THE SOUND IS THE SAILOR’S LAUGHTER

A Novel

For Andrew

The Sound Is The Sailor’s Laughter 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, in November of 2024.

First Final EBook.

Design by C.D.S.

Website: www.corinnedevinsullivan.com

NOTE: The story and characters in my book, “The Sound Is The Sailor’s Laughter,” are pure fiction. The occurrences on the ocean and in the Puget Sound are based upon true and actual happenings at sea.

Table of Contents

Chapter One… an old personal letter

Chapter Two… her maritime dream

Chapter Three… her desire for industry

Chapter Four… her torn heart

Chapter Five… her forever job

Chapter Six… her new friend

Chapter Seven… a new commitment

Chapter Eight… time to prepare

Chapter Nine… for any approval

Chapter Ten… the ship of war and fish

Chapter Eleven… her mother and the sea

Chapter Twelve… the pirates attacked

Chapter Thirteen… there was poetry at sea

Chapter Fourteen… the engine broke

Chapter Fifteen… Singapore was brief

Chapter Sixteen… her return home

Chapter Seventeen…. her loss over the gain

Epilogue

Chapter One

an old personal letter

An old, personal letter from some time ago in 1997…

Dear Floyd Ladd,

I am writing this letter to you with your kind advice in mind that we should stay in touch for the rest of our lives. It was like ambitiously sneaky of me to talk to you at your movie premiere like that. I sort of introduced myself because I kind of was starstruck. I hate myself when I do that. 1997 is almost over so I jumped. I want this to be the best year I have ever had before I am 17.

You seem so vulnerable. I know this will be a vulnerable letter, too. It’s not right for me to apologize because I feel that vulnerability is sometimes worth achieving.

I do appreciate knowing the company chose someone other than me. I am appreciative you listened at all and how you asked everyone to give me a fair try. You treated me like a real actress with at least a bit of skill. I really am “forthright” as you wrote. But if there’s any possibility, at all, that I can be part of your next movie it would show me I am still worth something! I am not open to the court of personal opinion. I don’t want anyone to ruin me with their idea of what I should be just because I look lonely or mad. I am close to becoming an adult so I can see how things change with time. I need to deal only with men and women who are dedicated like I am. Artistically, I am actually stating how I need to just be me.

I remember how you said you were in the Navy. Our dad was in the Navy! I told him about your movie company and how you started it on your own in 1972. He thinks what you’re doing is hot shit!!! and he told me to tell you.

“Meade” (everyone calls dad by our last name) left the Navy’s service, oh, back in 1968. Chief Engineer Declan Aidan Meade (our dad) has been a merchant marine ever since those good ol’ Navy days back then. Merchant Marines aren’t military. They do a lot of work for the Navy “during times of conflict”— something like that!

Dad and I have plans to buy some stuff to film a movie with, and you probably have everything that we need to do it so Dad (Meade) has put something together, and you will probably be interested in it. I’ll print his good stuff out now, and I will send it to you with my letter. Please look inside!

It’s going to sound like the old “father/daughter sales pitch”. I’ll be honest: I hope you want to make a movie with this. I’ll wait to hear from you about this.

By the way, the “little man” you picked up and held for a little while is one of my little brothers, Malcom. He’s a good kid. He is making his plans to be an actor when he gets a little older. I have a lot of good people we can get for this thing inside my family to keep costs down. I hope you see fit to work with us. More on the way but you have to tell me if you like my idea, please! That’s everything I wanted to say.

Deviously as well as sincerely-sneaky,

Fiona (the moody one who acted like she was in trouble with the law)

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, I love you honey and I wrote things for you and your project. This is something special for you and me. I hope you put this away. Years from now, get it out. Read it again. Remember your old dad.

With a lot of love,

From Dad,

Meade.

(Hey there, sailor. Why don’t you make sure you delete our little notes off anything you send out of this house. Even if this guy handed you a fake address he still can be raking in cash hand over fist from an Arab diplomat. Kidding… Love, Meade)

Stories about my time at sea. Written for Wonderful Fiona, my daughter (header).

It was sometime back in the Eighties. I had been working on ships for the Navy over a couple of weeks. All kinds of ships are kept up all around the world to keep everyone safe from war. I supervised engine repairs, refreshed things, and learned how to check up on any new technology, among a few other tricks of the trade.

The entire activity was classified, however.

The US Navy generally handled our return to the States. This time, a private company was hired to take care of everything. They had us on a large airplane on a trip that began in a distant location abroad. It was something like a military airlift. It was just huge. I was completely stretched out during the first leg of the flight. I had an entire bench left only to me. The whole thing felt just like a movie.

I am a merchant marine licensed to sail as Chief Engineer on pretty much anything the ocean has to offer. I had been making fair money, but it wasn’t close to enough for what my family needed to spend during the weeks and months that I was away at sea.

It was the 1980’s and I was working on Marriage Number Two with the same woman: my wife, Aoife, was who I was flying home to.

I had a few gifts inside my briefcase. I had picked some things up for her and for our children. I had a dress made in about an hour out of Singapore silk. The woman looked at a photograph of Aoife from my wallet. She said she didn’t need measurements. She cut and sewed the dress right away. I bought one of a similar color for our young daughter.

At a gift shop close to my hotel I bought each of our twin boys a set of “Year of the Horse” Singapore money. These were wallets made out of imitation leather with fresh coins inside from 1978. They were certified by Singapore’s Board of Commissioners of Commerce as the real thing.

I was content to read and sleep on the plane. I stayed flat on my back and sort of had a day-dreaming experience. I envisioned me walking through the front door to my house. My dream played in front of me just like a ten-cent movie theatre. It was going on inside my imagination. I could relax and watch things go by on the movie screen inside my brain. In my mind, I just sank away.

In there, I was walking up to our house. I had a long-necked shirt on. It was blue with an anchor stitched into the front, over the heart. That’s how I always imagined a sailor ought to get around, and the mind is a magic movie theater where I can look like anything I feel is right. Maybe, in that scenario, I had returned from Turkey, instead of the job I had finished in reality. In that ride my imagination was taking me on, I wasn’t in my forties but my twenties when I was a submarine radioman for the U.S Navy.

I was having a hell of a good time thinking about these things. The plane was roaring as it flew. My eyes were closed. We didn’t have a stewardess. Nobody was checking in on us at all. It felt like not a soul on-board still knew I was still on the plane. There were less than thirty people on the flight, and everyone was real quiet and doing their own thing, such as reading.

I daydreamed about a bottle of wine under my arm and a trail of Turkish sausages, plus these real gaudy and pretty flowers, dangling from the other. And in the mind’s ten-cent movie theater, Aoife came plowing out of our house. She was laughing and singing like that old movie The King And I with tears of happiness. And she just comes flying out the front door at me. The whole thing happens on a summer morning, back in Seattle, where I’m from.

At times, the plane was sinking or jumping. It was not going to be a smooth ride back. Eventually, the plane came down. We were on the tarmac for only a minute or two. No one wanted us to deboard so I found my bag in the storage compartment and got a box of granola bars out of it for everybody to eat. Up we went again, headed to somewhere in Spain. The head smelled so bad it had us reeling whenever anyone opened the thing up to use it.

I rested on the bench. I thought about getting home and taking a load off. My head was rested on Middlemarch, by George Eliot, which was a good book. I had carried it with me on the voyage to finish reading it. There wasn’t another volume for me to grab next. I had nothing else around to get into.

I rested my head on my leather jacket and just closed my eyes. I dreamed about some big-time story as if it was my life. In it, Aoife would be endlessly running towards me, and smiling, inside my mental picture show, over and over. And I would hold onto her with both of my hands just to squeeze her tight enough, like a big hugger would do. Sinking deep into the dream, I sort of fell asleep. With irritation, I couldn’t help but tell Aoife the thing I can’t: “You spent my entire pay in a single day at Nordstrom and for your hair. Do you know how it feels to work all day?”

I fell forward. I opened my eyes. The plane was jumping. Messages from the cockpit screeched in the compartment from a box placed on the side of the hull. I could see that I needed to buckle up. There wasn’t anyone telling us to do it. I did it anyway. The other people followed my example. Then the plane dropped like a machine gun bullet until we were skidding to a final stop on a nondescript runway in Spain. It was located “who-knew-where”.

The plane sat on that landing strip. I waited for it to take off again.

I wished for Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I was on the fourth volume. It was decent reading.

Hours passed. It was hot. There wasn’t any music playing. The pilot was behind a steel barrier. Bad smells surrounded the head if anyone went over there, and I was getting sick to my stomach. The bench gave me an achy feel. I didn’t know if I was going to see Aoife, or the children, one more time. It was a bad bout of anxiety. There was no one talking to us. I felt small, somehow, in the bureaucracy of industry. The job I had been on left me too needy. There was menace, and there were business interests preying on the Navy what with this crazy trip taking every stop it needed to keep the costs down.

I waited.

To ease my mind, I laid back down and put my head onto Middlemarch like some kind of square pillow. It had become too much to dream about anything nice happening. I could say I felt too stuck in one place. Maybe I was through with it. Perhaps, I didn’t want to make it home, anyway.

The plane had come down onto a strip at a small, Spanish airbase that was supposed to be outside of Madrid. We had no way of knowing. There weren’t any cell phones back then. The internet didn’t come out until the Nineties. I had not a way to find out straight information. I had tried to ask around so, when I was attempting to rest, one sailor on board touched the back of my hand. I opened my eyes. He had some information from the pilot. The plane was supposed to be stopped forty-five minutes more and then get going again.

I sat up again. I was scheduled for another flight after this one landed in San Diego. The final one would take me back to New Jersey which was sort of doubling back the way I had arrived. That was the route the private enterprise people had put together for me. And they didn’t mind adding one more stop midway in Texas.

