Corcovado, Or Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars

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"Every morning at two, come rain or shine."

"You know...that's not normal."

"It is...if you have to be in the cockpit by four."

"Maybe that's why Mom always slept 'til noon. Or...maybe it was the bourbon."

"It wasn't easy for her, I guess."

"She knew what she signed up for, Pops. You were her meal ticket, her free ride."

"She's your mother, Ted, and I'm not sure she deserves that."

"You always were too easy on her."

"Easy?"

"The booze. The fucking around."

"Don't talk like that."

"Jeez, Dad...she's been cheating on you since I was in middle school."

"And your point is?"

"My point? Well, when you were gone she was either stone cold drunk and passed out by the time I got home from school, or..."

"You know, Ted, that's all water under the bridge. I don't want to hear it anymore and you don't need to live there. It's over, and it seems to me a little forgiveness is in order - eh, Padre?"

He stood in the silence that followed, looking down at the stars reflecting off the water, searching for Altair.

"What about you, Pops? Did you fuck around?"

"Nope, not once."

"Figures. You're the most saintly soul I've ever known. Too bad you're an atheist."

"I am not an atheist."

"Oh, come on, Pops. The only time you've gone to church is for a wedding, or a funeral..."

"So? What does church have to do with God?"

They both laughed at that one, if only because that line had always one of his favorite, yet he knew in his heart he might be wrong about all that stuff.

"I spend a lot of time in church now," Ted added. "With the Fathers."

"That sense of community is a powerful thing, son."

"I know. I think that's what attracted me to the church in the first place."

"Is that what attracts you to medicine?"

"Maybe a little, but not like the whole church thing. It's the idea that there's some purpose to all this, that maybe things happen for reasons we can never really fully understand."

"I think my grandfather was the same way. Said the only religious experience he'd ever had in his life was when he was flying airplanes."

"Sound like hypoxia to me."

"Smart-ass."

"Yup, and I have the SAT scores to prove it, too."

"You got your brains from your mother. Man, she was a real rocket scientist."

"Until Jack Daniels came calling, anyway."

"I guess we all have our crosses to bear."

"You know what her's is?"

"No, not really. A hunch, but she would never open up about it."

"What's your hunch?"

He sighed, shook his head. "You know what? Maybe you should ask her someday."

"You're just not going to speak ill of her, are you?"

"Nope."

"You still love her?"

"Yup."

"Jesus, Dad. Why...?"

"Why? Oh, I guess it has something to do with standing before God and making a promise to that effect. Something like that, anyway."

"But she..."

"There are no buts, kiddo. A promise is a promise, even if the other person on the other end can't keep up their end of the bargain. You're only as good as your word, and don't you ever forget that."

"I don't imagine you'll let me."

"I won't always be around, Ted. That's something you'd do well to remember, too."

"Oh?"

"You and your mother need to clear the air, come to terms."

"Is you sick?"

"Not that I know of, but..."

"I'm not ready for this conversation, Dad."

"Okay..."

They heard it then...a disturbance in the water...a rippling in the air, and they turned and looked down into the inky starscape and saw a sea otter swimming on it's back, looking up at them as it circled lazily under the bow pulpit.

"I'll be..." he said.

"I thought these little guys were extinct," Ted whispered.

"Not quite. I see 'em every now and then, even in the lake."

"Damn...he seems almost tame."

"Not likely. More like brazen confidence. They don't fear us anymore, I guess."

"Didn't they hunt them for their pelts?"

"Uh-huh."

"Damn."

"Yup. They're kinda cute."

"Kind of? I don't know about you, but I'd like one as a pet."

"Yeah? Well, aside from being aquatic mammals, they're also wild. I don't think that's a such a great combination, even for a dorm room, but go ahead - you ask her."

"Her?"

"Hey, Paco, she's laying on her back...see any of the relevant hardware down there?"

"When did you start calling me Paco? I was still a spud, right?"

"Oh, when we went down to Mazatlán that Christmas. You were, let's see, four? You couldn't eat too many tacos, and, well, Paco rhymes with..."

"Gee, that sounds original, Dad."

He looked up into the night sky, found Altair in an instant and felt suddenly reassured that it was still there, and that struck him as odd. Had his life changed so much, been so thoroughly disrupted that now he felt unsure of these same New Mexican stars? Then images of Ted eating tacos in a Mexican village filled his mind's eye...

