Chapter 12. Safe Harbor

If there’s a place for the sunset, it’s at sea. I idled at the pyramid to the display of crimson and golden light sinking behind the silhouette of the mesa above the shoreline. I circled back, dropped anchor at East Beach as soon as the marine layer came in, doused the cabin lights and waited for the double cover of the night.

Ryan was up to some dark shit and I kicked myself for not asking more questions. I began wondering about this Yuri too; thinking he might already be looking for me, or the Sherlock, at the Harbor. I lifted the seat on the stern where the outboard was stored and pulled out the case. The case held a Browning semi-automatic pistol and a shoulder holster with several boxes of 9mm ammo for it. The Browning’s holster fit nicely. I smiled. I hadn’t a sidearm strapped on me in a decade and it felt good. Ryan’s and Anna’s shenanigans were taking me on an adventure that could be deadly and, if anyone asked, I wouldn’t have admitted I missed that kind of action since Saigon fell.  Thank God, not all GI’s baptized in the blood and gore of combat felt the way I did about it.

*****

Most sailors keep a few books in their cabins. In one cupboard was a copy of the Bhagavad Gita. Some of the best read folks, though not always academically bred, are those in prisons and the military. I’d even read it before I got dinged but I must have skipped over some of these stanzas. Shades pulled, and under the soft glow of the desk lamp of the chart table, I opened it to a page and read. I could hear Krishna speak to Arjuna as the hypnotic sea gently rolled under the deck. I read between the lines of the stanzas regarding the castes, “The Priests, the Warriors, the fuckin’ regular people with homes, families, and careers. Krishna advises Arjuna that he can’t help to be anything but what he was born to be. Who’s to say my fate wasn’t to be condemned to an asylum or prison, an outcast. Arjuna was told to accept that his place in life arose from his own nature.

I took a deep breath and sighed the sorrow of resignation. So, we are born the way we are. I had been granted a part in the universe I’d denied. I tried to find peace back “in the world” where no peace for my kind could be found. No, it wasn’t just the cluster-fuck we called Vietnam. It was as though Krishna’s voice broke through the fog, “Strap on your Browning Arjuna and get back into the mix.”

“Hearing voices?” I questioned this bout of narcissism and anyone else would say I was more screwed up than Casey. He was, at least, harmless in a way that I was most certainly not.

Sure, I’d witnessed several of these guys talk about guilt from their experiences and adjusting to coming home as if they were reciting what they figured the shrink or their fellows in Group wanted to hear. But, when they talked about combat, their tenor changed… sometimes ever so slightly… but it changed. Any good therapist could spot it. Before anything else… the hardest thing to admit, in those circles at the VA, was the fact that some of us loved the action… feared it… were trained for it… but loved it and nothing… nothing could replace what happened to our spirits when death was at the door and we fuckin’ blew it away. It was the immortality of the moment. Ryan salved it positively by becoming a cop. Casey and I found solace in the bottle. But we had that in common. Once the lab rats map out the hi-way of our DNA, I’m certain that the warrior gene will be found on one of its off-ramps. We could never go back to being plain old civilians, even if Vietnam never happened. It was a double helix screw that bore into us like a worm and ate us from the inside out. The thought occurred to me that maybe… just maybe, Anna had it too by virtue of her birth in a nasty place.

*****

I took out the Channel chart to familiarize myself with the Island’s rocks and shoals. I had been to all the Channel Islands. Images of the coastline came back. The chart refreshed my memory as well as the seascape, going over it to happier times of sailing with Ryan and scuba diving in the various sea-caves and inlets with Elaine. But even these pleasant thoughts turned sour. I had to reverse the downward spiral of morose memories with the task at hand.

There were a few beers in the cabin’s small fridge but I craved the sugar sweetness of a soda instead. I realized I hadn’t the DTs I’d feared since my last drink. I should’ve. I always did when I dried out a few days. I had nothing more than the usual hangover, and some shakes, but it was remarkably easy to quit this time. It had never been this easy for me whenever I tried previously. Shit, it had been a couple years of hard daily drinking. I’d heard others say the same thing happened to them when they’d gone bat-shit religious. They always attributed it to a miracle… an act of God or any one of a hundred ambiguous Kahunas. It made believers of them. I hadn’t any such an apparition or transcendent experience. I’ve heard it said that a dramatic… or traumatic… conversion experience, changes the brain chemistry but that wasn’t quite enough of an explanation for me. I could have been driven into further depression but it was as though my friends on the Wall had called me to a mission. Maybe Earhart’s spirit was my version of a Higher Power.

