Читать книгу Death in the Polka Dot Shoes: A Novel - Marlin Fitzwater - Страница 10

Chapter Three

Martha Claire Shannon’s name appeared on the bow of two boats in Jenkins Creek, one a thirty-foot bay-built docked at the Bayfront’s pier, and the other a fourteen-foot Boston Whaler that my brother kept on a trailer at this home. One was his profession; one for recreation. He bought the smaller boat and twenty horse motor when his daughter was born, with the distant dream of taking her fishing near the marshes of the Bay, floating aimlessly on a warm summer day and showing her the patterns of life on the water. He knew she would enjoy seeing the long legged blue herons, with their necks stretched tight as a clothesline, skim across the water, then raise their heads and bring down their legs just like a jet airplane preparing to land. Already, at age one, the little girl would cry in the night when she heard the fractious, angry cry of the heron, such an ugly foghorn of a sound to come from such an elegant bird. And Jimmy wanted to show her how the herons came to the marsh at low tide, pranced around in the mud with such satisfaction that they finally drew that long neck down into their feathers, and in a final act of hauteur, raised one leg into their wheel well, and went to sleep, so motionless that they might be mistaken for a Florida yard sculpture. He also wanted to show her how natural enemies like the Osprey, growing in numbers in their big nests on the man-made channel markers, would attack the heron for no apparent reason, forcing them out of the sky in violent battles until the heron could find refuge in the tall marsh grass. None of that would happen now.

My brother had married Martha just two years ago, but they had known each other for several years. She had worked at the Bayfront when he started crabbing on his own. But it took eight years for the spark to catch, and then they wondered how they could have ignored each other for so long. Jimmy always figured it was because his mother was also named Martha, so he avoided her, at least subconsciously. But names seem to have a special niche in the culture of Parkers. Every waterman has a nickname, like Muskogee or Tank or Pirate, that usually comes from some experience on the water. The wives’ names are often on their husbands boats, sometimes with middle names never used in other circumstances. And waitresses seem to call everyone Honey, or Sweetie, or Darling.

The anomaly for Jimmy was that his wife and mother had the same first name, but different middle names. However, since he inherited his Dad’s boat, and since everyone knows that changing a boat’s name is bad luck, he simply kept the Martha Claire on the boat and everyone assumed that meant his wife’s middle name was Claire. It was complicated, but in the end nothing changed.

Now Martha was alone again, and seeking comfort where she had always found it, the Bayfront on a Sunday morning. The Bayfront Inn exists in every waterfront fishing community between South Carolina and Maine. It’s always dark and carries the same worn and splintered façade as the fishing boats. Both the bar and the boats are painted every year, never with all the old paint scraped off, so the surface is thick with coats that build up on door frames and window ledges. And the first day after painting, heavy rubber boots leave sliding marks on the floor, and grease from the diesel engines leaves dark smudges around the door handle. It’s only a matter of weeks before the spiders and dust mites have added their special touch of décor. And that’s when the watermen feel the most comfortable. The Bayfront wraps her smells of stale beer and eggs around you like a bomber jacket with a fur lining. It’s warm and comforting like a dear friend that has known you sick or drunk or foolish and still welcomes your presence.

Martha carried her Irish daughter Mindy in a plastic car seat into the Bayfront bar, set her on a round stool with red cover, wedged the seat in some practiced fashion against the bar, and tied it to a brass rail just under the ledge. It seemed unlikely Mindy would fall from that perch, yet most of the fishermen at the bar left an open seat between themselves and the child, a margin of safety as it were.

