Cross Current - Kling Christine - Страница 29
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- 29/78
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My heart had just gone from zero to sixty in under ten seconds, and I felt light-headed. Family! That meant a mommy, a daddy, and one point two children. I didn’t fit in that picture. What kind of mother could I possibly be? I didn’t even know what to do for a ten-year-old girl, much less an infant. And when it came to mothering, what kind of chance did I have? Look at the role model I’d had.
He was going to outwait me. Silence had never bothered B.J. He was just going to stand there, waiting for me to say something. I inhaled the smell of his sweat, his coconut soap, and the faint lingering odor of the Japanese food. Damn him. More than anything I wanted to mold my body against his, take him into my room, rip off his clothes, and lose myself in our lovemaking. And I knew if I did, it would mean I had made a decision I was not yet ready to make.
“B.J., just go. Okay? This is not a good night for this. Tonight, I just need to rest. I can’t—” I couldn’t what? Look at his eyes? “Night,” I said.
I closed the door and leaned back against it, and when I heard the gate close behind him, I wondered if I would ever have a really good night again.
XII
About the time I figured out that the ringing sound was the phone, and I realized I had better pull myself out of the depths of sleep to answer it, the answering machine clicked on, and I heard myself saying, “I’m either not home or out on the boat, so call me on channel sixteen or leave a message here. Bye.”
After the beep, I heard Perry Greene’s voice. “Seychelle, get your butt out of bed, honey. I know you’re there.”
I wanted to bury my head under the pillow and make him go away, but since the only reason Perry would be calling me at home at that hour would be for some kind of work, I reached over and lifted the phone on my nightstand.
“Shit, Perry, what time is it?”
“There’s my darlin’. It’s what, five-thirty? Hell, the sun’ll be up any minute now. I knew I could call you ’cuz I bet a foxy chick like you is up at the gym every morning making your hard little body even harder.”
“Perry, this little body of mine is two inches taller and about the same weight as your scrawny ass. What do you want?”
“I’m offering you an employment opportunity, sugar.”
As much as I detested the thought of working with this sleaze, I couldn’t afford to turn down a job. That Miss Agnes job had been my only work in the past week. “When, where, and how much?”
“I got a job moving some eighty-foot Eye-talian motor yacht from Port Everglades up to River Bend. This is an important dude. We’re talking future jobs here. It’s gonna need boats bow and stem. My cousin Leroy was gonna handle the aft end with his launch, but I just found out he got into a little trouble at Flossie’s last night.”
I sat up and swung my legs over the side of the bed. The size of the boat told me the paycheck would be enough to make working with Perry worth it. “A little trouble?”
“Well, Leroy didn’t know the guy had a knife! Anyways, it’s not so bad ’cording to my auntie, just a few slashes. He’s over at Broward General now, but we’re coming up on slack high water at nine this morning.”
“I’ll only do it if you’ll go fifty-fifty.”
“Damn, girl. It’s my job.”
“And you need me. Take it or leave it, Perry.”
He barely paused a beat. “All right. The boat’s called O Solo Mio, and she’s berthed between cruise ships right on the commercial dock. You can’t miss her. Be there by eight.”
He’d given in too easily. That could only mean he was hiding something.
I was famished after last night’s sushi, but I didn’t feel like driving anywhere. I had no fresh milk for cereal and no bread for toast. When all else fails, I turn to a supply of toaster waffles I keep in the freezer. I knocked the clumps of frost off a couple of waffles by slamming them into the side of the sink half a dozen times, then dropped them into the toaster. With the coffee water heating and the waffles sizzling, I walked over and lifted the lid to Red’s trunk and took out the stack of photos. While I ate the waffles with my fingers, licking off the syrup and washing it down with two cups of coffee, I sorted through all the photos in the trunk, dividing them into two piles—those taken on the yacht delivery trip, and all the rest. If I’d had more time, I might have been interested in some of the old pictures of my parents hanging out together before they became my parents, or the photos of Red with his Navy buddies, but right now, I just wanted to learn what I could about that trip back in the spring of 1973.
There were six photos of the trip, and I counted four recognizable characters. Besides Red and Joe, there was a young woman and another man with a big black walrus mustache and one of those awful boxy seventies hairdos. There was something odd about his face, as though it weren’t quite symmetrical, but I couldn’t really identify what was off. He was shorter than Red and bowlegged. He looked a good deal like that character in the cartoons—Yosemite Sam. He seemed to be the head honcho. Maybe he was the hired captain of the boat, maybe the owner. I doubted that last, though. He didn’t look much older than thirty, and even back in 1973, a schooner like the Nighthawk was very expensive to buy and even more to maintain. Trying to keep a wooden hull in that kind of shape in the tropics was like fighting a constant war against marine borers, termites, dry rot, the tropical sun, and electrolysis. Classic boats were beautiful to look at, but I sure as hell was glad that there were other people out there working on them, not me.
One of the photos showed a close-up of Yosemite Sam’s face, and I noticed that a wide scar cut through his left eyebrow and the two halves of the eyebrow didn’t align quite right. Whoever had stitched him up had left him with a zigzag look. His nose had been broken as well, and the skin of his face was deeply pockmarked, probably from acne.
I slid the photos into my shoulder bag with the idea that, at some point in the day, I would head over to Mike’s and ask him what he knew about his buddy Joe. Then I dug around in my bag for the Post-it that Collazo had given me with the name of the Haitian translator. The number was for the radio station where the police translator, Martine Gohin, worked. When I dialed it, an answering machine picked up. I left a message explaining to Ms. Gohin that Collazo had given me her name and that I wanted to ask her some questions about Solange.
Perry’s boat, Little Bitt, was already tied up astern of the Italian mega-yacht when I throttled Gorda down in the Port Everglades turning basin. Perry was on the bow of O Solo Mio, readying the towlines. As I knew he would, he motioned me to tie up off the bow. This meant I would end up the head boat, and what had started as Perry’s job was now mine. Not a problem. Gorda had more power than Little Bitt, and I had more experience than Perry at this type of work.
The tricky part of towing yachts this size up a narrow river is that boats get steerage only from moving at a certain speed through the water. If there is no water flowing past her rudders, a boat cannot turn. With the help of twin screws and bow thrusters, some boats are able to spin in their own lengths, but a boat like O Solo Mio still did not have brakes. The regulations required that vessels of a certain length and draft be assisted by a tug when going upriver. So, with five drawbridges standing between Port Everglades and the upriver boatyard facilities, as well as riverbanks that were lined with millions of dollars’ worth of yachts and properties, there was always plenty of business for Gorda.
For three to four miles inland, the river remained tidal so that it reversed its flow with each change of the tide. When towing a vessel, it was always preferable to tow against the current so that Gorda and her tow could be moving at five knots through the water, but actually only be moving at three knots over the bottom and past the riverbanks. I also had to be concerned about depth because there were spots where the river shallowed up to six or seven feet at low water. The trick was to tow upriver just after high tide while the water was still deep but the current was flowing downriver.
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- 29/78
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