Blood Tide Page 7

  Every day he watched her. She began leaving crusts of bread and hunks of cheese rind for him. Gradually she began working closer to him. Finally she was able to feed him from her hand. But when she tried to touch him one day, he crouched back, hissing, and flashed his long, yellow teeth at her.

  He scuttled away and didn’t return for three days.

  She called him Rance the Rat. Rance, short for Rancid.

  NINE

  The letter was addressed to “Señorita Capitán M. Culdee, Port Albion, U.S.A.” It had been battered, bent, smudged, spindled, and mutilated in the course of its passage through half a dozen post offices from Honolulu to Kentucky to Oregon to northern California. The cancellation mark across the gaudy alien stamps read “Siquijor, P.I.” Of course, Miranda thought, the Philippines. Her hands began to shake.

  “Dear Srta. Capitán,” the letter began in a spiky, old-fashioned script.

  I am a friend of your former shipmate Sr. E. Pascal, who has asked me to write to you. He had indeed seen your vessel THE SEAMARK in Philippine waters, at Puerto Princesa on the island of Palawan. Sr. Pascal was there on seamanlike business but four months ago. The vessel, he tells me, was taking on stores and water. When he approached it, a fierce Dog would not permit him aboard but rather attacked so as to bite him. Sr. Pascal inquired of persons at the dockside and was pointed at a young man of American persuasions who Sr. Pascal has asked where are you? The young man said you were drowned dead overboard in Mexico many months since. Sr. Pascal was very much saddened at this evil report but when the young man bought him beer to drink Sr. Pascal must wonder if this news is true. The young man was very much vagrant (¿muy vago?) on this news and hasty for his departure so when Sr. Pascal received your mail message inquiring as to SEAMARK he was very lucky, contento. Please excuse my badly English but I am working long years here in Siquijor and Sulu Sea mainly among Moros and Sea Gipsy Badjaos who speak not your felicitous tongue. Sr. Pascal sends you his fond love and much affection and wants much to see you once more and help you in recovering your fine vessel SEAMARK. Sr. Pascal would write you by his own hand but has forgotten how to do it. God be with you.

  It was signed “Padre Bartolomeo Cotinho, S. J., Misión San Ignazio, Siquijor Island, P.I.”

  So there it was. Effredio Pascal had come through.

  Miranda went first to the attic and opened her grandfather’s old sea chest, packed to its macramé-studded lid with charts and sailing directions covering the entire Pacific Ocean. They were hopelessly out of date, the most recent one published in 1938, but Miranda dug out a chart of the Philippines and carried it downstairs. Earwigs scuttled as she unrolled it, and the chart was badly gnawed around the edges, but she quickly found Siquijor. It lay due east of the south end of Negros Island, where Effredio had been born. Palawan, she saw, was a long, narrow island shaped like a dented, upside-down rifle. It lay, northeast to southwest, across the Sulu Sea less than four hundred miles west of Siquijor. Puerto Princesa appeared to be the island’s largest town, overlooking a wide, well-protected harbor on the island’s east coast. From there Curten could have gone north to Manila, or southwest to the tip of Palawan, then across the South China Sea to the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia. Or he might have stayed in the Sulu Sea. It was full of islands—hundreds, thousands of them. Or he could have . . .

  She stopped and smashed an earwig. Her heart was pounding. She had to slow down, think it through. She saw Culdee watching her from the deck.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Seamark,” she said. “A friend of mine—an old mate—he’s found her. Or seen her, anyway. Curten was still aboard her, and that dog of his, too.”

  “Where was this?”

  “Puerto Princesa. In the Philippines.”

  Culdee turned away from her, back to his knots. He was laying up robands for the schooner’s yards and staysails. But his hands trembled. He got up angrily and headed for the kitchen. He had a bottle of rum in the reefer, she knew. He pulled away on it in there for a minute. Then he came back out to where she sat looking at the chart.

  “The Philippines,” he said in a flat voice. He was looking down at her. He began humming an odd little tune. “What are you going to do?”

  “Get out there,” she said. “Get my ship back from that bastard.”

  Culdee started whistling the same tune, whistling up a wind she knew.

