7 - A New Committment
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 7: a new committment
The first of several letters sent in 2005…
Dear Floyd Ladd:
I had to bust down my front door and break 50 pencils with “drive” to write this letter to you. My needs for success are coursing inside my “grandiose but bossy body” just to send you a “surprising” and “overly private” letter.
Oh, yes! This is yet another “looooooong” letter from “good girl” Fiona.
Silly, you ambushed two people when you were all alone. My boyfriend and I were surprised you said a word to us at The Inn At the Seventh Ray. And you pretended to be nice, but you didn’t even recognize your one and only. And I would be wise not to criticize you. Still, you made a big, big show about my love interest so you deserve to feel scolded.
You must admit how NO ONE forgets me what with all the FIRE in my eyes—your exact words the very last time we parted our ways?
Tables turned!
It’s been years since the party. It’s hard to believe one thing bad I did ruined everything. If you still like me in any way at all, let’s be friends again. I do want to talk. Honestly, I want to reopen the show. I am committed to do it if you still like anything about it.
Once, when we were talking, you said you weren’t satisfied with anything having to do with storytelling. Or did you say you can’t find anything that could simply amuse you? Both seem true, right now.
Things have been decent, artistically. The worry I have is that I need to make much better money.
The jerk who I brought up to the canyon is talking about taking work in Arizona. I have an idea there for a film crew to develop. Work with me again, Floyd! Please, on this? Amazing how I can admit that I blew it all out of proportion with one single but worthless question, those years gone by! It was me, darling, and I know that!
My parents were divorced, years ago. It doesn’t bother me the way it used to. Dad is awfully depressing to talk to. All on his own, he put together something you can see. Haven’t read it myself. As usual, I’ll send my dad’s life story to the hidden address along with my heart-teasing letter. Kidding, you coward! You’re beloved but you’re also a super-freak coward for all time.
I hope you will respond.
I understand how people sometimes need to take a look at what they have done and end their abuses or just let it go. That’s what I was willing to do for you all that time ago!
With my love, Fiona
What happened to be enclosed with the aforementioned letter was this here print-out…
Dad, You can write any story you want about the ocean here… CLICK “SAVE” PLEASE!!!
…as well as this here documentations and such:
Fiona,
This movie idea is terrible. I read through the thing. Why do I do this story-writing business for you anymore? The entire thing stinks and I don’t know what I had going on when I agreed to help you. You’ve got something going on with that pervert who you can’t take your mind off of. Why don’t you get married and get a real life with a real job? That would make someone happy. Who would be happy? Me.
Love, Dad
HEY SHORTSTOP, DELETE MY NOTES.
Stories from my time at sea. Written for wonderful Fiona, my daughter. (header)
There is just nothing prettier than April in the Puget Sound. That morning, the sun had not yet risen. I cut myself a cup of coffee then headed out onto a little balcony at the back of my condominium. It overlooked a grassy hill with a playground built into the thing. It was around five in the morning, and I was ready to hit the hay after night duty.
I went inside and sat for a moment in my leather-and-wood office chair. At the time of purchase, that leather chair decorated a full office. Aoife had put it together. I had a nice spot to work from whenever I was home. I remember the day she first showed my office to me, and the chair was the best part of it all.
That day was “way back when” on our New Jersey-based blueberry estate. That big farmhouse in the country felt like it happened to another guy, and not to me. Aoife and I had finally sold the place when Marriage Number Three began.
We got a place in Florida. After all those years living far from any city, it was nice to walk down the road and just buy a cup of coffee and some donuts without nearly killing yourself on little winding roads that didn’t connect to anything grand until you were a mile away from an international airport.
I opened up my briefcase and found the cell phone Sam had bought for me. He had paid for one for Aoife and another one for me. I usually left the thing inside my truck whenever I was working.
I plugged the cell phone in. It showed a short list of missed calls. Each one came from my buddy, Ted Friday.