Vinnie Tupelo, the first mate on my brother’s boat, moved through the outside door to the bar, let his eyes adjust to the dim, and took the open stool beside the sleeping Mindy. Vinnie had been with my brother for six years, and now would have to find another boat unless I picked him up, which I probably would. He had been with the Marine police for 20 years and had arrested every waterman on the Bay at least once for violating one of the many fishing regulations. Vinnie was a very optimistic fellow for a policeman, and he used to brag that in twenty years of issuing tickets for violations, he seldom made arrests or got a conviction. The reason, of course, was that local judges around the Bay would seldom find a waterman guilty of any water-related infraction. The judges figured life on the water was tough enough, and a day of fishing lost to a court appearance was punishment enough. Besides, they were neighbors and friends. It’s one of the few breaks watermen get in their dealings with the government. Vinnie came to appreciate that fact, played his role in the drama, and after twenty years he joined the opposition. He became a first mate. Plus he knew that the old days of casual justice were dwindling and law enforcement wasn’t so much fun.

“Hi Vin,” Martha said, reaching across her daughter to tuck in her blanket so Vinnie wouldn’t accidentally pull the whole thing off the stool.

“Hello Miss Martha,” Vinnie said in his usual way. “Haven’t seen you since the service. Real nice.”

“Thanks Vin,” she replied. They both took a drink of their tomato beer, the only concession anyone made to breakfast. Martha hadn’t been a regular at the bar since she quit working at the Bayfront, but she was the wife of a waterman, and one who kept his boat at the Bay-front, so she was known to everyone. As the bar started to fill up, the boys filed by Martha, expressed their regrets, often with just the word, “Sorry,” then took a stool.

Vinnie decided to move the conversation away from sadness by commenting on the Redskins, the Washington football team that was the real reason for the Bayfront’s fast gathering crowd. It paid to arrive early on Sunday if you wanted a bar stool for the game at one o’clock. There would be standing room only by game time, which meant tradesmen and watermen three deep around the bar, a sound level equivalent to a diesel engine at daybreak, with people trying to reach between each other to pick up beers or shout orders to Simy, who was tending bar. It was important to be “on stool” by eleven o’clock.

“We may need another new coach,” Vinnie said, looking at Simy as she walked to the back of the bar. “The Skins can’t gut it up. They choke.” No one answered, mainly because the other guys at the bar were reading the sports page of the Sunday Post, and hadn’t quite assimilated the prevailing wisdom of the day.

“Vinnie,” Martha said, “I never really knew how Jimmy put that fishing trip together. Do you know?”

“No mam,” Vinnie said, shaking a pinch of salt into his beer. “I heard his talk about it, but I didn’t hear that. He was real excited about going, though.” Vinnie was still wearing his baseball cap with the logo for St. Mary’s Seafood on the front. Caps were a part of the uniform, mainly because they were always free. As Vinnie says, nobody in his right mind buys a cap anymore. And it gives you a little sun protection. Even so, caps always fall off when you’re working the crab pots or the trotline, so it’s best not to wear one at all. Hats with brims would be better protection from the reflections off the water, but you can’t keep them on at all. Just the speed of the boat will blow them off. But if you walk in the Bayfront restaurant or bar at lunch time, every man in the place has his cap on, and no two will have the same logo. If you ask someone to remove a hat, well, Vinnie never heard of that.

“Vinnie,” Martha continued, “who was on that boat with him? I was just told it was the local captain. I keep thinking someone could have grabbed him.”

“Now Miss Martha,” Vinnie said, “these things happen. There’s no sense crying over the water. It goes with the business.” Vinnie and the boys didn’t like to talk about deaths on the water; it’s too capricious. Always happens too fast. Some boy falls in. By the time you turn the boat around, he’s gone. Just vanished below the water. It had never happened to Vinnie, but he almost went overboard many times, and he knew the feeling of losing your footing, or dropping a hand net overboard, or having the captain give his engine a quick thrust and the boat lurches out from under you. Happens nearly every trip out, and Vinnie didn’t like to think about it.

“I just can’t believe it,” Martha said quietly. Simy heard the conversation and knew she didn’t want in, so she picked up a dish rag and wiped the counter, which meant leaning forward until her already stretched blue jeans were tight as tape across her fanny. Vinnie said nothing, but he watched. Simy scanned the growing crowd for trouble, as she watched every customer for every emotion from crying to fighting, and she set another beer in front of Martha.

