Chapter 18. Modigliani Eyes

   Casey and Anna were cozy at the helm where they’d been watching the action when I came out of the cabin. Her eyes were riveted on me while I walked back to the stern to sit and air out what had transpired. The Blatva… it was something I’d heard of but hadn’t paid much attention to. The LSD affects were at that stage where my brains felt fried and my eyes burned from the light reflecting off the seas.

“We’re goin’ to the Bay now, the Boss wants us there,” Casey’s voice interrupted the thought.

“What?” I had begun to wonder what Ryan was doing ashore. I knew he would have something planned but I had been in the dark up to then. It would be easy to get Casey to tell me everything he knew of it. I probed, “I know Ryan wants us in San Rafael but you must know more than me.”

Casey was bubbling with joy to be part of a big plan… that he knew more than me, “I have a good friend, Jimbo. He has an old boat I heard he’s been workin’ on. New canvass and paint. Other than that I gots no fuckin’ idea what Ryan’s up to.”

Anna interrupted, “Speaking of fuckin’ ideas, I want to know what the fuck’s going on with Doc, huh? What’s the plan with him?”

“He’s still tripping pretty heavy. I sent him below to chase the bats from his belfry, I suppose. I’m done with him though… got what I wanted.”

Anna entered the cabin and went straight below towards the berths where Doc was quietly sitting on the bunk. “I gotta use the head and change clothes.”

I followed close behind and called out, “Wait, Anna. I’m done with him but we need to pow-wow.”

The Dinky Dao had a layout similar to the Sherlock’s except that the Casey’s tub was an unmodified working lobster boat. The Sherlock had the same cabin and berthing configuration. Converted to a popular yacht design, it’s stern wasn’t open for hauling in lobster traps. The cabin was a step up from the deck to the galley and cabin table and then three steps dropped down to a level accommodating a small shower and head. Forward of that space and through a hatch were four bunks… two on each side. The helm was outside in the weather on the starboard side but under the same canopy as the cabin.

The Dinky Dao was in dire need of a paint-job and unlike the Sherlock, there was garbage everywhere. Empty plastic water bottles, empty beer cans and gallon wine jugs, newspapers, doubled plastic bags stuffed with laundry, and junk… fishing line and flasher lures etc. covered every counter and table top. However, a stack of skin magazines was a conspicuous exception. They were kept, covered in cellophane in a neat bundle in a plastic milk crate under the table I’d cleared for our breakfast.

It was noon by the time I was done with Doc but I was anxious to keep him out of reach of Anna. Once paranoia slips into one’s psychedelicized consciousness it is difficult to sort out which fears are justified and which ones are not. I knew a few Lurps (an affectionate name adopted from the initials for Long Range Recon Patrol) that liked to go into the bush on acid to enhance their environmental awareness. This worked well for real reasons to be safe, “left of the bang”, but it might also account for some of the Geneva Accord violations against innocent villagers. My paranoia told me that Anna had a motive to take out Doc beyond mere revenge. He might expose more than she wished of how she fit-in. I had to keep those suspicions in check, however, because they might just as well be chemically induced fears.

Anna was already stripped down and stepping into the shower. I could see why Ryan was in love with her. Her nudity, while my mind was sucked into a cosmic chemical reality, didn’t evoke any desire at all to possess her sexually. I was completely enrapt at the sight of her innocent beauty. My mind raced from big questions to wondering whether women got the same depth of sensual arousal at the sight of a man’s naked body. They might but I suspect not because I don’t see women keeping a neat and bundled stack of old skin mags. I million and one such ruminations passed through that transcendent Bardo as she slipped out of sight into the shower. I went from paranoia to awe in less than a flash… the time it takes for a match head to flare upon striking.

Her shout from below snapped me out of that Bardo of reflection, “Hey! There’s no fucking water!”

She came out and up to the table wearing a weather jacket and nothing more. She knew she was going to be grilled and was prepping herself to craft the best defense she had leaving the jacket open enough to expose the partial curve of her breasts. Just enough to keep me distracted. There is a line from the Bible… hell, I don’t know where to find it. I just heard Thumpers quote it in jail. It says the eyes are the windows to the soul. Anna had been trained by someone on more than that Mac-10. Her eyes suddenly became hard to read and that’s a skill known by only a few amateurs that are unwelcome at poker tables or by specialists in trade craft. I knew full well when the subject’s eyes became opaque and unbreakable.

I broke the ice, “We aren’t playing the school-girl now, are we?”

She wasn’t playing alright. She had become robotic and my task was to remind her that she was human; that I was human, and hardest of all, that Doc was human. Her jacket opened to expose more Modigliani flesh but I was transfixed on the opaque eyes. The painter studied eyes. Each portrait displayed a fascination with the deception of eyes. It was as though the painter never quite figured them out. He painted what he saw. There is one painting of a teen with the pupils blurred… there could be a three ring circus behind them but there was no way to get past that matte glaze. No wonder he drank himself to death with absinthe and wine.

Her hands lay flat on the table with her fingers spread as though on display. They were another work of art; long, thin and graceful, those of a Gothic saint that had just blown away a man with a Mac-10 a few days ago.

I finally saw in them. Her eyes turned sad… full of regret, "Look Crash, I've got nothing more. This tub needs swamping out if we're staying on it for any amount of time. Let's not play cat and mouse for a while and get to work."

"You might be right. But we have to talk."

It felt good to fill garbage bags with Casey’s junk. He objected a few time saying, “I need that!”

“What, you need this Styrofoam cup?”

Anna ordered him, “Get back at the helm, Casey. Trust us, you won’t need anything we get rid of,” and I was astounded he obeyed like a scolded child.

We fill several bags of junk and set them on the deck. If it was up to me I’d have dumped them over the side but Anna stopped me.

“The ocean isn’t your dump, you dumb fuck. We can get rid of this shit in port.”

The whole deck was packed and stacked with black plastic bags but there I was… I’d been slapped stupid for a minute, “You’re as bad a Ryan. Shit. He didn’t even want anyone to through fucking cigarettes butts overboard… like a dolphin would choke on ‘em.”

“Who do you think straightened out Ryan about that?”

I was beginning to see why Ryan loved her. Casey shrugged, “As annoying about bullshit as she is you can’t argue with her. I mean, you could argue but you can argue with a brick wall too.”

“Okay, Okay. I get it.” I looked around the Dinky Dao and felt good about how clean she was and still had good lines after all. “I’ll take the helm now. What do you think Casey, you like her?”

Casey’s face was to the garbage bags like he wanted to salvage what he could. Anna had a coiled up the hose we’d used to flush what was left through the scuppers. “He likes it. Don’t you feel better, Case?”

He sat on one of the bags, “Okay, I guess. Where we gonna set in?”

“Monterrey… big enough harbor. We oughta go unnoticed there… ‘cept for hauling this shit to a dumpster.”

As we approached the lights