No one wanted to ask the people outside to let us get out. It was probably better to remain on the plane. The one reason to deboard would to make a quick phone call to Aoife, who was at our farm. Again, I closed my eyes to sleep. I hoped to ignore the smell inside the head that was really getting to me.

Aoife was the only woman who would unabashedly tear the heart from my day, from thousands of miles away, from any port I ever called her from. I didn’t need to deboard for that phone call to take place. She did it without fear, often over a terrible phone connection. In the course of our lives together, I would arrive to port in Singapore, or Saudi, or Unimak Island, or up in Alaska, and I would beeline it right to any phonebooth I could find. Or, I stood by, like a fool, waiting for another poor soul to finish a telephone call home to his wife. None of them really seemed happy after the call. I would check in with Aoife just to let her know I was okay and that I was still alive. Thing is, no matter what terrible thing she said, she would give me a place in the world. With her saying my name after the weeks or months I had spent at sea, I felt reality real firmly and underneath both my feet. It was a truce between black and white, when things came to Aoife and I, and I constantly found myself studying our equation.

If I called her now, the conversation would turn to the never-arriving paycheck. She dealt with that predicament every month. The first thing she needed to know whenever I called in from an international port was why the check from the company I was working for was delayed, or late, or why it had taken so long to clear at the bank. All that, and I’m in a fragile state when I am done with a job so I don’t want to mince any of my words. I can’t remember all the details about money and checks. And it would be right there that our argument often began. That’s why I didn’t dare attempt to find a phone to make any phone call back to my home.

In our forced conversations from such strange and dangerous ports as those that encircle the globe, I cannot but can’t avoid the urge to tell Aoife off in each response to her acrid statements towards me. I find myself diving headfirst into the argument, each time, between she and I. Every angry word drains into the remainder of the conversation, messing everything up between she and I and from that moment forward.

But, at the same time, what would my life be if I wasn’t somehow always moving in Aoife’s direction? Aoife is the one woman I have fallen into a state of permanent respect for. I enjoy greeting her after a trip. I like having her with me anytime we go somewhere. We get into giggling together about presents I bring home for her. I must look like some shy kid. I feel total devotion.

Walking in a port town in the Orient, I look for some stone or electronic gadget to give to Aoife. I’d like to find something that is more spectacular than the last gift I bought for her. When vessels take me to other countries, I look for a special present. I want her to have unique opportunities so I search the marketplaces, and I change my money, and that is how my wife is fairly respected by me.

I fell forward again so I stood up. I needed to stretch. I walked around, and I sat back down. Then I rested back on the bench. My eyes were closed.

The plane shuddered all of a sudden. It jerked a little bit forward. Then, it stopped still. A minute passed. The place rocked back and forth a few times. Then, it moved back and forth one more time. I sat up and put my seatbelt on. I tried to read the book, but the plane continued to shake. From below, an odd noise was going rowr, rrroar, rowr. The sound came from a distance.

I looked at the others seated there with me. Everybody had a bottle of alcohol. I had a liter of vodka in my briefcase, underneath the bench. I removed it and mixed it with some orange juice another sailor gave out in plastic cups. I drank it, but it was last time because a minute later I was sicker than a dog, and the plane was still rocking from side to side.

Time went by and, still, no one checked in. Not a soul told us we couldn’t unbuckle our seatbelts.

I went into the bathroom, but the head was all backed up. There was a round portal inside with the shades drawn. It was the only window I noticed. I pulled the curtain aside, looked out. We were still on the ground. and I thought we’d taken off an hour ago.

My watch told me we had been sitting there for two hours inside that hot hot. The smell from the head was everywhere. I opened a little side door. Nobody said anything.

It didn’t look like anyone on the flight team was ready to go. The ground was empty outside except for one person holding a machine up against a ladder that rested on the ground. He seemed to be fixing the ladder underneath our plane. There was something like a rope ladder next to me—or maybe it was a single rope set up by someone I knew to act like a ladder.

“That’s it. I’m heading out,” I said to the guy who might be in-charge.

“Union regulations say you can’t, Meade. All the gear is stowed under those nets. Take a seat.”

It just so happened that mine was right there on top. I was able to grab hold of the suitcase handle and take it out, along with the orange juice guy’s suitcase—the person standing there, next to me. We both wanted to go.

“Thanks, Meade,” the guy says to me, and follows me off the plane.

Outside, it was hotter than anything I had experienced in Spain before. Me and the other guy walked across landing strips. Then, we had to wait at the airport’s car-park. No one was around, and we knew we had to pick up our efforts. There were a few ways to find the main public roads. We managed to call a taxi once we found ourselves a phone booth. We shared a ride to the closest airport. The driver told us it was supposed to be a quick road, but it just felt like a wasp-filled endless beltway around the middle of Spain.

We had to drive for hours. Creedence Clearwater Revival played on the radio so I asked the driver to turn things up. Later, everyone wanted me to talk submarine stories so I gave them some.

Probably thirty dollars would have been fair to spend on the long ride, between us both. Instead, it was nothing. However, our driver was concerned, and so we both tipped him well.

Each of us bought a first-class ticket. We ordered drinks, and I passed out. Midflight, I woke up. A woman nearby handed me The Avignon Quintet, by Lawrence Durrell, when she heard me complain. I couldn’t get it started so I handed it back. I had left my copy of Middlemarch on the military airlift, but managed to give her a short view of its plot while we were all waiting to deboard.

I arrived home to fifty beautiful acres, located riverside, in pulchritudinous New Jersey. Aoife had found our new home a few years ago. It happened when we were getting back together after our first divorce from one another. That was a dangerous time for me, financially.

Aoife and I had been married to each other (for the first time) eight years earlier. After it, we had to get divorced and stay divorced for a long time. She had only recently agreed to get married to me, once again, the year before.

The sale of the first home we owned was sort of a grand ending to the entire montage of our first marriage together. I see the sale of my favorite spot, in a neighborhood close to Lake Washington, as the really dramatic point of our first divorce together. It brought up the odds for all the action about to arrive under the heading of “Marriage Number Two”, clear out in New Jersey.

There is a short film inside my mind. It unreels on the floor of my brain. I have spent hours sifting its pictures. The show is termed, “Marriage Number One”. That stretch of my life has been completely disposed of. Aoife sold the one house in Seattle I truly believed I would live forever in—live happily ever after in—and she just left it far behind. Packed up everything we had bought together, and, with our children, moved across the United States to a blueberry farm in New Jersey.

My telling Aoife she could go ahead with buying a farm in New Jersey was an important move right at the start of the second marriage. The new residence changed the landscape between each other enough for us to ensure we were both somewhat deranged. That was when we started to believe we could keep going together no matter what else happened. The challenge was there. Of course, that wasn’t the plan we talked about, but that’s how I see things now, looking back on our story together.

I could only be certain that Aoife felt the same way I did. Strategy is a big part of her family’s mentality. She liked to tell everyone she ever met about how she was able to get through to me on an emergency phone call, when I was in Japanese waters, having recently survived a typhoon, on a four-month trip, in order to get me to pay for the new farm’s down-payment.

The phone connection had been terrible, but I got what she was asking me for, eventually. I said, “I always wanted a farm. If you found one you like, go ahead. We’ll buy it.”

The whole place was sight-unseen for me. She bought it on the recommendation of her best friend, Sally, but Sally had never liked me all that much.

I am a union man. The union on the West Coast actually likes me a lot, usually. When I was finally back home from that twelve-day government job, after the ordeal with the plane in Spain, the union’s secretary there made a point of calling me. I had just about gotten my shoes off, after stepping through the front door of my New Jersey-based blueberry establishment.

The representative of my shipping union was already hammering at things. He told me, “It was a landing gear problem. They had made stops that took a long time the whole way. Meade, everyone has, in turn, agreed that it wasn’t meant to be a problem. And then you chose to deboard, while at rest, inside Spain. From here on out, it’s okay for anyone to, you know, go ahead and do that, if he must depart, if he feel he needs to. But, hey, only if it doesn’t break the law, or cause trouble with passports, or with any immigration people. Those are the places they can get at you.”

“That sounds real good. Thanks,” I told the man from the union.

After I hung up the phone, I threw all the dirty laundry from my travel bag into the washer and turned it on. Aoife was an hour away, at some club meeting with a county official. Aoife had been talking big on local politics. She might steer herself into a career in the city government if I was careful how I went about pushing that to her.

It was good to be home again. The two-story farmhouse had a friendly feeling. It had been built in the 1800’s, but I had yet to get an exact year. My mind was at rest from the shipping industry’s red tape, and the complicated journey home. The harrows of the open sea were far away for the next six months.

I never wait around when I see something is going bad but simply walk in a different direction. However, now that I was a family man, I had all these cute kids. I knew they would approach soon to ask questions. I had to solidify my answers all the time with these guys. I also still had a cost-heavy wife to care for, so the pressure inside my mind to get back to sea would come and go. With Aoife, I really felt a need now to squeeze into society but wondered if it would ever open. Because of the factors at stake, I decided to try to keep things low-key that week and play it cool with our kids.

For the most part, I was away at sea and making all the big bucks needed to cover the cost of things. My most persistent worry was how to make the family last. When Marriage Number One ended, my entire life was at stake. I begged myself not to do it again during Marriage Number Two, by mistake.

Aoife had a lot to buy. She would be gone in the city the whole afternoon. I had successfully brought in a sizeable paycheck and she was fully content, so I needed to take care of children, and so I walked outside. It was time to start enjoying being a class-act type of guy, in the “Husband” as well as the “Dad” departments.

I washed up, and put a sweatsuit on from a voyage I was hired for last summer. The merchant marines get t-shirts and sweatsuits that go along with the vessel. The clothes have the ship’s name printed on them. Some have a picture of the ship printed on them. Wearing these on-shore made me feel like a real merchant marine who was on vacation.

