You have to wait the locals out. Nothing is done without a reason, and sooner or later they either get around to it or change their minds and leave. The quickest way to change their minds is to press them to find out what they want.
He looked around the lounge and said, “Changed it some.”
“You haven’t been aboard in a while.”
“I guess I was about fourteen. You and Dad armrassled to a draw, maybe forty minutes, with the sweat popping out and one or the other of you groaning from time to time, your faces like beets. He was a little bit stronger, and you had a little bit better leverage, having a longer arm.”
“I remember.”
“Then it was Meyer stepped in and called it a draw, and you both fell off the chairs and lay on the floor there, panting like dogs in the summertime.”
“I remember it well. Want a beer?”
“I won’t ever forget it, not ever. I’d never seen anybody ever rassle my dad to a draw, arm-rassling or any other kind. Little early for me for a beer, I guess.”
“Carta Blanca?”
“Well, not all that early.”
He drifted out to the galley with me, and I took two cold ones out of the locker and uncapped them. We went back into the lounge, and he dropped into a chair and took long swallows, wiped his mouth on the back of his brown hand. “Real good. Thanks. You and my dad were friends.”
“Pretty good friends.”
“I come onto something, I don’t know how I should handle it, and there’s nobody I can rightly ask. I don’t want to bring Bud in on it. He’s back up at Duke in that summer program. Andy’s too young. And I can’t ask Mom.”
“What’s it all about?”
There was a long final hesitation, and then he shrugged and sighed. “Like this. I’ve been building up a fair trade down there below Marathon, but it’s nothing like Dad had here. I’ve been over his list for the season coming up, and he’s booked nearly solid. I know his kind of fishing. I can do it, but not as good as he did. He could smell fish. The HooBoy would be mine to use or sell, whatever. I went prowling around among the charterboat guys, trying to find out if I could make some kind of a deal for his boat plus the bookings. Everybody acted just a little funny. You know? There was something going on I couldn’t figure out.
“So I went over to the boatyard, to Dalton and Forbes, where the engine work is being done. And they acted funny over there too. It’ll be ready in one more week. I climbed up the ladder and went aboard her. I looked at the work sheets. The work is all paid for. Thirty-eight thousand dollars’ worth, and he paid in cash.”
“To rebuild a couple of old diesels?”
“Rebuild, hell. A new pair of high-speed jobs, with every kind of booster you can think of. They reinforced and cross-braced the whole front end of the hull. High-speed props. New controls. Outside it isn’t changed. It was always just a little bit underpowered. He could have gone bumbling around in it, looking the same as always, but when anybody jammed those throttles forward that thing would take off like a big-assed rabbit.”
“Isn’t that a displacement hull?”
“No. It’s kind of a modified deep vee, and they’ve put a new kind of step thing on the hull that will pop it right up into planing position. I remember when it was new, if we were heading downwind and he gave it full throttle on both engines, and we had a lot of room ahead of us, it would get up onto the plane and scoot. But it took too much gas to get it there. Jerry Forbes told me they think it will do a little better than forty knots once they get the step adjusted just right. I don’t even like to think about it. He told Mom he had to get five thousand together to get the engines rebuilt. I’ve been through his papers, and there’s nothing there to show where any thirty-eight thousand came from or where it went to. What do you think was going on, Trav?”
“Did they enlarge fuel capacity?”
“Bigger tanks, and they set them so the center of balance is a little more forward of where it used to be. When he got that boat, I was six and Bud was four and Andy wasn’t born yet. We were so proud of the HooBoy. It was so pretty!”
“Your father was a good man, Dave. He had lots of friends. He worked hard. You could trust him.”
“So where did a good man get thirty-eight thousand cash money?”
“Have you looked around at the charterboat people along this coast and in the Keys lately? There’s a lot of big new vans and pickups. Lots of gold jewelry. New televisions with big big screens. Brand new washer-dryers. And little trips over to Freeport for shopping and gambling, and maybe a visit to the branch of the Bank of Nova Scotia.”
“Certainly I’ve looked around. And I’ve thought about it. Fellow I knew down in Marathon had him a fast little runabout, like a California boat. Cigarette hull and power assists so he could do up to eighty-five, he claimed. He was clearing ten thousand a week running coke from a mother ship. One time they waited for him and tried to corner him. They had three boats not as fast as his. But he tried to get away around the end of a reef, and he cut it a little bit short and turned himself and his pretty boat into a ball of flame rolling for fifty yards along the night water. Friend of mine saw it happen. We’re not talking about people like that coke dealer. We’re talking about my dad, Dennis Hackney Jenkins, Hack. We’re talking about lying, and cash money, and why’d he have them turning the HooBoy into a bomb.”
“Look. I don’t want to be in the position of making excuses. He’d just turned fifty. Men do funny things when they come up against a birthday with a zero on the end of it. They wonder if their life is pointless. They wonder what other kinds of lives they could have led. Don’t judge him. A man can be tempted. Few ever get caught, and the ones that do get out on bail, and cases don’t come to trial for years. The U.S. Attorney’s office in Miami has a nine-year backlog of dope cases.”
He stood up abruptly. “Thanks for the beer. He wasn’t like that. You know it and I know it. And I’m going to find out what the hell was going on.” And out he went. Blind loyalty. It made me wish my life had been different and I’d had some sons. Sure, McGee. What you want are the full-grown variety, big and sturdy and loyal and true. But you never wanted what came in between: diapers and shots, PTA and homework, yard mowing, retirement programs, Christmas lists, mortgage interest, car payments, dental bills, and college tuition. You made your choices, fellow, and you live with the results. And if in the end there is nobody to give a single particular damn when you die, that too is part of the bargain you made with life. And maybe that was what Annie was trying to tell me a couple of weeks ago.
If Dave Jenkins was as shrewd as I judged him to be, he would take delivery on the HooBoy, put it back on Charterboat Row, and start filling Hack’s commitments to his clients. Certainly Hack wasn’t working in a vacuum. Sooner or later some information would turn up. Somebody would come around. Charter fishing was sick. Money was tight and getting tighter. A lot of them were out there after the square grouper, as the bales of marijuana were called. Hack or whoever would run the transformed HooBoy, could make $10,000 a trip, out and back to the mother ship, some rust-bucket freighter chugging around out there, sixty miles offshore.
I decided to look him up when I came back from Houston, find out if anything at all had happened. But I wouldn’t look him up to do any arm-rassling.
He looked as strong as his father, and his arms were longer: After a match with him, I would have to brush my teeth with my left hand for a week.
On Friday the sixteenth, Eastern Airlines took me from Miami to Houston by way of Atlanta. I went first class, I told myself, for the sake of the leg room. At six-four I am not the right size for tourist. But I probably went first because I like first. If I did a lot of flying, I’d probably find a reasonably good way to wedge my knees into the tourist-size seats. But flying seldom, I tend to treat myself to the best. I had alerted Meyer, and he met me at the gate and led me with my underseat case out to the lot to his rental Datsun, which seemed even smaller than tourist class.