I arrived at the Bayfront about eleven, and the bar was full, but the drive from Washington was slow and pleasant, with little traffic and the mid summer air filled with seagulls and the whine of bicycle tires. The Maryland bicycle club surrounded me at the last stop sign outside of Parkers. One of them was very pretty under her helmet, and I wished she would have turned her bare shoulders toward me, but she didn’t. She just signaled permission to go in front when the intersection cleared. I wished she had been going to the Bayfront with me.

I was surprised to see my sister-in-law there. It seemed too soon after Jimmy’s death for her to be going to bars, even if it was the Bay-front. I closed the door behind me and noticed the poster of seventeen women in bikinis and high heels, with their bare fannies staring right at me. Then I turned to join Martha, silently calculating what I would say to her. She was the one who had called me about Jimmy’s death, and we had cried together over the phone, then again when I arrived at their home. That first day we stayed together till late into the night, talking about her future, and Mindy’s future. We talked about the will, about the land, and about the insurance policy that would allow her a comfortable life, if she didn’t blow it all. She was a little bitter about Jimmy leaving me the boat and half the land, but she and Jimmy had talked about it before, and she understood the boat had been my father’s and should go from father to son. I had promised to take care of little Mindy, at least to see to her education, and generally we had worked things out.

Still, it was disconcerting to see her and Mindy at the bar. I thought about the psychologists who advocate the playing of Brahms lullabies around young children, even in the womb, to impart a feeling of warmth and security. I wondered what messages Mindy was soaking up today, surrounded by sentences without verbs and shouts of “Go Skins.” Maybe she would become a linebacker.

I took the only stool open, which was next to Martha, and ordered a beer. Although I had been to Parkers several times in recent years to visit my brother, I hadn’t been to the Bayfront in a long time.

“I see they’ve added a trellis over the front door with fake ivy. Trying to make this place look like a country cottage.”

“No,” Martha said, “just trying to hide the drunks coming out of the john and still zipping up their pants.”

“Is that a problem, here?” I asked.

“Every day,” she said.

“Hello Vinnie,” I said, leaning forward to see around Martha. “I haven’t seen you in a long time. I understand you’re taking care of the Martha Claire.”

“Go out there this morning, turn the key, and she’ll purr like a kitten,” Vinnie said. “Want to take her out?”

That’s what I wanted but was afraid to admit. Driving to Parkers on a Sunday morning seemed like a weekend outing. I wanted to see the boat, but I hadn’t really thought about taking her out, which would have involved calling Vinnie, getting the key, and if I had to go alone I might run the whole thing aground. I hadn’t been in the Parkers channel for years, where several new marinas had emerged from the banks like marsh grass, and I hadn’t run a single screw, thirty-foot, work boat in years. But now it had all come together by accident, so I said, “Yes, let’s go.”

“After this beer,” Vinnie said.

I was looking at Vinnie, so I didn’t see where the voice came from, but I heard someone shout, “Hey, you Jimmy’s brother?”

The Bayfront Bar was really two long bars facing each other, with taps on both sides, and a barmaid who paced continually from one end to the other. The back end led into a storage room for kegs and cases of beer, and the front end was closed by a swinging door with a sizeable latch on the inside, suggesting that more than one drunk had tried to enter the runway without authorization. I noticed Simy and heard the guys call her by that name, but I had never focused on her before. She had coal black hair streaked with grey, giving it a tint the local car dealer might call “smoked salmon” silver, but it was vibrant, and somewhat unexpected on a woman who appeared to be in her early thirties. Too young for grey hair, even prematurely, but interesting in that she went for the mature look and not for the youth.

I looked across the bar at a large man wearing a red plaid shirt, a hat that said something about plumbing and heating, with loose ends of brown hair sticking below the cap like celery sticks. After a couple of beers on a Sunday morning, he was already loud, but my Parkers instinct said that after a couple more beers, this was the classic belligerent who would be threatening, even with a baby on the premises.