I walked to the barn. I intended to grab a bale of hay. Aoife had asked me to throw one over the fence for a horse she had bought while I was away at sea. How she was able to throw a bale over a fence every day, all by herself, was hard for me to guess. Doing that myself, and having the horse come nodding my way, the esteem of having become the owner of a fairly unproductive blueberry establishment that looked correct to all the people driving by and living in the area really filled my heart.

During that very first week back home from sea, I found my twin boys making army camps everywhere they could. They were about ten years old so I could tell that Ben was going to be big and burly and blonde like the men in Aoife’s side of the family. Sam was smaller in stature. He had a darker shade to his skin, but he had my shade of blue in his eyes. He was handsome. Heck if they weren’t both good-looking boys.

I waved them over. They waved back. I called over to them, but they needed to perform a variety of military procedures and I had to kick it out of there, go back to my work for Aoife.

The blueberry farm wasn’t more than ten acres. Only a few of those had blueberries growing anything on them.

There was a great, big, brown barn, built a long time ago, before the house, some time back in the 1700’s. There was an old-fashioned storage shed. It was built from wood the original landowners had chopped down. Three tractors from three different eras were growing rust under the coverage of the wooden bay. Much of the shed’s wood had rotted through and then, I suppose, had solidified.

There was a small shack. It was built up along the bottom using rocks from the local river. It was built up on the top and across the roof using regular wood. The paint on the wood had been blue. Now, it was peeling in scrapes and edges that my kids could easily get ahold of. The real estate agent said that one was most likely built in 1979.

My kids had stuck up a sign that said “Dad’s Place” outside. I unloaded every toolbox I had into there. Then, I launched into filling the little building up with screwball machinery I bought on laudable trips to every hardware store in New Jersey. If Aoife and I ventured together, we bought old-fashioned benches and things inside antique malls. Every purchase of machinery for my shop was filled with gratification of a job well-done as soon as I had moved it into place.

I walked around the corner of the barn. Next stop was the tractor shed, but you were there, picking flowers on the other side of one fence that rounded up a small pasture. Another new horse was only a few yards away. I hadn’t known Aoife went and bought all of us another horse. I thought about my wife’s bold purchase, but didn’t sweat a thing. It was Aoife’s new treasure, and I hadn’t any worries that afternoon.

I had to stop for a chat with you. I remember the conversation like it was this morning. You must have been seven years old. The twins had fooled you out of something you meant to get started up. Your mom had planned to take you into town to start a class in ballet. She got too busy with getting the twins ready for soccer camp, plus a trip for them to the model store. That put you in the outs.

For that, you and I loaded up into the pickup truck. I had bought that small, red pickup for about one hundred bucks. On the way to your class, you said you had some big aspiration to be a farmer like me. That made me laugh. And then you were laughing hard with the joke, too.

There was a big hole in the floorboards under the backseat of the truck, where the asphalt went racing by. We talked louder than the wheels. We were happy to drive around and show the truck off. We got you to the class right on time that day.

Seemed like you and your brothers were involved in the types of things that me and my own brothers and my own sisters might have done back when we grew up. I was born in a shack. My parents were both children of Irish immigrants to America around the turn of the twentieth century. Back in the Forties and Fifties, my friends and I went everywhere on foot or on bikes in our neighborhood, just south of Seattle, in Washington state.

Fiona, I watched you and your brothers and I had a feeling that all three of you were going to become merchant marines one day, after you got a little bit older. I still believe that’s true.

Fiona, why not become a merchant marine? There are plenty of women who do. You can get a job wherever you want to take one. Why not be a merchant marine for a while until you get some living time under your belt? I know you’re going to be a big actor, so just shelf my idea, and it’s no big issue. I’m am telling you what is coming to me right now, while I type out this thing you asked me to write. Go ahead. Tell me I’m slime.

Back during that time on the farm, when you and the twins were still so young, things were a challenge. I never could predict how things were going to turn out, but I could see one thing clear: that no one there seemed big on harvesting any blueberries. That was a fact so I tried to understand why I was standing in the middle of a blueberry farm that I was paying a big mortgage on. I spent the next few days walking through the bushes and inspecting things against advice from this man in town who owned a horticulture establishment. It was pretty clear there was a lot to do to make a sky-high splash up in blueberry heaven.

One evening, Aoife and I were standing in the kitchen. You kids were all in your pajamas. Instead of going straight to bed all three of you had stayed up late watching a movie. I had purchased the first VCR we ever owned that day. Suddenly I remembered the gifts I had bought in Singapore. They were sitting on a table in my office. I asked Ben to find them.

The Singapore silk dress went off like a big hit with the little one. The boys thought the coins were useful. But Aoife up and dumped her silk dress in the trash. Everyone there was dumbfounded. The room went quiet. The kids went back to watching their movie.

“I like everything you did,” I told Aoife. We were still standing in the kitchen which had been fresh-painted. The brown cupboards and the wallpaper looked overly used, though Aoife didn’t want negative talk about the establishment.

I want to clear something up between you and I, Fiona, about that night. I wouldn’t tell anyone this other than my daughter, and I want you to know that. When I was at sea on my last job, Aoife and I had been arguing. She wanted me so stay home for a while if I was willing to use my vacation time with the union. If I did that, Aoife explained, I would certainly catch decent part-time work in one of the East Coast ports. Aoife couldn’t understand that the set-up with the roads and the arrangement with the authorities in those ports was not going to work. That was all we were saying to each other.

“You know, you’re kind of uptight, tonight,” I told her, but Aoife turned from me. I had a little speech I wanted to make and take her into my arms. But, I couldn’t see her face. I forgot what I wanted to say to her.

When she turned around she stung me, slapping my face. I don’t know what was said, but I grabbed both of her wrists and she was still trying to hit at me, and doing it just because she got mad for a minute. She started yelling at me to let go of her wrists, and I guess I was yelling about things right back at her. But, I didn’t know what to say to her to make her stop hitting at me.

Pretty fast, Ben rushed in with a plastic sword, or a baseball bat, and begun to hit at me, too. He got me pretty quick on the cheek. Sam was in there and you were crying in the doorway. Sounded like everyone in the room was telling me, “Don’t you hurt our mommy! Go away! Go away! We hate you! We hate you! We hate you!”

I just about had it, then. I pushed Aoife away from me, and I walked out to the truck. It was useless. Aoife would just go crazy if I ever got mad or shouted because, once upon a time, I used to be a fighter back when I was young. I was a member of the Rainier Valley Athletic Club, and some real contenders were at that place. At bars, in my twenties and early thirties, or in drinking situations that turned ugly, I fought whoever I needed to, whenever I needed to, if the situation got bad enough.

“Never touch a woman, or I’ll break your fists off. And don’t beat your kids, either,” is something my old man told all the boys in the Meade home. He said it more than a hundred times. Some men hit their wives back whenever their wives bit or kicked, but I am not one who would ever do that.

I drove around the countryside and got pretty lost. That took only five minutes. It took a while to find the way back home. By then, I felt terrible. The whole time I was asking myself if this was a nightmare. The attack came from nowhere. I was scared as hell at losing everybody I cared for.

Later, I was in our bedroom. Aoife had quieted down. She wanted to talk because she didn’t think I took her seriously three months earlier when she made a point to tell me about a man who had been advancing on her from the town’s council. It happened right after I had departed on the last job.

Aoife was terrified the man was going to try to take her out, again. There were big names in the county’s social calendar who liked her. She talked a lot about these people. There was a city commissioner who had stopped by when he had not asked first or been invited. Aoife talked about calling the police which I didn’t like and told her so. I let her know it would only intensify things.

I said, “Aoife, everything is changing for you here in your new place. You’ll learn to take it easy with the men. They’ll eventually understand. They’ll learn you mean what you say.”

Fact is, she dressed a bit too cute for a married woman with three children. She spent a lot of time at department stores. I learned long ago to never complain because it wouldn’t do me any good. She dressed a little off, at times, and looked like a showgirl to me, at times, too.

Aoife launched into how she was sad that we had moved so far away from our families. Both her parents and mine, as well as our siblings, lived in Washington state or in California. She used to get together with all of them, all the time. She was disappointed her sisters weren’t now planning to move to the countryside, so as to be close to us.

Internally, I was forced to speak with honesty.

I said, “That’s something that both of us wanted to know, Aoife. Why did you say we needed to be on the East Coast in the first place? This is just totally insane. It’s nuts. I told you in Seattle it would go full circle, with you wanting to go home again. In point of fact, both of us bet on it, at first.”

“Both of who, Meade?” Aoife asked.

“Your dad and I both got into it on the phone, the other day. It’s just something that’s needs to be talked about.” I put my hand on hers.

We kept talking until she calmed down. After all that, Aoife and I fell asleep next to each other for a little while. When she woke, she decided to let things go.

Aoife said to me, “I guess I can let it ride for a while. This is a done deal. But don’t you tell my mom what I say, Meade. I’m tired of you and her making fun of me. I’m here alone in this place. I am really disappointed with this set-up. There are always men around in the town or at the school who are really too bold with me, to be sure. You let it out with anyone about me being flaky, and I’ll be back home with my brothers looking after me, and you can run this place. Do you hear?”

“You picked New Jersey. I wanted to stay or head down to San Francisco. Don’t tell me it’s me who is at fault here,” I said to her.

Then I made a promise: I was going to stick by her side, to the very end, no matter what, because she had always been there for me. However, I wasn’t going to let her run things any way she chose to, and I told her that.

A strange anger swelled up inside.

I yelled something like, “You chose to be here on your own! That choice is on you! If I choose to make something important happen, back on the West Coast or anywhere in my career, I didn’t want to be challenged by my wife every step of the way. That seems fair to me. Anyone would respect my reasoning, Aoife!”

Money was so tight, but it wasn’t right to shout. It wasn’t even the right thing for me to say. I admit I was still mad about the time she tried to get me to go work for oil companies, last year. The fact was that we weren’t covering the mortgage, along with everything else that needed to be paid for.

