The Turquoise Lament (14 page)

"He reacts beautifully."

"What happened? I mean, where was he when it happened?"

"You have no idea how many times I told this, over two years ago, how many times a new official popped up and had to hear it all over again."

"I'm sorry. Forget it."

"It doesn't matter as much now as it did then. It so happened that Howie and I were both below. The three of us had been swimming. We were anchored just outside Little Harbor. It was a very calm sea. It was about three thirty in the afternoon. Both Howie and I heard this strange thumping sound. He ran up and as soon as he saw what had happened, he yelled to me. Fred was on his face in the dinghy with his legs trailing in the water. The dinghy had shipped some water. Somehow we got him up onto the deck and got shade over him. Howie got on the emergency frequency right away and pretty soon there was a doctor on the way in a seaplane, but Fred stopped breathing before the plane landed even. There was an investigation and all that. And I flew back in the same chartered plane with Tom Collier and with the body. Tom has been an absolute doll about everything. I don't know what I would have done without him."

"So you think that Howie Brindle would be a good person to sail around the world?"

"I guess so."

"Some reservations?"

"Not really. It's just that I thought people like that were great readers, and kept journals and did a lot of heavy thinking. Howie is just sort of a physical person. I don't think he really has much going on up here. You know? He's terribly pleasant, and he figures out the little problems, the best way to do things, but if you said to him, 'Howie, do you think there is a hereafter?' he would look sort of startled. I can tell you almost exactly what he would say. He'd say, `Some people believe there is and some people believe there isn't. I guess there's no way to find out for sure.'"

"Do you feel you really got to know him?"

"You know as well as I do that six weeks aboard anything the size of the Salamah is no way to remain strangers. After Howie brought her back to Lauderdale, Tom asked me if I had any objection to Howie living aboard her and caretaking. I said none at all. I went down and removed the personal stuff, and Howie helped me load it all in the station wagon. Funny. I was so positive I wanted to sell her until the day she was sold. And then I was sorry."

The young were shrieking and yelping. She took her last sip of drink, looking at me across the rim of the empty glass. The ice chinked as she put the glass down. A handsome woman with the eyes of a gambler. I've got aces back to back, and I dare you to bet into them. Good smile lines.

She said, "I'd like to come see your houseboat some day when things aren't so drunk. I remember an absolutely gigantic shower stall, or did I dream it? Much too big for a boat."

"It's there. It's real." She was waiting for the definite invitation. No thanks, widow lady. With that figure and mouth, you can get all the safe, healthy fellows you want. I stood up. "Thanks for letting me bother you with these weird questions."

"It's okay. I needed a break. I hate cleaning the place. If I can't find somebody soon, I'm going to have to sell it before it works me to death."

"It's the right time of year to advertise in Boston or Chicago."

"You just may have something there. After school opens, I could fly up and interview applicants and bring the best one back. See you around the marina, Travis."

I went back to Bahia Mar to fill in a very troubling blank in Brindle's history. Meyer had stimulated my memory to the point where I knew Howie had been aboard the Salamah until she was sold. But she was sold before Professor Ted was killed. So he would not have met Pidge until she came down from school when Ted died, and to meet her and to be available to give her a helping hand, he had to be living somewhere else in the marina complex.

The cold wet wind had swept the area fairly clean of both residents and tourists. The parking meters at the beach area stood like a small lonely forest of Martian flowers. Some young folk in wet suits were trying to find breakers to ride. They weren't breaking often. They were sliding in round and gray and slow, as if quieted by oil. The black suits are the last step in unisex. Out there with their boards they looked as neuter as black seals.

I checked out several neighborhoods before I came up with anything. Any big marina has neighborhoods. The charterboats, the rag bums, the fat cruiser crowd, the horsepower freaks, the roundthe-worlders, the storekeepers, the staff.

