Chapter 17. Ahoy There. Wazz-up, Doc?

Maya - Mother Goddess
Destroyer of Warriors & Kings

We boarded the boat in time to hear Ryan's call. He repeated three times, “Home Base to Sherlock.” And, “Calling Mizz Sherlock”

I snatched the mic off its hook, clicked the squelch button three times and waited for his ID.

He confirmed, “This is Dang. Calling Way.”

“Hue, Roger.”

“Hue, set course for San Pedro. Rafael’s San Pedro…at the Q.  Danger is imminent.” Emphatic, he said again, “San Pedro… repeat, at Rafael’s.”

“Roger Dang. Copy.”

Anna asked, “I get the Roger bit but what’s this, baby talk… way-way dang-dang?”

She deserved to know as much and I hoped she would loosen up and tell me something, anything, that would unravel this monkey’s fist of deception.  “We use our old handles. His was Dang, you know, for Da Nang, and mine was Way as in Hue… simple but good enough identity shields.”

“Cool, spy talk. So, now Mr. Bond, I’m hungry… get cookin’.”

“Yes, you’re a natural spy but take a fuckin' rain check, won't you? There's no time to cook. Didn’t you hear the call, danger is imminent? Let’s hope we can duck in the shadow of Arch Rock.”  We were gifted by mother nature another off-season fog bank as we got underway.

“Shadow? What do you mean, it’s dark?”

“I mean the radar shadow. They might not see us if we can get there.”

 “Are we going to San Pedro?”

“San Pedro alright. It’s Five hundred miles north in the Bay. Point San Pedro by San Rafael. You know, the Big 'Q'.”

“You’re shitting me… How would he expect you to know that?”

“He remembers what I called my old haunts. Nick-names like Rafael for San Rafael and the Big 'Q'. for San Quinton, Doc will think Rafael’s a place… a bar or friend in San Pedro. I’m just hoping that Yuri fuck doesn’t get it.”

“Ryan knows you alright. More than I ever did. I’m a bit jealous. What else is there that I don’t know about you Crash?”

“Mutual, Anna, he knows you better than I do too. It’s hard to figure what he’s on to but it’s about time you let me in on what both of you know about this friggin mess we’re in.”

It was dark enough to hardly make out the coast line. No sooner than we passed the pinnacles nearing the Arch Rock, I heard the loud rumbling blast of the pipes of the ego-rette boat off the Starboard side coming our way. She shouted, “She sounds close… not much time.”

“He’s further away than it sounds. They’re like Harleys… no one would buy ‘em if they were quieter.”

Before we cut the power behind the Arch Rock, Doc’s boat must have turned into Lady's Harbor. I knew he would have seen us had he been paying attention to his screen because we had quite a profile this close but he must not have noticed us before we ducked in the shadow of Arch Rock.

We had to use stealth in lieu of speed. We heard them coming out of Lady's Harbor and closer but could see nothing from where we idled behind the rock. With my Browning, I wouldn’t have a shot until they came within sight of our hiding place and I could be sure that, whoever they were, they would be armed better than us. Browning automatic side-arms were the standard issue for Counter Intelligence in Nam. I was well-trained with one, had used it for real, and could lay out a tight pattern at over fifty yards. Nothing I had was good enough to go against whatever I was sure they must’ve had. In spite of my training I had no extraction plan… no plan B and it had been a decade since I’d been on a range. This was going to be a do or die… most likely die.

I listened to the scanner in the cabin for radio chatter among the gossip of lobster and urchin boats until I heard, “Shoreline? Dream Boat to Shoreline …  Dream Boat to Shoreline. Lady’s Harbor... No Sherlock?”

“Not there?” You sure? Then go Potato Harbor. You lazy turd, you know? Copy?”

I heard the Slavic accent. It had to be Yuri.

“Dream Boat to Shoreline. I’m sure. … copy, I’m going to Potato Harbor.”

Lazy turd… I liked that. Okay, Yuri’s in charge.  It sounds like Doc’s nothing but an underling. Doc didn’t have the thoroughness to check out where we were helpless and Yuri knew it. I was happy that Potato Harbor’s at the other end of the island and far enough away to give me a lead. If luck had it, I might be out of range of their radar. That gave us a slim chance I could’ve gotten out of this bind if I powered along the coast in the dark.