Aoife started to cry. I couldn’t even touch her hand or give her a hug. Hugging me wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, for her, anymore.

“You haven’t really ever been able to stick up for me. You act like you will. Then you blow everything off into left field. Go back to sea, Meade! You don’t care about us here, all alone. You put it on me to take care of big things. So, that’s fine with me. My choice is you get out of here, right now, if that’s all that you are planning to do, anyway!”

For more than a full day, we were in a heated fight. At the center of our anger towards each other were bills and unpaid things the kids were already planning to do. I had to get up from the argument that evening and walk.

I strolled outside. It must have been one in the morning, but I found you, my little daughter, outside and lying on your back on top of the picnic table that rested on our front porch.

“Hey, get to bed,” is what I said to you, but you didn’t move.

You might have been sleeping but, when I got to the table, you were looking at me. I sat down. You turned your eyes to look up at a molasses night sky. I had to rub my eyes with my fists because I felt so bad.

You pointed up and told me the stars were all arranged in constellations by the hand of God.

“Who told you that?” I asked.

“You probably did,” you said.

Then you looked kind of sad. You asked me a solid question, something like, “Dad, are you really going to go back to sea just after you just got here?”

I told you it was looking that way, and so you said, “I like camping with Ben and Sam, but sometimes I get scared. It’s better when you’re around. You can pick me up for practice, too. Otherwise, I won’t be able to go. And I will quit ballet just after I started it.”

“You want to keep good, ol’ dad here at home with you? That’s mighty nice of you.”

You thought that was funny. Next, you told me, “Mom told me I am supposed to beg you to stay. I want you to stay for the whole month! You promised already you were going to be ready to help with the things for my big play at school. And, also, Mom said you were going to take us out to the movies. I want you to bring us all somewhere special every day.”

You got up from the picnic table, and then sat at my feet kowtowing.

“Please, please, please can we go out for a movie every day, dad?”

That’s when Aoife emerged.

Aoife said, “You have a midnight sandwich on the counter, Fiona. Take it up to your room, please. Then, let’s get to sleep.”

“Let’s eat, pal,” I said. I took your hand and pulled you up. I had to give you some advice which was, “Don’t ever beg, okay? Never, ever let me catch you doing that. Ever. You make yourself look pretty trashy.”

Aoife said, “That’s enough. Meade, she’s young. You should watch yourself or your kids will end up talking like a sailor.”

You may remember two flashlights turning on, next to a lopsided tent out by the tractor shed. Ben and Sam came running towards the old farmhouse. They were hungry, too, and it was too cold for their camp that night. Together, everybody walked inside.

“Can we go to the movies every day?” You pleaded again, just like how your mother trained you how to talk.

You kept at it, asking me to stay until you kids all drifted out of the kitchen and everyone went to bed. Before daybreak, I already had gone.

I flew from New Jersey straight to Equatorial Guinea to take a job on a type of ship called a Well Cleaner. It was an English vessel equipped to handle oil rigs. It operated somewhere off the western coast of Africa. The job offer I accepted turned out to be long enough to promise us months of decent pay. If I could get an extra spike of cash to Aoife by taking it, we might be more relaxed with each other the next time I was at home.

Chapter TWO

HER MARITIME DREAM

The one letter from 1998…

Dear Floyd Ladd,

I am so very happy to receive your letter in response to the one I sent to you last year. I am completely thrilled to be there next. It’s my dream!

I can’t believe what you endured in Haiti. I had no idea in the world you had been taken hostage. Thanks for sharing the behind-the-scenes of your new TV series. Your optimism is famous now! I hope one day I can say that I have saved another person’s life. That was a personal ambition of mine forever ago.

I had so much fun reading the idea your people have for your next television series. What a big responsibility everyone there must have. I think television will be better for the work you are doing. It would be nice to have something all the people can watch that isn’t the same trash-talking. I like to feel good about things instead of just arguing about them.

I don’t mind being at the front of this project, either.

All the times I thought I might die after shaming myself in front of the entire world meant nothing unless someone I loved noticed what I had done. Standing on my parents’ front porch with my dad, or my brothers, and having them point out some little characteristic I have, without noticing, then telling me why I’m just an inbred prostitute they picked up on the side of the highway, and that’s why I’m so “special”… it’s stuff like that which is hard to take. The biggest anger I feel in my soul right at this moment is for the bigger publications who smear artists like me, and they really don’t care much if I live or die. After all, I’m seventeen now.

Ohhhh, hey! There’s another Meade! My mom gave birth last week, and it was unbelievable to watch it happen. The baby is named Ted. Actually, it is Theordore Phinneas Gallegher Meade, II, after my dad’s youngest brother.

There is also another “episode” from Chief Engineer Declan Aidan Meade with this letter! He wrote a bunch of stuff for the big movie plan we have. I haven’t had a chance to read through it but I promise you, it’s good. Everything he says is absolutely 100% true. Hope you will one day consider making this stuff into a movie!

Everyone in my family can’t believe I’m going to be staying in Los Angeles for the entire month. I am waiting for the word “go” before I arrive. Looking forward to a phone call or an email…

Completely competitive but dutifully side-lined as needed on your request,

Fiona (the crispy one who won’t behave)

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 thing is going nowhere, as far as I can tell. Last thing I remember discussing was New Jersey. Remember all the blueberries no one bothered to harvest (you, too, brainiac)? Everybody was angry at me. I didn’t deserve it if I was paying for it all, and I was. I figured it was best if I stayed away. I worked on the ocean, for more than a year. Work didn’t come very easy.

Fiona, you and your mother and all your brothers are perfect, as far as I am concerned. You guys are the best thing that ever happened to a guy like me. Let’s be clear on that.

Be sure to delete the note before printing this. Don’t send strange things off to your big-shot friend in LA.

With lots of love from your father, Meade!!!

(Delete this if you mail it).

Stories about my time at sea. Written for Wonderful Fiona, my daughter. (header)

It was the middle of the Eighties. I needed more money to cover family expenses. Aoife was pregnant. We were looking forward to another Meade. However, it also meant a higher cost margin overall.

After waiting for something better, I left the union and started doing a lot of work for oil companies. The very first job happened to be on an English ship working off of the coast of Africa. The people in charge don’t just hand over a license for that type of work. I needed to get a waiver, and I had to get my deep-sea diving papers from the Navy up-to-date.

The oil rigs are in the middle of the sea. They are all equipped with transportation difficulties. Getting on and off can be catastrophe. Everyone has to stay alert. A helicopter flies people up to the rig’s platform, three hundred feet in the air. The chopper has to be ready to take off fast, in case things kick up with the wind or with the water below. The rig has a service boat traveling back and forth, from shore to land. It stops at a partially submerged staircase on its bottom deck.

There was another oil rig I had worked on, and it had a big crane that carried you up in a little basket. You stepped on it in a boat, and then the crane brought you straight up. You had to hold on tight inside because the minute they lifted it off the ground the thing would be blowing back and forth. At the end of that, they kind of swung the line. It threw you upward and onto the platform. Looking down, the vessels below looked like postage stamps in the water.

Riding in the basket was about as scared as I had ever been. You got a good idea of what not to do. At its peak, there were a few hundred feet down to fall. Big, gnarly men grabbed hold of the basket’s handles to secure it, as soon as it came close enough for them to reach. Then you got out on the deck fast. That was how you finally were on-board the oil rig.

This isn’t bragging, Fiona. I’m telling you that for certification in disasters such as helicopter escapes, they flipped a helicopter up and onto us five times, in the water, and we had to get out of all kinds of different things. We were in the training for a week or two, with fifteen other people, and everything was sinking. We were practicing escaping from a water vessel. We had to get into a life-raft, but it was a bitch with a guppy suit on—that’s a wet-suit that covers your whole body and you look like Gumby—and I was doing that when I was about fifty years old.

The company had me and another sailor called Kingston Riggs put up in a nice hotel during our training. We were the same age. Riggs was a laid-back kind of sailor. He was easy for me to tell a joke to, but not sarcastic about it, at all.

When we were newly requalified, our first stop was a mandatory doctor’s examination in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. They gave both of us the micro chloride medicine. I had it earlier, in the Eighties. They had been using it with the merchant marines to protect us all from malaria for some time.

We flew to Paris, France, from Florida. Then, we flew across the Sahara. It was a ten-hour flight where you didn’t see anything but sand and the sky looked like it was half-dead. All throughout the long hours we spent together in the air, Kingston Riggs explained how important the oil industry was.

Close to landing, we circled once out over the ocean. I saw there were dozens of oil wells there. They were huge. They worked day and night, all along the coast. Our job was scheduled to be handling the Engine Room of the Well Cleaner ship as it moved around from rig to rig. It looked like thousands of rigs off the western coast of Africa. Every one of these needed to be cleaned regularly.

The plane was ready to land. The nose touched down in Malabo, a city on Bioko Island, off the coast of Equatorial Guinea.

I saw a whole bunch of planes pushed off to the side of the airstrip: 727s, 737s, 707s. Inside, I asked around to find out. An official running the airport told me the man in-charge had set something up so that whenever a company didn’t pay its bills he just had their airplanes pushed off into the ditch. Equatorial Guinea has dealt with big human rights abuses. It made my skin crawl looking at those abandoned airplanes.

When an oil rig is working and it’s pumping, a certain amount of wax builds up. I was going to work for the company that was hired to flush out the build-up. I would be an engineer on one of their many vessels.

The company put me up in a beautiful five-star hotel while I waited to board. They told me to eat everything I wanted at a five-star restaurant on its first floor. It had been a good company to me, so far, but I couldn’t believe the red tape. Took me three days to get that squared away with my “Okay To Board”.

The first rig for cleaning was located two miles out in the ocean. A helicopter flew Kingston Riggs and I to the platform of the rig, three hundred feet up in the air. From there, we waited for two days until the Well Cleaner could take everyone on board. There was a hole in the middle of the ship called a Moon Pool. Divers and vessels accessed the water and were launched through the pool.

