Fiction: Dancing at the Driftwood Hotel (#11)

A novella with some real characters

By Roger Owens

Well, we’d been fishing for shrimp for a couple of months in the Straits and out in the Gulf, and we hadn’t done that bad. Blackie spent some money refitting the Horny B. with the trawling booms and nets, and cousin Lester had proven his mechanical abilities many times over. He did most of the welding himself, after careful calculations as to the weight and drag and so on, and I gather it was a painstaking job to weld those booms in the right places. Engineering was never my strong point. Then it was Joe Hook who once again showed us how things worked, operating the diesel-powered compressor to let out and retrieve the nets like he was born to the job. How he knew stuff like that was beyond me. Blackie mutely shook his head when Lester asked him how Joe might have learned how to trawl for shrimp in upstate New York. In any case, we would load the hold with shrimp and pack it in the ice Blackie bought in Key West, and every week or ten days we would pull in to the port and sell it all at a nice profit.
    We knew it couldn’t go on all year; we’d been warned the shrimp didn’t run in summer. Like most of the shrimpers, I guess Blackie figured we could make enough in the season to tide us over. Or maybe we could dive for oysters or something, or search for buried treasure. The Florida Keys were a whole new world to me, a tropical world of which I could never have dreamed. The waters varied from crystalline to opaque green, and tiny bays seen from beyond the reef were the most perfect turquoise the human eye can behold. Day after day the Horny B. would drag the Straits of Florida for the bounty of shrimp, and the bottom, normally no more than twenty or thirty feet down, would be clearly visible. It was all Joe Hook could do to keep the nets from scraping sand.
    It was New Years Eve, and we were out in the Gulf where it gets deeper, looking for cold-water shrimp. We had a good load in the hold and were all eager to reach dry land. Lester most of all, because Miss Porcelain was well along then and he wanted to be with her. She had stayed at home, which was in one of the tenement houses full of Haitians and Cubans. A white girl from across the street named Louise had befriended Porcelain and had promised to look after her while the rest of us trolled for our fortunes on the high seas. That’s how I thought back then, like we were all a bunch of buccaneers from one of those cheap novels like they sold in the drugstores. The hold was near full of shrimp on ice, more than enough to make a good profit. They were something new, something we hadn’t seen before; these shrimp were pink. All shrimp were pink when you cooked them, but these were pink raw. We all figured we would get a good price for the novelty. Blackie was always fair, and divvied the earnings up evens all around after expenses. The girls got their shares too. Blackie said they worked for it, by God, and, by God, he was right, but there wasn’t another man in a thousand miles would have said the same back then. Blackie always did believe everybody was as good as anybody else, man or woman, black or white. Miss Porcelain, in my opinion, was better than just about anybody else. I just wish it had done her some good.