Fat Jack Hoover was replacing a compressor aboard the Miss Kitty, the ornate top-heavy old single-crew mahogany yacht he captains for a crazy old lady from Duluth. She comes down once or twice a year for a week to ten days each time, bringing along a maid, a cook, three poodles and four friends. When she comes down, she wants to cruise up and down the Waterway, very slowly. She doesn't want any rocking and lurching, or any more noise than necessary. Fat Jack sends all the billing to a bank in Duluth. They pay with hardly ever a question.

He wiped his greasy paws on a ball of waste and sat on the crate the new compressor had been shipped in. "Now who would know the most about it would be Rine Houk."

"That sells yachts?"

"The very one. From the shape that Harron ketch was in while he was showing her, he come to believe Howie was reliable, which is a rare thing especially lately, especially anywhere. Like with a house, it is a good thing to have somebody living on it when you are selling it, so the air isn't stale, the bugs stay hid, the bird shit gets wiped off the overhead. So what he does is make a deal, Howie moves onto that big son of a bitch of a thing out of Corpus Christi, that QM crash boat that was custom-made into a yacht, big old high-octane Packards in her, you couldn't blow fuel out a fire hose as fast as she'd suck. Ninety foot? A friggin' fiasco, that thing, what was the name on it? Weird. Oh. Scroomall. Big sacrifice sale at forty thou, but the way I looked at it, Howie agreeing, you'd have to pull the Packards and put in diesels, change the tanks, gearing, trim. Nineteen and forty-four it was built, and all as solid as you could expect with the owner trying to hammer it into pieces on any little ripple whenever he run it, so you would end up with seventy-five to eighty in it, conservative guess, and what do you have? Another freak PT conversion is what you have, roll you sick on a wet lawn. The owner got it this far with a new wife on her, just a kid she was, and she said enough, she wouldn't even go back onto the son of a bitch to get a toothbrush, so he put it up right then. Fahrhowser his name was, round bald fella with a voice to rattle the dish cupboards. There was work to do on it, so Howie got more pay, Rine Houk getting approval from Fahrhowser.

"I couldn't see any rich man getting stupid enough or drunk enough to buy that Scroomall. One day there was a girl on deck, one of those spindly saggy kind, long blond hair hanging, a face that if she was dead it would have a livelier expression on it, sorry old clothes like a ragbag. Turns out, talking to Howie, she's the daughter of this Fahrhowser, took off from school, she's broke and wants to stay aboard only don't tell the old man. He doesn't know what he should do. She must have moved in, because it was anyway a week later I saw them on the beach and didn't know it was the same girl for sure, because in a swim outfit you could see what was hid under those raggy clothes, and it was pretty nice. From how they were horsing around together it was clear to any fool she'd moved in all the way. What was her damn name? Susan. That's it. Not so long after that my crazy old lady come down from Duluth and I had to run up and down that damn Waterway for a week and a half. I disremember seeing Howie for a time, and then I seen him one day on the Trepid, helping out Pidge Lewellen. I stopped and asked him if somebody bought that Scroomall crock and he said not yet, he was still living aboard, and it hadn't even nearly been sold, as far as he could tell. I would guess that he stayed aboard that Texas boat until the wedding. Sometime later, one day that crock was gone, and you'd have to ask Rine Houk about what happened. And whyn't you go below and drag us up a pair of beers, McGee? It's a cold day for beer, but talking makes me sweaty."

For about fifteen seconds I didn't know I was talking to Rine Houk. It had been a year and more. The man I knew had a long head, bald on top, a cropped stubble of salt and pepper around the edges, glasses with big black frames.

When he called me by name I peered at him again. "Jesus Christ, Rine!" I said before I could stop myself.

He shook his head and sat down behind his desk at his big boatyard. "I know. I know. You should try wearing this goddamn thing in weather like we were having lately. Trav, it's like wearing a fur hat with ear flappers. The sweat comes apouring out from under it and runs down the inside of these wire glasses like you wouldn't believe. If I see myself far off in a store window and I squint up my eyes, I can almost believe that's a young fellow I'm seeing. Selling is a young man's game, Trav, and don't you forget it."

