17 - Her Loss Over The Gain

The Sound Is The Sailor’s Laughter

A Novel

For Andrew

e-book: “The Sound Is The Sailor’s Laughter”

The Sound Is The Sailor’s Laughter By Corinne Devin Sullivan

ISBN 979-8-9909558-0-6

© Corinne Devin Sullivan. 2024. All rights reserved.

Publication made by: CORINNE DEVIN SULLIVAN BOOKS

Published in the United States of America, in November of 2024.

Chapter 17: Her Loss Over The Gain

A letter he read only once, near the end of 2005…

Hi Floyd.

Well, it’s been a long time. I just walked into my apartment here in Studio City. I was gone for half a year in total. Paid the rent the whole time.

It’s nice to be back in the valley.

I didn’t want to say anything to you again. Then I guess I read all the letters you mailed here while I was at sea and out of town. I am impressed you managed to send me a postcard from Ventura every morning in July. That was cool. It made me feel nice enough to write you.

After that voyage ended, I flew directly back to Seattle with my dad. Mom picked us up at the airport. She did an acting routine to pretend what you did to me doesn’t matter at all. The moment she told Meade and I about the deal the two of you made for Malcom plus HER version of my dad’s life story I was going insane inside. And how mom “took Floyd’s phone number off the fridge” and “worked the whole thing out together like old friends” and it was “even though they had only just recently met.”

When I found out what you had done with Malcom I really snapped. That company of yours paid him FIVE TIMES what I had to wait six months to get!!!

I was really hoping to engage in the artistic moment of creation together.

I can’t tell you how this all felt. I was not going to talk to you ever again. I wasn’t going to be your friend ever again. It has taken me eight years of hard work, hasn’t it? Just to get to the place we are today. And my own mother sailed in on a million dollar deal for a major motion picture?? To be clear, I was never dragging any of my heels. I am CERTAIN you told mom to phrase her response to me that way.

Here’s where I get to say nasty things:

There had better be something more for Chief Engineer Declan Aidan Meade than a car! It is his life, after all.

My mom doesn’t really understand Meade’s drive or ambition. They’ve been divorced three times. Yes, they are married now, but that isn’t the point, is it?

You did go around my back., yes, you did. I don’t care what your HIRED attorney has said. You hired MY LITTLE BROTHER and MY MOM out from underneath this family!

“It’s so much work and money and everything else they are receiving.” Well, I am the point of origination for everything you “sparked up together”. She has never talked that way before meeting you.

I’ll be very clear on these issues as I see them.

Since everything you set up with MY MOTHER is only based on the stories I have been sharing with you, you are both guilty of theft from yours truly.

You probably will read my words in this letter and just throw the letter away before you have read everything. Go ahead, then. My truth will forever be kept solidly inside my heart, though.

Malcom won’t ever understood what it means to voyage across the sea. He is not a sailor. Your plot line is terrible. If Malcom is the star, he is much shorter than his dad, so there’s keeping things realistic, too, when it comes to believability.

“The youngest well-paid new star of this decade”—or something close to that is what I have been reading everywhere. I could have just as well been that to you, my friend.

You said you have things covered on your end for me to receive something, too, but I want you to carry it with you as a debt of guilt. I said don’t move forward on anything. I meant that. I had a vision.

My dad’s health has been compromised. Distinctly, I heard him making a really strange sound at the back of his throat, right away. It came on during the entire ride home from the airport. That’s on you! It was the shock of my mom’s news to suddenly have millions stolen from us and just given away to Malcolm!

That was when something shattered inside his throat… probably between his throat and his broken heart. The strange sound hampers him and is on your own head because whenever I bring up this single subject for discussion, he distinctly has the same audible trouble. Meade’s nerves are probably damaged.

I am going somewhere with this one day because he is physically distressed. I bring up the movie and he is leaning over and he cannot help from convulsing and makes a distinct, strange sound.

That’s everything.

I think you are a good person, Floyd. I do.

I take everything in all these letters you wrote to heart. I honestly do. I mean that.

I’m not going to say anything more than what I wrote. Better leave everything unsaid for these remaining days. But if you need to call on the phone, you are invited. Then we can have a long conversation about us.

The thing you wait for seems to be here. You can’t help yourself from jumping ahead of me, the woman working herself to death by any industry’s standards to bring an honest story to the world. Too bad you aren’t lucky enough yet to listen to the woman who is trying and bleeding herself dry to help you return YOU to yourself.

With all my trust lost forever,

Fiona

What happened to be enclosed with the aforementioned letter was this here print-out…

Fiona,

Use this story I wrote if you want to. I am also sending you some notes you left on the seat of my truck.

Dad (MEADE!)

A Short Story About A Sailor I Know

This is a short story (and not a tall tale) about Baxter, a sailor I once grew fond of.

I couldn’t say that he was anything other than a competent man upon the sea. He served me well as an excellent friend to have, and that was by all accounts of those who stood close by, not just my own testimony on this matter of said sailor, Baxter.

Baxter was a decent man to bring aboard any vessel on any trip across the deep.

When we first made each other’s acquaintance, I was the grizzled man of the sea, and Baxter was a fish out of water. He was scared of my words and frightened by the teeth of hard labor inside our Engine Room. I already had learned well how these things can kill young men before they learn to swim in the wretched systems and alliances of the world the mariners still, yet, can and do reside inside of well.

Baxter had become a man in Seattle, in the 1980’s and the 1990’s, and there is nothing like the fresh air in that city as it brings in the smell of salt and seaweed off the Puget Sound. I, too, was raised there, indeed, but it was in the 1940’s and the 1950’s.