“Yes I am,” I said with a smile, hopefully disarming.

“I knew your brother, didn’t I Martha,” the plumbing man said without waiting for an answer, “and he was a good man; a good waterman who wasn’t afraid of hard work. And I’ll tell you this, I can’t believe he let that tuna get him.”

Oh God, I thought. How could he bring this up right in front of Martha?

“Let’s talk about this later,” I ventured.

“I’ll tell you what I think really happened,” he said.

I turned toward Martha and she stared straight and hard across the bar, a confused look on her face, unsure of what she heard or how much credence she should give it.

“Neddie,” she said quietly, “what’s he mean by ‘what really happened?’ Is there something I don’t know?”

“No Martha,” I said reassuringly, “he’s just blowing off. You know these guys. Every waterman thinks he’s infallible.”

“I’m leaving,” she said, reaching over to untie the car seat, and tuck the blanket around Mindy. “Stop by the house if you get a chance.”

“Thanks. I will if we get back with the boat in one piece. If I don’t see you, I’ll call later,” knowing I probably wouldn’t stop by the house.

Martha picked up the car seat with one arm and was out the door even before I could follow. It would have been polite to escort her across the street to her car, but she had never had an escort before and I was still paying the bill when she vanished. The plumbing man gave me a shrug, knowing his comment had probably upset her, but he didn’t care. These kinds of people somehow mistake rudeness or insults for straight talk and honesty, thereby bestowing themselves with a mantle of satisfaction, even general helpfulness. In fact, they were just rude slobs who wanted attention. I ignored the comment, and turned to Vinnie.

“Vin,” I said, “I would like to take the boat out, not to crab, but just to see how she feels, to know the water again.”

“Will do, Captain,” Vinnie said. “Pay the lady and let’s go.”

“Captain,” I repeated, realizing no one had ever called Neddie Shannon a captain before. It sounded strange, like he might be talking to someone else, or making fun of me, except that watermen never take the title of ‘Captain’ lightly. It was Vinnie’s way of recognizing that the Martha Claire was mine, and a boat is a proud thing, a way of life deserving of the title “Captain.” That’s why watermen don’t like to sell their boats to the “pleasure crafters” from Washington, as they’re called, because the weekend owners don’t respect the spirits that live in the timbers, the lives that are chronicled in every crank of the engine. When Vinnie called me Captain, he watched my eyes to see if I respected the title, just as he would watch me aboard the Martha Claire to see if I appreciated the chime of the boat and the way she cut through the quiet waters of Jenkins Creek. That’s when the waterman is quiet, leaving the pier, when he feels a oneness with the Bay, a man in his role as ecological cog with the fish and the birds and the water. That’s when the waterman’s focus on the clouds and the weather is so intense that the roaring engine in the middle of the boat is but a whisper in his mind, because he is so much a part of the shimmering world of wind upon the water. I wanted to see if I would feel that power.

“Come on Vinnie,” I said, “let’s go to work.”

The big John Deere diesel roared to life with the first turn of the switch. It belched a small cloud of carbon, coughed a couple of small explosions, then settled into a bottom-of-the-belly roar that smelled like power. These John Deeres would run forever, hour after grinding hour, whether through a heavy storm with the Bay’s pounding chop, or across a Maryland tobacco field. It was comforting to know, of course, that Vinnie could pull the box top off the engine and repair about any external part in a matter of minutes. Vinnie eased the Martha out of her slip without ever touching the rub rail on the pilings, made the gentle turn into the channel, and said under his breath, “She’s all yours Captain.”