Friday lived in another time zone, somewhere in Ohio. He had left Seattle in the Seventies. He understood sailors and the industry. He had gotten me into a lot of high-paying things such as working as an advisor on maritime projects for conglomerates. He was a good person to call when I wasn’t allowed to go home during the union’s vacation period, when I instead needed to find temporary work to pay our bills.
Friday launched right into the reason he had called. There was a World War II vessel that needed to be crewed and sailed over to Alang Bay, in India. Friday needed to get things set up. As well, he would need to ensure the vessel had the Coast Guard’s approval to depart no later than the first week of June, if not sooner.
Friday described his situation to me. He was running his production from the United States on behalf of the ship’s new owners who lived in India. They had acquired the vessel sight-unseen when it was auctioned off. The only plan that they had was to strip her down. From there, they would sell off all the parts.
There was probably a million dollars’ worth of fishing apparatus inside. The worth of the metal that made up the vessel itself also helped make the owner’s venture fairly profitable.
The ship was called Sassy. She was one of the ships that were built for the military during World War II. She was similar to the old Liberty and Victory Ships. She must have been about half their size, or even one-third their size. Her type was useful carrying supplies and people in shallow harbors and for coastal runs. They performed well in the island-hopping going on inside the South Pacific that once played an important military role in winning World War II.
Then, in the Seventies or so, a company bought up a bunch of these retired military craft. They were all Sassy‘s kind. They had been hoping to have a fleet of fishing vessels. And so they had paid for every one of the ships to be refit with big fish processors for regular excursions inside the Bering Sea. Soon afterwards, that company was paraded through newspapers as losing out on everything they had done financially. They had to sell it all off at cost.
Sassy had been left unattended, sitting in the yards, for a while now. No one was certain how many years. It might have been a decade or more. After they had refit her into a fish processor, she had been bought by a man and wife team who had run a somewhat successful operation for close to two years. No one had information about whenever it had happened.
Friday described her to me. He said she was pretty rusted up, with rows of covered windows and ports instead of regular glass, and holds down beneath the water level that were empty of fortifications regularly afforded a valuable ship of that kind. And yet, still, massive fishing machinery was loaded on in, and there it had all remained.
I was familiar with Sassy’s kind. Most sailors in Seattle who had earned their metal back in my day had seen a number of these ships sailing around. They had been around the Puget Sound for many decades. By 2005, it had been a while since I had seen any at all. It was good to remember those unique ships along with their military legacies. In fact, one time in the Eighties I had been hired to pilot one across the sound.
“I was kind of hoping I could get things squared away by the end of this month. That would enable the ship to depart by the second week of May,” said Friday. “What do you say, Meade? Can I put your name on this list?”
The crew would bring Sassy across the Pacific Ocean, to India, and then run her aground. The people who spotted the deal had paperwork from some official over the entire Alang Bay coastal region. It gave Friday a go-ahead to bring Sassy up the shore at high tide and then abandon it. Now the new owners were waiting until Friday had a crew who could manage to bring Sassy there.
As a Chief Engineer, I knew I was going to like Sassy. I grew up in Seattle, with army surplus stores everywhere. I had been incorporating old war paraphernalia into one place or another for my entire life. Calendars, tables of all sorts, boots and socks, old tools—these things seemed to never end in storage lockers on-board abandoned vessels, or in desks at any port.
I looked out the window of my one-bedroom condominium. The day was just getting started. It was the middle of April. Summer was still a bit around the corner. The flowers in Seattle were unstoppable. Things are never sweeter in the area than they are in April. It was the perfect time to go through an old ship and put her right for sail. Things in my mind were now lining up terrifically. In fact, things were just about perfect.
When I am gone, I will be gone. I was worried that I hadn’t done enough. Sassy might have sailed across the world’s toughest waters. She might have been part of some old war hero’s dream on his single, long voyage. It seemed to me like taking Sassy across the sea would be the complete picture to end her story, and possibly end mine, too.
