1
On the Hard
It begins and ends, as always, with the sea. Strange movements across its restless face, ever-changing. They get into you, the endless motions of the black waters, and they never leave you, not really. A chorus in melody, rising and falling. A call and response. There is a gibbering in the corner of the life raft, but everyone is gone. I am essentially alone. But we're all alone at the end, aren't we? It's how we get there that matters.
This is my testament and I consign it to the lightless sea.
…
The Victress had been on the hard since 2019 in Tampa and I didn't have the dough to refit her. She needed new canvas, rigging, antifouling. Her electrical system was salt-rimed and corroded, and I'd need to reglass her lazarettes, which kept letting in water, and troubleshoot two winches that also were constantly inconstant. Her wee 15 horsepower Yanmar heart-her original engine-had coughed, sputtered, and given out within sight of land-so close yet so far away-and I'd put in a call for a coastal tow, which was pricey but unavoidable. My chartered guests at the time-a muscle-bound father and his two muscle-choked sons-were beyond disappointed; they were litigious. It would be a while before I could get enough capital to put in a new engine.
The Victress was no good anymore for the tourists and Bimini cruising, and maybe I wasn't, either. The scubadeers and snorkelers and idle-hand crews want ice machines and margaritas served by attractive crew decked out in white. Xboxes and Blu-rays and charging stations without the juddering rattle and belch of smoke from a generator on deck. The Victress had a VCR and an 8-track. Booze was served cabin temperature and self-poured.
And the crew was, well, me. Single-handed and absolutely unprepared for COVID-19 to destroy what few charters I did get.
In 2020, I took a job crewing for rich men during the cruising season (a pandemic will never stop the rich from doing what they will), and when the season was done, spent two thirds of my cash on marina fees. In '21 I did the same, making the transatlantic passage from Majorca to the Azores to Sint Maarten, which is my favorite dump. There I crewed about, got sick with the 'rona but was vaxxed to the gills so I did not die, and landed a slot on a rich man's Oceanis bound back to Newport, Rhode Island, the playground of the rich sailing set, for the offseason. After a twenty-four-hour bus ride, I was back at home on the hard in eff el ay, home of Florida Man, meth-addled alligators, gun freaks, and porn stars. Don't forget the sinkholes.
The irony is, at sea I went dry, and on the hard I could not stay wet enough. I drank like a drowning woman and my thirst only deepened like the coastal shelf. Riley left me-it is easier to keep a lover when there is blue beneath you and a shifting deck below your feet. Everyone wants to fuck when the universe is concentrated in the sails, when the wake teems with life by day and shines bioluminescent at night. But when you're on the hard? Lovers find other slippery fish for their pans. A landlocked boat on braces is a chore; its master suffers a diminution. Divorced from the sea, fallen from grace. And I was hard drinking. I had money enough for that. Vodka, the bullet what slew more Russians than any invader. Months and months and months of the cheap stuff and used paperbacks and sun until I was disgusted with myself and my liver was swollen and aching when I received Loick's email.
FROM:
[email protected]SUBJ: your broke ass
Vines,
I have it on good authority the Victress is dry and you crewed last summer on an Atlantic passage for Stevens on the
Evangeline. I was sorry to hear your boat is hard up and likely to remain that way for a long time.
Maybe we can fix that, if you're of a mind. There's good money. A delivery job and this boat . . . well, this boat is a beast and while you're a fucking piece of work, you're a damned good sailor. And you know this engine, I believe, quite well. So I thought of you when Huntington asked who to crew. Yes, Hank is here. I hope that doesn't scare you off.
Did I mention the money is good? It's very good.
Call me or maybe we can Facetime?
I know we did not part well but I miss you, dude.
Holler back,
Yer boy, Loick
…
I hollered back at him once I could freeload off my neighbor's Wi-Fi.
I always have physical charts and can still navigate by sextant and stars, as I learned so long ago. But I like my phone. I love my tablet and news and up-to-date digital charts and constantly improved navigational apps. They can fail and redundancy on a boat keeps you alive. You have to adapt, or you'll end up holed and taking on water. Still, it took me three or four tries before I got FaceTime working.