  “What’s that song?”

  “An old one from the Philippine insurrection,” he said. “‘I wanna go to the Filla-Pie-Neens, fight for my country and live on beans. I wanna go to the Filla-Pie-Noons, fight for my country and live on prunes.’ It goes on and on from there, however silly you want to make it.”

  “Are you coming with me?”

  “How?”

  “In the schooner. She’s nearly ready now. I ran her down to the boatyard in Port Albion and stepped the masts yesterday, and I’ve got most of the rigging rove. She’s good as new. Shipshape and Bristol-fashion. You coming?”

  “Christ, no,” he said. “My sailing days are over. I’m too old for that shit. No way. I hate that part of the world. Forget about it.”

  That evening, toward sunset, Miranda rowed the dinghy out to where the schooner lay at anchor in the bay. Bare poles swung slow and naked against a red and black sky. The little ship lay trim on the water, her bowsprit raked sharp from the long, clean sheer of the main deck. The hull looked black in the failing light. Miranda tied up to the taffrail and rigged a bosun’s chair. With a brush and a bucket in hand, she hoisted herself and painted over the schooner’s name, Caprice.

  Culdee watched from the captain’s chair.

  When she finished and lowered herself back into the dinghy, he could make out the ship’s new name, in bold white capitals: VENGANZA.

  “Vengeance,” he thought. “Payback,” but in Spanish. Appropriate. He uncorked the rum bottle, put the neck to his mouth, and tilted it toward the stars.

  TEN

  If Miranda had so far blown through the old estancia with the verve of a force nine gale, she now hit typhoon velocity. She hanked the schooner’s new suit of sails and ran out for sea trials, discovering that although it made her hustle like a Honolulu hooker, she could indeed single-hand the ship if she flew only the main and a headsail. That would cut her speed some, but once she got down to the trades she could hunt up a few deckhands. In the PI, Effredio was waiting and maybe some of her old shipmates would be on the beach somewhere along the way. She called the Philippine consulate in San Francisco and learned that as a U.S. citizen she didn’t need a visa, so long as she stayed in the Philippines only three weeks. Later, if need be, she could extend it.

  Provisioning was a problem. She didn’t have much money—a little over twelve hundred dollars from the sale of the catboat, and most of it would go for diesel fuel to drive the Graymarine auxiliary—there were doldrums down that course. She invested more than she cared to on canned meats, flour, and baking soda, then baked up a supply of hardtack and stowed it in the old ship’s biscuit tins that she found in the schooner’s galley. Not enough to last the voyage, but maybe she’d get lucky along the way. Her luck seemed to be turning now.

  Antiscorbutics? With fair winds and a boost from the currents she was only a few weeks from Hawaii, where guavas rotted in the gutters, but she laid out a few more bucks at the health food store in Port Albion for a brown-glass bottle of generic Cs and two gallons of fortified lemon juice. It would go well with the tea she’d already stowed.

  Pubs and charts? In a used-book store near Vallejo she found the U.S. Defense Mapping Agency’s Sailing Directions (Enroute) for the Philippines, volumes I and II, all updated through the previous year, along with matching charts. After long hesitation, she sunk another three bucks on a coffee-stained, rat-chewed copy of The Philippine Pilot. Thank God she was born to a seagoing family: she had salvaged her grandfather’s old sextant, barometer, and stopwatch while cleaning house last winter. The schooner’s old brass-plated clock kept a
ccurate time if you wound it regularly—she checked it against a time hack on the marine band. Anyway, she knew the wind and stars down there.

  A barrel of kerosene (for the stove, the lamps, and the running lights), a cask of heavy cod-liver oil (to calm both her bowels and storm waters—just a tablespoon or two would solve either problem), three quarts each of marmalade and red-current jam (to go with the hardtack—she boiled them down herself to save expense), a dozen tins of butter and Crisco, dried veggies (mummufied in a drying box she built from a foil-lined cardboard carton and a two-hundred-watt lightbulb), stainless-steel fishhooks and heavy-test monofilament (half a mile of it, for trolling once she got offshore)—on and on and on, until her head was spinning with the fun of it all. Fitting out, fitting out, make all preparations for getting underway. . . .