The roar of the engines faded so that I thought I had enough lead to skirt the rocks and slip out around Profile Point. This was a risk because we could expose ourselves. A small blip on the screen there. We we were a mere mile out from the point when the roar returned. They had a beam on us and I couldn’t outrun her.  I swung around directly to meet them. It was a fool’s move but I had no choice. Anna stood by me and we rode together.

She was smiling like she was enjoying the carnival ride more than I was. The roar got closer and passed us to come up on our stern. Anna ducked into the cabin out of sight. I mistakenly believed she was just hiding. Doc was at the helm with two stooges standing at ready behind him. Stooge One, who looked like Curly, held a familiar old AK-47 on me. I had the browning out on him. The comparison ended at Stooge Two except that he was a stooge.  He held a twelve gauge with a military door-breaching muzzle.

Doctor Lawrence Spawnn grinned with a cigar butt in his mouth. I never hated anyone the way I hated that fucker. He bore no resemblance to Moe or Larry but he was just as arrogant as the former and as stupid as the latter. He even tried to keep up the pretense that this was just a friendly encounter… one Yachtie to another, “Ahoy there, where’s the whore?” he called out as Stooge Two slapped a loop over a cleat and stepped over the side onto the deck of the Sherlock. “You may as well drop it Crash, you’re out gunned.” Doc was unarmed. It was like him… he was always for gun-control and preferred having his minions pack for him.

They must have had orders to take us alive or that AK would’ve made Swiss cheese of me by then. That was my only advantage. I dropped the Browning. Stooge Two, on the deck behind me, held the muzzle to the deck and pumped four door-breaching rounds into and around Mizz Sherlock's engine well. Stooge One held the barrel of the AK so steady between my eyes I could look down into is black abyss.

This was all happening within the time-span it takes to think, but not enough and say, “O Shit!”. Ready to meet death, it was what I like to call, a Dostoevsky moment. It had happened a couple times before… when mortality was surer than the next breath and the mind fixed on something insignificant in the blink of an eye. That nano-second the Tibetans call a bardo… the space where eternity is fixed on a flash… the donkey’s bray … a living sparkle of light on the spire … it can drive a man insane … resignation awakens to contrition… letting it all go… forgiving all into action…. action that slows within that window of time…. Rather than having an existential revelation, I was trained to act within that bardo.

Time hadn’t frozen… it was moving rapidly. I was moving with it and fell away in time to hear a brief thrrrrrrup from inside the cabin. Flickers of reality took wing.

Stooge One puppet dropped to the deck. The AK fell out from his side… his strings of life were cut before he could fire a shot. The movies would have him fly backwards off the boat but, in real life, large caliber bullets, a forty-five caliber Mac-10 in this case, goes through flesh, vital organs, and bone as easily as a hot knife through soft butter. The Stooge Two dropped his piece and dove off the stern of the Sherlock into the waters.

A Mac-10 is a .45 cal machine 

pistol . It is one of the most 

difficult to control because 

of its powerful kick. Most 

prefer the smaller caliber 

9 mm Mac-11

Anna, held the Mac-10 on Doc while I picked up and holstered my piece. I attended to the Stooge. Death was already beginning to draw the dull film over his eyes that stared into the heavens. Taking the loop off the cleat on the Dream, I drew it over Stooge One’s foot and tightened it to his ankle. I picked him up and tossed him overboard where he dangled headlong off the side tied to the cleat on the Sherlock. Doc just watched, stunned… he had no idea what he’d been up against. I threw in anything that would float that had The Doctor’s Dream stenciled on it. Besides the required life jackets and rings, he loved his dream so much that he had its name on everything from swizzle sticks to coffee thermos. 

I said Bugs Bunny, “Ahoy, What’s up Doc?”

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.”

Chapter 15. A Tiger Cage

Vietnam Syndrome Exhibition
Model of a Tiger Cage
McKinney Tx. 2015

Anna cut some thick slices of the bread and burned them on the open flame of the galley range into something that resembled toast. She made up for it by frying the powdered eggs in butter and emptied the can of corned beef into another frying pan.

 She served them up, steam rising from Navy surplus tin trays, accompanied by an exuberant voila. I sat without lifting my fork. She probably thought I was saying grace and interrupted the cloud of non-thought saying, “I heard about a caged tiger once. When its cage was left open the tiger hung back staring at a hunk of meat outside until his keepers saw him. They tossed the meat into him and shut the gate. He had his chance. Eat dammit. It’s real.”

