The Crimes of Jordan Wise (13 page)
Read The Crimes of Jordan Wise Online
Authors: Bill Pronzini
Some things—
No, forget it, I'm not going to say any more.
Annalise liked the beaches more than I did; too many tourists to suit me. On the days I worked or sailed with Bone, she'd go to Magens or Coki or Sapphire alone or with Maureen or one of the other nonworking wives; swim, sunbathe, sit under an umbrella with her sketchpad designing swimsuits and beach attire. Occasionally she and Maureen would take an off-island trip together, or spend an evening at Bam-boushay when I preferred to sit home with an iced Arundel and watch the sunset and the harbor lights.
No one asked any questions about our past life that we couldn't answer with a few simple lies. No tourist or island resident looked at me as anything but another well-to-do expat. We spent money, but not as much as you might think. The cost of living wasn't all that high on St. Thomas in the late seventies and early eighties. And the return on my investments had exceeded expectations, so much so that I added another $100,000 in blue chip stocks to the portfolio.
I can't say exactly when Bone and I stopped being just tutor and pupil and became friends. It was a gradual thing, built on mutual respect and ease in each other's company and our shared passion for boats and the sea. One of those curious, not quite explicable, almost symbiotic relationships that occasionally develop between like-minded men of different races and cultures. But I can tell you when I first realized it and knew that he felt the same way.
It was a day near the approach of hurricane season in '80. The kind of humid day where you can almost see the moisture dripping in the air, feel it wet in your lungs every time you breathe. We'd been belowdecks on
Conch Out
all afternoon, installing a rebuilt chemical toilet and a new water Une in the head, and when we finished we were dehydrated and sweating like pigs. I suggested we head over to one of the waterfront taverns for a cold beer, as we'd done a few times before. Bone nodded, but when we were up on the seawall he asked if I'd brought my car today. I said I had, and he said, "How about we go to another place I know."
The place was on the edge of the native quarter, a rust-spotted Quonset hut that must have dated to the early years of World War II. The only indication that it was a tavern was a painted sign over the entrance that read "Bar"; if it had a name, I never heard Bone or anyone else mention it. And if any curious tourist had ever walked in, he'd likely have turned right around and walked out again. The interior was dark, with a plank bar and mismatched tables and chairs and a pair of vintage ceiling fans that did little to stir the sluggish air. The customers were mostly Thomian blacks, one of whom turned out to be an Obeah woman who dispensed charms for love and luck and to ward off jum-bees. You had the feeling that trouble brewed there now and then, and that you wouldn't want to be around when it did.
The dozen or so drinkers that day wouldn't have tolerated me half so well if I hadn't been with Bone. They all knew him; a few spoke to him; the bartender called him by name. This was his regular watering hole. I understood that was why he'd brought me there: he'd decided to let me into a corner of his private world. For a native black man to do this for a white expat was not only an expression of friendship but a privilege, and I didn't treat it lightly. He bought the first round and when I bought the second he raised his glass in a toast and for the first time called me Richard instead of "mon" or Mr. Laidlaw.
After that day, he wouldn't take any more money from me except for gas, oil, and provisions when the two of us went to sea together. "No, Richard," he said when I offered. "Remember when you first come to see me? You said you have sailing in your blood, I said we'll find out. Now we both know. Bone won't take pay from a mon same as him."
We went to the Bar fairly often. And now and then to one of the native cafes for fish chowder or conch fritters or callaloo. Sometimes we talked, sometimes we just sat and drank beer or iced rum. Occasionally he would reveal snippets about himself and his past. He'd been married twice; his first wife had died and he refused to talk about his second, even to speak her name. He had a teenage dalighter, Isola, he visited from time to time in Nassau. He'd attended college for a year before the sea called him. He'd once worked as a deckhand on a Panama-bound tramp steamer, once been approached to smuggle a ketch-load of weapons to a group of Puerto Rican insurgents (he wouldn't say whether he'd actually done it), once spent two years island-hopping his way around the Caribbean.
I envied him his free spirit and his adventures, and part of me wished I could tell him about the one bold, daring adventure in my life. It was just as well that I couldn't. For all his knockabout ways, Bone had a strong moral code to go with his intelligence and his dignity. He might have understood what had led me to do what I'd done, but he'd have thought less of me and probably severed our friendship. Would he have turned me in? No. He wasn't the kind to involve himself with the law. His duty was to himself and those he cared about, not to white or black society.
After a while I was more or less accepted by the Bar regulars, though I wouldn't have wanted to walk in alone after dark. In Bone's company I felt as comfortable there as I did at the Royal Bay Club. I was acquainted with a lot of white people on the island by then, the Verrikers and the Kyles and Jack Scanlon and Dick Marsten and several others, but the only man I considered a friend was a West Indian black sailor with a single name.
Bone.
He was the only real friend I ever had, before or since.
Hurricanes are always a concern when you live in the Caribbean. The hurricane season runs from June through November, but historically more storms—and the worst ones—occur in September than any other month. Most are Category 1 or 2, sustained winds of 74 up to 110 miles per hour, and if any of the islands is in the path of the blow, you can expect relatively minor damage such as flooding and what the official notices refer to as "moderate defoliation of shrubs and trees."