I approached the SB harbor rowing the skiff between the pilings under the Harbor Restaurant as the fog set-in thick as snot. That helped to make the shortcut under the wharf harder for the eyes of the nightshift rent-a-cops to see. I knew they usually smoked a cigarette, or something stronger, at the end of the pier after each round.

Sports-fishing and whale watching excursion boats tie up on the interior side of a small jetty inside the entrance to the harbor. Along its spine of boulders, under a walkway to a navigation light, a narrow strip of sand made for a small spit on the outside of the harbor.

Almost to the jetty, a go-fast cigarette boat, appeared off my port bow. A search light radiated a halo in the fog, furtively side to side, scanned the marinas. She’d been coming directly towards me. I beached the skiff and leaned back, digging my heels into the wet sand, and tugged it to the boulders where I ducked in their shadow. Just in time, she turned her beam away to check out the slips behind the breakwater. I wouldn’t use a light to search at night… especially in fog. Two things happen; it effectively blinds the eye to any movement outside of its scope of light and even a light mist spreads it out and throws it back at ya cutting visibility to a few yards.

Adrenaline stood my senses at the relief of going unseen. I crouched and made for a space between a couple of rocks while I took a breath and looked for an escape route, or some kind of package, stashed there. As though a boulder had risen, a dark form that had been squatting in the shadows of the rocks only a few yards from me came out. The mission already compromised, I readied myself, gripping the Browning from inside my coat.

The form got closer and I let my breath out. It was Anna tossing a sea bag over her shoulder. She passed me on the way to the skiff and whispered, “C’mon.” She dropped the sea-bag over the gunnels. I expected that to be all there would be to it and she would turn away.

Instead she helped me push off the skiff from the beach.

“What’s in the bag?”

“My clothes,” ankle deep she jumped in. Then, commanding in a low voice, “No time for small talk, let’s get out of here.”

“So, you’re the package?”

 “I said, no time to chat.”

*****

The cigarette boat roared up to the outer jetty’s sand-spit buoys and turned back towards the harbor. the search light scoured everything like a wand, swinging side to side. I could make out the name on its starboard bow when it turned nearer to us. It was The Doctor’s Dream. That figured. His was one of the few cigarette boats in the harbor. She got close enough to illuminate the skiff in its beam and give the jetty rocks a look over. Thankfully, he was too lazy to get off his boat to check out a beached skiff. He had to be looking for the Sherlock solo. If Yuri was with him was the pro I thought he was, he would have preferred using a night vision device.

We took the chance to row over to Stern’s Wharf as it cruised further into the harbor and cut is motors.

I took the chance on making a little noise once we were a hundred yards on the other side of the Wharf and started the outboard on the first pull. We put up aside the Sherlock without further incident and boarded while I watched for the cigarette boat. I passed the light outboard motor and sea bag up to Anna and climbed back aboard. She slung the sea bag over her shoulder, one hand on the rail, swung up deftly on the runner going forward, dropped her bag down the forward hatch, came around and jumped down on the deck behind me.

Anna was cheerful, “Aye Mate. Been knockin’ the hats off strangers lately?”

I put a finger to my lips, “Shush. Help me pull in the skiff.”

My hands weren’t used to ropes and rigs and I could figure, neither were hers. Regardless, hand over hand, we lifted it over the side in unison like old salts before I asked, “Knocking off hats?”

I put the small outboard in its ventilated locker. Working together gingerly, we strapped the skiff, keel up, in its place across the stern. She shouted against the deep growl of the engine, “You know… feeling grim? November of the soul?”

Oh, its Melville. I did the finger quote thing, “Then I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.” I felt a little pride I remembered it.

The deep grumble of the 1946 straight-eight marine engine made enough noise to bother me for one moment. The Sherlock was painted a dark blue. Without running lights in the fog, it would be hard for anyone to see us. Still, we had to get some distance from the harbor because there was no way we would be able to outrun the go-fast at our fifteen knots top speed. Anna huddled next to me, holding herself, in hoody and sweats… might have been warm enough for Santa Barbara winters ashore but not where we were sailing.

“Speaking of November, it’s colder than day-old dog shit out here!”

“You’re underdressed for going down to sea.”

I don’t like surprises and it was a surprise that she was aboard but, more surprisingly, I was glad to see her. I patted her behind to step into the cabin, “There’s foul weather gear in the fo’rd hold. Help yourself.”

She yelled back on her way down cheerfully, “I know this boat better than you do.”