"You had to be there, I guess. As a parent, I mean. You stuffed those things in so fast...your cheeks were so puffed-out...you were a sight. You had your first beer then, too."

"I - what?"

"Well, you don't drink the water down there..."

"I remember...the Aztec two-step..."

"Well, you bit into a huge jalapeño. Your face turned beet red and you started to tear up, and I had a bottle of Carta Blanca in hand. You reached up and grabbed it, downed about three quarters of that bottle in one go..."

"And I've been madly in love with beer ever since."

"I guess you thought it saved your life."

"It probably did. Hallelujah, and praise the Lord! Beer, breakfast of champions!"

"Milk does a better job, so does Coke."

"Thank God you drank beer those days."

"Well, too late. There she goes," he said as the otter rolled over and disappeared beneath the black waters.

"Damn. And I was really hoping..."

"So, you wanna get moving?"

"Now? It's still kinda dark out, Pops."

"Track's laid in on the GPS...no problemo."

"Well, sure; I'm still on east-coast time, so I'm up for the day."

"Okay...I'll fire up the diesel. You better go below and stow your gear..."

"I know the drill, Dad."

Ten minutes later they were motoring out of the little harbor, then he turned north towards Little Flattop Island - and Canadian waters - and still there was no sign the sun was ready to put in an appearance. He sat behind the wheel, looking at chart symbology as Altair motored through the various channels between all the big and little islands that formed their route north, and then he heard Ted down below fixing coffee and warming croissants.

"You still do the Nutella and orange marmalade thing?" his boy, his fat-cheeked "Paco," called out over the rumbling diesel, and he shot a thumbs-up back to the galley. A few minutes later they were eating in rumbling silence, the only sound the diesel working below the cockpit, but soon enough an apricot-salmon-colored sky appeared over Mount Baker, and he wondered what this new day would bring.

"So, we putting into Vancouver tonight?" Ted asked.

"Yeah. Nanaimo is still kind of dead this early in the summer. I'm not even sure the marina is open there."

"Suits me. Is Nancy's still around?"

"Yeah," he replied. "Some traditions are too strong for even time to kill." Nancy's was THE place to meet and eat on the Sound, literally. It wasn't called Desolation Sound without reason, but it helped the food there was good. "You wanna steer for a while? Time to drain the main vein..."

"What? No autopilot? No flight director with auto-land capability?"

He shook his head while he flipped on the autopilot, then walked to the aft rail and pulled down his shorts enough to fire a stream into their wake, his knees braced against the rail as he looked up at the fading stars. Altair was gone now, gone beneath the southern horizon for another day, and he felt that old familiar tinge of sadness - then he heard Ted walking aft, by his side, and soon he was draining his vein into the sea, too.

He took the cut between Deer Harbor and Jones Island, adjusting his course on the chartplotter and executing the change, then he cycled the radar, saw there was still no traffic on the water...but then he saw Sucia Island ahead, and Echo Bay.

Probably the worst weekend of their lives came back to him in those returns...

"Echo Bay?" Ted asked, pointing at the screen.

"Yup," and he saw his son shrink from his own memories of that sundered place. Barbara, drinking more than usual that weekend, decided it was time to shred her son to pieces, and with her razor sharp tongue had belittled and berated him - while he'd been out on the water in one of their kayaks. He'd looked on from afar as Ted dove off the bow and swam ashore, so he had paddled to shore, tallied the damage.

Ted was sitting on the rocky beach, knees pulled up to his chest, tears falling from reddened eyes - trembling like a leaf - again.

They'd sat and talked until the sun went down, then he'd gone back to get another kayak to bring back to the beach - and he noticed Barbara wasn't in the cockpit. When they both got back to the boat she still wasn't there so he'd gone below to check on her - only to find Barbara passed out, only this time with an empty bottle of Valium in hand.

She'd been carried out by the Coast Guard that night, airlifted to Bellingham. Stomach pumped, three long days and nights in the hospital while they waited, then back home - another vacation ruined. Ted was a total wreck by that point, but nothing compared to Barbara...

And here it was again. All those feelings in radar returns - as if beamed from this place for all time.

"I know it still hurts," he said, "and I guess it always will..."

"I don't know why you think I could ever forgive her."

"Because of human frailty, son. Nobody's perfect..."

"That's a laugh, Pops. She's the meanest human being that ever lived."

"She wasn't always that way, Ted."

"Oh? What happened?"

"Lots of things, I think, but first among them was, well, me."