James Donald Owens did not like the looks of the sky at all. He had been in the Navy long enough to see bad weather on the way from over the horizon, and to the east he saw it. Clouds were gathered out there, like a herd of wild cattle, where no island existed to gather them. It made no sense; tropical storms were usually in the fall, but the signs were there anyway. It was deadly hot in spite of being December 31st, and his buddies aboard were diving in the salty waters just like it was July. He reported himself aboard to the Officer of the Day, but he was only there to shower and change his togs. Tonight was the New Year’s Eve Ball put on by Key West High School, and he was going with Louise. The very thought of her made him sigh like a boy in love. He was a boy in love. Yet the times and the war had made him a man early in life.
    The shower smelled like farts, but there was plenty of hot water since so many crewmen were ashore. Their superiors said the local well water – orange and a little slimy, piped aboard through the dock supply cocks – already smelled like farts because it was naturally occurring sulfur water, and it was perfectly fine for washing. The men resisted until Jim told them it was true, but nobody paid any attention until he revealed, almost accidentally, that sulfur water naturally caused mens’ primary members to become, well, prone to action for the next many hours after bathing in it. After that the swabs all washed up with a passion. There was absolutely no truth whatsoever to what he told them, but it got them to smell better. He grinned to himself every time he thought of it.
    Nobody came banging on the door calling out for a “proper Navy shower,” so he took his time getting clean. He dressed in his best civvies, a blue suit he’d bought at the same place Harry Truman went. When he came on deck, the sky to the east was a solid line of black clouds. He immediately returned to his berth and hoisted his heavy-weather gear over his arm. When he reappeared with the coat and boots, the swabbies on deck stopped and stared. They weren’t stupid, most of them, and they trusted him. Their eyes went to the east with his, and they saw the same thing he did. As the sun sank behind his back, James descended from the Sarsfield with his eyes on the approaching storm.
    The gymnasium at the high school had been decorated for the evening with ribbons and bunting. A band was setting up on the stage and testing out their instruments and the loudspeaker microphones, with lots of squeaks from the horns and a guy saying “Testing, testing,” over and over again. Along the sides, where the bleachers had been folded back against the walls on wheels, chairs and tables had been set up, and the principal and the teachers were already gathered around a “special” bowl of punch. There looked to be quite a crowd coming in. Bands of rain were blowing across the island from east to west and umbrellas began to pile up by the doors. Tables meant for snacks and tropical punch were covered with raincoats. Jim was impressed. Floridians were not known for bothering much with rain gear. In their opinion it never lasted long enough to take the trouble, except of course in a hurricane.

