Chapter 16. Green Bamboo Snake Dance

It felt better… talking with another human being about the emptiness. I listened to her voice strain as she opened-up a bit more, “I haven’t known my parents… my people since... ah, I have memories… vague… they fade with time. Ya, I know foster homes and… I hate to think about it now.”

“Well, I hardly knew mine either… except, when I was a kid, Dad gave me a boat.”

“My therapist gave me this assignment: Every time I tell a lie; I write it down on one side of a ledger. Every time I tell the truth, I check it off on the other side. Do you believe in Karma, Crash?”

“Now, don’t go hippy on me, Anna. I’m not a liar.” I realized, as soon as I said it… shit, I lie all the time. “Well, yes, I'm a liar sometimes. But, I believe lying's as human as the first stone axes. That’s not an excuse… just a fact. Counter Intelligence was about getting to the truth but you just didn’t get there by being honest about it.”

Anna agreed, “Me too. I’m a liar whenever I think I can get by with it. No one can be expected to understand. They live in a bubble… Crash. I mean, people like us… our daily reality shocks normal people with so-called, normal lives and they think we suffer our symptoms… like we want to become like them and they treat it clinically with therapies … to make us feel," finger quotes, "comfortable in our own skins.” She slapped her butt, and winced, “I don’t have skin without my junk… your booze.”

I loved her clarity even though it pissed me off and frightened me at times. I’d been thinking the same though. We were connected. It wasn’t so much that a young junkie was teaching a weary old drunk but that I was hearing her with new ears. “Yeh, I know… We know the proper meds on the street if that’s the only aim…to be sent merrily off to happy land. It’s not their fault. They’re informed… they try… they try hard but there's a line we are on the other side of, that can't be crossed.”

She put an arm around me and kissed my cheek… not like a sister kissing a brother either. Soft lips on the lobe of my ear she whispered seductively, “We’re just like each other, Arjuna.”

I know her shrink would call it transference. I felt it too but recoiled, “No… no please, Anna. I can’t.”

“I’m just trying to break some of the tension here,” she elbowed me… jabbed hard, “but maybe we care the way survivors of a shipwreck do, okay?”

She was making me nervous. I threw in some sarcasm to ease the tension, “Yeh, the old lifeboat scenario, we care about each other until the food and water runs out and we have to eat the weak.”

She stood, facing me, back to the sea, leaning on one foot in fluid grace, pirouetted towards the hundred yard drop to the waters below, a leg stretching forward to the edge, planting the other foot behind with alternating hands swooping over the edge. I recognized her dance as an expert snake style Kung-fu. 
Anna’s hands locked in a striking pose when she saw it and exhaled with force, “Shit, that’s Doc.” 
   I saw where her focus went mid-dance. The white arrow of a wake heralded more tension jetting across the Channel at eighty-knots in our direction.

 The boat was close enough for its wake to be seen with the naked eye. There were no trees anywhere except the ones sheltered in the ravines. No seed but thistle, scrub sage, and thorny barberry, had time to plant itself here where unrelenting winds blew across the top of the island. And Anna had been close to being blown away too. Maybe she didn’t care and loved dancing on the edge. That was okay with me because, in times like these, I needed the gut-string pulled tight as an e-string on a Stradivarius. The unknown foe out on the sea and the sexual tension of a taboo young woman tightened the wire of my consciousness.

She was right. The chances were a thousand to one it against it being anyone else’s boat other than Doc’s. I felt my nakedness. Damn, it would have been good to have the binoculars from this vantage. A sniper rifle would have been great too but my only weapon was left under a pile of clothes in the cabin of the boat. Not that it was of any use up there but I would've never left my piece out of reach in a combat zone. From that day one we were in the zone for sure. Then the wake turned towards Prisoner’s Harbor. 
I said, “Might be nothing. Let’s go back.”

Her elfish grin told me she knew it was beginning and she loved the action so much she gut-laughed and shouted, “Ha-Ha! Yeh, let’s go!”

 “Right, let’s go.” Thinking of the Cigarette boat, hoping it wasn’t Yuri at the helm, I wanted to fly down to the Sherlock, strap on the Browning, and listen to whatever chatter came out of the scanner. I felt no rocks underfoot nor spine on my bare legs all the way down to the water with Anna a few leaps and twists on the terrain behind this time. I was alive and no longer on hold. As soon as we got down to the beach, I challenged, “Let’s race to the boat. Loser cooks!”

Exhilarated, I ran across the beach and dove into the water before she could answer, believing that I would beat her to the boat. I’m a damned good swimmer and was sure I could take her by a couple lengths but, in spite of my exuberance, the girl’s athletic prowess had me punched out half way there when she dunked my head as she passed and I grabbed at a kicking foot. She shook loose and put a length ahead of me before we got to the boat. She kicked my ass.

I mocked a weak protest while we hung on to the diver’s ladder over the stern, “Foul! You made contact!”

“Rules of engagement!” She fired back, “Do you see a referee around here? Where there’s no referee, there are no rules.”