I took the wheel without saying a word, unbuttoned my cotton shirt so the wind would luft my shirttail, and scanned the creek for the green and red channel markers. “Right on red returning” is the first rule of the road my dad ever taught me, meaning take the red marker on the starboard side of the boat when returning to port, and the reverse is true when leaving. That marks the channel, where the water is deepest. I eased Martha to the right side of the channel and headed for the red marker barely visible in the distance. I had stood in this very boat for hours at my dad’s side, yet today it seemed like a new experience as I tried to recall all the lessons my dad had casually bestowed. The first step would be to cut this right and left business. It’s port and starboard, I knew.

Vinnie stood with his arms folded under his chin and resting on the sill over the galley doorway, his eyes glued to the water, not in search of trouble, but because that was the magic: the mouth of the creek opening its arms to release us into the bay and the welcoming jacket of morning sun that stretched across the water, ready to warm the bow of the boat. That’s the moment when the spirits of the Bay settle into your bones, and for a lifetime, draw you back to the water. I waited some time before easing the throttle forward. Then felt the thrill as the wake lifted and spread out behind us like water over a dam.

“Vinnie,” I said, “what was that plumber saying back at the bar?”

“You mean about Jimmy?”

“Yeah.”

Vin was reluctant. “There’s been some talk Ned. I don’t know what it means. A lot of the boys think it’s strange about Jimmy. How it happened.”

“What do you mean, strange?”

“Well,” he began, “we just don’t see how he’d get his arm caught in that line.”

“But, you know Vinnie,” I countered, “I read a couple of years ago where that happened to some guy over at Ocean City. Catching tuna. Reeled him in for hours. Had a gaff on the fish. The big son of a bitch opened his eyes, saw the boat, and lunged for the bottom of the sea, taking the guy with him. It has happened.”

“I know it has,” Vinnie agreed. “I guess some of the boys just wonder, that’s all.”

“Well,” I said, “I wish they’d keep their ideas to themselves. Now Martha’s all broken up about it.”

“I’m real sorry about that,” Vinnie said. And I knew he was.

“Listen Vinnie,” I said, “if you hear anything else, let me know. But could you pass it to the boys to cool it. We gotta help Martha get back on her feet.”

“I’ll do it, Ned,” he said. “I surely will.”

I shoved the throttle forward, noticed the compass at 250 degrees, and figured maybe we could get lunch at Harrisons on Tilghman Island. The open water was easy to navigate. I watched for other boats while Vinnie kept an eye on the crab pot markers. He knew if we tangled the prop in one of the pot lines, he would be the one to go overboard, untangle or cut the line, and spend the rest of the day wet. My main concern was the shipping lane from the ocean up to Baltimore. I didn’t want to get in the way of a tanker, probably Liberian, carrying oil or containers and rising about eight stories above the water.

“You know how long it takes a tanker going twenty knots to stop?” Vinnie asked.

“About l0 minutes,” I guessed.

“Six miles,” Vinnie said, “however long that is.”

I didn’t see any tankers, just a few fishing boats and some sails gathering in the distance.

I let the sun and wind fall flush on my face, a breeze stronger than expected. Sometimes even when the sky is clear, the wind whips up the waves on the Bay and tosses the boat. The waves crest close in this situation, and it’s easy for a wave to catch the bow and throw the boat. Just for a moment, you lose balance and move your left foot to the side for better balance. The wind today was starting to pick up. I couldn’t see it, but I could feel it, and remembered the old waterman admonition that a good work boat should be at least 28 feet long, so the boat will reach from the crest of one wave to another. As a boy, I tried to reach two crests at once, but it never seemed to happen that way.

“Vinnie,” I said, “why is that boat just circling in the water?”

Vinnie looked dead ahead and squinted, but said nothing. I thought it was interesting, so I turned the Martha about five degrees starboard and headed for it. Finally, Vinnie ventured a thought.

“There’s a pound net out there somewhere,” he said. “Maybe he’s circling to see the Loons. Or maybe he’s getting ready to empty the net.” Loons and seagulls seem to sit on every part of the net, waiting for a free lunch of the fish that happen into the enclosure.