There was a Caribbean hurricane that first year, in early August. Hurricane Allen, I think it was. A monster blow, so intense that it reached Category 5 status—sustained winds of more than 156 m.p.h.—three different times over a period of about five days. Its central pressure was one of the lowest of all time, around twenty-seven inches when it was south of Puerto Pico. For a while it looked as though it might hammer the Virgins, and there were all sorts of storm warnings and preparations. But the eye stayed out over open water, bypassing us and howling up through the Lesser Antilles, where it weakened off Haiti and Jamaica; it didn't cross land until somewhere near Brownsville, Texas. We did get a taste of it, though: high winds and heavy rain for a couple of days.
Annalise was terrified the whole time. Her appetite for danger didn't extend to hurricanes. She'd been through earthquakes, as most native Californians have, but they were a tolerable threat because they came suddenly and were over in a minute or two. With a hurricane, you had plenty of advance warning and dire predictions of how much devastation to expect, and then, when it came howling and screaming like a bombing blitz, you had to ride it out over a long period. She wouldn't leave the villa, or let me take down the storm shutters and open the jalousies, until the day after the winds died down and the rains stopped.
I didn't say anything to her, but I had just the opposite reaction to Hurricane Allen. There is something in the elemental fury and frenzy of a tropical storm that excites a matching wildness in me. Still does to this day. An appeal to the dark side, I suppose. Yes, definitely an appeal to my dark side.
Annalise was jealous of my relationship with Bone. It threatened her somehow, in ways other than the time I spent with him—irrational ways. She hadn't liked him when I first introduced them, a reaction based on nothing I could see that passed between them. He was polite to her, on his dignity, as he was with everybody he met for the first time and especially with whites. And yet all she had to say about him afterward was "God, he's ugly, isn't he?" It occurred to me that she might be prejudiced. I didn't want to believe it and I never spoke to her about it, and she never said anything to me, but now I'm convinced she was. She avoided native Thomians other than service and trades people, and looking back, I can see that there was a kind of condescension in the way she treated blacks.
Once he suggested we take
Conch Out
on a three-day run to St.Croix, and that night I told Annalise about it and asked her to join us. With Bone's blessing, I said, a poor choice of words.
"His blessing!" she said. "Well, isn't that big of him!"
"He thought you might like to go along. So did I."
"Well, I don't want to. You know how I feel about small boats."
"It's only three days. And the weather forecast—"
"Three days. Lovely. Cozy. Just you and Bone now."
"What does that mean?"
"If I didn't know you so well," she said, "I'd think the two of you were sleeping together."
"For God's sake, Annalise."
"Well? You spend more time with him than you do with me."
"That's not true."
"Oh, isn't it? Sure seems that way."
"You know how much sailing means to me—"
"And what about the things that are important to me? Like visiting other parts of the world. Like trying to get a foot in the door of the fashion industry. I haven't given up on that idea, even if you think I have . . ."
There was more in the same vein. And it was no use arguing or trying to reason with her when she was in one of those moods. I'd had a few stings from her sharp tongue in Chicago, and a few more that were even more barbed down here. It gave her a hard, nasty edge that I didn't like at all.
If she'd used that tongue on me regularly, I'd've confronted her about it. But she didn't. She seemed to sense how often and how much she could provoke me, and she never went beyond the limits of my tolerance. Most of the time she was the same soft, sexy, loving woman she'd been that year in San Francisco and the first several months on St. Thomas. It was only Bone and the time I spent with him, and not getting her way when she had her heart set on something, that brought out the bitch in her.
In February of '81 I had a call from Dick Marsten. I'd told him I was interested in buying a boat of my own, and he had one in the yard, he said, that I might want to take a look at. A twenty-five-year-old yawl, thirty-four feet at the waterline, that had just come over from St. John. You don't see many yawls down here anymore, but there were still a few around in those days. This one had been built in Connecticut, run for a time on Long Island Sound, then sailed down in the fifties. Her owner had been ill for some time and she'd been neglected as a result, but she was still a sound vessel. The owner had died recently and his heirs were looking for a quick sale. So the price was right—not exactly a steal at $16,000, but still something of a bargain.
I'd been counting on a ketch, but that was because it was the type of sailboat I was familiar with; the only difference between the two is that the mizzen is smaller on a yawl, and stepped behind the wheel. So I said I'd come down, and when I went I took Bone with me. The yawl was out of the water for scraping, and she looked old and frowsy sitting there in the hot sun. There were a lot of things wrong with her. Her hull and deckhouse needed painting, the spars and brightwork sanding down and varnishing; the halyards would have to be replaced, the tracks and slides overhauled, a new bilge pump put in, and any number of smaller repairs made above- and belowdecks. But she had nice lines, a plumb stem and broad beam, a clean-running stern without too much overhang, and lifelines that had been rigged in heavy bolted stanchions.
When I asked Bone what he thought of her, he said, "Good salty sea boat. Built strong, caulked tight. Hull's solid. Engine got to have an overhaul, but it should be okay. Tell you better when I hear it run."
"How long to put her back in shape?"
"Hard to say. Lot of work to be done."
"Six months?"
"Maybe longer."
"Is she worth the asking price?"
"Seems so to me. You want her?"
An odd feeling had come over me as we examined the yawl. The same sort of feeling I'd had for Annalise in the beginning, without the sexual element—an intense possessive need that I now understood was the first stirrings of love.
"Yes," I said, "I want her."
"Then you better buy her," Bone said. Then, as if he'd intuited what I was thinking, "Right boat for a mon like the right woman. Grab her quick before somebody else take her away."
"Will you help me with the repairs?"