serious to drink. His fear mounted. There was something awful in her energy, in the strong sheer of her jaw. By God, she was going to reform him!

  Panic set his heart to racing. He was shaking again, all over. He slunk out the back door and down to the boathouse. In there, he now remembered, he’d stashed a jug of rum, stowed under tarpaulins. It was still there. He broached it and drank. Two hours later she found him flaked out on the dock and snoring in a halo of fumes.

  Stalemate.

  EIGHT

  And so it went for weeks, for months—Culdee either drunk and voluble or comatose in his captain’s chair. The more he wasted himself, the harder Miranda worked. As if they were on a kind of seesaw, she thought. The lower he sank, the higher she flew. How long could he last? He was killing himself.

  “Why do you drink so much?” she asked him one morning. He was at the bright, gabby stage of his lopsided cycle—twenty minutes of rum-fueled pep followed by a day and a half of the dead-eyed sulls.

  “Doctor’s orders,” he told her slyly. “If I don’t put away at least a fifth a day, I’ll croak. So will the sawbones.”

  “I never heard anything so ridiculous. Who is this so-called doctor?”

  “There’s two of them, actually. Mine’s the good doc. If I don’t do what he says, the bad one will kill us both.”

  “What are their names? I want to talk to them.”

  “You won’t find them in the book,” he said. “But they call themselves Doctor Igor and Doctor Superigor.” He laughed and raised the bottle.

  Another time he told her about the hook rats. They were big, ugly things with thick tails. The tails had barbs on them like fishhooks, and when you were asleep, they crawled up on you and stuck their tails in your chest. Then they started chewing into your belly. You couldn’t pull them off. They had scales on them like sharks, razor sharp. Grab hold, and you’d rip your hands to ribbons. They burrowed in fast, and you could feel them tugging your guts, gobbling them like long, soft sausages. Scream, and they’d only chew faster, wagging their tails with joy. But they didn’t like booze. If you could get to a bottle quick enough, all it took was a couple of long, strong slugs to make them scuttle away. For a while at least.

  Now and then he could quit for a week or two at a time. Then he was fun to be with. He worked alongside her at the chores, cooking and cleaning and washing the dishes, fixing the pump when it broke, polishing brightwork or painting the hull of the catboat. He told her sea stories about WestPac and his old shipmates, memorable cruises and epic liberties. But he never talked about the scars. She’d noticed them, like bracelets of old coins around his wrists and biceps, shiny and concave, and when he worked shirtless in the sun, she’d see the deep, glossy hole in his shoulder. He had small round scars on his chest and back, and more of the coin things around his ankles. One day she asked.

  “Got caught in the shit storm,” he told her. “Shit burns deep.”

  They worked on for a while in silence. His face grew hard in the weak California light. They were caulking the catboat, paying cotton and o
akum into the seams and pounding it deep with caulking irons. The air was sharp with the reek of creosote. Culdee hammered the oakum viciously with the heel of his fist, muttering to himself. Then he stood up and slammed the iron on the deck.

  “Shit burns deep,” he said. “But payback is a motherfucker.”

  He stared out to the far southwest.

  Miranda was trying, long distance, to collect the insurance on Seamark. If she got it, she thought, they could afford help for Culdee—not a shrink, he wouldn’t stand for that, but maybe a long trip somewhere, a sea voyage, something to put him back in touch with life. The insurance carrier was the Bank of Polynesia, in Papeete, and weeks passed between letters. The bank always wrote in French, in language so arcane and convoluted it took weeks more for Miranda to decipher them. They wanted proof that her vessel had indeed been stolen, not lost through some act of criminal negligence on her part, some fait maladroit that would exonerate them of responsibility.

  The few Mexicans she knew in La Paz and Cabo San Lucas pleaded ignorance of the affair, if they answered her letters at all. In despair, she wrote to all her former mates in the wide Pacific—Heinzelmann, Taka, Effredio, the lot of them. No answer. Then the bank, too, fell silent. She began to understand about payback.