The company owned seven or so underwater pressure vessels. They were all in operation while I was there. On lunch breaks, I talked a lot with the ship’s skipper. He knew all about the work being done by their divers.

What they did underwater was pretty incredible. It was mixed-gas diving. After a twelve-hour shift, the divers returned to a pressure vessel parked a couple hundred feet deep. They slept inside and then another shift would take over. Those divers never did get out from under pressure during the time I was there. They did all sorts of things deep underneath the ocean. They flushed the valves and hooked a hose to the rig. They handled the BOP—the Blow-Out Preventer. The BOP had been in the news each time there was terrible trouble on any oil rig because it should be able to prevent oil rigs from ever having a disaster during drilling.

He told me, “A lot of money is spent cleaning up oil wells, and picking stuff up. There is just an enormous amount of money in the industry. The owners pay a million dollars a day for this ship, I kid you not. And it is at work eight months out of the year.

“Listen: in a week, production from drilling is going to pay for all of it. In a week. You just wouldn’t believe the type of money in this industry. Gets to be something like millions by the day. Some will bring in twenty million or more a day. Difference in production after they clean a well—just one of the wells—more than pays all of its costs for the whole year. We’re going to clean about fifty wells this trip.”

This type of work was a different type of thing than what I’d dealt with in my industry before. The technology was enormous. Divers would dive down, hook their hoses up and flush things out so the machinery would operate well. They would shoot liquid kerosene at it—or whatever the hell they used. They shot it in there and it flushed the wax out of it.

The oil business is incredible to see. It doesn’t compare to what people worry about in the United States. There was an enormous amount of oil wells, when I was there. They were burning gas off all the time.

I was required to leave my berth’s door open except when I was in bed, asleep.

Normally, you get something you need to throw out, you throw it away. On this vessel, you had to leave it outside the room. I couldn’t keep a trashcan in my room. Theoretically, it was so you didn’t have a fire, but that was not honestly the case.

On that particular vessel, Kingston Riggs and I were the only Americans. The Scots listened to everything we said. They never enjoyed hearing about America’s politics, but they loved talking sports.

The ship was headed north when we departed Africa’s waters. We went up to the Azores located off of Portugal. Then, we went up to Scotland.

I kept talking to Aoife and all of you kids whenever the ship was in port. You remember me calling every few weeks or so? But even if I missed my family, I was back at sea pretty fast, and so then I fell out of touch sometimes for more than a month.

“How’s things at the place?” I often asked Aoife when we finally had time for a phone call together. Aoife had given birth to Marcus on her own, while I was away at sea. I never forgave myself for missing that.

“I’m having a decent time,” Aoife would often tell me. A lot of the time she even laughed at my jokes. There was another time where she cried because she missed me so much.

Truth is, when I was at sea, I was kind of “on the job”. With whatever I was in the middle of, I had a lot to worry over. I got absorbed. That’s why I stayed cool with everyone.

Inside, I had already died when I saw all the trouble. My family never got into anything other than fights, when I was growing up. Now, my own wife and kids were having the exact same trouble as I did when I was just a kid.

Aoife told me she had succeeded in getting every one of you kids into a private school type of thing. Supposedly, what she went through, by doing it, was such a big deal to everyone in the city who she hoped to impress that some people wanted her elected to the education board. I was impressed by Aoife. I never finished high school, at all. Neither did Aoife, in truth.

I would have liked to have spent more time with my kids when everyone was young. With the pressure of covering the mortgage and paying for the schools and covering all the blueberry farm expenses, I couldn’t stay long in any way.

Fiona, you sent me a card every month. It was something you had to make in art class. It had something smeared on the front like “You’re the best dad in the world.” It was usually something pretty hippie looking, but a lot of them got me to cry.

If I could get you an address for a port, you often sent a bucketload of your cards half way across the world. But if I didn’t have any address to give you, or if the ship took off before your cards had arrived, everything went to my union. Those little cards would stack up back at the union hall in San Francisco, and then I’d get them there. I’d be standing at the front of a line, trying to shove them into my briefcase, without spilling any. I’d read every one of them the first night I got there. I would be sitting in a Motel 6, waiting for someone to buy me a plane ticket home, and your cards cheered me up.

Not a glamourous story, but this is the life I have lived. It would have been nice to say I lived the dream, but things didn’t happen that way for me. I wish I could have been around for you and your brothers when everyone was growing up.

For me, I wanted to continue paying the bills so everyone got a chance to do whatever they needed to. And everyone was into getting a brand new pair of shoes every few months. At the very least, I could keep the show on the road from far away by staying at sea and earning money.

I was reading Steinbeck. I found a full collection in a vessel’s book depository. Titles like “Of Mice and Men” and “The Pearl” were all there—pretty much everything the guy had ever written. I made it through all of them. He was a standard fortune teller. I liked it all.

Obviously, some trips were made home. Most were productive, Fiona. How else did your mother and I get you Marcus and little Ted to take care of? You know that whole thing and how it works.

There weren’t that many times I stayed home more than a few days or a week. With my kids attending a private school, and a wife who could pretty much move mountains if she felt the need to with the city, and a blueberry farm that looked nice from any angle of the road as strangers drove by it, I started to feel like I was finally the winner.

My one trouble became a need to abandon working for the oil companies. I only walked into that field because I had these absolutely crushing bills to pay at home. At the time, I didn’t dare risk losing my marriage for them.

Still, after almost a decade working with oil, I still didn’t trust any of the boys there. I didn’t like them, either. But, I didn’t see any other choice than staying. The bills were always coming in so I did it.

Chapter three

her DESIRE FOR INDUSTRY

A letter sent in the middle of 1999…

Dear Floyd Ladd,

Been so nice working with the company you have put together! I hope you will let me stay on your roster even if you don’t want me on the other side of the camera.

I’m a little confused about not being needed anymore with the show in its second season. I was under the impression I was the lead-in on the entire series. It’s depressing, to say the least.

You got it right. My twin brothers, Ben and Sam, are both famous in politics. I fully prefer not to talk ever about them. Please do not ask me ever.

That said, one family member loves the idea of making a movie about his life… you can always talk to me about Chief Engineer Meade! You should deeply consider things. Dad raised me over the phone from ports in the Orient, Africa, the Middle East, or Singapore—and from fishing ports in Alaska. It was just the way I was brought up, take it or leave it.

I only bring him up because you told me you like ships way back in our first conversation.

Hey! Great job on the nomination for the Academy Award because any recognition is a giant step towards success. Sorry I forgot to say it earlier.

Hey, if you are looking at putting something together based on me, you should include crazy sleepovers my friends and I pulled together in the Nineties. That would amplify innuendos and sexual drive in Season Two. So important so don’t skip! If there really is going to be a “next big thing” with me at the front, this little bit will add a touch. We were into Disney, foreign films and occult trash. We would stop for an hour at the video store. We’d get about six movies and watch them until the middle of the night while we ate just a pile of pizza and ice cream pretty much every Friday. My friends I got to know each other really, really well. Well, it’s nothing porn—not like that. It’s just that’s the sort of thing we got into doing on weekends until I booked a commercial. I made my first paycheck working in film at fourteen. From that point on, I lived sort of like an adult by supporting myself.

Anyhow… I am starting to bore myself. New Jersey has been real. I want to get back to New York. LA is not my thingy. But I will be willing to stay in LA for the rest of my life, at a moment’s notice, if you ever call me back and want me there for another season.

Take care, Fiona

P.S. Malcom has headshots! Nice!!! I’m sending a stack for you to cast them about if you like him. Contact information is on the back. He’s not turning out to be very tall but he is so funny! He’s my Fav--Totes!

What happened to be enclosed with the aforementioned letter were 2 print-outs…

My Spite or is it really My Story?

By Fiona Eloise Meade:

The closest thing my dad ever achieved to normalcy was the caring and tender telephone call Meade made into our farmhouse every month. We were so amazed to hear something from him that we would go berserk.

During all the phone calls, everyone in the house filled him in, as best as each person was permitted to do by my oldest brother, Ben, for it all had to take place in the timespan of less than twenty minutes for it was a great expense. Mom had to pay the phone company every month with a check.

My parents wanted to make some money selling the blueberries off the farm but that never happened. Any blueberries being picked at our family’s blueberry farm brought such a goodhearted laughter to my dad. It filled the phone. At other not so good times, our father charged on us for names of anyone picking the blueberries and then what exactly happened with the money they were paid for with. We would have to give names to him very quickly or we would need to have some receipts to show him whenever he came home otherwise my dad would be so sad that he would start to cry!

I have twin brothers, Ben and Sam, who are much older than I am. I have two younger brothers, Malcom and Ted, you are much younger than I.

The twins were mostly famous only because they conducted shouting debates out in the back pasture. This was carried on all throughout their high school years. A shouting debate requires a big field and so everyone found the family farm to be perfectly made for them. Everyone was able to hear both the grand as well as the smaller points that were made. I was only ten and eleven years old. I am sure shouting debates are popular at your school. They are popular in this country. Many of the nation’s most important people in politics attended our high school, and they are usually popular people, too. I am certain how everyone who was popular in my school—or, actually, everyone with political ambitions who graduated with the twins had spent some quality time in my back pasture.

Children should be remembered as being kids during childhood. For example, both Ben and Sam were rather screwing off with their sports and research projects and their “in-between classes”. However, Ben was a champion in basketball. Sam was into “very necessary” girls and won an award for science in junior high. As this tale centers only on my father’s life, it’s important to remember how Meade was proud of his two oldest sons because they passed opportunities to slack off and instead stuck with high school until the very end and didn’t end up a pair of permanent drop-outs in their sweet lives.