There was something more to my endeavor yet I shall end that tale there, for the moment.
I decided I would sail Sassy to India. Hadn’t been to the Alang Bay before. It had developed a reputation. I saw photos of a gargantuan crawler and a retired cruise ship sitting well up onto the sand itself, after the tide rolled away. I heard story after story about how, next, the low caste people in India then pull the ships apart.
I pulled the flip-phone out. I told Friday I would do it. We made the deal right there. I would sail on Sassy in the Chief Engineer role in the last voyage she would make.
Friday was ecstatic.
“We can get started by putting together a crew for the Engine Room,” said Friday.
Then, he dropped the bomb when he told me, “Meade, we have to get the job done on time. Can you get out of here in a week if I pull the people together?”
“Can’t say.” I told him squarely, “Let’s see her first. If she’s been grounded you may need to have a new bottom put in.”
Friday was quiet when he ended the phone call. He called around to people he knew in shipping. He ended up getting recommended to him a fishing boat captain who went by the name of Stanley White. Friday asked me to speak to the proposed future captain, and so I gave White a call on my cell phone.
White was drunk at the get-go, and he was getting drunker while we talked. I ended up hanging up. But, he called me back right away, and so I decided to take that as a good sign.
White wanted the work. He was persistent. But, after I hung up, I stood there thinking about it. I called White one more time, just to be certain he was the right guy. He said he thought he was already hired. He insisted it was a done deal. He was angry at my following up so quickly, it seemed.
I asked, “How did I become the bad guy?”
I had to calm White down. He wanted me to tell him we were friends. I had to hand it to the guy because next I told White that we were solid as friends.
I put the phone down. In the same minute, Friday called me to say, “Meade, the guy’s qualified. I remember White from a job up north. White’s a decent man, as far as I’m told. The owner likes him.”
Don’t know why I was needed to begin with if the owner liked him already. Friday wanted me “happy” but Friday himself was perfectly happy with White. A college buddy of Friday’s gave a better second endorsement than anything I could. White as the Captain for Sassy‘s final trip was now a sealed deal.
I sat down at my desk, in my leather-and-wood chair. I looked at the photos you had framed. They were all of you, for the most part. But, you also put some up of your brothers and of Aoife with her horses.
I thought about how my sons’ work had been carefully devoted to political moves since high school, but my daughter was unemployed even though most people thought as highly of you as I do.
Fiona, I have always admired that you land big acting jobs, now and then. But that time when I called you, I was in a situation where there wasn’t anybody else who came to mind. It was the same thing most people do when they need to hire: you offer it first to your family.
I broke the ice with Friday, first. I told him how I wanted to hire my daughter to assist in the Engine Room. Talked very highly of you, Fiona. Talked about how you got right in there and earned permanent AB (that’s short for Able-Bodied Seaman).
I swiveled a bit in the leather chair.
I said this to Friday: “Well, my daughter is good. Her name is Fiona.”
I wanted to be honest with him.
I said, “No, never done much, but I can get her to help me. She’s going to say no, at first—” because I remembered all the arguments you gave me against merchant marines, in general— “but I’m going to offer her the job anyway.”
Then I said, “Fiona is very, very secretive about whatever the hell she’s been up to these days. Can’t return a phone call to me in less than a week. Been burning up her twenties in an acting career.”
I was being real with him. It turned out Friday thought my daughter working together with me on Sassy was a fine idea.
Fiona, I handed you a hard time because I don’t get a full picture from you, ever. Between you and Aoife, the story was always a little worse the second time around, on any subject. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t trust working with you at sea. I hoped you and I would meet each other on the same field of work. It would be nice to get to say some things without Aoife starting a staring contest with me, over your shoulder. That happened a lot whenever we did some family thing together.
When I called about Sassy, I caught you in bed. You told me you were still at your place in Studio City, down in California, and would be getting up for work on some small acting thing in an hour or two. It was after lunchtime.