"Bullshit, Rine. How about Colonel Sanders and his greasy chicken?"

"I'm not exactly selling box lunches."

"Don't get huffy with me just because I don't like your hairpiece. We've never been great friends, Rine. But I like you. You are an honest man in a business where they are rare. I want to know a couple of things. Why that red-brown color like a setter dog?"

"That's the color my hair was when I had any."

"Do you sell boats from fifty feet away, or talking up close?"

"I sell them right across this desk."

"Have you got a young girl friend?"

"Me!"

"Are you looking for one?"

"Am I looking for a coronary?"

"Rine, somebody gave you a bad steer. Are you selling more yachts lately?"

"Business is generally rotten."

"Listen. I did not think of you as being young or old. I thought of you as being Rine Houk, the boat broker. I never especially thought of your face. But now I see your face underneath and between all that shiny hair, and your face looks so damn withered and old, I don't know whether to laugh or cry. You look silly Rine. You look like you had bad judgment. You look desperate. I wouldn't buy a leaky skiff from anybody who looks the way you do right now."

"Get out of this office," he said, but he wouldn't look right at me.

"Rine," I said gently.

He took a deep breath and let it out. He blinked rapidly, and I saw the tears squeeze out of his eyes. He jumped up and went around the corner of his desk, bumping into it, and went into the bathroom off his office and pulled the door shut. I felt rotten. People make such strange evaluations of self. Why upset them? It's none of my business. I waited. And waited. And waited.

He came out, sans wig. He was back in the big glasses. He didn't look at me. He sat on his heels in front of the executive icebox with the genuine cherrywood paneling. "Black Jack do you?" he asked.

"Fine. No mix. Just rocks."

He made the two drinks the same and made them heavy. He brought them to the desk. The intercom said, "Mr. Houk?"

"Yes, Mark."

"There's a Mister Mertz here who's interested in the Matthews fifty-two."

"So sell it to him."

"But you said-"

"Forget what I said. It's a beautiful thing for that money. Sell it to him."

He picked up his drink and gave it a little lift in my direction, then drank it down. He ran his hand over his bald head. "Had the old glasses in the cupboard in there."

"Handy to have a spare."

He hit the desk. "You don't know how hard it was, dammit, to all of a sudden one day start wearing that hair."

"I can imagine."

"No. You can't imagine. Jesus. All that wasted effort."

"Are you giving it up?"

"You told me what I already knew. Now I'm just another bald old fart. Feels good already. Thanks, Trav. Can I sell you… some kind of a leaky skiff?" He grinned and then blew his nose.

I asked him about the Scroomall, shocking him for a moment with the misapprehension I might be interested in it. He remembered the boat, but he had to look at his files to remember what had happened to it. The owner had finally sent two men over from Corpus Christi to take the boat back to Texas to try to sell it there. The men had to turn back twice before they got it running properly.

"And Howie Brindle worked out well?"

"I wish I still had him. I wish I had one round dozen Howie Brindles. He didn't break his back looking for things to do, but when you told him, they got done. And if he'd put his mind to it, he could have sold boats."

"Was it Tom Collier who recommended him?"

"It could have been. Or Mrs. Harron, or both of them."

"Never any problems with him?"

Rine tilted his head. "What are you being paid to do?"

"Funny question."

"I guess so. Fahrhowser had to have money to back his bad judgment in buying that old crash boat. He could still be looking for his daughter."

"Susan? The one who stayed on the Scroomall with Howie?"

"Not with Howie. Not that way. He actually loaned her some money to get home on. He told the guys who came looking for her, and he told me the same thing, he made a deal with her. He'd let her come aboard and get rested up provided she'd go home, no arguments. He said he was seriously thinking about calling her people anyway, but decided not to. I guess she never made it back to Texas. And if she hasn't by now, she never will."