The Hemingway Maid Ch. 03

"Jim, this puke over here is from the Agency. He's got a check with your name on it. No amount filled in. Name a figure, or let him do it, but we owe you big time for what you did."

"I don't want anything, Ron. Never have. God Damn! Ron! I'm fucking sick. Elise! Never again?"

"Yeah, Sport. Sorry."

The agency bean counter sat there, pen in hand poised over his check.

I just waved my hand at him. "Put that away, would you?"

The man wrote an amount on the check, then turned it over and slid it to me.

It sat there like an insinuation, glowing with tainted evil.

There were some men in the cockpit, working on something by the wheel.

"What are they doing up there?" I asked Ron.

"They're putting in some stuff for you. A GPS chartplotter and a satellite phone. We want you to know where you are, and how to call us if you need us. Anytime, anywhere," the bean counter said.

"Sounds like there are some heavy strings attached, Ron."

"Not at all, Sport. But just in case somebody finds out what happened, who was involved, and they want to toss a little revenge your way. No big deal, Sport, really."

"I don't suppose there's a device in that stuff that'll tell you where I am, huh?"

"Puddknocker! I'm appalled! You think we'd do that?"

Did I ever tell you how irritating that grin of his was? No? Sure I did . . .

+

Sabrina sat at anchor off Nassau, in the Bahamas, on a late September day. It had been almost four months since the flight from the Marina Hemingway, since I'd seen Elise. Not a day went by that I hadn't thought of her.

I had left Key West almost immediately. Ron had helped me get Sabrina ready for sea again, and I'd replaced a few items in her rigging that had been stressed in the storm, but I had wanted to get all of this behind me. I had gone to Ft Lauderdale and visited Mom and Dad, and told Dad the whole story over drinks.

Dear old Dad, ever the realist. What's his first comment?

"What did you do with check?"

Like I said. A realist. "Nothing, yet, Dad."

"Want me to set something up with it? I can talk to my broker over at . . ."

"Dad, I was thinking of giving it to the Salvation Army, or maybe the Communist Party of Central Iowa. Or maybe a fund for knocked-up nuns."

Big frown. "How much did they make it out for?"

"I never looked, Dad."

Even deeper frown. "You got it?"

I nodded.

Look of total disgust. "Let me see it."

I never argued with Dad. Futile. Very futile. I took the folded check and slid it over to him. He opened it up and whistled.

It took a lot to get Dad to whistle. Now I was curious.

"If I were you, I think I'd get on the next flight down to Cayman and do something with that. It's drawn on a Cayman bank, by the way, just in case you wondered." He was spreading the sarcasm a little thickly, I thought, as he slid it back to me.

O.K., I'm weak. I turned it over and looked at the numbers.

I whistled.

+

Dad had sailed over to the Bahamas with me; it was our last trip together on Sabrina. He stayed with me for three weeks, even got in the water and went snorkeling. He reminisced and groused about his arthritis. We talked, we listened, we got to know one another again. One of the rare things a boat does well . . . they bring people together.

"I guess that Hemingway thing kinda made up for those poor people on the raft," he said one evening as the Sun was setting. "God, I'll never forget that day."

"Neither will I, Dad, never."

I watched Dad moving around the boat, the now awkward way he moved about, the joints in his feet and fingers that were swollen with arthritis, the labored breathing as he worked the sails. I hated to watch him endure the humiliation aging - men as full of life as he'd been must be so keenly affected, I thought. I thought of him and Mom, together since the end of the second World War. How love, true love, comes to so few people. The American landscape was littered with the flaming remains of divorced and shattered families in this, the closing years of the American Century. The Golden Age of the Divorce Lawyer, I thought. Disposable values, disposable families.

But how valuable, how dear true love is. How common loneliness has become.

There were no Elise's on my horizons. Only empty sky, endless ocean.

A few days later I put Dad on the plane for Lauderdale.

Life is so short.

+

I wandered through the Bahamas, stopping every now and then to take in a sunset or catch some food at a local market. I'm one of those people, I try to fish, I throw a line in the water, and I can hear the fish start laughing. Give me a market or I'll starve.

I met new people along the way, made a friend here and there. Couples and single men. Lonely single men and couples that bickered at one another. What a scene. What a choice.

Why are we so intent on carrying our problems with us everywhere we go?

Every now and then I'd meet a couple so very happily in love that it was a joy to watch. They would come to me like a painting . . . a stylized tableau of hope idealized and eternity reconciled. Too, every now and then I'd run into a man or woman very happy with their solo wanderings, not lonely at all, just in love with exploring the world around them. Meeting people so very different from themselves. Happy in themselves, though.

I envied them.

I felt I'd never find that kind of peace.

I had touched the contours of happiness when I held Elise in my arms, but the thought came to me, I would never be happy with Elise or anyone else until I could find happiness within myself.

Where would my wanderings take me?

+

Toward Christmas I headed toward the British Virgin Islands, toward the Bitter End Yacht Club, a hotel, restaurant, and watering hole famous throughout the eastern Caribbean as a good place to pass the time in good company. Hurricane season was over, the waters as I approached the Virgins so unbelievably blue, the sky so clear, it would bring a smile to any heart.

After six months away from Cuba, I was reconciled to my life of solo explorations. I spend days photographing people and their homes and lives, walking the towns and villages of small islands by day, reading about their culture at night, and taking care of Sabrina. I was, however, after more than a week at sea looking forward to lavishing some TLC on both of us.

Navigating the approaches to the Virgins during the morning, we looked to make our way to the Bitter End by late afternoon. The day remained clear and beautiful, the sea became startlingly blue the closer to land we came. The islands, once so far away, now surrounded us.

As the late afternoon Sun hit my back, I dropped sail and squared away the deck, made ready dock lines. I approached the local fuel dock, and cut power, drifted toward the dock, and backed down to a soft landing. I tossed the dock lines to Pedro, and went to shut down the diesel.

Pedro? Pete?

"Hey Puddknocker! Look who I found!"

I turned toward Ron, and dared not to hope that . . .

Elise was standing there in the palest pink little sun-dress, the deep gold afternoon Sun turning her visage into a misty ghostlike shadow that stood before me in the beauty of eternal creation. Suddenly I couldn't see her my eyes were so full of tears; I was laughing and crying as she flew from the dock to Sabrina's welcoming arms.

And mine.

I held her to me with all the force of a hurricane as her mouth found mine. She wrapped a leg behind my thighs as we fused in the fiery sunlight. Through the shimmering waterborn world of my eyes, it looked as though the world had turned to flame.

"Well, there they go again Ron," Pedro said with that little snort laugh of his.

"Shit, I forgot to bring a video camera again!"

Elise was pulling my swim suit down, reached for me with the desperation of a dire passion long suppressed. She pushed me down onto the cockpit seats when she had freed my passion, and moved her body over mine.

"C'mon kid, we better get outta here," I heard Ron saying as that scuttled up the white stone steps that led through trees to the hotel. "Say, Pudd, we'll be up by the pool. We gotta talk! I heard about this new marina . . ."

Sure thing, Ron. Be right there.

Eternity is a road; the way glows in the light of creation.

I held that gentle light in my arms, and caressed her.