Blackie Wainwright stared intently through the sweeping rain. The sky ahead to the southeast was churning like a boiling pot, and the Horny B. was bulling her way through increasingly steep rollers. Still one hundred miles from port, they had at least ten hours steaming to go, and more if the weather went any worse. He was already concerned about their fuel situation, and had Jackson running the engines at about seventy percent. A rough ride home would cost them their final reserves and Blackie didn’t trust the bottom of these old fuel tanks. They tended to gather water, dirt and scum over the years and most boat crews failed to clean them or strain the filters properly. They were a clogged fuel line waiting to happen, and a clogged fuel line now would send them all helplessly downwind to hell. He had seen the reefs to their west, north of the Tortugas, and he feared them. They were ship-killers. The sun had disappeared early, and at five in the evening it was dark as the inside of a coal sack. He checked the radio reports but no hurricane warning had been issued from the National Hurricane Warning Station Miami. Other fishermen reported deteriorating conditions on every side. Boats he believed to be in the Atlantic did not respond.
    He had a hold mostly full of shrimp, and all his trawling gear was in the wind. At that moment Lester, Jackson, and Joe Hook were fighting the rising winds and spray to secure the equipment, but there was nothing he could do about the load in the hold, which made the Horny B. squat like a pig in the water. The fact that the hold was not quite full made it worse, because the load would shift from time to time, tons of water and shrimp slamming from one side to the other, and those times were coming more often as the waves got bigger. Lottie stood by him in the deckhouse, and though she sensed his tension, she kept her silence. She held tight to a stanchion and he clutched the wheel. The boat flew sickeningly up and crashed agonizingly down, breathtakingly up, uncontrollably down, and then again and again, spray flying endlessly in the gale.
    That’s when they saw the fishing boat off to their port ahead, wallowing in the growing swells. At about forty feet, she was a shrimp trawler like the Horny B., and it was plain she was in trouble. Between the wind and the swells she twisted back and forth enough to make an old whaler puke his salted herring over the side. Her trawling booms, only partially secured, flew about like trees in a tornado, and she was running her sodium deck lights so her crew could try to secure them. The rust streamed down her sides like blood from shark bites. Quick as he caught sight of her, Blackie’s radio crackled and the other captain shouted in fright, his Cubano accent coming through. “¡Ayudamos! ¡Nosotros la Santa Inez! Help! ¡Ayudarle por favor! We lose power, our fuel ¡contaminado! ¿Necessitos...que?” Blackie could just hear a garbled translation from someone nearby, then the other captain continued. “We need...tow! ¡Ahora! Quickly!” Lottie didn’t even have to turn those big brown eyes on him. Blackie answered instantly, calmly. “Afirmativo, capitan, somos los Honoria B., le passaremos a estribor, we will pass you to starboard, and trail a towline. Be prepared to retrieve it and make it fast as soon as possible.” It was clear why their fuel tanks were contaminated, and the contaminant, as always, was water. Steel tanks always collected water. The Santa Inez was a battered old dame whose owners either could not afford regular maintenance or did not believe in it, and part of that maintenance was cleaning those tanks. Shaken like a drink mixer in the storm, the water and oil and rust and shit on the bottom of those tanks had been stirred up and sucked into the fuel lines of the poor derelict Santa Inez.
    “Praise God! ¡Gracias por Dio, capitan! We will be ready!” At Blackie’s shouted direction, Lester left Joe Hook and Jackson Lee to finish securing the net lines and the trawling booms. Wainwright watched in plain admiration as LC wrestled the heaviest line they had, some three and one-half inches thick, through the windlass centered on the deck behind the wheelhouse and fastened a balloon float to the bitter end. Then, in the flying rain, he dropped the line and float off the left side and casually watched it bob away in the shrieking wind. He then turned to man the windlass as if stepping up to his back-yard grill at home. The man was solid as a concrete block. Blackie turned the boat to port as Lester paid out the line, and, as he had hoped, it came within boat-hook range of the men gathered on the bow of the Santa Inez. He did not think they could have tried again if they had missed. In no time they made it fast to their bow and the Honoria B. took up the slack. The instant the bow of the Santa Inez faced once more into the waves, her crazy corkscrewing motion ceased, and she steadied head-on into the rising gale. The Honoria B., on the other hand, was immediately yanked almost backwards, and Lottie now turned frightened eyes on Blackie. He laid a steadying hand on her arm, as if to say they weren’t in trouble yet. He wished he could be so sure. On the radio, the captain of the Santa Inez confirmed they were headed for Key West as well, and had broken down trying to fight the wind and waves. Blackie could see it in his mind: the tanks of the Santa Inez, already low, sloshing with filthy water at the bottom that had been churned up by the waves and fouled the fuel lines. The Cuban captain lamented his hold full of shrimp, which, like that of the Horny B., now only endangered his vessel and likely would never see port or make him any profit. Why, he wanted to know, had no warning come from la Centro de Advertencia de Hurrican National in Miami? It was, Blackie Wainwright thought, a damned good question.
    The two boats, tied together, now became a nightmare to guide through the waves, which no longer came in lines from the southeast but shot up on all sides. Peaks and valleys appeared from nowhere, jerking both vessels wildly back and forth, severely hampering their passage, while the wind veered around the compass. The Gulf was often well-lit by starlight, and the moon sometimes shone so brightly one could read by it. Now, despite the early hour, it was blacker than the darkest night, an oppressive cloud covering the sea. Wainwright calculated their situation in his highly experienced and very worried mind. The Horny B. possessed two fuel tanks, and the secondary tank now showed a bit over a third full. That was enough for her to travel at her full twelve nautical miles per hour for about ten hours. That was maybe one hundred twenty miles with her holds empty, a flat sea and no headwind. She now carried a hold bursting with shrimp, ice, and water. Lots of water. Shrimp, he thought, are full of water, and there was no help for that. And you need that water to store them in, but water is heavy. Very heavy. And what is ice? Why, more water, that’s what it is, and he feared his command was already sinking. There was more water inside his boat than outside. She was currently towing a vessel a good bit over half her own size that was also loaded with shrimp and water – can’t forget the water. And they were headed almost directly into the wind from what had to be a hurricane. By his direction Lester now had the engines running at half ahead. Any faster dragging the Santa Inez would be suicide. The best he could figure, they were making about three knots. That meant they had at most twenty hours of power, likely less, which would give them sixty nautical miles at the outside. At that moment they were right at ninety-seven nautical miles from the Port of Key West.
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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