By Roger Owens
Well, after what-all had happened that night already, I sure wasn’t expecting to hear how we were going to Miami to buy and run a fishing boat. After Blackie shooting somebody deader than hammered dog shit, and Joe Hook turning out so cold-blooded and all, I didn’t know what to think. But when Blackie told us his plan and said should we ask if the guy and his colored girlfriend wanted to come, we all said yes right off. He told us we would need about six or seven hands to run the size of boat he had in mind, but if Joe Hook and Lottie were thinking like me right then, I figure they thought fishing in the sunshine for a living sounded mighty good to them if we had enough hands or not, and they were. Thinking like me, I mean. So I told him we all said not just yeah but hell yeah. Blackie laughed at that. He said it was one of my “alpine aphorisms,” or as I would laugh with him and say if he were here today, one of my “mountain mouthfuls.” Damn, I wish he was still on this Earth somewhere. I said it back then and I’ll say it again now. Blackie Wainwright was special. He made this place more interesting.
Lottie Jane Miller had to be the happiest girl in the world, or at least on this side of it. She was in Miami, Florida with a rich, handsome man who knew where he wanted to go and what he wanted to do. She was wearing the yellow dress she’d picked up in Naples from the Reverend Mrs. Tight-Ass, and they were talking to a pair of boat-brokers in the offices of Streeter and Ripley Maritime Outfitters who could not keep their eyes off her breasts. Knowing this could only help Blackie get the best deal possible, she made a point of reaching across herself for the bottle of cold cola on the desk between them, or anything else that would make them squeeze out a little more. She thought the bald guy’s eyeballs might actually fall out and bounce across the floor like in the cartoons she’d seen at the drive-in theater. They were all the rage and everywhere she heard people saying, “I tawt I taw a puddy-tat,” or “The-the-the-that’s all, folks!” She was having fun. The other broker guy, who still had his hair but had some sort of trouble with his mouth whenever he looked her way, was making another counter-offer, this time of eight thousand dollars. The subject at hand was the mackerel trawler Honoria B., a sixty-eight footer for sale at the docks just a short walk away. She was astonished that she would ever be a part of something so huge and expensive. Eight thousand dollars? It might as well have been eight million dollars. No different than if it was on Mars. She had never held a dollar in her life until Blackie gave one to her back there in Naples. She almost snorted with humor, thinking of what she’d bought with it: Joe Hook’s girlie underwear. Beside her, Blackie laughed and patted her knee under the table, which sent the brokers into new and obviously sweaty regions in their own personal lives.
“Eight thousand! I’ve already told you, it will take a minimum of two thousand to make her seaworthy, and that’s if the driveshaft isn’t damaged. You had a fire in the engine room of this little tub, gentlemen, and believe me, I know it is the worst thing which can happen to a vessel other than sinking and being lost outright. It is exactly what happened to my greatest ship during the war, the Pauline Gooding. Of course, the sinking of the Pauline was not because of a drunken engineer neglecting to tend his charge, as in the case of the Honoria B., but rather the result of not one but two Nazi torpedoes right in her guts. She burned like a forest fire. They were in the Baltic Sea at the time. All four hundred eighty-two hands were lost.” If he thought anything of mentioning his former love, Blackie showed no sign of it. The brokers took their eyes off Lottie’s goodies long enough to show they now understood they were dealing with a shipping man, who knew what was what with a small boat like this. Lottie was shocked at how her own perspective had just changed. Four hundred eighty-two people on one boat! She had never thought about how big warships and freighters really were, but she knew they were a ways bigger than the Horny B. She couldn’t wait for him to buy her off these fleasy houndogs cheap so she could tell him her racy new nickname for their new boat. Well, new to them.