"You?"

"Yeah. When we started to drift apart maybe I could've..."

"Dad...stop. You can't take the blame for who she is, all the things she did. She's a crazy, fucked-up narcissist, maybe even a goddamn psychopath, but all you did was fall for her routine, once upon a time, but you don't have to carry that around for the rest of your life. YOU need to move on, YOU need to find someone else - while you're still young enough."

"You think so, huh?"

"Fuck yeah, you old goat."

"So...you really wanna get laid this summer?"

"What?"

"You said you wanted to try the whole girl thing this summer. What'd you have in mind? Falling in love, the whole nine yards, or just getting your rocks off?"

"I'd like to, well, both, maybe."

"Has this got something to do with the whole priesthood thing?"

Ted looked off, studied the mountains for a while, then turned back to him. "I don't know...maybe. There's this girl, Susan, but I just don't have any confidence in myself..."

"So, you're not really serious about this seminary thing?"

"I don't know, Dad. Sometimes, but it doesn't really feel like a calling to me anymore."

"Okay...suppose you meet a girl this summer, and you fall in love? Then what?"

"Then that whole thing wasn't for me."

"Okay. Then - where does that leave you?"

"I don't know, Dad. Maybe...like...just take one thing at a time?"

"Maybe, but what if being a priest is what you really want to do? You're confused right now, and adding a girl to the mix might only make things more confusing. So, maybe you should just turn away from all those things for a while. Getting in a relationship might just fill you with all kinds of regret later down the road."

"Father Murphy talked to me about it, ya know?"

"Oh, how is that old goat?"

"Fine. He sends his regards, by the way."

"Hard to believe we both had him as a prof."

"Yeah...those Jesuits...they seem to hang on the longest. He turned eighty last year."

"And still looks like he's fifty, I bet."

"Forty."

"All that clean living."

"Yeah, right. Those guys love their vino, that much I'll say."

"So...a girlfriend? You want to try a one night stand first? Vancouver is probably a target-rich environment."

"Isn't that line out of Top Gun?"

"Top Gun was out of real life, Paco. Art imitates life, remember?"

"You mean, you guys really talked like that...?"

"Sorry. Yes."

"Sorry? Why are you always apologizing?"

"I don't know...kinda feels like the thing to do. So. Vancouver? We goin' on a pussy-hunt?"

"Jeez, Dad, you sound just like Trump..."

"You mean, I take it, that Trump sounds like ninety percent of the other white-Anglo-Saxon-males in this country? Man, what a double standard that guy has to live up to... Ya know, I heard that W was at a birthday party down in Texas, like before he was governor, and he was drunk as hell and walked up to the honoree, a woman who had just turned fifty. He says something like, "Gee, does it feel the same to fuck after fifty as it did before?"

"Yeah, I heard that one. Did you know he was arrested in Maine, for driving while intoxicated...?"

"Yup, and did you hear he assaulted the trooper who arrested him?"

"Yup. Kinda makes me think there's a double standard at play, don't you think?" Ted asked.

"Oh? How so?"

"Well, Clinton gets a BJ in the oval office and gets impeached, while W skated on all that stuff."

"W had smarter people around him. Politics is the art of not getting caught."

"Man, have we sunk so low?"

"We? What do you mean? There've been politicians for thousands of years, of one stripe or another. All this crap is nothing new, and all of which seems like a good way of you avoiding the question. Do you want to get laid? Is that the idea?"

"So, just like that...you can get me laid tonight?"

"No, but I can get you in the right environment. The rest is up to you."

"Jeez, Dad..."

"Hey, Paco, you need to remember this: girls like sex too. Got it? You act like a Neanderthal and you'll never get anything, but take it easy, be yourself and just let nature take it's course."

"I'm scared around girls."

"Yeah? That's been programed into you by millions of years of evolution. You SHOULD be scared of 'em, Paco, because once they sink their fangs into you you're doomed."

Ted laughed, a nervous laugh full of expectation and insecurity, then: "Is that what Mom did to you?"

"Exactly. Didn't I ever show you the fang marks?"

"Ha-ha."

"I'd say the trick, given the biology of the situation, Ted, is not to fall in love. At your age you're programmed to fall in love, it's almost a biological imperative. The drive impairs your thinking, too, makes you say silly shit and do even sillier shit. Like marry a gal you hardly know, promise to spend your life with her..."