“I didn’t suppose they still allow pound nets,” I said.

“You mean because they take up so much room, or get in the way of boaters?” he replied.

“Yeh,” I said, “just figured their time had come.”

“No,” Vinnie explained, “but there aren’t many pounders still out here. There aren’t many small fishermen still out here. They have to get licenses and permits for the nets, and they have to come out every day to load the catch, often before they go crabbing. Then if some damn city slicker in a cigarette boat runs through the nets at night, the waterman gets sued. Not many left.”

“I forgot how it works,” I said casually, not remembering exactly how the nets collected the fish.

“See those sticks in the water, just to the left of where that boat is circling?” Vinnie asked. “They form a couple of leader nets that funnel the fish into a Hearth enclosure that catches the fish. See those sticks that run about two hundred yards west of the circle? There’s a leader net along those sticks. The fish swim into them, panic at the thought of being trapped, then turn to swim along the net until they reach the enclosure. There’s a trap door where they go in and can’t get out. Then the waterman comes along in his open boat, closes the trap door and scoops them into his boat with a dip net. Not very high tech.”

“Still, pretty ingenious.”

“There are probably better explanations of the nets,” Vinnie said. “But the result is the same. Fish of every kind swim in, can’t get out, and the fisherman in an open boat scoops them up. You’ll find everything from fish to human body parts in those nets, but they work.”

Vinnie hesitated, then added, “They been doing it since Jesus, and probably before.”

“No, I just read that some waterman in the 1800s invented the pound net, probably right here on Jenkins Creek.”

“Jesus was a waterman and he used nets,” Vinnie responded. Vinnie was a little defensive about his religion, and I let it pass.

“I don’t see anybody in that boat,” I said, moving my eyes from the pound net to the moving boat.

“Maybe that’s why it’s circling,” Vinnie said. “Those new boats have an automatic turn mechanism so if you fall overboard, it circles. Of course, the captain could be in the cabin banging his girlfriend.”

I kept on course for the boat, nosing the Martha Claire back after every wave pushed us off course.

“Over there,” Vinnie shouted. “He’s in the water. Probably drunk, or taking a leak.”

I couldn’t see anybody for the chop, and I momentarily lost track of the boat. Then I found him, a man with his arms flailing, fully dressed and slapping at the water. He was bobbing in the waves, but the boat was circling behind me. I had a moment of anxiety in the thought that I had come to the boat too quickly, without figuring the width of its circle, or where the captain was located. Now the boat was behind me, but the man in the water was in front of me.

Vinnie said calmly, “He’s outside the circle of the boat, pick him up first. Get close. I’ll toss the line and we’ll see if he takes it. Forget the boat.”

That’s easy for you to say, I thought. The empty boat was rocking wildly. We weren’t in any real danger. But sometimes when a wave raised the port side of the Martha I could see the man’s face in the water, white and unresponsive.

“Why doesn’t he look up, or wave?” I shouted. “Is he dead?”

“I hit him with the damn line, and he didn’t take it,” Vinnie said. “I’m going in.”

I realized Vinnie had put on his life jacket while I was talking. He kicked off his tennis shoes, threw his cap on the deck, and jumped into the Bay, not two feet from the victim.

Christ, don’t hit him, I thought.

Vinnie was with him instantly, threw back the man’s head and turned his body like it was a rubber toy. He took a few seconds to get his legs untangled from the victim, took about three strokes and he was beside the boat. I shut down the engine, mostly because I didn’t know what else to do, and I didn’t want anybody caught in the propeller. I rushed to the side of the boat and looked down at Vinnie’s nearly bald head, with a few strands of hair draped across his head like wet seaweed. Vinnie was nearly cheek to cheek with a small head of coal black hair that showed no sign of life. I fell to my knees, waited for the boat to rock low once more, then grabbed the arm of the motionless man and flung him into the boat.

“Jesus,” I shouted, not realizing how small he was, or how the adrenaline had increased my strength.

