Chapter 11. Casey at the Pumps

...imagining the quays and stays... the haunts
of pirates  and smugglers... of Jack London's time.

Mizz Sherlock rounded the sand spit buoys, past the sea landing jetty, and into its slip at Marina One. I dropped the bumpers, jumped off, and set the bow line to the cleats when Ryan stopped me. “Don’t tie up the stern. You’re not staying.”

I knew this hadn’t been a mere fishing trip, though I didn’t know what he’d been fishing for. I sensed he might have been checking me out the whole time to see if I was up to it… whatever It was.

 “What’re you talking about, Ryan?”

“I’m making arrangements for a package you’re going to pick up. In case you haven’t figured it out, you’ve got to disappear…” he took off his wool cap and stepped onto the dock. Handing me a wad of cash, he gave these directions, “Top it off with Casey at the pumps. Shouldn’t take much. In case he doesn’t ask, be sure to tell Casey you’re taking it to Ventura Harbor.”

“Yeh, sure. In case he doesn’t ask. Where am I going if not there?” I laughed because it would be rare if Casey didn’t put his nose in everybody’s business, Questions whirled around in my mind but I was honored. Ryan never let anyone else take out Mizz Sherlock.

 “Take her out of the harbor towards Ventura as far as the Pyramid.”

The Sahlberg Pyramid. I knew of the story. A couple goldminers hit it big in Mexico around the turn of the century. They never lived in Santa Barbara but they built the mausoleum in the Santa Barbara Cemetery overlooking the Channel. It must have seemed to them to be a good place to lay down their bones.

“A marine layer’s supposed to be coming around sunset. Wait for its cover and circle back to East Beach moorings after dark. Take the skiff from there to the Sea Landing Jetty. I’ll have a package for you there”

The sea landing jetty juts out a couple hundred feet out into the harbor from the shore behind the breakwater. It helps form the wide beach the tourists enjoy by catching the sand that drifts west from Sterns Wharf with the current.

“What kind of package?”

It would be fair at this point to wonder why I went in the Army instead of the Navy like Ryan. After all, I’d been sailing since I was a kid, exploring every inlet of San Francisco Bay. At first it was in an 8-foot Sabot sail until I graduated on my 16^th birthday to a 22-foot sloop I named the Holy Terror that I could sail outside the bay. My father would have been called an unpublished beat poet that lived on a houseboat in Sausalito back when Boho’s could afford to live there. He OD’ed on heroin before I turned seventeen. The sloop was the last thing dad gave me before he checked out. As far back as I can remember I’d been on the water, sailing around most of the sloughs of the Sacramento River and San Francisco Bay on adventures, imagining the quays and stays… the haunts of pirates and smugglers… of Jack London’s time. The Navy’s new PCFs, commonly known as Swift Boats, trained in the sloughs of the Napa and Sacramento Rivers and, after seeing them roaring through the sloughs at top speed, I fantasized piloting one of them too… in exotic far-away places in Southeast Asia I’d only read about in the papers. At that time a few Special Forces were the only ones in Nam. I knew little or nothing of that. But I saw those boats and it was love at first sight.

Mom took dad’s death hard and left me to her mother in Benicia. Grandma loved me and if I could say what love is I would say I loved her too. But she was too old to handle me… a troubled youth… a petty criminal, and a high school drop-out. To this day I have no idea what became of mom. She’d disappeared into Berkeley with a radical boyfriend and later joined a commune in Northern California.

 Never had a felony; however, I found myself in court several times before this last one. I’d temporarily traded the sabot, for a joy ride on a power-boat to go upriver to Rio Vista. I figured whoever owned it wouldn’t miss it overnight. Evidently, he did. Police were waiting for my arrival.

It’s a long enough story for now. I tried to convince the Judge that I was more suited for the US Navy since I had been on the Bay my whole life. Suffice it to say that the US Navy wasn’t taking high-school dropouts and juvenile delinquents in 1964. The Army was always there with the help of the courts to replenish its ranks with naïve young men and the Big Dog, President Johnson, would be asking for five hundred thousand more before the next year. I was cynical at best but I figured three years in the Army was better than a year in gladiator school.