After almost nine years of owning the blueberry farm in New Jersey, my father took his very first six-month vacation when he got home from a trip to Singapore. There and then, Meade had a collection of carved elephants, and they were all for me. They were all carved out of ebony and ivory, and he said, “They make some of these elephants as big as a golf cart, Fiona, but there was no way I was going to carry that one back to the ship.” Every one of them was lost somewhere between the barn and the blueberry fields. The youngest brother I have, Ted, somehow buried every one of them without asking anyone whether or not he should. He was only seven years old! There had been eight beautiful elephants, in total. Now, they are just like buried treasure for someone to find.

On that fateful day back from Singapore, it was wonderful to have Meade home.

After the second night of Dad being back from sea, our parents were at it.

On the third night, I walked down into the kitchen and discovered how awful the room’s “attitude” had gotten to be. I had to assume that an argument had taken place. In the air, it was cold. It was all the heavy spite I dreaded. And that’s why I changed completely. I had spite, too, from then onward.

My parents swore they had not been fighting to which I replied, “Well, don’t let me stop you.”

Mom asked Dad about picking up his vacation pay, to which he said, “Aoife, if you don’t mind asking later, that would be nice. I’ve been home about five minutes.”

My mom came back at him with the worst thing you can say.

She said, “Well, don’t come home at all unless you have your vacation pay with you. You can just stay on the ship. Fiona and I won’t care, at all.”

The kitchen was then quiet.

The spite I had developed made me say, “Most of us won’t care, but some of us will surely die by this.”

I realized that I had pushed them into a fight without them really seeing me when, actually, I was hoping to make a light joke. You have to grab things by their horns, so to speak! I had my own spite now. I sensed it was going to backfire. I had a bottle of milk I was trying to put the lid on. I started to place it inside our fridge.

“I usually plan to take it a little later, instead of blowing it all at once. There’s not much to go around when it comes to paid vacation time for me.” My dad said that one. And he also said, “Why don’t I get to spend any of this money I earn on my own things?”

Meade liked talking to the empty room that only had my mom and I staring back at him.

For a minute both mom and dad didn’t say a word. But then I dropped the milk!!!

Both of my friends flew at me with tears of agony and betrayed friendship that we all scorned despite all of our years together. But I deserved it for being so much like acid. I didn’t know I could simply not care what the hell was wrong to begin with and lightly toss their worry away. They were shouting at me to get out of the kitchen. Then I had to get the milk cleaned up.

By the end of that week, my dad drove me to an audition I had booked. It was a really big deal. Next thing I know, he told me he made the decision to make another trip to sea.

“For how much time?” and I heard my voice crack with emotion because by then the spite had ended its rage inside of me, and I was reminded about how much I distrusted my father in general but still loved him a lot no matter what. We tell each other we are “compadres” but that is dishonest as we are Irish and not Mexican at all.

“I don’t know. It’s a six-month job. Could be a year. I don’t want you causing trouble. Don’t stress your mom.”

That was the first time he ever said anything like that. I was the instigator but I wasn’t even in their thing. I wasn’t listening, even, but that’s where truth is hard to see for it may be that one other person’s side is much more relevant to the story of life than mine. Sometimes. I need to be quiet. Unfairly, no one ushers me in. Like rain on a windy, autumn day when you’re walking back from the bus stop, I remembered that I did provoke the entire thing.

I felt terrible in my life after that one experience. I have never returned to who I was before it happened.

However, I did end up booking something. It’s going to pay for my apartment in Hollywood. It’s going to last for about four years. That’s how much money I made. So, I think the spite is good, sometimes. Still, I understand how the karma was changed by my dad’s words. Ever since then I just learned to suck it up.

That whole time period is basically where I grew-up, for real.

About a week later, we all were made to say our good-byes again to our father, Chief Engineer Declan Aidan Meade, at the airport, one more time. He didn’t take his vacation time, yet again. So, in the end he won and also mom won because he left.

And this part could be the entire movie. If you will close your eyes you will see it (better do it soon after you finish reading this unless you miss it!)… I never can forget all of us waving to him when he walked off down the really long hallway to board his plane going to Texas. He looked different, like a shadowy guy. I remember asking myself if my dad was going to be alive next year.

The End.

The other paper that 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, I’m taking something positive from this. I appreciate writing things out. I ever wondered what my family thought or if they thought at all of me while I stayed away. Finally, someone gets to say something they’ve been meaning to tell this world and that someone is me. I love you (but don’t let it get around too much or the others will know I took sides). Love, Dad

***IF YOU SEND THIS THING OUT OF THIS HOUSE DELETE MY NOTE.***

Stories about my time at sea. Written for Wonderful Fiona, my daughter (header).

In 1989, I had applied for a permanent job with a group of companies in the oil industry. There was a constant need from my wife to cover her expenses. That’s why I fell off the wagon to start working at sea for oil, one more time. On top of everything else, our mortgage payment for our blueberry farm was just too heavy.

On a plane ride over to the Gulf Coast for a work interview, I was reading a magazine about hydrogen generators, just to sort of pass time.

The guy looking to hire me picked me up in his brand-new Chevrolet. That was a big deal in those days. On the ride to the dockyards, I started talking about hydrogen generators. It was all taken from the article I had read. It turned out I was saying things he had never even heard of. He hired me pretty much right there. Told me it was because of my electrical background, more than anything else.

Then I asked him to turn up his radio because Norman Greenbaum was singing. I had bought his album back in the Seventies, back when I had lived up in Seattle. I like his single, that big song Greenbaum sings: Spirit in the Sky. It was playing real soft so we turned things up and got to singing with it.

The next day, I managed to swing by this strange bookstore while the ship was still in the port being readied for the next trip out to sea. They had little bundles of books for sale everywhere you walked. I picked up a roll of them. It turned out to all be stuff by Michael Crawford. Every book dealt with the Roman republic. I always wanted to understand better why Rome fell, but I found out later on that that wasn’t what was happening in Rome at all.

Next, I picked up a huge cup of coffee and scarfed down a dozen donuts. I liked doing it without anyone around to complain about my belly fat. Then I had to make my way fast to the yards. My gut told me the vessel was ready to go much earlier than planned. When I arrived, I found out I was correct. Everyone had already gotten ready to head out to sea. They were happy I was so nonchalant about starting the trip a day or two early. So, off we went.

The oil boys were running a particularly big company, back in those days, with ships that went all over the place. They would take seismic soundings for oil then fly the results to an unknown location, on a helicopter that went through LAX no matter where the vessel was located.

Aoife and I continued to talk on the phone whenever I could call her. She was nice and happy about the consistency of my pay but not as excited as I had hoped for. She needed a bit more, she liked to tell me. Everybody got a new pair of running shoes every year, even the toddler and as well our new baby, Ted. It was just shoes, shoes all the time. They couldn’t get something at Goodwill or any army surplus store around town. It just had to be designer shoes, every time.

The trips made to sea on this vessel were known as “stints.” That’s how everyone knew what we were talking about on pay stubs and throughout all the logs. Each “stint” would be about thirty or, maybe, sixty days away, on the ocean. After one’s “stint” finished, we all got to take it easy for a month or so.

I was supposed to fly from Alaska on through to New Jersey, for a few weeks off, after each “stint”. That schedule would provide me with time to see my family, regularly, for the first time in our children’s lives. However, the first time I was released for free time I called Aoife on the telephone, and she was drifting. It was apparent she was trying to end each conversation too quickly. Neither of us could hide the fact that she smiled whenever she mentioned some guy she had met in the city council. She handed off the phone, first to the twins, then to you, then to the little guys, and that was the end of every phone call.

So, I just skipped it, and kept myself in Texas doing sideline work in the port on my days off.

Inside and down deep, I was ready to get back to all of you right then. My family had become the best thing I had. It was sad when I told you I missed you because you didn’t say anything for a little bit. Then you said, “I think you are supposed to be here today, Dad. That’s what I wrote in my calendar at the beginning of the year.”

I promised I’d be home whenever the job let me. You went silent, again. You seemed to take my not making it back personally. No one else mentioned a thing. Maybe that’s not true. The boys also had a say on the topic but don’t quote me today on anything from way back in those days.

You remembered every detail I ever gave you about free time or work schedules. That’s just the point, Fiona. Someone knowing what you’re doing, and listening, is everything to a guy like me. Children are just the best thing in the entire world. Besides, the truth is I just didn’t want to see Aoife if I was going to get my ass handed back to me ever so carefully. She had transformed into a different woman. She was a little bit like a worm.

I know you aren’t going to be happy hearing these things, but this is how it all went down. I’m relaying the story of what took place. By all means, take out parts you don’t want anyone to know about the Meade family, Fiona.

I know I hurt things between you and I every time I chose to stay at sea. That gives you the upper hand. I had kind of sunk into my own shell. My heart felt like someone stopped it.

The song Cat’s In The Cradle was my own life ever since the twins came along, back when everyone lived up in Seattle. I had busted my rump to get these furniture toy things that Aoife was certain the twins would need or appreciate mentally. Then came the need for an entire nursery carousel thing that had to be installed in the ceilings.

Cat’s In The Cradle is the song by Harry Chapin about the father who is sure he is never at home for his children. Point is, you were the only one who seemed to track with things at all.

Cat’s In The Cradle was on the radio right after I got into my free rental car. The company provided rentals to all the union members. I had just signed up to spend my free time when I should have been going home to our blueberry establishment working part time in the Port of Houston. I was going to catch a double-feature movie. It would be Batman first and then Honey I Shrunk The Kids.

The song had finished. I cried a while longer. Then, I decided to change things up. I wanted to get interested in my own world, one more time. Instead of catching time at the movie theater, I looked up data about attaining my next credential in the engine room. I spent years going back to school, so to speak. The merchant marines offers all sorts of night classes. They make you meet extra requirements at sea. That’s how, eventually, I got the highest certification in the merchant marines. As a result, I am able to work on any vessel. I can sail Chief in the Engine Room anywhere it’s needed.