You told me, “Dad, I’m not sure what I would handle for you on a job like that. I’m willing to do what our family needs, but tell me something: what will the work be? I should know what I’m going to do. Otherwise, I just don’t know if I can put my name down.”
You got onto a roll and said, “Dad. Why don’t you call me and tell me you’re a bit proud? I am surrounded by the parents of truly esoteric and beautiful, genuine artists. They are… amazing… fully supported. They have giving, loving people everywhere who will cover everything they need. I’m not asking for much. Just offer a little respect. A nice touch in the conversation would help. Please, dad? Okay?”
I wasn’t trying to start a shouting match. I never saw a movie come out of all this work you put into your career, which is kind of what was promised when I agreed to help pay your rent.
I think about you burning through the brightest years of your life with nothing to show at the end of it, other than the porn film your brothers told me about. Now, I have never, ever said it to you directly and you can just delete it. This is my side of the story. That’s what I’m getting at. I see a lot of me inside you. You are a lot like me, and so I understand. Both of us have got that go-getter thing inside. We make bad choices, as a habit. We both come out of trouble on top, too, plus we become a lot smarter. But, we don’t have a lot of friends on account of us both being so feeble when it comes to those suave maneuvers most people seem to make.
The twins each got diplomas from working hard to make a way for themselves. Plus, my boys are traditional chauvinists. They have never married, but they are only thirty years old, so it is not a problem for me or for them. The Irish can be like that. I had eleven uncles. Two of them never did anything except live at home and help their mother. They were the best people in the family. When my grandmother passed, my uncles both helped the nieces and all the nephews. Gave them a hand with anything anyone ever needed. And they both lived totally respectable lives.
Fiona, you and I were always pretty relaxed with each other when you were growing up. We used to be able to talk for hours. We used to eat shrimp together at that one place inside of Pike Place Market, in downtown Seattle. Your whole childhood, we always managed to have a lot of good times. I thought it would be great to have you in on this one trip.
Two hours later, there was a phone call from your mother to me. I hadn’t heard from her in a bit.
Aoife said, “Don’t ask our only daughter to go to sea with you. She’s a working actress with a lot going on. Is taking that thing to India a union job? I want to see the transcript.”
I didn’t need that. If Aoife wouldn’t get into the spirit of the thing, I didn’t want to talk at all. I was committed. I didn’t care if I was taking a rusted heap across the Pacific Ocean.
She scoffed and told me, “It’s Fiona I feel sorry for—not you, Meade.”
When the twins were young, I was always going to get both of them to the top of the shipping industry. But, the twins were racing in the political polls every year, beginning with the big shouting debates I heard about on the farm.
The last time we got together for any length of time, we were taking a few days driving up the coast in an RV they had purchased dirt cheap. That was a year or two ago.
The three of us were eating oysters on the Willamette River, down in Oregon. I wanted to punch up the kids’ enthusiasms for shipping.
I told them both, “Ship owners are people who take one hell of a risk. If they hit it—well, I sailed with a couple of them who are multi-millionaires now. They were in the right flow at the right time. But, I don’t know how somebody gets over that first hump.”
Ships were coming up for sale all the time. They told me they loved the ocean “just like their old man,” but when it came to actually working at sea, they said, “We don’t have the finances, dad. You got to have millions to make anything work in the shipping world, these days.”
A fisher can go fishing and make enough money to maybe pay the crew and give themselves some payback, but it’s not enough to keep the machinery up. Owners kept getting deeper into debt. All the risk was always for the owner. Most ran good companies, for at least a little while. Then, it collapsed on themselves.
Typically, what the owner does is quit. Then he sells his vessels to pay everyone. Eventually, the owner just abandons everything. Then, anybody can take it. They only have to sign for it. When nobody does, they can’t get rid of it. Some of them drained the oil out of their ships, took them out and sunk them as break-waters off of Dutch Harbor, up in Alaska.
