68 Knots (6 page)

The last flicker of McKinley's flag brought Crystal back to the world before her. She shook her head.

“Hey, Boy Scout?” Crystal said, her hands on her hips.

“Yes?” Arthur winced. “Yes,
Spider
?”

“The flag is supposed to stay on board, Dumbo,” she said. “McKinley's not going to need it where he's going.”

Arthur sighed. “Oh, well,” he said. “It's McKinley's only souvenir from his ship.”

After the ceremony, Arthur and Dawn cleaned the captain's quarters. It was gruesome work, but it taught them a lot about Howard McKinley. They found personal papers, nearly $1,200 in cash, a letter he was writing to his mother, and eight different prescription medications in jars and bottles.

“He was discharged from the Navy for health reasons,” Arthur told the crew, assembled once again around the dining table. “The papers don't say what the reasons were, but I'm guessing he was an alcoholic. There are six cases of rum in his cabin.”

“Six cases!” Logan said. “Where do we keep the glasses?”

Arthur started to say something, but Logan lifted his pudgy body from his chair and rushed to the captain's quarters. He came back an instant later with a glass bottle of brown rum. Jesse fished eight glasses from the galley, and Marietta dug several large, dusty two-liter jugs of warm Coke from the galley shelves. The rum was dark and strong, and it mixed well with the Coke. Logan drank his rum straight. The only two who chose water instead of rum were Crystal, who said that alcohol was a cheap form of escape for people who were too weak to deal with reality, and Joy, who explained that she had vowed to meet her Maker without alcohol ever touching her lips. At first, Arthur also declined to have any rum, but when Marietta put a glass in front of him, he changed his mind. Logan stood and held his glass high.

“A toast,” he said. “To the crew of the schooner
Dreadnought
! May the wind blow steady and the waves be small. Aye! Aye! And all that stuff.”

They all raised their glasses.

“To us!”

“To the
Dreadnought
!”

“To small waves!” The crew clinked the glasses and drank together.

Logan made a sour face. “Like, we have
got
to get some ice,” he said.

Arthur considered asking the crew to elect him captain, but then he remembered something his father had told him years ago. They had been coming back from some meeting his father had attended. As usual, ten-year-old Arthur had to
wait in the car during the meeting, reading books and keeping the doors locked while his father negotiated and conducted deals. Arthur had spent a lot of time waiting around since his parents' divorce. When his father returned to the car, he was in a strangely good mood. His eyes gleaming, he reached over every few minutes and patted his briefcase with genuine affection. “Arthur,” he said in a gloating voice, “just remember one thing, and you'll always do well: Raise for discussion only those points you're willing to lose. Everything else—just do it.”

With that advice in mind, Arthur assumed the Captain's role on board the
Dreadnought
without a word. He decided that he would let other people steer the ship, but he would be the one who chose the destinations, set the courses, and issued the commands. He moved his gear into the newly cleaned captain's quarters. No one seemed to object.

“Okay,” he said to the sailors seated around the dining table as they sipped their rum, “I think there are a lot of things we need to do. It's getting close to dinnertime, so we need someone to cook.”

Joy raised her hand. “
Por favor
,” she said. “Food is God's nourishment for the body, and I'm really a great cook. Lots of spices, lots of great Mexican recipes. If it's okay with you, I'll do a lot of the cooking on this trip.”

She had no trouble getting the others to agree. Joy had centered her life around offering to help, serving as a support system for others who needed practical, emotional, or spiritual assistance. She hated the feeling she got when she saw a way to help someone and then chose not to do it. She wanted to increase the overall happiness in the universe, and that sometimes took a lot of work.

Leo felt the same way. Joy had met him when they were in the fifth grade, back in Austin, Texas. They became friends quickly, and they spent a lot of their time together. They would meet every evening along the banks of the river, holding hands and talking as the bats swarmed out from below the bridges. Joy had known from the beginning that they would be married, but Leo was slower to catch on. He dated some other girls in junior high and even after they started high school, but those relationships never lasted. Joy waited cheerfully each time, knowing that Leo would come back to her warmth and loyalty.

He got the picture after a painful break-up during his junior year in high school. He had been dumped, in public and with a lot of scorn, and he spent much of that evening with his “best friend” Joy. He told her all about it, he thanked her for listening so carefully, and he wondered out loud why he even bothered dating other girls when it was Joy—

That's when Leo caught on. Three weeks later, he told Joy he loved her and promised to buy her a ring as soon as he could afford one. He worked at a department store, stocking shelves and doing some checkout. He was saving his money carefully and would buy the ring once he had enough for a nice one. In the meantime, Joy worked toward her goal of founding and leading a new church back home. She planned to call it “The House of Joy,” and it would be based on a particularly caring form of Christianity. Nonviolence toward all people, as children of God, would be one of the main tenets. Compassion. Helping the poor. And bringing the deep thrill of God's message to everyone through music. Lots of singing. Lots of prayerful singing. Not too many rules or requirements.
Just love, laughter, and the Lord. She had signed up for the Leadership Cruise to learn how to lead the church she would create.

