Years ago, he’d had a sailing accident. As a result, his closest friend, Raymond, was lost at sea, and the meaning of Raymond’s death, nagging and irresolute, continued to consume him. The customary remedies were unavailing, and he intended to resort to this soothsayer of his past. His employer, the owner of numerous large orange groves, had agreed to this final shot: after that, he was on his own. This ultimatum was not offered lightly: Errol, a fluent speaker of Spanish, had a loyal crew who would disperse in the event of his firing. The employer, a patrician cracker who also owned a large juice plant in Arcadia, Florida, said something that really caught Errol and made him see his plight more clearly. “I just can’t have someone like this. Not around here.”
It was evening before Errol boarded Czarina, unfurling her jib to gain enough headway to sail the few yards to her mooring. Not far away, a big ketch with the steering vane and ratlines of a long-range cruiser tugged politely at her rode. Otherwise the tideway, lit by stars, was empty. He went below to the galley, turned on a lamp, and made a drink, then carried it to the cockpit, where he sipped and watched the clouds make their way in a moon-brightened sky. He brought the bottle with him and refreshed his iceless drink from time to time, feeling the deep motion of the boat as the incoming tide lifted her against the weight of her keel.
Errol awoke as the sun crossed the side of the cockpit. As usual, he was sick and disgusted but with the rare luxury of not being guilty over something he’d done the night before. He declined to throw the empty bottle overboard and sentenced himself to live with it a few hours more. He had wisely provisioned the galley already — wisely because he hardly had the strength for a shopping trip now — but was in no mood for food. He remained stretched out, waiting for his mind to clear.
Errol made his way around the yawl, raising the mizzen first so that she swung on the mooring facing upwind. Raising the main seemed to take all his strength, the hard stretched halyard in his aching hands, but the sail went up and the halyard somehow found its way to a cleat and Czarina trembled under the steady luffing of the mainsail. Errol went forward and cast off the mooring, and Czarina began to drift backward toward the dock. Errol released the mizzen sheet and drew in the mainsail; Czarina bore off into the tideway. He trimmed the mizzen and the yawl sank down onto her lines and beat across the harbor, tacking here and there to avoid anchored boats. Errol was glad she had no engine: an oily bilge would have been disastrous in his current state.
He sailed south in shallow water past islands covered with winter homes and islands which had been declared wildlife refuges. There was occasional traffic on the Intracoastal Water-way and to the east, towering from the mangroves, a baseball stadium. Cumbersome brown pelicans sailed on air currents, suddenly becoming arrows as they dove into schools of fish. Czarina was moving well, rail down and tracking her course insistently. A northwest wind was building, and Errol planned to evaluate the seas once he reached the pass. He would venture out into the Gulf and make a decision. The leeward side of the foredeck had begun to darken with spray as the wind increased, and he could hear the telltales on the leech fluttering. Exultation at the little ship’s movement cheered Errol at last, and he went below to examine his larder. He cut up an apple into a bowl of dry cereal, then poured Eagle Brand condensed milk over it. Czarina had sailed herself contentedly in his absence, and he sat down to eat with an inkling of happiness.
The tide was falling through the pass, building up steep seas. A big new-moon tide, it sucked channel markers under and left streaming wakes behind them. Errol was anxious to begin his voyage and, nearly certain he would be turned back, he beat out toward the Gulf of Mexico and the dark sky to the west.
Because of the running tide, the faces of the waves were steep and the little yawl seemed to be ascending skyward before reaching their crests. The long slopes at the backs of the waves were almost pleasant as she ran down them, the centerboard humming in its trunk and a fine vibration coming through the tiller. But by the time he passed Johnson Shoals and began to contemplate a long trip in these conditions as opposed to the immediate sporting challenge, he grew apprehensive. There was green water on the deck racing toward the scuppers, the bottoms of the sail were dark and soaked, and he was getting shaky again. This development was something he meant to observe from afar.
He came about and headed downwind toward Cayo Costa, avoiding whatever temptation he might have had to press on in this small boat, and in the face of obvious peril that would have been the real loss of nerve. Better to shake himself miserable in a safe anchorage than abandon himself to the fatal and picturesque.
Pelican Bay was a protected anchorage in the middle of a state park, and its oceanic zephyrs were personalized with the smells of hot dogs and hamburgers from the many boats anchored there. Errol was ill equipped to cope with this banality, and he looked beyond the mouth of the bay to the increasingly raging seas of the Gulf with melancholy and regret. By tomorrow, the winds should have diminished and clocked around to the northeast, which would make the hundred-mile open-sea crossing to Key West one long reach. Meanwhile, the high-spirited shrieks of children made him furious. That the powerboats looked like huge tennis shoes only added to his general dissatisfaction with the world. Nevertheless, his belief that all his problems would go away once he reached Key West brought him a kind of grim cheer; recently and in an hour of unsurpassed bleakness, when the landscape of his failures seemed almost to afford death a dismal glamour, he’d had a kind of satori in which he’d either remembered or imagined an old woman of infinite wisdom who could see him on to a better place. In years past she’d done this for him and for several dissolute friends, among whom he remained the sole member whose life seemed to be slipping through his own fingers. The occasion of his vision was less than august: trying to please a new lady friend, he’d lost a toe while mowing her lawn at midnight, and the pain as he sat in a crowded emergency room, a bath towel around his foot, a tall to-go cup in his lap, seemed to summon forth a vision of a livable future spelled out by the old lady in Key West. He had to get there and he would, once the wind was in the northeast.
About fifty yards away, a man stood in the stern of a dilapidated launch, hands on his hips, playing Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony from a boom box at high volume. He seemed to be challenging anyone who might wish to interrupt his attempt to educate waterborne vacationers. Errol was having difficulty ignoring this. Presently, a cigarette boat filled with young people pulled anchor and relocated near the loner in the old launch. They played rap music on their much more powerful sound system while mimicking the crablike moves of hip-hop. Errol ransacked his boat for booze and miraculously found a six-pack of warm beer made with water from the Rocky Mountains wrapped in a bundle of canvas in his sail-repair supplies. He tingled with the excitement of discovery as he remembered hiding it from a woman who’d come aboard one morning, an attractive woman who’d gone nuts, shouting invitations to a coast guard station in her underwear. Errol permitted himself to sample the beer. Feeling better, he mused over the old fellow’s persistence in playing Beethoven; and with the second can, he began to enjoy the undulations of the half-clothed youths in the cigarette boat. The arrival of a private helicopter overhead, ruffling the entire surface of the harbor and tossing the smaller craft merrily, made him bless whatever gods had dropped off the six-pack. He retreated to the cabin and assumed the cooler view that would become necessary if the hilarity continued to spread over Pelican Bay. His simple ambition — to avoid insanity — seemed in danger of deteriorating into misleading annoyance. Still, he was smart enough to know that the curtain would fall again. It was only a matter of time.