Baxter and I shared similar circumstances. Both of us had a choice to be caught between the devil and the deep, blue sea, or to learn to sail so that, with each passing day, we can take aim at the God Triton when he strikes hungrily at each craft upon his ocean.

Baxter was always an easygoing man with me. He was easy to like, and easy to while away an afternoon together with, lost inside the rum and chitter-chatter of the barstools. I took him under my wing. Then, I promoted to other old gulls who nestled like I had for an eternity amongst the docks and ties of the Western Starboard that they should do this particular fellow the same kind of help.

With time, Baxter grew to achieve an even sort of keel. Next, he looked more like a duck in the water as opposed to a cat thrown in a tub. This is where I saw a sort of sailor emerge in good Baxter. He was not scared at all of the sea. Yet, still, he was scared of me.

With each passing trip across the Pacific to lands unexplored by most the world, still, Baxter came to allure most grizzly men with whom he sailed out across the deep. Something lacking drew each old man to him, similar to a black hole in outer space. Baxter was not one to talk of deep water. His friendly smile portrayed copper-bottomed dissonance. If anyone sought to pry the lid off of this heart, they found an empty vessel. His soul was neither shipshape nor Bristol for it was just empty of anything solid. And Baxter’s wishful but commonplace dreams seemed to leave each friend high and dry, at the end of each conversation though the old sailors each believed the talk should have run quite deep.

Three sheets to the wind might still get a good gang of sailors home regardless of the weather, but bringing a bottomed-out, heartless fake onto one’s crew was sailing too close to the wind, at least from my perspective. That failure to offer anything introspective was, for my dead-souled friend Baxter, the worst of any cross to bear. We had many good times abroad and at the bar, but he was still nothing much to me for he seemed to have no heart.

For that terrible plight Baxter encountered, nature nor the water neither could fix.

Things changed when he bought a ticket alongside mine to sail upon a wreck of a cargo ship from Seattle to India. The ship’s history as a cargo vessel for the dead of the awful Second World War, was terrible to hear. No one dared encounter the holds the entire time—no one, that is, other than Baxter. As a result, when at last the old ship rested for the very last time on the simple shoreline of India, before being torn to shreds and, next, scrapped, Baxter bore the burden of the dead. Yet, he seemed to sense their outcome and did set the abandoned souls trapped inside there, next, in a word, free.

When he once again resumed his role as himself back in Seattle, he was a different person. Changes can change a man forever. In Baxter’s case, all the changes were for the better. For, on the voyage, he was taken aback in three most recommendable ways:

In the first regard, Baxter was no longer presented to the crew as the Wiper. By the grace of his good work, he was accelerated to Second Engineer. And let the paperwork be damned!

In the second, once we were set adrift at sea and he had to pay the devil, which is a most difficult task to do for anyone, his old self was there though merely only an apparition sliding inside the boards of the sinking, sightless ship. The ghost of Baxter’s own history was not friendly—no, he wasn’t at all.

And Finally, for the Third, Baxter was touch and go the entire time with a single, tramp—an unimaginable foe who tried everyone’s patience, but, in the end, proved to be a solid, second-class citizen to him and his wife and a friend to the very end of time.

In these three chance occurrences, Baxter’s life was set free from the coils of the serpent, so to speak.

For this, I conclude but not before I ask one and all to raise their glass! To you, Good Friend Baxter! Whose sly smiles and social follies once marred my happiness. It certainly became true they exist no longer. Next year, you’ll be done, and a friend of mine forever.

To you, Good Friend, Baxter, whose laughter is finally, in the end, the most genuine thing I hear at sea.

No sailor speaks nor chides at disaster, for the scare isn’t the devil but the sailor’s own laughter!

Written this August day of 2006, By my hand, Chief Engineer Declan Aidan Meade

What happened to be ALSO enclosed with the aforementioned email was this…

Notes Taken By Fiona E. Meade (unedited)

Don’t say anything about being scared. Instead, tell them all off.

Make things funny. Everyone had a good time. Lots of laughter.

We almost tanked and died.

I found comfort in Baxter’s friendship. It transcended everything marriage or even sex had to offer. The ship could have been a romantic stay, completely away from this world, for both of us, if I hadn’t been raised by a religious man who wants his answers black and white. This was fortuitous because Baxter’s wife had given him four children, so far, and I’d burn in hell if I had allowed even one kiss. However, his wife was in an argument with him the entire time he was away at sea. For that, I spent hours talking to him during our voyage about what I would say to her. As a result, their marriage stayed put. A year after the voyage, Baxter said thank-you and told me how, “It just helps to have a friend to talk to about these things.”

My mother didn’t catch any fish herself at all, during the entire trip. She told me she never cast a single rod.

My mother is treacherous so far as humankind would say. Not only does she have plans to control all of my father’s life while he is alive, she also rendered her version of his life at sea. She stands with her authority before mine. That’s what my dad and I think about her.

WRITTEN AND PUBLISHED BY CORINNE DEVIN SULLIVAN

ISBN 979-8-9909558-0-6 e-book: “The Sound Is The Sailor’s Laughter”

© Corinne Devin Sullivan. 2024. All rights reserved.

Publication made by: CORINNE DEVIN SULLIVAN BOOKS “The Sound Is The Sailor’s Laughter” Published in the United States of America 2024. First Final EBook. Design by C.D.S. Website: www.corinnedevinsullivan.com