  “You’ll never find him,” Culdee said.

  “How’s that?” Miranda was curled up on the bunk in the master’s cabin, her hair all over the place, working up a list of everything she’d stowed. In the light of the kerosene lamps her eyes glowed red out of black and blue circles. A wild woman with a pencil in her mouth.

  “Well, look at it. According to that padre fellow’s letter, your old shipmate saw the boat a week before he wrote. But the letter didn’t get here for seven weeks more. You’ve been another four weeks getting your gear together—that’s three months already since the sighting. By the time you get out there, it’ll be six months.”

  “Five. I worked it out on the charts already. Five tops, maybe less if the trades are steady.”

  “You mean you’re going to cross the Pacific in a sailboat in only two months?”

  “Look, it’s 6,223 nautical miles, Great Circle, from San Francisco to Manila. At eight knots—”

  “You can’t go Great Circle. You’d be bucking the westerlies most of the way.”

  “Well, if I drop down quick to the trades, I’ll only add a couple thousand miles more. At eight knots—”

  “It’s more like three thousand. And I’ve been watching you. You can’t push that schooner flat out. You—even you—haven’t got hands and feet enough to bend on full sail. You’ll creep along at five knots tops, and even then you’ll be lucky not to get knocked down, the first big blow that hits you.”

  “Then come with me.”

  “No way.”

  She grew sullen. He stood there in the hatchway, bleeding for her. He didn’t want her to go. He needed her. Without her he’d drink himself to death in a month. There was nothing he could do about it. The hook rats would get him. But he couldn’t go back. The rats out there were even worse.

  “Anyway,” he said, “what’s the rush? You’re driving yourself too hard. You’re driving yourself nuts. Take a look in the mirror. Piss holes in the snow.”

  She looked, and he was right. Then her face in the mirror started to blur: images through saltwater. She blew out the lamps and went up to her room.

  Late that night, prowling around the house dead sober, Culdee heard her tape deck playing behind the bedroom door. A tinny little Japo tape deck, all she could afford. She was playing songs from the sixties, songs she had to tape herself off the FM band because her old boyfriend Curten had stolen all her tapes along with her boat. The songs didn’t mean anything to Culdee—he’d been out of circulation when they were popular—but they meant the world to her: “Paint It Black,” “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” “Baby Love,” “Me & Bobby McGee.” Suddenly he could see her as she was then—a sad, skinny teenybopper whose daddy was in the big joint up north because he’d been a bad boy fighting in a bad war. Even her mother says so. Even her best friends say so. But she doesn’t believe it, doesn’t believe, and she sinks into the beat. “Nothin’ left to lose.”

  Well, you better believe it. Culdee shaped his course for the reefer and the rum jug.

  For three days, four days, she was down. She slept until noon, danced for a bit on the rocks above the surf, slept some more, played her tapes. She sat next to Culdee on the deck at sundown, looking southwest. Then she went in and slept some more to the music.

  On the fifth day another letter arrived from Padre Cotinho. It was short and sweet. He had discovered the magic of the zip code, so it had only taken a week to arrive this time. In it he enclosed a clipping from the Zamboanga Times, dated just three days before he mailed the letter.

  PI DOG BITES AGAIN!

  BATARAZA, Palawan (AP)—The infamous Pi Dog of Bugsuk Island claimed more soft-hearted victims yesterday. Reports from Rio Tuba described how the Piratical Pooch lured another outrigger load of wealthy tourists to penury and embarrassment.

  The curly-haired canine corsair appeared once more—the third time in as many weeks—swimming apparently exhausted in the high seas near Ursula Island, a noted bird-watching Mecca for which the outrigger was bound. Tourists with tears in their eyes begged the boatman to bring the dog aboard. “No sooner did he shake himself off, all over our camera, than he bared his fangs and cornered us in the bow of the boat,” said shutterbug Toribio Banag of Davao. “I made a move at him, and he nearly took my hand off.”

  A few minutes later a high-speed inflatable—allegedly an Avon Redshanks 12-footer, according to witnesses at the scene—raced alongside, and the Maritime Mutt’s pirate master leaped aboard. Masked and silent as always, he relieved the passengers at pistol point of an estimated P50,000 in traveler’s checks, cash, cameras and jewelry.