At first I considered the Army a punishment. I’d always pictured myself in the Navy with clean sheets and on the water instead of fox holes in the dirt. But, later on, when I was ferried from place to place by the Riverine, Brown Water Navy in PBRs and PCFs, I found I would not have enjoyed being a sitting duck on the Mekong Delta as much as these crazy fuckers, the River Rats on Swift Boats, did. We all had our niche. From boot camp on I sent a check to pay the monthly fee of the Holy Terror’s slip to my only friend, Jimbo, while I was away. I eventually gave her to him after a couple years. While I was on leave in ’68, before the Tet, we had a wedding of sorts. I gave her away to Jimbo and we Christened her with one hell of a good drunk.

Ryan’s voice broke through my reverie, “You remember Santa Cruz Island, Lady’s Harbor?”

“Sure do.”

“That’s where you’ll be taking this package until I contact you.”

Lady’s Harbor is a snug hideaway that only hikers can access about eleven or twelve nautical miles west of the pier at Prisoners Harbor on Santa Cruz Island.

“You should be safe there. I’ll call at twenty-two hundred. Don’t give away locations over the air.”

“What, you running an amateur spy agency or something?” I was joking, though it did seem odd, “Why the hell are we so secretive? Whoever they are they can’t have lookouts everywhere.”

“No, they don’t have lookouts everywhere. But they know how to ask questions. You know the game… or don’t you remember?”

It was a dig but I didn’t mind. I knew he was still probing. So many years I’d been out of the game. Was I able to execute the mission? I had no answer for that either.

“When you cross the channel, whatever you do, don’t let yourselves get sighted from the pier at Prisoners Harbor.”

“Roger that.”

Prisoners Harbor has a pier and is occupied by a Ranger’s Office year around. I knew better than to question Ryan’s judgment and caught on to what he was implying about how thorough the mess was that Anna had gotten us into… that someone powerful enough to fear was behind it. It wouldn’t take much to monitor us with a regular police scanner. The fewer people who might know my whereabouts, the better. I hadn’t thought about Anna. Ryan knew that, because of Anna, someone would be looking for me and that somebody would be more sinister than Doc and Bob.

Ryan stepped off onto the dock to his storage locker. He unlocked it and handed me a sea bag with a smaller gym bag, “You shouldn’t need these. The gig’s up if you do. Put ‘em under the seat back there, in the outboard locker. If you have to use them…Uh, just know I’m doing all I can to keep it from coming to that.”

“So, what do I do if the gig’s up?”

There was no answer. The sadness in Ryan’s silence was palpable. He had no plan beyond the finality of failure behind the mask of command.

I realized the answer was to simply get out any way I could, “I see. It’s Saigon all over again.”

*****

Casey had tangled, sun-bleached, shoulder length dreds, and a scraggly Fu Man Chu that cascaded willy-nilly to mid-chest. His clothes hung loose over a wiry frame, belt tightened to the last notch. The rest of his face got a shave about once a month when his compensation check came in.  He’d been a machinist-mate on a PBR up and down the Lon Tai shipping lane to Saigon, which was all I needed to know. I liked his chatter sometimes. Besides that, he was a good fisherman… a certified outboard repairman. And a few of us knew he was also certified by the US Navy… a dinky-dau, section eight nut case, … half his skull was plastic because of an RPG… still carried a couple ounces of shrapnel elsewhere. It got him a Purple Heart and a bunch of stories he never told anyone except when he was drunk. I liked him well enough to go to his cluttered boat to down a few shots of whatever he had. Clutter is too kind of a word for Casey’s boat. It was an old sport-fishing boat, but long overdue for a field day and paint job. The cabin was a refuse dump of empty bottles, fast-food wrappers, plastic laundry bags, and oily rags.

The marina was a community like a village. Casey, besides playing the part of the village drunk, was the community newspaper, working at the pumps, and repairing outboard motors for the folks. He loved to gossip and talk about everything, from the comings and goings of everyone, to who was catching what and where. Most people liked him and a few snobs hated him. But even the Harbor Patrol tolerated him when he got caught tearing around the harbor drunk as a skunk in his skiff. They simply hauled him back to his boat and lectured him to no avail about how he could lose his drivers’ license the next time. Auto or boat, it didn’t matter. Casey didn’t sweat the warnings because he had no drivers’ license to have taken away.

As Ryan suggested, Casey wasn’t to be trusted with secrets. He was just so dinged in the head that he was happy to know any item to tell anyone asking him about anything. It never occurred to him to wonder whether the asking could be sinister or benign.