Vinnie had both hands on the side of the boat and was heaving himself in as I laid the man on the deck and started yelling at him.

“Wake up.” But there was no response.

Vinnie quickly turned him on his stomach, hit him on the back, and water seemed to rush from his mouth. He was a little man, with narrow features, and eyes that didn’t open, but were set in deep wells. Even for a drowning man, he looked desolate, like he just crawled out of a cave.

Vinnie flipped him again, on his back, and blew into his mouth. That’s all it took. The man just started all his systems, like the dashboard of a car that lights up on ignition. His eyes opened. He coughed, again and again. His arms rose as he tried to turn on his side.

“Get her started,” Vinnie said, as he tried to help the man get in a comfortable position for coughing and breathing.

“Get the boat,” the little man said. It was a weak voice, pleading. “Don’t leave the boat.”

Criminently, I thought, I almost forgot about the guy’s boat. But who cares. The first rule here is save the victim.

“I’m OK,” he said, “get the boat.”

“Where the hell is the boat?” I muttered, swinging the Martha Claire around to find the circling power boat. It was off my stern, circling at a fairly good speed, maybe seven knots. Like a figure skater, repeating the same circle over and over.

Vinnie was sitting on the deck with his new acquaintance, but he looked up enough to suggest, “See if you can get close enough to board her.”

“Hell no,” I replied, knowing I couldn’t do that even if it could be done. She was going too fast.

“How much gas does it have?” Vinnie asked his new friend.

“Fifty hours,” he muttered.

“Fifty hours!” I exclaimed. “We could be here for days. Let’s call the Coast Guard.”

“Wait,” Vinnie said. He struggled to untangle himself from the man on the floor. He raised the man’s body and leaned him against the engine box. “It will be warm,” he said. “Sit here and hold onto the side.”

I kept the Martha within a few yards of the pleasure boat, but I couldn’t hold the circle and I couldn’t hold the speed. I would fall behind, and then cut across the circle in the water until I caught up again. The boat had made so many circles that its wake seemed like a permanent scar in the water.

Vinnie went below and came back with a dark green army blanket, my father’s. It had been given to Dad by his brother, who fought in the Philippines during World War II. Uncle John had once sent me a hollow coconut from Guam that was finished into a bank, and every year on my birthday he would send a silver dollar to put in the bank. The blanket still had the Army’s insignia stenciled on one corner, but there was a sizable hole in the center where some battery acid had leaked on the blanket.

“Is that for the guy?” I asked as Vinnie emerged from the vee birth.

“No,” he said, “the boat. Pull Martha into the circle wake of that boat. Wait as long as you can, so you know Martha is on the same course as the cruiser. I’m going to throw this blanket in the circle and hope the cruiser hits it. Once I throw, get the hell out of there so it doesn’t hit us.”

I didn’t ask the purpose of this blanket maneuver, but it seemed significantly easier than trying to jump into a moving boat.

I found the wake just after the boat went past, threw Martha in neutral, and waited for the cruiser to circle again. It took a couple of minutes to come around. Finally, it was bearing down on us when Vinnie threw the blanket and screamed, “Go. Go. Go.” We lurched forward, causing our guest to roll on the floor. But Vinnie never lost balance or line of sight. He saw the cruiser approach the blanket, devour it under its sharp bow, and the blanket disappeared under the hull. And then the cruiser coughed. Like a child with someone’s hand over its mouth. Muffled. Then another cough. And the motor died. The cruiser stopped and within an instant was floating in the water as helpless as a styrofoam cup. The blanket had become entangled in the propeller just as Vinnie had calculated, and the big engine stalled.

Vinnie moved in close to the helm and said, “If you can get close, I’ll board the boat and we can tow her in.” He was looking me right in the eye, I think to see if I was shaken by the whole experience.

“Vinnie,” I said, “if I ever drive this boat again, even for one minute, I want you by my side.”

“You got it boss,” he said, moving to ready his jump.