As for raccoons, he struck out there. The traps yielded nothing but the same cat three nights in a row and then nothing at all. Ditto opossums, though he spotted two of them on the street out front of the house late one night a couple weeks back and he’s keeping the traps set and baited just in case. Gophers he’s given up on. They moved in within weeks of the raccoons’ departure, fanning up great conical mounds of dirt like miniature calderas all over the new lawn, and he consulted with his gardener over the problem. “Can you catch them — alive, I mean? Unhurt.” The gardener looked at him for a long while. Then, very slowly, measuring out his words, he said, “Poison or Macabee trap. Either way, they’re dead. You want pets, go to PETCO.”
Anise is the first to show. She’s wearing clogs and a crotch-high jumper kind of thing, in yellow, like the playsuits little girls used to wear when he was a kid, with the exception that she’s no little girl and her playsuit is cut deeply in front to show off what she has. Her bag is slung over one shoulder and she’s got a bottle of wine in each hand, one red, one white. “Cambria, honey. Martha’s Vineyard. My favorite.” She tips back her straw hat to peck him a kiss and then wrinkles up her nose. “What’s that smell?”
“The rabbits. Don’t you remember? This is their big day.”
Then she’s down on hands and knees, making kissing noises at the cage under the table and talking baby talk to the brainless nose-twitching things backed up against the wire mesh as if wire was all there was in the world. “Oh, the poor little bunnies, all stuck in that awful cage. Little bunnies, look at you. Nobody’s going to eat you now, don’t you worry. Uh-uh, not with Mommy here.”
He watches with real interest, the fringe of her skirt thrust up in back and her breasts gone heavy with gravity—Doggie-style, that’s the term that comes into his head — and how long has it been since they’ve had sex? Was it last weekend? Seven whole days? Three steps and he’s hovering over her, bending from the waist to peer into the cage, one hand seeking out the heat of her, right there where the flap of skirt rucks up and the tight silken material of the crotch takes over. “Mmm,” she murmurs, pushing back against his hand with a revolution of her hips, “that feels nice.”
They’re in a deep clinch, mouth to mouth, groin to groin, Anise pressed up against the bulkhead and everything in him strung tight as a bow, when Wilson’s face appears in the doorway. “Hey, hey, now, none of that,” Wilson crows in the voice of the class clown, which is exactly what he was and is, “or we’ll never get out of port.” And then, to Alicia, whose face slides in place next to his as if they’re looking down a well, “You see what’s going on down there? They’re doing a porn movie only they forgot the camera.”
Alicia has wine too, a wicker basket crowded with the necks of bottles, and she’s all legs coming down the steps in a pair of tight white shorts. Wilson has a case of Dos Equis propped up on one shoulder, a grocery sack of avocados and tortilla chips in his free hand. “Got to have chips and guac,” he announces, setting his burden down on the table, “or it’s not a party. And this is definitely a party, am I right, Alicia?”
Before she can respond, before she has a chance to hand the basket to Anise or even say hello, Wilson has her in a simulated clinch, thrusting his hips in parody. “Can’t let nobody show us up, huh, baby?”
Dave is feeling loose, or as loose as he’s able to feel because relaxation is not his long suit, and instead of shutting Wilson down he just lets him go. Smiling, one arm around Anise’s waist, he says, “We’ll see about that — knowing you, you’ll be snoring about ten minutes after we pass the breakwater.”
Wilson’s in motion suddenly, swinging away from Alicia to take the basket, set it down on the table and then spread his arms wide in an elaborate palms-out shrug. “Maybe so, Captain, but when the time comes”—a wink for Alicia—“I’ll be ready to report for duty.”
And everything’s fine, sparkling, beautiful even. They’re all smiling, all the way around, and he’s thinking how great it is to be able to do this, to get away, kick back, slow down, let life come to you instead of chasing after it all the time. Ever since he was a kid he’s been going out on trips like this, and for his money there’s nothing that can compare with the excitement of coming aboard with your arms laden and taking your sweet time to stow your gear and provisions in the ingenious motion-proof lockers designed specifically for that purpose—“Making everything shipshape,” as his mother used to say — and then starting the engine, casting off the lines in a solid pillar of sun or even a cold dripping mist or a rain that taps on the roof of the cabin like a thousand separate fingers and motoring out of the harbor with nothing but anticipation ahead. When he was in school and the tedium of routine and term papers and pop quizzes got him to the point where he felt as if he were buried in layers of mud like one of the hibernating frogs in the tricolor illustration of the winter pond in their biology text, his parents would take him and a friend of his choosing — Barry Butler, Joe Castle, Jimmy Mastafiak — out to the islands for the weekend.
Casting off was like settling into your seat on the jet to Hawaii or strapping your longboard to the top of the car to drive down to Baja, only better, far better, because the trip was part of the adventure and when you got there it was like you had your own house with you and not just a suitcase or a gym bag. And yes, he’s seen the mile-long motor homes out on the freeway with the reanimated corpses propped up behind the wheel, spewing out the fumes while they drag their earthly belongings with them from Toledo to Butte and back again, but sitting on a concrete strip in a pall of smoke with ten thousand other idiots can’t compare with being at sea, where every day, every hour, every minute, there’s something new to get your mind around and you can just flick the wheel with one little finger and go anywhere you want.
Wilson, quick on his feet and with the makings of a sailor in him if he ever wanted to go there, casts off and then joins him at the helm. The girls are down in the cabin, glasses of cold clear viognier balanced delicately in their hands while the bottle beads in the antique ice bucket Anise found in a junk shop somewhere. They motor down the long double row of berths, the Chez When, the Mikado and the Isosceles II showing them their sterns, the fog so dense they can barely make out the letters of their names. “It’s supposed to be clear around noon,” he says over the sound of the engine, “and, I don’t know, it should be nice out there the rest of the weekend. That’s what they’re saying on the radio anyway.”
“You joking or what?” Wilson has a beer cradled between his legs. He’s dressed in an oversized T-shirt, baggy shorts, sandals. On his head, canted back, a baseball cap — not black, not this time — but the tomato red of the Anaheim Angels of Los Angeles. “I picked up Alicia down at her apartment on Bath? I couldn’t even fucking see the house.” The beer comes to his lips, his throat works, it sinks again. “Noon? If it clears by six we’ll be lucky. Shit, if it clears at all.”