"You mean, life is reduced to testosterone - and insecurity?"

"Pretty much, yeah."

"And that's what happened to you?"

"I don't think I'm any different than anyone else, Paco. I say stupid shit under the influence of testosterone or tequila. Or, as the case may be, both testosterone and tequila. Your mother got me at a Cinco de Mayo thing over by the commons."

"She...got you?"

"Got a couple shots of tequila into me, showed me some high thigh. I was a goner after that."

"You make it sound so simple..."

"Falling in love IS simple, Ted. You just gotta let it happen. You'll know when it does, too. Take my word for it. The problem is to hold onto your brains when your pecker wants to take over."

"And, what if, after, I decided on the priesthood...?"

"That's a calling, Ted. In it's purest sense of the word, and yet you've always been interested in those kinds of questions, so I wouldn't be at all surprised."

"You're wouldn't? It sure surprised me..."

He looked at the chartplotter again, noted they were abeam the island now and he checked the depth under the keel, then watched as the autopilot changed course to 315 degrees - about thirty miles to their next charted waypoint - and already he could see jets angling in for their approach to CYVR. How many times had he shot the same approach, he wondered? How different everything looked from up there.

Had his life up their skewed all perception...?

"Want a DDP?" Ted asked, and he nodded.

He swept the horizon while his boy was below, saw something odd on radar - then visually picked up a Coast Guard 44 just as Ted came up from below.

"I think we're going to have company," he said, pointing at the display, then at the white hull arcing into a turn - in their direction.

"Coasties?"

"Yup."

"You got any dead bodies stowed below?"

"Two or three, why?"

"Just wonderin'? I brought along a couple, too."

They watched in silence as the cutter drew near, near enough to see a couple of men looking at them through binoculars from the bridge.

"I thought you have one of those stickers?"

"Yeah, still do, but that just allows me to clear-in without having to go to the Customs Dock in Seattle."

"What are they looking for?"

"Drugs. Terrorists. Horny college students. You know...the usual."

One of the men on the bridge-deck waved at them and the cutter changed course towards Bellingham, and he waved back. "Well, we're in Canadian waters now, or will be in a few minutes. Guess it wasn't worth the hassle."

"When will we get to Vancouver?"

"Oh, about ten hours," he said as he popped the top to the Dr Pepper. "I think the wind will pick up in about two hours, so if you want anything hot to eat, now's the time to do it."

"You got bacon and eggs down there?"

"You're kidding, right?"

"Stove still work the same way?"

"Yup, still does."

"How many eggs? Still do three, over easy?"

"I do."

"Okay, comin' right up, Masta."

After 'growing up' together on Altair, there's was an easy routine. Ted knew where everything was, how everything worked, even how to break a few non-essential items, too, but he knew his way around the boat almost as well as his father did. And soon enough, the smells coming out of the galley hit all the right buttons. As they skirted along the Saturna Islands he saw a pod of Orcas and called them out; Ted watched from the galley while trying not to burn their eggs.

He watched the water closely after that, as the sun rose over Mt Baker, and he thought he could see Garibaldi's crown beyond Vancouver - as the morning's first puffs of breeze filled in; they'd be able to make sail within a hour or so, he thought. Then he wondered where he could take his son to get laid in Vancouver.

'And how long has it been,' he wondered, 'since you've had any?'

Hell, he couldn't even remember the last time...and funnier still, he didn't even give a damn.

+++++

They tied-up at the Coal Harbour Marina an hour before the sun slipped behind Vancouver Island, and after he showered he walked up to the Harbor Master's office and talked to a few guys hanging around there while he waited for Ted. The locals recommended a few places overlooking the marina and once Ted arrived - off they went.

Loud music and watered down drinks seemed to be the order of the day, and though there were a few womenfolk around nothing seemed to call out to either of them so they left after a few minutes. They walked to another place that happened to have a deck overlooking Altair, and they took a table on the deck overlooking the marina - about fifty yards from the boat - and a waitress came to take their drink order.

"Dark rum collins for me," he said. "Ted? Name your poison."

"The same," Ted said - cooly.

"I'll need to see some ID," the waitress said.

"He's my son."

"Doesn't matter," the girl said.

"How about a ginger ale," Ted sighed. "Maybe with the cherry on the side?"

The girl grinned. "What do you want?"

"A beer. I'd kill for a cold beer."

"Been out on the water?" she asked.

"Two days," Ted said. "Coming up from Seattle."