She came out of the cabin presenting a cute picture standing on deck fully dressed in oversized Macs looking like a Norman Rockwell child playing in her dad’s New England lobstermen’s slicks. She asked, “Ryan said something that I had no idea of... you know. What do you think he meant ‘by full circle’?”

“Don’t ask me. He doesn’t waste words. Has to be something he wants us to think about.” I was smiling. We were far enough past the buoys by then so I took her up to 10 knots. She wasn’t made to plane but for plowing through the swells instead of slapping and banging over them as any faster boats her size would.

I looked back from the helm at Anna sitting on the transom and watching the wake roll out into the dark behind us in the inky deep. Full circle indeed. The words came out without me thinking as it dawned on me, “To the sky gods. I’ll be fuckin’ goddamned!” Fatigue must have been getting to me because my belly rolled out a laugh in the wake of the possibility, “April fuckin thirtieth!”

“What’s so funny ‘bout my birthday?”

I don’t know why I hadn’t suspected before. That the girl I gave to the Sky Gods might as well had been Anna.

Trying to conceal this troubling revelation from her, I asked, “What did Ryan tell you about this trip besides you being the package I was picking up?”

Mizz Sherlock began cutting through the gently rolling seas that were growing. She held on, standing next to me at the helm, under the overhang of the cabin.

Ryan’s package comment stuck. I had to ask, “Do you remember anything about Saigon?” Anna didn’t answer. She was turning green. I knew the signs and pointed to the port side of the deck, “There’s a bucket in that locker. Go over the side or in the can but don’t use the head.”

She sat at the gateleg table in the cabin with the bucket on deck next to her. I hollered into the hatch, “Open the windows a crack ‘cause, if you’re staying in there, the cabin makes it worse. Fresh air out here’s better. Not much, but better.”

“I don’t give a shit,” she answered while opening the windows within reach before the sound of ralphing came back out at me. She moaned, “I’ve never been sea-sick before!”

“Anyone can get it if it hits you right.” I turned the navigation lights on when we entered the shipping lanes to reduce the chances of a tanker running us down. It’s best to give out tasks to sea-sick sailors and I knew it would get a bit rougher soon enough. I hollered into the cabin, “Anna, make sure the forward hatch is battened down. And then come back here and make sure the skiff is secured good.

The currents in the channel are jokesters and they could easily take us off-course over two miles. A warm stream runs northward along the Santa Barbara side of the coast but the prevailing cold stream from the Gulf of Alaska runs further out and part of it turns between the north flowing current on the coast and the Islands. This makes for a confusing drift to amateur sailors and, with the winds adding to this, the seas churn up like a mad dog at the most unexpected times. I expected it and enjoyed how Mizz Sherlock handled the white capped swells. For the fun of it I had her full throttle over the top of one wave and plunging down the trough and into the next, sending spray radiating from her prow high and wide, before I cut back for Anna’s sake and to maintain her into the seas.

We made only about three knots progress for about an hour but it was safer at this speed. The seas calmed into gentle rolling a mile south of the shipping lanes in the shelter of the island. This did little to relieve Anna’s seasickness. By the time we came in sight of the lights at Prisoner Harbor, the marine layer lifted. The pier was ninety degrees dead ahead from three miles out when I snuffed the running lights. I set my direction but couldn’t see much of anything but shadow of the Island on the radar screen. I turned Mizz Sherlock’s bearing forty degrees to the starboard side hoping the reverse current would take us less than twenty degrees north. We were only a couple hundred yards off the coast when I spotted the entrance to Lady’s Harbor by the glow of the surf churning up a soft bio-luminescence on the shoals at each side. We got lucky going down the coast in the dark even with radar especially passing the shoals. Once safe in the harbor by midnight, we dropped anchor where it was only a couple fathoms deep. I’d been in Lady’s Harbor before and always thought it was the best of all the anchorages for its privacy. It had the extra assurance of no hiking trails above the surrounding cliffs.

Anna came out of the cabin and emptied her bucket over the side. “Sorry, I never get sea-sick.” And putting her fingers on chart, said, “It’s a Peace Sign.”

I knew she was still green in the gills but it was good she was trying to be nonchalant so I asked for distraction’s sake, “What’s a peace sign?”

She held two fingers to my face in a V, “Yeah, look… the chart, the harbor’s shape’s a peace sign,”

Hanoi Jane and the anti-war movement sickened my spleen so I countered, “I prefer Winston Churchill’s Victory Sign for us.”

Her eyes bore through me, “No, my friend, we need peace.”