Years of being alone, as though I had been in a tiger cage of my own making, had been relieved… the chains dropped and the gate opened. This girl took an interest in me and that too was a simple comfort I hadn’t had or hadn’t noticed before the last few weeks. Each day with her was an awakening.

I picked up a fork saying, “Maybe the tiger doesn’t know where it wants to go. A cat figures things out… weighs things first… checks out the scene… eat or run… run back to the jungle.”

“I say, run for it, Crash. The jungle is where you live. Not in that fuckin’ cage.”

I took a deep breath before pounding catsup out of the bottle onto the hash and gobbled up my plate without talking much beyond a grunt of pleasure. Yes, powdered eggs and canned hash. But they might as well have been gourmet that morning. After I sopped-up my plate with the burnt bread, I said, "You know, Anna. Ketchup was originally a sauce from Tonkin... a fish sauce: Kicap, or something like that, I think."

"Oh really? Are you saying everything worthwhile comes from Asia?" 

"Asia's a big place. But yes,you did, Annadel Bonnaire. You know what I'm saying."

I waited for something from the radio and sat in the cabin, reading while Anna sunbathed almost nude. It was around noon when she stood, gazing at the canyon leading to the beach, and asked, “Can we go for a hike?”

I looked up to where she was talking about. It was a warm day for the first week in December… now that the sun shone down from over the cliffs that protected us. It was okay where we were anchored in the shelter under the cliffs but I knew how cold the winds could get above us.

“It isn’t easy to get out up there,” not wanting to leave the radio, I handed her the binoculars. “Look for yourself.”

“There’s a trail … ain’t so bad in the middle… a creek bed.” Anna eyes locked onto the binoculars checking out the coastline and talking to herself, “Terrain’s pretty rough up that draw alright.”

She handed the binoculars back.

I didn’t want to leave the boat but thought I’d humor her by agreeing, “Go ahead, freeze your tits off… but you’re on yer own.”

By the time I finished saying that, out of the corner of my eye I caught a flash of bare flesh swoop out over the transom. She treaded water, shouting, “Let’s go, you pussy!”

I couldn’t let her get by with that kind of challenge so I stripped down to jockey shorts, braced myself and dove into the shock of cold water… bare flesh submerged… stung… stunned… numbed… before I broke surface. I swam Olympic hard to the beach where Anna stood grinning ear-to-ear.

“You aren’t hiking up there bare foot, girl!”

“Ha!” was all she said.

Yes, we hiked barefoot and near naked. Anna, in wet skivvies, forged ahead, waited for me, and held out a hand on the rough parts of the climb. She didn’t seem to mind the sharp rocks on tender soles, or the brambles scratching bare flesh across ankles and thighs, but I did. She was a lean and lithe cheetah and physically prepared for any challenge the trail might offer. We managed to get to the top where there was no trail and, catlike, she led me through the brush out along the top of a steep ridge that jutted out over the harbor until we came to a cliff that dropped vertically a couple hundred feet. I followed, distracting myself from vertigo and the agony of each step with my eyes glued on the smooth contours of her tush. The transparency of wet cotton briefs, inches away and at eye level at times, revealed a couple small bruises underneath. I could guess what they were about.

We had a view of the boat below and the coast of the mainland beyond the Channel. Anna took straight to the edge and sat, feet dangling over the edge of the precipice. I approached her perch with caution fighting off an onslaught of gut-fucking fear, though ego wouldn’t allow me to succumb to it. Especially since Anna didn’t seem to have had it. I sat at her side, a half-pace back, catching my breath.

Her eyes were half open when she began to speak, “You’ve been sitting in a cab too long, Crash. Catch your breath and let yourself breathe naturally.”

 “I get it. You’re in pretty good shape for a junkie.”

“For a junkie? What do you mean by that, asshole?”

“Speaking of asses, what about those bruises on your butt? I’d seen ‘em before. No one’s been spanking you for sure.”

“Well, big boy, Junk’s an occupational hazard for our kind. I told you I was still using… didn’t I?”

“I thought it was just pot and a line here and there but…” Checking my contempt. “You weren’t sea-sick, last night? You fixed,” I accused. My heart felt like lead was poured into it. I wanted badly to let it out… to cry…. to curse… I swallowed… gulped it down.

As much as I had been living the low-life and taking every drug I could, my imagination had always held the image of an, emaciated and jaundiced, junkie nodded out in some shooting gallery with tracks up and down collapsed veins. But, other than that bruise on her butt, Anna was vibrant and healthy to look at. Her body perfect and her mind clear. Young, I figured, you can get by with it for a while when you’re young.