He answered and a silhouette filled the screen. Loick is Black, and I've read that digital cameras are racist in their programming-everything is automated and calibrated for our pasty pink Caucasian faces-so when he appeared on my phone he was just an amorphous and shifting mass, bracketed from behind by a light-bloomed window.
"If it isn't Samantha Vineyard, as I live and breathe," he said in his rumbling voice, full of mirth and not a little mischievousness.
"What are you, a matron from the 1950s? 'As I live and breathe,'" I said. "You should be quipping in French or something." He'd been in America since he was seven, but I know it pleased him when anything French was mentioned.
"Le poisson, le poisson, he he he, hon hon hon," he said, in imitation of the chef in that mermaid movie. Loick laughed and the silhouette moved. I heard the tinny rattle of drapes being drawn; the amorphous mass became a handsome Black man with a shaved head.
…
Years before, when we both were much greener and becalmed somewhere between San Diego and Hawaii, I asked Loick why he would shave his head when he had a full head of hair. The black crown became visible after a few days if he didn't go leeward and shave with an electric razor.
"Vines, I've been told I've got a fine-looking skull," Loick said, grinning. "And I like to show it off."
He laughed and then became solemn. "You know how it is, Sam," he said. "We all find little ways to keep control." He gestured at the flat sea and empty sails: example A of our existential lack thereof. We'd thrown up a spinnaker in hopes of catching any light breeze but it was as slack and empty as a starving man's stomach.
"I started shaving my head when I was in school because it made me look like a guy you don't want to fuck with, and I never stopped. It eventually stopped being an affectation and became a habit." He laughed, a little at himself. "This shiny dome is me keeping control. Handling my shit."
"Well, your hair's coming in quick and you still look like a guy not to fuck with," I said.
His smile gleamed. "Then why you always fuckin' with me, Vines?"
…
Now Loick sniffed and gave me his best I-love-you-but-you've-disappointed-me stare. "You look like absolute dogshit, Vines. Underweight and pasty. You even able to do this job?"
"Of course," I said. "I'm off the booze and fattening up." I was actually three pounds down from the previous month. And a little buzzed. "I'll be shipshape by the time I get there. Just tell me about the gig."
Loick peered at me through the internet, as though trying to suss out any lies I had told him. There was only a peppering in there. The rest was salt.
"It's a weird one, for sure," he said, eventually. "A big boat, which is why they hired Hank. And it's got an older engine-a Rolls Royce-which is why Hank was okay with you on crew despite your, erm, differences."
My differences with Hank Huntington involved a mutual paramour by the milquetoast name of Pat. Nice enough to bed but not nice enough to scuffle over, at least until the rum started talking that night we harbored in Tahiti. Hank roughed me up some as he's twice my size, but I managed to dot his eye and bloody his lip pretty good, so that the onlookers began hooting "He's leaking! Big boy is leaking! This chick is kickin' his ass!" Hank's pride couldn't stand that. I came out of the fight with a broken rib and some internal bleeding that put me in a haint blue Tahitian hospital for two days. I sent Hank the bill and he paid it. So, yeah. There was some blood between us and some of it might be construed as bad. But not enough for me to turn my nose up at a job, nor for Hank to run off someone who knew old boat engines as I do. I cut my teeth crewing on an old twin-masted schooner, the Erinyes, a hundred-year-old wooden Herreshoff with a beefy Rolls Royce engine deep in her belly. By the time my four-year hitch aboard the Erinyes was through, I'd rebuilt that engine five times. I don't want to talk about the year I rebuilt it twice.
"Is Hank still trying to be a YouTube star?" I asked.
Loick laughed. "Let's put it this way: There's a high probability he's fucked his drone already." The words made me think of sausages being chopped by Ginsu knives. He pursed his lips. "I'll give you that your mind seems sharp enough, Vines. But seriously, if you're underweight and gonna be spewing for the first month, we can find someone else."
There was something off here, but I couldn't put my finger on just what it was. Loick did not approach things obliquely. He was holding something back.
