They were just rounding Dunderberg and heading into the Race, Manitou Mountain and Anthony’s Nose looming up on the right, Bear Mountain rising on the left. They’d left Haverstraw at noon, and were scheduled to dock at Garrison for the night. Normally, they’d be in within the hour, but the wind was steady in their faces and the tide was slack. There was no telling when they’d get there. Tom studied the sky, and saw that it looked bad. He sniffed the breeze and smelled snow. Shit, he thought, of all days.
But then he brightened. Snow or no snow, they were on their way to a party. Dockside at Garrison. And it couldn’t start till they got there. Awash in light, he took in the mountains, the plane of the river, the soar and dip of the gulls, he filled his lungs, savored the spray. A party, he thought, working the image over in his mind until he could taste the food and hear the music. But it wasn’t just another party, it was a foot-stomping, finger-waving, do-si-doing, year’s end blowout for all the members and friends of the Arcadia, replete with a mini concert from the guru himself, Will Connell, and the Tucker, Tanner and Turner Bluegrass Band. They’d set up a big circus tent with electric heaters right down on the green, and there would be square dancing, there would be beer, a bonfire, hot food and hotter drinks. It was a big day. A great day. Her inaugural year was over, and the Arcadia was coming home to roost.
The sky darkened. The chop got rough. Sleet began to drive down, pins and needles whipped by the wind. And the wind — suddenly it was playing tricks, blowing steady across the bow one minute, puffing from the stern the next and then all at once shearing across the port side in a sudden gust that whipped the boom halfway around and nearly jerked the tiller from the numbed hands of the scrawny exsaint. There were eight crew members aboard, and all eight of them — plus Jessica — got into the act before it was over.
With the first lurch of that great deadly boom, Barr Aiken, the Arcadia’s captain and a man for whom Tom would gladly plunge into raging seas or fight off the Coast Guard single-handed — just let him give the word — shot across the cabin and up the gangway like a hurdler coming out of the blocks. He called for all hands, relieved Tom at the helm and in half a minute had everybody scrambling to reef the sails. Thirty-five years old, a sallow and weather-beaten native of Seal Harbor, Maine, with a hangdog look and eyes that always focused in the distance, the captain was a man of few and soft-spoken words. He pronounced his name Baaaa, like a forlorn sheep.
Now, the wind dancing and the sleet in their teeth, he spoke so softly he might have been whispering, yet his every word was as distinct as if he’d been screaming to the roots of his hair. Down came the jib. The mainsail was reefed again. Everyone held on as he jibed and began tacking from point to point across the narrow neck of the Race. It was business as usual, no problem, only a little more exciting maybe with the way the wind was kicking up. Tom almost fainted from happiness when the captain handed the tiller back to him.
“Must be the Imp,” Barr observed, folding his arms and spreading his feet for balance. He spoke in his characteristic whisper, and there was something like a smile hovering around the lower part of his face.
Tom looked around him. The mountains were shaggy with denuded trees, their great puffed cheeks bristling with stubble. The sky was black over Dunderberg, blacker ahead. “Uh huh,” Tom said, and found that he was whispering too.
It was almost five, the sleet had changed to a pasty wet snow and the party was in full swing when they motored into the dock at Garrison. A purist, Barr had kept her under sail as long as he could, but with the unpredictable wind he’d given up any notion of sailing in, and started the engines five hundred yards out.
The decks were slick and anything that stood upright, including the crew, trailed a beard of snow. Ahead, the dock was white, and beyond it the ground lay pale and ghostly under an inch of snow. There was the scent of food on the cold air, distant strains of music. Hunched and bony, the ex-saint of the forest stood in the bow, holding Jessica’s hand and watching as the lights rode toward them across the water. “Well I’ll be damned,” he said, “if they didn’t start without us.”
By seven o’clock Tom had gone through three soyburgers, an egg salad sandwich, two falafel delights, a bowl of meatless chili, six or seven beers (he’d lost count) and maybe just one too many hits of Fred the bosun’s miracle weed, puffed stealthily in the lee of the tent. Winded, he’d just sat down after a spate of fancy gangly-legged do-si-doing and swinging his partner, and he was beginning to feel a little vague about his surroundings. Those are the walls of the tent, he said to himself, gaping up from his hard wooden seat as if he were tarred to it, and those the big electric heaters. Outside, in the dark, is the dock. And next to the dock is the sloop. Yes. And down deep, tucked way up under the taffrail in the innermost recess of the main cabin, is my bunk. Into which I can fall at any moment. Suddenly he blinked his eyes rapidly and jerked up with a start. He was babbling. Only seven o’clock and he was babbling.
He was giving some thought to extricating himself from the oozing tarpit of his chair and maybe bellying up to the food table for just one more soyburger with tomato, lettuce, ketchup and onions, when he was assailed by a familiar, probing, cat’s purr of a voice and found himself staring up into a face so familiar he knew it as well as his own.
The purr rose to a yowl. “Tom Crane, you horny old dirtbagging sex fiend, don’t you recognize me? Wake up!” A familiar hand was on his elbow, shaking it like a stick. And now that familiar face was peering into his, so close it was distorted, big hard purple eyes, ambrosial breath, lips he could chew: Mardi.
“Mardi?” he said, and a flood of emotions coursed through him, beginning with a thunderbolt of lust that stirred his saintly prick and ending with something very like the fear that gives way to panic. He was suddenly lucid, poised on the edge of his chair like a debutante and scanning the dance floor for Jessica. If she should see him talking to … sitting beside … christ, breathing the same air in the same tent…
“Hey, you okay or what? T.C.? It’s me, Mardi, okay?” She waved her mittened hands in his face. She was wearing some sort of fur hat pulled down to her eyes and a raccoon coat over a flesh-colored body stocking. And boots. Red, blue, yellow and orange frilled and spangled high-heeled cowgirl boots. “Anybody home?” She rapped playfully at his forehead.
“Uh—” he was stalling, scheming, caught between lust and panic, wondering how he was going to keep himself from bolting out of the tent like a purse snatcher. “Um,” he said, somewhat redundantly, “um, I was thinking. Want to step outside a minute and have a hit of some miracle weed with me and Fred the bosun?”
She put her hands to her hips and smiled out of the corner of her mouth. “Ever know me to refuse?”
And then he was outside, the chill air revivifying him, a cold whisper of snow on his face. Mardi trooped along beside him, her coat open and sweeping across the ground, her breasts snug in spandex. “Isn’t this a trip?!” she said, whirling twice and throwing her hands out to the sky. There was snow in her hair. Across the river, to the north, the lights of West Point were dim and diffuse, as distant as stars fallen to earth.