They would buy this boat and they would sail her around the Caribbean Sea like pirates in a novel and they would catch lots of fish, and they would live a long time on sandy beaches with all their friends around them, and everything would be like a dream. She would have babies, and when she couldn’t go fishing with him because she was pregnant, she would wait for him on the shore, and his homecomings would be so romantic they would just have some more babies. When they got old there would be so many brown children running around, nobody would know if they were hers or Porcelain’s, who she now loved like the sister she never had and was so jealous of because Porcelain was already almost six months pregnant! She leaned back and crossed her arms under her breasts, and she thought the bald broker might fall over in his chair.
Blackie finally bought the boat for three thousand, four hundred and fifteen dollars. He also got a promise from the perspiring fellows that the tank would be full of diesel and the hull would be scraped and painted by Tuesday. He handed them a note on the Bank of Key West for one thousand dollars, signed by a Mr. Charles Thompson, as a down payment, and assured the Messrs. Streeter and Ripley that he would be back promptly at nine on Tuesday with the remainder and expected everything to be ship-shape and the papers to be in order, as he wanted to steam with the outgoing tide. That, he reminded them, was forecast to start at 9:37 precisely. With many a longing look in the direction of Lottie’s bosom, the gentlemen, Streeter and Ripley, shook hands over the deal and saw them through the door.
Out on the street they looked at each other for a second and both shouted laughter, throwing their heads back and letting the roars of hilarity come. He was trying to tell her, “They...they don’t even know...that fire was nothing...all they could look at was you!” She was holding his face and kissing him, telling him “She’s good luck for us, I just know it, the Horny B....” His eyes grew wide, and he howled and pounded his thighs. “The Horny...Horny B....” He picked her up and whirled her around in his arms, and she knew she was his. Forever. It was the most wonderful feeling she had ever known.
Lester Clayton Tottenmann worked hard. He worked long. He was up far before the brutal Miami sun clanged across the eastern sea line, and when he went to his scant rest each night in Porcelain’s sweet arms, it would not be many hours before that same harsh sun pulled him up again. He did not care how hard he fished or how long, or how badly the sun might burn him if he wasn’t careful. He did not care if his hands were split and cracked and bleeding and his back ached and his shoulders and nose were blistered so bad the skin fell right off them. He didn’t hate Florida anymore, he loved it. He recited a prayer to Florida every day. The mosquitos could suck him dry, and the sun could burn his bones, as long as God let him stay with Porcelain Jones.
He cleaned wooden thingamajigs that did not need to be cleaned; he oiled brass doohickeys that already gleamed with a buttery glow, indicating the daily care he had already lavished upon them. If it was supposed to roll smoothly, by God it rolled! If it was supposed to cinch a line and hold it fast, you could consider that line cinched! He harassed the locals on the docks to learn every last thing he could about boats, and motors, and fishing, and how to help Mr. Blackie so he would just let them stay on his boat forever. He felt as if he was on top of the FBI’s Ten-Most-Wanted List, and only if he worked hard and long, and really, really tried to do right, might the national manhunt, surely mounted long since for his crimes against humanity, somehow pass him by and leave them in peace. He had never wished for anything more in his whole life.
Porcelain was going to have his baby. He was mad with joy. He was someone else, a happy someone whom Lester Clayton Tottenmann could never have imagined existed, let alone imagined being. His life, her life, all life was a miracle, and he was going to get to be in on it! Their own private miracle! He was at once elated and horrified. He had never had much to lose before – or not so’s he’d thought about it. Sure, a fella doesn’t want to lose his parents, but he figures he’s a’gonna if he’s lucky, and they don’t lose him first. He had no brothers or sisters, leastways none who’d lived. But now, holy Moses, now he had everything, and now, by God, he had everything to lose. And one thing he knew for sure and for certain was that if a guy had anything worth a damn, anything at all, then he could bet his bottom dollar it’d be no time whatsoever before some mean-ass bastard would come along and try to take it away.
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[Editor’s Note: The novella of which this installment is a part can be ordered from Amazon.]
| Copyright © 2017 by Roger Owens |
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