"Why don't you tell me about this boat before you fire me?" I said.
"Well, she's big, for one. A hundred tons and almost a hundred and thirty-seven feet."
"Holy hell. I can see why you'd want me for the mechanic," I said. An older boat that large is so unwieldy and logy in the sea that should her engine fail-well, the worst could happen. Modern boats have redundant engines; if one fails, the other can take up the slack. Not so in older boats. Of course, there's always the sails, but working around reefs and jetties, or coming into harbor, an engine is a necessary dynamo. And a Rolls Royce engine in boats is essentially a massive twelve-cylinder car engine to turn the screws. With a boat as gigantic as this one, even a Rolls going full out wouldn't get it going faster than five knots. "Is it even a sailing yacht?"
"Yes, it is. It's a Tahiti ketch," he said.
"This weird-ass boat have a name?" I asked.
"She's called the Blackwatch," he said.
…
"The Blackwatch," I said. "Okay, that's got some old-world racist vibes."
"Yeah," Loick said. "Like, some real horse latitudes kind of shit. Apparently, it was named after some old movie. Not a good one, either." He shrugged his massive shoulders. "Racism is like asbestos. You look at anything from, I don't know, a generation or more past, that shit is everywhere. It's everywhere now too, don't get me wrong, but they baked that shit into the foundations."
"A Tahiti ketch?" I recalled reading about them before, seeing them in photos, but all the books were by long-dead authors and all the photos sepia. "The boat is what? A hundred years old? What are we talking here? A two-year trip?" I was joking. But only a little. A boat takes months of preparation for an ocean passage and this one would entail sailing south to Panama, then through the Canal, then through the Gulf, then up the Eastern Seaboard if we didn't cross the Atlantic heading for the Azores. Only then would we get to the transatlantic passage, which was enough to make any veteran if not scared then very serious. It was March. A month for outfitting and provisions (at best), a month down and through the canal and into the Gulf-whatever delays in Panama could not be helped. It looked good on paper, but one or two unforeseen delays and we'd be screwed, caught in the Atlantic during hurricane season for sure.
"Not yet, but close," Loick said. "Here's the deal. They bought this thing for, well, millions. They've put aside two million for the delivery. The boat is in remarkably good shape for her age. The music producer who owned it kept it maintained and mostly at dock in a froufrou marina with yearly servicing and cleaning. It mostly functioned as a kinda getaway for him."
"All the better for cocaine and orgies, I guess," I said.
"Hey, to each their own," Loick said. "I don't like cocaine, I just like how it smells." We both laughed. Two old friends throwing out tired jokes to ease the awkwardness of reacquaintance through a small screen. We went quiet for a moment. You fall out of practice being friends, speaking lightly, easily, candidly. That's something for when the shearwaters glide in your wake. It's more difficult on the hard. Away from the sea, spirits are stowed away.
Loick began again. "The good news is that sometime in the last twenty years, the producer installed heavy-duty electric winches, and flew over someone from Rolls Royce to rebuild the engine and put in a genny and a freshwater maker. That engine is so beefy and the tanks are so big-this motherfucker was commandeered by the US Navy during World War Two, after all-it's got a thousand-gallon fuel tank! We could probably get to Key West from here without even hoisting a sail." He shook his head. "This fucking boat, man!" Whatever reserve had been occluding his enthusiasm, those clouds parted and his excitement shone through. "It's like a fucking Old World mansion! You won't believe it. Vines. Vines!" The last bit he hissed. "It's got a fucking piano in it."
Holy shit.
"Are we talking a Casio or, like, um, a baby grand?"
"Somewhere in between," he laughed.
Then he sobered once more.
"And this big bastard is haunted," he said.
2
Haunted Haunted?
"What?" I said. "Are you serious?"
Loick shrugged. "That's what they're selling, along with the boat. Its 'special' history. It's a boat and it makes noises like all boats. The thing is, there are just so many fucking berths and little nooks and crannies, it's like that weird British show, the one with the guy in the blue telephone box."
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