“I’m trying Crash… been trying since…”

Sitting there on the precipice I understood… it was a flash. Looking down at the Sherlock bobbing gently at anchor from the edge of the cliff we sat on, I thought of Earhart taking his dive off the bridge. It was his last chance to get back to his soul… and Anna… she had been committing the same slow suicide I had been and we, all three of us… and Ryan too, were in the same boat in more ways than one.

She didn’t answer my accusation but reversed it, “I watched you become a drunk over the years. Driving a cab at night when I met you… hiding from it.”

I just wanted her to shut the fuck up and wondered how she got so abstract wise. “It… what’s it… do you know?

“That shrink I go to… she hints… that’s all she does… she says it’s one of the reasons…” her voice drifted with the winds. “Crash, you know I’m trying to quit, don’t you?”

I sighed a dead, “Fuck yes.”

“C’mon, get off your high-horse… just breathe with me. And try to crack a smile, asshole.”

We became quiet. Sitting with Anna on the edge of a cliff, with the wind on my back, I went back at the Koi Pond. A distant image came to me as my mind became fixed on hers. They call it a mind meld in aikido.

She opened her eyes, caught me staring at her.

I said, “You know; I did… I did some…” My mind stopped. I was going to say something bad… maybe good? I continued, “uh… meditation in Nam. It must have been part of my job. I remember some things but names and places get jumbled. Sometimes I have trouble remembering your name, Anna. It used to scare me. But before all that we went to these people.”

She asked, “We?”

Anna’s simple question opened a door that had been shut… sealed as though something dangerous was behind it. The cage door was opened and the jungle beckoned. One word did that… just one word. “We.” I remembered being there with a woman… I had no idea who she was or what she meant to me. I had just a vague figure of her in dreams since… “Yes, I remember now. The first weeks of the monsoon season. June… This place in Hue. A bunch of peacenik monks trying… under the constant bombard of the tropical rain thundering on the corrugated roof… Catholics and Buddhists… American GI’s and shit, Charlie had infiltrated the group… NVA did too and so had we… I went there… what … to snatch and grab a high-valued agent… deprogram her. It was a woman. Some shit was coming down in the spring…”

“A woman?”

“Yes, a woman. She helped me escape. A beautiful woman. I’d been sent in after the Tet… you know, 1968,” I said, remembering an image of her standing graceful in the traditional áo dài between an orange robed monk and a black cassock of a priest… nothing more. The voices of monks chanting… a sky-blue brocaded silk flowing and opening whole length over white trousers… I loved the earth she stood on… but her name was lost in a void… but she was that to me… her voice too, it haunts my dreams, and sounds eerily like Anna’s. I would’ve betrayed my country for her, “Was it worth it?”

I wasn’t a coward. I was a traitor! I'd left others in cages. Fuckin' tiger cages. The words stung… “No more please.”

Anna stammered a Japanese phrase she’d memorized;

 “Yu-gasumi

   Omoeba hedatsu

      Mukashi kana.”

 It’s a haiku by Kitō from one of Ryan’s books in there. I don’t speak much Japanese but I try to get the flow, ya know.”

I surprised myself. I knew the translation;

“The mists of evening…

    When I think of them, far off

       Are days of long ago.”

The pupils of her eyes flashed astonishment too. After a long silence, as though talking in her sleep, tears washing her face, she said, “It’s you. It’s me, David. I’m as lost as you. I always just wanted to take a long nap.”

I didn’t want to think of the past any more than I had to. The gnawing memories churned in my gut, “Yes, I don’t know what happened either. This is a good place for the mists.”

The wind was fierce over the slopes of the island and a cold wrap on my bare back. I felt its chill … but warmth arose from my belly… I listened to the mews of gulls keeping an eye out on the channel. Anna, sitting beside me, was a presence… a powerful presence of peace… peace that had evaded me for so many years. We sat together for almost an hour. Pelicans flew past us at eye level in formation.

 “You do know, David. It’s all in there somewhere. Ryan told me about your escape from the tiger's cage.” Her voice was almost normal again. “It’s not so bad, not knowing the past, that is.” 

Chapter 14. A Safe Harbor

We were cutting through growing but gently rolling seas. Anna held on, standing next to me at the helm under the overhang.