I flipped the marlin’s head by its spear hoping it would stick into the dock. It almost did but fell on its side; one dead eye staring up at the sky. Casey almost tripped stepping over it while passing the nozzle and hose down to me, “Crash, don’t fuckin’ do that… shit… What the fuck? Looks like it was bit off by a real big shark… you been out there? Goin’ back out to get that son of a bitch, aren’t you?” All the while we were filling the tank he was itching for me to say something about it or what I was up to.

He put the nozzle back in its place in the pump and continued to rattle on non-stop, “Only ten gallons? Round it off to fifteen bucks after that shit,” he nodded towards the marlin, “Sherlock’s a nicer boat than mine but I’d rather let a man screw my wife than take my boat out.”

“You never had a wife, Casey.”

“Never wanted one either. He must be trying to sell it to you, eh? I can tell ya’ halibut’s striking just off the pier and anywhere on East Beach. Caught two illegals yesterday… eighteen inchers. You know Harvey?”

“Can’t say I do.”

“Well, he was with a guy I don’t know… Yuri somethin’… we threw one back but barbied the other at my boat right away. Yep, low tide yesterday morning. That Yuri guy was weird… I mean cold… I seen a few snipers, you know, Seal’s and Lurp’s like him… accent like a Ruskie… hardly said a word… weird… come to think of it, he was like you… no, not sayin’ you’re weird…’cept when you get those eyes… you both got those eyes… did I say cold? Yeh, cold… stared towards Sherlock’s slip most of the time. Say, ya know, yellowtail are running too. Even a few marlins got caught out there. Can yah believe that? Not as big as this one but…”

Casey stopped his chatter long enough to give the marlin’s head on the deck a good looking over like he hadn’t noticed it before, “Wish I had my polaroid for a picture. Can you wait for me to run and get it?”

“No. I’ve to get going to the Ventura Marina before it gets dark. Ryan wants it there… maybe he wants to have the bottom scraped and painted.”

“You’d better git goin’ then. Why not do it in the yard here?” he went on without skipping a beat, “He sure keeps her up. She a fine lady… wooden boats are. That Sherlock though… She’s sure sweet ta look at. Say, ya know, speakin’ of sweet ladies, whew, Ryan’s got this Dink chick he’s been with lately… I saw her head once. Butch cut, ya know… but, I don’t think she’s a dyke… maybe. Naw, but why would Ryan, what, ‘go’ fishing’ at midnight with a dyke? Bald or not, I seen her with hair once too… got a good eye for chicks. She’s a fine catch for a geezer like him. Maybe he’s payin’ her. Left ‘fore… ah, just before midnight, yeh. I was on the Wanderer havin’ a nightcap. Must’ve been fer a quickie ‘cause I saw the Sherlock in its slip within an hour.”

Casey called the Vietnamese, Zippers, Dinks, Gooks, Slants and Slopes. He meant no harm by it. That’s what everyone in Nam called them. I didn’t like it, but he couldn’t help it. The kids that were sent to Nam were from Iowa, Arkansas, and even California, and they knew nothing of the ancestry and heritage of these people. As far as Casey was concerned they were all Doo Mommies, mother-fuckers. I knew I’d be wasting my time if I corrected every GI that used these terms.

I played along with Casey, “Oh, yeah, nice. Ryan’s an old man but he’s pretty slick... doesn’t have to pay for pussy.”

“Oh yeh? saw them anyway… late. Busy man ‘cause he took you out this morning. Must’ve been for a quickie. With her, I mean. Say, Crash, I got some good shit from that Yuri guy. He gave me a bindle and a bottle of Jack. I ain’t done all of it yet. When you get back, c’mon down to the boat… do a few lines like old times, eh?”

I thought, why not throw off Yuri, or whoever. I gestured to Casey to give me an ear up close, “Yeh, sure Casey, if anyone asks, especially this Yuri guy, don’t tell ‘em where I’m going.”

I knew that, if Yuri was a pro, he would get it out of Casey no matter how hard Casey tried to keep it a secret.

I never saw Casey so happy. He had someone’s confidence and an item to keep secret. He shouted as he walked away down the dock, “You got it Crash… I don’t know yer goin to Ventura.” Then he stopped and spun around and hushed, he whispered loud, running a finger across his lips, “Say, did I tell you? That Yuri guy told me the same thing.”

“That he’s going to Ventura?”

“No, not to tell anyone he’s askin’ ‘bout you.”

“Me? Thanks Casey. I owe you one.”

“Yeh, Mum’s the word, you can trust me.”