  Then cur and cohort reembarked, and the raft sped off in the direction of Bugsuk Island, south of the crime scene.

  Cave canem, especially at sea!

  Miranda jumped and whirled, grabbed Culdee by the shoulders, and kissed him beard and all. “He’s there! They’re both there! That’s my raft and everything, and that’s the sea dog’s style if I ever saw it. Curt used to leave him on guard when we were in port. One night we came back from a pig roast at the hotel in Mulegé and found Brillo with three Mexican kids cornered in the head. One of the kids needed stitches and a tetanus shot. He’d tried something with a knife. That’s Brillo all right.”

  “Surprised no one’s shot him yet.”

  “He’s bulletproof,” Miranda said. “Curt swears he can dodge bullets. He’s uncanny.”

  “Sounds like you’re more in love with the dog than you are with your boat.”

  Her smile faded.

  “I’ll get them both back,” she said.

  The next day, after stowing ice for her fresh stores and topping off the water tanks, Miranda was ready to sail. Culdee wandered around the house, wanting a drink badly but not enough to let his daughter’s last sight of him be that of a falling-down drunk. Time enough when she was gone. He couldn’t stop her now.

  “Tide turns at 1800 or so,” Miranda said after she’d run through her checklist for the last time. “Come on down and help me with the mainsail. Wind ought to be offshore by that time, and if I can sail off I can save some fuel.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Aw, come on. I’ll buy you a drink.”

  “Well, maybe just one.”

  They sat in the schooner’s cockpit, watching the sunset and waiting for the tide. Miranda opened a bottle of medicinal rum and poured Culdee a water glass full. No ice, no mix. He drank it down, in his sadness unable to talk.

  “I’ll work well off tonight and catch the current,” she said. “Marine weather says strong northwesterly breezes gusting to thirty knots, so I ought to make good time. It’s part of a big front. Maybe I can get clear of Reyes before it comes around to the south.”

  “Mmmnh,” Culdee said.

  “Here, let me top off that glass.”

  A string of pelicans lumbered past, heading out to the anchovy grounds. High overhead a wedge of geese moved north, yapping like distant beagles and catching the late red light.

  “Remember to go shopping tomorrow,” Miranda said. “I took the last of the fruit and vegetables and that package of hamburger.”

  “Mmmnh.”

  “Hand me your glass.” She
refilled it.

  “I wrote Washington a couple weeks ago to deposit your pension check in the bank at Albion,” she said. “Here’s a checkbook I got for you.” Miranda handed it to him, and he tried to stuff it into his shirt pocket. She put it in for him. “It’ll be easier for you this way; you won’t have to wait in line at the bank to cash it, and you won’t be so likely to forget you even got it.”

  “Yeah.”

  “The Datsun’s low on gas, so get some tomorrow. I covered it with that tarp last night to keep the salt air off it. You ought to do that every night you’ve used it. It’s starting to rust out back there by the tailpipe.

  “Mnnmph.”

  “Give me your glass. This is good rum, isn’t it? They don’t make rum like this anymore.”

  “Nuh.”

  “Hey, hand me that screwdriver over there next to the binnacle. I forgot to stow it.”

  He got up, staggered heavily to starboard, overcorrected to port, and sprawled against the cockpit coaming. Then he lurched toward the binnacle, and Miranda stuck her foot out. He hit the deck limp, rolled on his back, and started snoring. She looked at the chronometer on the bulkhead in the companionway: 1805. The tide was sucking weakly at the schooner’s hull. She dragged Culdee down the ladder and into the mate’s cabin, rolled him into the bunk, pulled the checkbook from his pocket, took off his shoes, covered him with a blanket, then stepped out and locked the door behind her. She went quickly up to the house, shut off the main fuse switch, tightened the water taps, left a forwarding address for the mailman, and then secured the heavy shutters over all the windows. She locked the doors. That was it. Tomorrow the sheriff would begin his watch, checking the place randomly three or four times a week to guard against break-ins. She’d had to pay him extra for that, but it would be worth it.