  Up the coast from the house a creek cut its way through the foothills and spread, behind the dunes, to form a small marsh. Below the marsh was a tidal outlet. Steelhead ran up through the channel to spawn far upstream, and in spring and fall ducks fed in the pickleweed of the brackish water. One day when Culdee was sober he took Miranda up there. They brought along a picnic lunch, a double gun, and two flyrods.

  They hiked up through the dusty hills, spooking deer from the manzanita thickets. Valley quail whistled from the old, rotting fence posts, in fields where wild cattle once ran. Then they dropped down a rain-rutted draw to the creek. It was cold in the shadow of the madronas, and the boom of the surf, masked now by hills and dunes, was hollow in the distance. The creek was clear, with deep green holes beneath the fast falls. Culdee pointed out a dark, long shadow finning in one of the pools—a steelhead trout fresh in from the sea—but they continued on down a goat trail beside the creek until they broke out on the edge of the marsh.

  “Quiet now,” Culdee said. They left the rods and hamper beside a rock and crept, crouching down into the reeds. Culdee had the gun. They worked along the edge, slowly, in hip boots. The water was cold. Ahead Miranda could hear the throaty chuckling of ducks and see the circles of their dabbing. Then the ducks got up off the water with a sudden splashing racket, their green heads brilliant in the light, and Culdee shot twice. Two of them folded and fell. He turned and smiled. He’d shaved and brushed his teeth that morning, and for a moment, looked almost boyish.

  Later he taught her to shoot at the birds that came swinging in over the floating bodies of the ducks he’d killed. He coached her in mounting the gun solidly—keeping both eyes open, her left hand far out along the barrels, then swinging smooth and fast and steady along through the swift, low shape of the bird until she saw, down the plane of the barrels, the black, glittering eye. That was the time to hit the trigger. She killed the third bird she shot at—a pintail, it turned out. And the fourth as well. That was enough ducks for one day.

  They lunched in the warm lee of the dunes, sharing an abalone salad, the main ingredient of which Miranda had personally dived for from the offshore rocks, along with her own home-baked rye bread. Then Culdee took her to a big, cold blue pool where the creek met the brackish water. He pointed out the shimmering shadows cast on the rocky bottom by the newly arrived steelhead. He worked some line off the flyrod and with one quick, low backward cast laid it out, quartering upstream of the rearmost shadow. The fly—a Humboldt railbird he called it—lighted on the water without a splash and disappeared into the current. A moment later the shadow flickered and was gone. Culdee raised the rod, and it bent almost in half. A long, silver shape exploded into the sky, loud as the morning’s mallards. The reel screamed. He handed Miranda the rod, smiling again, his eyes bright and happy. The fish was strong, as strong as the wahoo she’d often caught in the islands, as strong and acrobatic pound for pound as the blue marlin she’d hooked and lost off Kona. The steelhead broke off on its tenth or twelfth jump. She turned crestfallen to her father, but Culdee told her not to worry, there were plenty left where that one came from. Then he taught her to cast.

  Later, as they hiked up the trail toward home, he stopped and looked back down at the marsh and the creek. His eyes were dark now, and the smile was gone.

  “That was my heaven,” he said. His profile to the sunset, Culdee’s face was half red, half black.

  While the good weather lasted, she hunted and fished on her own. She grew proficient at it, deadly enough when she wanted to be, but it could never be her heaven. She’d found that already, and lost it: the freedom of the seas. Now she was on the beach. They were both on the beach. That was the hell of it. She let her hair grow long. She’d only kept it short so it wouldn’t foul in the rigging.

  With the winter rains Miranda looked indoors for work. The old family schooner, Caprice, rested on blocks in the boathouse, high and dry and shrouded in canvas since her grandfather’s death fifteen years ago. She was forty-eight feet, two masted, and although her rigging was rotten, the oak-ribbed hull was still sound—even if great gaps showed daylight through strakes where the caulking had dried out. Her masts of Douglas fir seemed strong enough. Crawling around the forepeak and lazaret with a flashlight, Miranda found a shipwright’s treasure trove—blocks and shivs; snap rings and eye-bolts and spare pelican hooks; gallons of litharge and red lead; Stockholm pine tar for the rigging; coils of Manila, cotton, and hemp rope in diameters varying from three-inch hawsers to small stuff; shackles, thimbles, cringles, sail twine, and needles; bolts of heavy canvas stowed airtight and safe from rats and rot; reels of wire cable and shots of anchor chain (rusted by time but needing only the touch of a wire brush and some fresh paint to be young again); even two spare anchors, Danforths, just in case.