When the next “stint” began, the vessel’s captain assigned me to a “top-priority detail”—that’s how they term things in oil.

There was a secret room on the vessel the size of my bedroom. In it was a square box. You opened it up, and there was nothing but chips, chips, chips. I’d studied about all of it. It was the hub where they shot the data to. It was taking in the readings the company was paying for with these ships going to sea. They wanted to see what the bottom of the ocean looked like.

If anything happened to that room, right away they had to call Houston, and I mean anything. If somebody could steal all these readings the vessel was getting then they could drill in the company’s places or sell the information out from under them for a million dollars.

One night, they called me up at about two in the morning because there was a problem. Nobody could enter the little room but me. I was the only one with access because, in addition to being the Chief Engineer, I was now carrying the doctored-up title of “main electrical guy”.

There must have been a dozen locks to open up.

Everybody on the ship was standing around.

I opened the final lock. The top brass wished me luck so I stepped forward.

I walked inside. There was a stand-by connected with switches. I hit the breaker. Right away, somebody started beating on the soundproof door. I went back out through all the locks. The people on the deck were cheering. They told me everything was set right.

“It was nothing.” I told everybody.

We arrived back in port because it was a big deal if anything happened. A man was waiting to come aboard. He was from the very top of the top brass of the oil company. He had a technician with him named Freddy.

He said, “Well done, Meade. Can you walk us through?”

Freddy, the Captain, and the best man they sent over from corporate watched me open things up, once again. It was a big shove of keys that I had to go through to do it. Once we were inside the compartment, I showed them what I saw: one big box did a great job, and the other one was an antique. I had switched it over.

“Well done, Meade.” Freddy told me.

We closed the room up. Next, we were all headed out for lunch. The Captain and everyone walked behind me and the corporate people, down the gang plank and to a row of cars rented for them. Everyone was so happy. They were each giving me pats on the back.

Our vessel had to return to sea. Now that we had firmed things up as friends, the company asked me to start attending their daily meetings. The people in attendance were all high-ups. I was asked some mighty unfair questions, but I answered them anyhow so I could fit right in. The next day, I wasn’t convinced anyone needed me. I had to attend anyway because I had already put my name in the log for the last one.

The meeting started to feel just so fake. I told everyone there, “I’m in the blueberry industry, and in the blueberry industry, we don’t mess around.”

The Captain and his mates started to buddy up to me. But they also told me I needed to watch myself.

“You might be a farmer, Meade, but we’re talking international commitments. Don’t hold back. Jump right in.”

A lot of the stuff the company worked on was right off of the Russian line, up north. This was back when Russia was still a big enemy of the United States. For political reasons, we couldn’t have anything to do with them. The oil companies seemed not to care a thing for respecting boundaries.

Eventually, everyone on the ship knew I owned a blueberry farm even though they didn’t know that we never actually harvested anything. I didn’t need to divulge worship material for any one side. I only dreamed about being back there, with Aoife, and all of my boys, and you who were starting to make it big, back then, in your acting career (it was early on and before all the trouble set in).

The little things mean a lot to me, Fiona. I don’t agree with every idea that goes through your head. A lot of them are just ridiculous, actually—but that’s because of your connection to your mother. You are my daughter, and I’m going to love you no matter what decision you make. That’s just the way it is.

In the middle of the third meeting, I had it. I needed to quit working for oil. It depressed everything about my life. The job had us out at sea for “stints” of twenty-eight days, taking all their readings until the ship would head back in to its port to be re-crewed. Everyone had time on their hands, at that point. I could go home, for a bit, and get some rest. As you know, that didn’t happen—not once. But after that third meeting and listening to the mindset of every person there who complained about Russian waterways, I couldn’t stay.

Aoife told me to stay at sea, take whatever extra pay I could earn, working as second in the Engine Room to my scheduled replacement during the off-times, or getting into some other temporary work in the port.

But, that one night, I couldn’t take it anymore. The helicopter was just ready to go. The company let me fly in to the airport from the ship, in the same helicopter they delivered the daily readings from.

It was impressive. The chopper landed at LAX, the way it always did. From there, I caught a regular plane at the last minute to New Jersey. I planned to rent a car and surprise everyone at the farm.

I called Aoife when I landed. I told her I was in town. I was going to sleep close to the airport and then drive out to the farmhouse with all the presents I had picked up for everyone. Instead, Aoife drove to the city to meet me.

I brought Aoife out in the best rental I could get, one that had all the gadgets. We spent a night out. I took her to the best Spanish restaurant in town, close to the airport. It was one I always had my eye on. Next, I took her to a hot, little club. They played every mix of music, and I held her close that night.

Aoife didn’t like the idea of getting back to the farm. The twins were taking care of you and your two younger brothers, and Aoife’s horses. It meant she had time free for us. I took her out for clothing and other things she wanted to purchase. She got herself a new wardrobe.

Aoife stayed with me, alone, for two nights. Then she let the bomb drop. She had gotten a real patient attitude about life since the last time I was there. She wanted me to get right back to the vessel because they had called her when they found out the joke I tried to pull by taking the helicopter in, and she had talked to the Captain. She was relieved that he was going to take me right back as if it had all been fine from the beginning.

What a rotten trick Aoife had pulled.

Aoife took the gifts I had purchased for everyone. She gave them to our children, herself.

Aoife and I were strung out on our love affair. She had me flying straight back out to work, never taking any free time at all to live on the farm I was paying for. I didn’t make the guest list there, anymore.

Back at sea, going all over the place while taking these readings, and fixing things up whenever someone called on me to do something extra, I got to feel like I wouldn’t ever be able to go home. Working conditions were not comfortable. I felt like a fish out of water there.

Finally, I took my own break after the next “stint”.

On the last day, I caught the helicopter a second time. The thing flew over to Los Angeles, and I took a plane up to Seattle from there. I stopped by my dad’s house. I saw my brothers and sisters and all their new children.

My entire family was all friendly. Everybody was happy to see me. It hit me how long it had been. Nephews stopped me and made a point to thank me for loaning them money years ago, and for letting them stay at my place without charging anyone a penny. I used to do anything I could whenever my family asked for my help, back before I had to move myself to New Jersey to be a farmer.

The trip back home was the good one. I had needed it for a long time. I didn’t know how badly I needed to square away with the people in my own family who still liked me a lot.

I got back to work, and I felt relaxed and ready for my next four weeks at sea. We went underway right on schedule. Like always with oil, the clock was on and ticking from Day One. The engine room was shining. People were stubborn for a minute or two, but they liked me enough to say, “Glad to have you here, Meade.”

On Day Two, someone approached me with a clipboard, and said, “You got to sign this. That’s to pay for the helicopter.”

“You were going there anyway,” I said. “Why would I pay for the helicopter?”

“When you have a personal thing, we get you to pay.” He told me, standing there outside the engine room. Some of the boys needed a break. I let them take it. And I told the higher-ups to stop haranguing them because they had been at all of their throats for minutia.

I was going to tell him to hang it. Fifteen hundred dollars was the price tag. It was one month’s mortgage payment for the blueberry farm. It was also a lot of pairs of Nike shoes for the twins and my baby boys. I told them I was already going to look for something better for my pay.

The Captain himself came to see me. We talked a while.

“Go, then.” He finally told me.

The ship was traveling south, to port in Dutch Harbor, up in Alaska. I called Aoife to tell her I was coming home. It would have been my first time home in a year. Ben answered the telephone.

“Hey, pal, how are you? I got you a big surprise. You’re going to love it,” I told him I had found him a big deck of flipping cards, the ones he would save up to buy. A mate on board was selling about fifty of them to me for thirty dollars. It turned out the cards would normally cost about a thousand dollars. But Ben didn’t sound happy about the cards. I had to ask why.

“Well, for one thing, Dad,” he said. “You and me have some talking to do, next time you are home.”

Aoife was in the background, yelling at him. There was a pause when he covered the mouthpiece. The fur was flying between them.

Ben said, “Call me back. Ten minutes, or something like that. Hey, dad, one more thing. Keep smiling.”

That was my line. I had used it on them many times when they were growing up. I had to get in at the bottom of the queue one more time again to use the payphone. It was probably about thirty-five minutes before Ben heard from me.

Ben said, “When are you getting back?”

Turned out Aoife had been unfaithful. Fiona, you probably never heard anything specific. I’ll say what it was: she was staying with a high-up in the town council. Ben told me the news right then and there. I couldn’t speak. I just cried. The shame and distrust I felt was raw. It gripped my heart.

The men standing close by the phone booth stepped backwards to give me some more room.

Sam took the phone from Ben and told me how it had been going on between their mother and this man for years. They both thought I knew, but then they both came to realize I didn’t.

For some reason, I felt like did I know it, already, but that wasn’t necessarily true. I didn’t really see it coming. It made sense now that I knew. Everything went strange. I didn’t want to hear it ever again, in my life. I didn’t know the details. Somehow, in my soul, I understood everything that Aoife would try to pull next with me.

I told the boys how much I loved them. When I hung up the phone, I took a taxi to the nearest hotel. Drank about a box of wine, and I just about passed out on the floor.

There was a big party in Long Beach scheduled for that weekend. The oil company had chartered a plane. I hadn’t planned on attending it. Even though I was leaving, everyone was saying I should go to the party. All of the executives of the company were scheduled to be there.

We flew into Los Angeles as one big group of sailors and millionaires. It felt like everyone was staying sober, but I hadn’t drunk that much in years. I got hammered.

A few guys said, “You know, you got to play it cool around here.”

I told each one, “I’m in the blueberry industry, and in the blueberry industry we don’t worry.”

No one managed to argue with me. It turns out, no one knows how blueberry sales work.

Somehow, I managed to sit down with every one of the managers that night. Maybe even the owner had tapped me on the shoulder. They all knew I was working out well as the Chief Engineer on the company’s ships, but they didn’t know I had already had papers signed off to leave that world, for good. When I told each what I thought about oil and their industry, they nodded and just walked away.