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 her, “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 out at me. She moaned, “I’ve never been sea-sick before!”

I assured her, “Anyone can get sick 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, bring the bucket with you and make sure the forward hatch is battened down. Then come back here and help me secure the skiff.”

The currents in the channel are jokesters and they could easily take us off-course over two miles. A warm stream runs from the south along the Santa Barbara side of the coast but the prevailing cold stream from the Gulf of Alaska courses further out in the opposite direction nearer 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 the 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. The seas rolled glassy calm 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 thickened. I set my direction but couldn’t see much of anything but the shadow of the Island on the radar screen. I turned Mizz Sherlock’s bearing southwest, hoping the reverse current would keep us on course. The radar missed it but we were only a couple hundred yards off the coast when I got a visual of the soft glow of the surf’s foam churned up on the shoals at the entrance to Lady’s Harbor. 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 through the spiny brush above the surrounding cliffs.

Anna came out of the cabin and washed out her bucket on a line over the side. “Sorry, I never get sea-sick. Can we camp on the beach ‘til I get over this bile? I need to be on solid ground. There's a cave over there.”
   "No, that won't do, my dear little green one. Not unless you want to get woke up by the next tide."

We took the skiff to the beach and rolled out our separate bags in the bush beyond the graveled sands and more importantly, above the hightide line. saying nothing, Anna skootched herself back up to me and fell asleep pulling my arm over her shoulder. I held it there as any father would hold his sweet snoring child. The sound of waves splashing on the graveled beach lulled me into the harmony of nature resonating with the stars above. When I had it, I don’t believe I appreciated it as much as I did then… the comfort of simply holding someone I cared about this much.

Anna woke me from a bad dream at sunrise… That is, the erased chalk residue of a memory of a bad dream… a feeling… a sense of loss… the image of my daughter… and the child... the package in Saigon. Anna nudged me, “Wake up, Mister, let’s go have some breakfast.”

She had already rolled up her bag and tossed it in the skiff by the time I stood. I didn’t roll mine but slung it over my shoulders against the chill of dawn and stiffly stepped over and into the skiff.
"Say there Mr Kraszhinski, do you wake up the house yelling like that every goddamned night?"

I sat aft for a few minutes after boarding the Sherlock to put together my thoughts."No... I mean, I don't know. Sorry."
Anna had started the burners by the time I joined her. Chattering like an early morning scrub-jay, she chirped, “No biggie. Say, I found powdered eggs, real butter in the fridge, some homemade bread, and cans of corned beef hash here! You hungry for some powdered eggs and hash?”
   Happier than I ever thought I could be, I sniped back, "What's this, a father/daughter day at the office?"

Chapter 13. The Package

"Strap on your Browning, Arjuna,
and get back in the mix."

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. As soon as the marine layer came in, I circled back, dropped anchor at East Beach and doused the cabin lights, where I waited for the double cover of fog and 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 Ryan gave to me. It held a Browning semi-automatic pistol and a shoulder holster with several boxes of 9mm ammo. 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 terror, 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 indoctrinated by academia about what they read, 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 families, mortgages on homes, 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 Penelope. 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 in Washington had called me to a mission. Maybe Earhart’s lost and forlorn 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 sweeping 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 our 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 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 our hunter 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. Its weight told me it held more than clothes. 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 light aluminum skiff, keel up, in its place across over the cabin. 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 that 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 a nun’s twat 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 in oversized Macs looking Norman Rockwell cute-kid in daddy’s slicks, “Ryan said something that I had no idea of... you know.” She tilted her head to one side and asked, “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.” She looked so childish cute I wrapped my arm around her. Puzzled, I planted a kiss on her forehead and said, “He lays out hints about shit and lets me figure them out on my own.”

We were far enough past the buoys by then. I took Mizz Sherlock up to 15 knots. She was made for plowing through the swells instead of slapping and banging over them like the newer model lobster boats.

I looked back from the helm at Anna sitting aft and watching our trail of bio-luminescence cresting over and across the inky deep. She was the perfect image of serenity and beautiful and so very beautiful… reminded me of someone… “Full circle?” The words came out without thinking, “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 thirtieth!”

“My birthday What’s so funny ‘bout it?”

I had speculated… suspected before… in her studio, but I had off and on dismissed the thought… that the girl I gave to the Sky Gods might as well had been Anna. Or, I thought, maybe Ryan was making her taboo for me to keep her for himself.

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?”