  Miranda turned to. All winter long the boathouse rang to the chime of her caulking iron while rain drummed on the roof. At night, in the house, she sewed new sails by hand until her palms were sore, then soothed them by smearing warm tar into fresh rigging. She carved trunnels of locust wood to replace the few that had split, worked hot oil into frozen blocks until they hummed, cut chafing gear from an old cowhide. She wire-brushed and painted, rasped and splashed, until she was permanently spotted, like some gaudy reef fish—red and yellow and black. There were rats in the schooner’s hold. She stalked the dumb ones and killed them with a marline-spike. The smart ones she smoked out with a slow fire of rags soaked in fuel oil and Raid, then shot them with the 12-gauge when they abandoned ship. Finally there was only one left, a grizzled old graybeard wise to her every trick. One day she cornered him up in the forepeak. He reared back in the beam of her flashlight, glaring at her down the long, scarred reach of his snout, whiskers bent and twitching like frayed wire. He smelled horrible. One ear had been chewed to a stub in his lifetime of mating and fighting. He’s ready to die, she thought, but he’s not afraid. Ah, well, what’s a ship without a rat? And she crawled away without touching him.

  Topside at the house Culdee sat in his chair, staring out to sea. Now and then he’d catch a whiff of hot tar or red lead, and his nostrils twitched. Vagrant breezes brought him the rasp of Miranda’s saw or the bang of a hammer. He got out of the chair and rummaged around the house until he found a coil of clothesline. He tried to cut off a length of it with his old rigging knife, but the blade was too dull. He sawed it through with a bread knife instead. About six feet ought to do it. He whipped the ends neatly with waxed wrapping twine so they wouldn’t unlay and went back out onto the deck.

  When Miranda came up for lunch, she found him at the edge of the deck, by the railing. He was throwing knots. Simple ones at first—Kelligs and beckets, buntlines and bowlines, timber hitches and
Magner’s hitches. He took them slow and easy, and when he tied them right, he almost smiled. Then he moved on to more difficult ones—the sailor’s cross and waterman’s knot, the lover’s knots (true and false), lanyard knots, sheepshanks, a double crown with single loops.

  On the difficult knots his hands sometimes cramped, and she would find him cursing, tears in his eyes, banging the hand on the deck. It resembled the monkey fist he was trying to tie. Before she could stop herself, she was telling him that if he ate better and didn’t drink so much, he wouldn’t cramp up like that. He just stared at her, not trusting himself to talk.

  “Aw, this is just kid’s stuff,” he said finally. “I don’t know why I mess with it. I used to tie these things in the dark. I used to could tie them in my sleep.”

  But the next day he came down to the boathouse and searched through the old line until he found a coil of worn, two-and-a-half-inch hemp. He carried it back to the house, and she heard him chopping at it with an ax. On her visits to the house she saw him unlaying the rope lengths into their individual strands, then into their separate yarns. He checked them through for strength and began retwisting them. A week later he presented her with half a dozen neatly tied fenders, each grommeted perfectly at either end. “Keep you from taking splinters out of the dock when you come alongside,” he said.

  Now instead of just staring out to sea, he would stare out to sea and throw knots, blindly, all the time.

  By winter’s end, as the rains grew intermittent and the weather warmed, Miranda opened the boathouse doors. Through most of the afternoons the sunlight reached the schooner’s stern sheets, and she began replacing sections of taffrail that had weakened or rotted out over the years. She found some old teak among the sea stores, lathed round and the right diameter, but it was straight. She rigged a steam box and softened the wood until she could warp it to the proper contours. It was pleasant feeling the sun again. One afternoon she felt she was being watched. She had stripped off her paint-stained canvas shirt and was working topless. When she looked behind her, she saw the rat’s eyes gleaming in the companionway hatch.