I told them I was hoping I could buy a ship one day, but that day had never arrived.
My words failed with Aoife. It could only be Aoife for the task. I hadn’t wanted your mom to know about the job at all until it was finished.
Aoife suggested promoting Ben and Sam for jobs on-board Sassy. The twins were now big, hulking men, with blue eyes, like me. They had other ambitions in the works for themselves. I couldn’t see a reason to take them away from what they already had planned.
The next week, an old vessel was on the brink of being sold. The owner had decided to unload it. I didn’t think he would be asking much. I told the twins about it. The idea played out over and over on the ten-cent theater inside my mind. In it, me and my sons were finally all going in together.
But I called the agent and she called the lawyer.
They said, “You can have it for a million bucks.”
“A million bucks? He only paid thirty grand for it,” was my only response.
The owner was a nice guy. I had been working for him as Chief. He told me about all of his big deals going nowhere when, suddenly, we both came to realize how he didn’t know I was the man working for him, down in his own Engine Room. We had run into each other at the bar inside Thirteen Coins and just got right into talking about his problems in the industry.
“The first time I hear a problem with money, I’m out of there,” I said it to him, thinking he was going to assure me. But, his face frowned. Then, I felt bad. He was some sorry piece of work, just like me.
“You’ll get paid. I’m an honest man,” he promised.
I had too many obligations not to worry about getting paid on every job I took.
Eventually, his vessel was staying dockside, and the whole crew was waiting. A lot of time passed, and he couldn’t hire a full crew for the company’s next line of jobs. I waited anyway. Then, we were all let go. Next I heard, his vessel was up for sale.
I saw him one more time, in the dockyard. We ran into each other by chance so I told him good-bye and shook his hand. He wasn’t as disappointed as I would have felt in his shoes. He was optimistic about some opportunity his family had put together for him in sales.
If your family were billionaires, and your dad gave you two hundred million, that’s a good start. But, a lot of dads have given a lot of kids two hundred million who went totally broke on it. And, I’m not broke but I also don’t have a ship to call my own. I’m just a guy trying to earn a living.
Friday called again about Sassy’s departure when I was heading down to my truck. The ship’s owners were pushing us to move things forward. They wanted Sassy underway by the end of tomorrow, or at least in May. And with my experience out on the ocean, I knew we should have her to Alang Bay by the beginning of July to avoid rough water.
I hadn’t yet seen Sassy. The ship’s actual condition remained a mystery. She was moored somewhere south of Washington state and was being brought up to Seattle in a day or two.
Later that day, Friday called me a second time. Seven Ukrainians had been hired by the owners. That was kind of a surprise. Friday told me about how these people are hired cheap because they want a chance to make it inside America. I didn’t like the sound of that, so he assured me everybody’s papers were in order. Plane tickets had already been purchased. They were all flying in from Russia.
Now, I was feeling uncertain. I wasn’t going to be with an American crew. That changed everything for me. I didn’t mention anything. Friday and I both had now faced a mutual problem of hiring personnel for the Engine Room.
I remembered an old engineer called Kingston Riggs who I had sailed with back in my days of working for all the big oil companies. He was someone who had been in shipping for a long time. Our paths would cross here and there. I found his number in my desk drawer.
I called Riggs up, and I hired him right away to be the First Engineer for Sassy‘s final trip. He needed help. His bills were piling up everywhere with a cost-heavy ex-wife. He additionally had a group of young men who were now in college. I felt kinship immediately. Friday thought Riggs was a perfect selection.
Ted Friday announced Sassy was ahead of schedule on her arrival. She was supposed to be fully pulled into the Port of Tacoma by 6am the following day. After a good night’s sleep I would get to visit the vessel for the very first time.
Feeling a lot more “up” now that I had someone in Riggs to perish together with inside Sassy’s Engine Room, I decided it was a good time to walk aboard. I was looking forward to seeing the vessel. I ready to get a feel for what I would be working with.
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