Joy sighed and looked around the galley table. Leo seemed very far away.

Arthur continued. “We also need to get you all decent places to sleep. It looks like there are enough bunks in this room for all of you, so we'll need someone to empty out the ones used for storage. Logan, please take care of that along with Crystal and Bill.”

The three nodded.

“Great,” Arthur continued. “Now, we have time to sail a little bit more today, and I'd sure like to move away from the place where we dumped McKinley's body. There are nautical maps in the—”

“Charts,” Dawn said.

“What?”

“They're called ‘charts.' When you're on a boat, all the ropes are called ‘lines' and all the maps are called ‘charts,'” she said. “Charts show landmarks, compass headings, water depths—the whole bit. I read a book about sailing after my parents signed me up for this cruise.”

“Okay,” Arthur said, bristling at the correction. “Dawn, would you please look at the
charts
, figure out where we are, and choose a safe place for us to anchor tonight? I'll take the helm.”

“Yes, I will,” she said with a freckled smile. “I'll find a safe harbor for us all.”

“Great,” Arthur said. “I'll need some help with the sails, so everyone else meet me on deck. We'll get under way in a few minutes.”

Arthur stood, and the others followed his lead.

“And crew,” Arthur said, “I'd like to take this opportunity to say that this is damn exciting! Let's have a hell of a good summer!”

They drank another toast and got to work.

The sail from McKinley's resting place to Little Green Island was clumsy at best. Little Green Island was a small rock farther off the coast of Maine, and the charts made it look pleasant, inviting—and uninhabited. Arthur steered the ship with a steady hand, but he knew little about how to keep the sails full and the ship moving forward. Several times the sails, apparently without provocation, suddenly began to flutter and luff in the wind, forcing Arthur to turn off course. He gradually gained a sense of how close to the wind's source he could point the ship without losing power.

Dawn took charge of the line that controlled how far out the sail could go to the left—she explained to the others that it's called the
mainsheet
—and Jesse took the one to the right. They pulled in on the lines when they thought they should, and they released when it seemed important. At times, Jesse pulled when Dawn was pulling, straining the lines between them, but over time, they figured out which sheet was supposed to be taut, and which one loose, at any given moment.

It took a long time to go a short distance, poring over the charts and scanning the horizon for landmarks to keep from running aground, but that evening the crew anchored the ship in a sheltered bay on the east side of Little Green Island. The evening air was calm and cool, and the boat rocked gently on the waves. In the main cabin below, most of the crew sat around the dining table; Joy was banging pots in the kitchen
and coaxing heat from the kerosene stove. The crew talked about the challenges that lay ahead.

“If anyone has suggestions for places to go, please bring them to me,” Arthur said. “We have the whole ocean in front of us, but we shouldn't waste time debating the destinations every single day.”

The dinner was Spam à la Joy, and the crew thought it was the best Spam they had ever tasted.

“To Spam!” Logan cheered. The crew toasted with glasses of warm Coke. Logan's had rum in it.

Joy also served a canned-vegetable salad, pan bread with butter, and hot cocoa for dessert. The crew ate and talked late into the night, then one at a time, they faded into the bunks—warm and comfortable in the main cabin, even though the sleeping bags were still damp—and went to sleep.

The next morning came early. The last one awake was Logan, and he looked a bit queasy.

“I shouldn't have toasted the Spam,” he said on his way to the bathroom.

After breakfast, Arthur decided that they should keep moving, to get more distance between the ship and McKinley's sunken body. He asked Crystal to take the helm and steer a course for Wooden Ball Island, eighteen miles off the Maine coast and tucked just east of the larger Matinicus Island. Wooden Ball was about ten miles away, an easy day's sail, and it didn't seem to have any houses or structures on it. “Just the place to lie low for a while,” Arthur said. Most of the crew worked the sails, but Dawn offered to stay below to clean the dishes. Arthur said he would join her and help out; it seemed like a good way to show the crew that he wasn't above the dirty jobs.

Once the pots and plates were clean and put away—“in a logical place, for once,” as Arthur put it—the two of them began digging through the shelves and holds that squeezed storage space out of the tiny galley.

“I think this is a ham,” Dawn said, lifting an oval metal tin from a damp and musty compartment. The label was missing, but the shape was right, and it had one of those little metal keys that make opening possible. Rust stained the metal in places, so Arthur suggested that they open it.

“If it's still good, we'll have it for lunch,” he said. “Otherwise, it's shark food.”

Dawn pried off the key with her long fingers and began to twist the metal strip around it. The stench was immediate. It was the smell of decay, of death, and of flourishing bacterial life.