Next morning, I boarded their chartered plane with the rest of them. We were going back up to Alaska, but I had already planned to buy a ticket back to Seattle. No one was kicking me out the door despite the attitude I had displayed at their big party.

I was still a little drunk. There were two large men which my seat was in-between. Each man must have weighed about three hundred and fifty pounds, and they were both crammed into the airplane chairs with one seat in between them. They must have each been at least six-and-a-half feet tall.

One of them saw me the minute I walked on-board.

The man seated next to the window said, “Meade? Come here.”

The other big guy stood to let me in. I squeezed into my seat.

I asked, “What—do they hire you guys by the pound?”

They introduced themselves while the whole plane laughed at my joke. No one knew how things were going to play out. They let me know oil had their own union—a company union—and I was invited to join. Turned out that they all liked me, still.

But, I already had a union, from back before my work there, in oil. My union was based out of San Francisco, and that was where I was headed to. I knew they would be happy to let me back in. So, I told the men I was not interested in whatever they had going on.

We had a couple of drinks together on the plane-ride back to Alaska. One of the men was on one side. The other one was on the other side. They continued to tell me about joining the company’s union, but I already knew I was old history. I was not going back. I had to make more income to buy more things for the people I loved.

I knew I was just about to be divorced by Aoife, again. That was my main problem.

I saw a straight path in my mind. It started to form on the mental picture show inside my head. I saw myself over my shoulders, with my jacket pulled tight. The scene was grainy, or a yellow-tone resting on black and white film. I was walking a rough line to get right back to my regular line of work. It had always been on transport ships around the Middle East and Africa, or container vessels going to and from the Orient, or with fishing crews up in Alaska. I wouldn’t be able to stay with the cushy oil guys even if they became my best friends, and even if they took me to a party every weekend.

The men on the plane started to strong-arm me to join the oil company’s union. But I have been to Ballard and back again, and I do not strong-arm well. They didn’t like the attitude I had so I just kept ordering everyone more drinks. That kept them happy.

We landed, and they both sort of rolled out into the aisle. By then, we were best friends. Everyone was having a good time. That was the last sentiment I heard them tell me when I left.

I called my old union on the telephone. Next, I took a flight to San Francisco because, at the time, they had more to offer in work than Seattle did. The city looked wonderful. I hadn’t been there in more than a year. I stopped at a favorite spot close to the union hall and told some jokes while I drank a beer as well as rum. When I made it back to the union hall, no one had changed. They each gave me a nice greeting. I put in for my next job. Nothing was available that day so I flew home, to New Jersey, unannounced.

The first person I saw was Sam. It had been about a year. I knew he could have been a good football player. The kid stood over six feet tall. He looked healthy. He was strong. He had a gleam in his eye like he already had a plan in his life.

I was friendly to him and said something like, “Hey, kid.”

Gives me a great big hug. He was crying by then. I guess I started to tear up, too, standing next to him. Because the kid is just forget-it handsome, and he’s got the whole world in his own hand.

Sam was unhappy about me and his mother. He knew that our not keeping it together was all going to end with everyone unhappy, all over again, like when he was a boy. The end of Marriage Number One had been hard on him. He knew that the end of Marriage Number Two meant we would sell his home just like we had sold the first one.

He walked with me back into the farmhouse. He asked why Aoife’s new man, Terrence, was already living at the farmhouse.

I told him, “A guy is going to do what he thinks is right. A lot of people I know did a lot of things. I was doing something right, too, because I always worked. After everything was said and done, I knew I needed to earn enough to keep the show on the road.”

Sounded real calm to Sam. He just looked at me, like he was impressed. In my mind, I noted the man’s name as “Terrance,” but never showed my need for that knowledge to our son.

Ben came running right up to me. He burst out the front door of the farmhouse, running straight at me. Caught me by the head, and pulled me onto the grass. Together, the twins tried to pick me up, and then they did. My boys carried me into the kitchen.

Straight out of Tartarus, Aoife started yelling at all of us. She lightened up when I told her to cool down, but she didn’t like the pressure. Then, eventually, she let me give her a tiny, little hug. I couldn’t resist giving her just one more hug because she really is a sexy woman. Then she let the boys give her a big hug, and each one did. They were crying hard so she settled them down by telling them how they are both fine sons to her all the time. For some reason, it was a good time we had together there in the kitchen.

But then Aoife wasn’t right, again, and she shook her fist and pulled away from me and the boys. She made a comment about their intrusion. Everyone had to tell Aoife to lighten up.

There was this strong tension in the room. Aoife and I never stopped looking right at one another. Neither of us knew what was coming, or what we needed to do, next.

Marcus and Sam were in the living room watching a television program. Handsome and dark, both of them were, like I am. Aoife may have been angry due to her red hair and her family’s lighter complexion. Everyone in our family ended up looking a lot like me. All four boys got to bragging. They told me they were ace’ing everything they had gotten into at school.

I teased Aoife. Even though we were about to end things, I loved my sons and a lot of her was there. Then I realized that she had cried but had hidden the fact when we were all kind of joking about their maturity. I couldn’t believe it. She just kept staring at me. That’s how I knew I had to get going.

Fiona, you were away at some sort of an acting camp, that day, per your mother.

I told Aoife, “I can pick Fiona up tomorrow. She loves it whenever I surprise her.” So, you were already with me, in my mind, Fiona. It was better you didn’t show up. That get-together that afternoon was male-oriented.

Aoife continued to just cry the whole time. Soon, everyone was looking at her.

She said, “You could have called first instead of stressing the entire family’s packed schedules with a whim, Meade.”

Aoife was apparently now willing to turn the boys’ afternoon with us all getting together and talking for the first time in a year or two into something heavy. I just wanted to enjoy the feeling of the place. But between Aoife and I staring at each other, and our children’s concern over her tears, I could feel happiness falling away from us, practically dissolving under our feet, standing there in our kitchen.

She said, “Meade, I didn’t know you were going to be here this weekend. Are you going to tell us to sell the place?”

The farm wasn’t even being sold yet. It was just an unspoken thing that everyone knew could happen. When reality set in, and with the way things were in my life, I had no pull—no sway anywhere—to control the farm any longer. And Aoife was never going to ever say outright that she was sorry for anything that she had done to bring our marriage to its end.

Later that night, I stayed up with my boys. I gave them each a beer even though they weren’t old enough. They were now apologizing for their mother’s bad behavior towards me. They found it irresponsible of her given all I had factually achieved on everybody’s behalf. It wasn’t a secret how I got the money to pay for everything. I simply got willing to work every day no matter my frame of mind.

I didn’t want this emotional happening to change them or shape their minds. I asked them to consciously refuse to take on that part of her personality, later, inside their own lives. They saw how she was being distant with them, too, and it was not just me she hated, sometimes.

They had a lot of jokes they had learned during their lives in New Jersey. They shared them. We were in the twins room. I was lying on their bed with Malcom and Ted. The twins were on the sofa and armchair they had somehow acquired from Terrence, their mom’s new man. They each apologized for liking the furniture, but they couldn’t help anything about it because both of his pieces were made from genuine leather.

The boys all joined in together to pump me up. Even the little guy, Ted, made a pissant out of himself just to get me to smile at his antics. He was just a toddler, but he started telling me about how I was the man who made it all happen, and that he knew who to protect me when it came to his mother.

I told my boys, “There are people who don’t know a thing about what they are doing. You can’t tell them a thing.”

Then I gave them each a handshake. Then I gave them each a long hug.

“Are you guys going to get divorced?” asked Sam.

“That would be the second time,” said Ben.

I didn’t say anything. Didn’t want to set things off. I handed Sam the rest of the twelve-pack, bid them each goodnight, and I walked into the room Aoife and I shared.

Aoife said, “I am not going to stay up. I am going right to sleep.”

But before she fell asleep, she wanted to know why I was back.

I told her, “I’ve been gone for two years, almost. Give a guy a break, won’t you, please?”

She brushed off questions about Terrence. It was still clear to me that she had drifted elsewhere. I was no longer the mainstay of her heart. I wondered if I ever really was.

I sat on the end of the bed. She didn’t have the courage to tell me to sleep in another part of the house. To fill the space in the room, I started to talk. I told Aoife I was going back with the union, and leaving the oil boys. I was just waiting for a ship back at the union to call the oil company to officially, finally quit.

Then it was like things hadn’t changed at all between us.

Aoife sat up in bed and said, “Well, don’t quit until you catch another ship because we can’t lose a day on the payroll.”

“We’re not making it with the oil people. I’m headed back to Seattle. They already know.”

“It’s not reliable. No, no, we are at least waiting until we have another ship. We are flat broke. Do not quit that job.”

I wanted to cut my ties, with them and even with her, now, because how could she never care about what things really had meant to me after all these years? It was not good between Aoife and I. Still, I almost always followed her instructions. Now, those instructions were guilt trips. I planned to throw everything into the fire.

“You made all this happen, Meade.” Aoife said. She looked me straight in the eye and the look pierced the very lining of my heart. She told me, “You make it all happen in this family, in the end.”

I stopped by the twins’ room. The party had ended. The twins had gone to sleep on Terrence’s furniture. I carried the little ones to their room and tucked them in myself. Then, I slept on the couch. As I nodded to sleep in an easy chair that cost us nine hundred dollars I felt sweet content.

That was a nice day. And it happened after one hell of a bad year at sea with the oil people. By the next morning, I let it go fully.

Thankfully, Terrence didn’t stop over. But, in the end, I knew they all had sided with their mom when the morning came.

Aoife said, “Meade, I didn’t know you were going to be here this weekend,” in front of my sons who each fell into that rapport with her because they had hangovers and couldn’t keep anyone’s schedule.

However, I still followed her instructions and didn’t officially quit with the oil company right away. In less than a week, Aoife had received a letter telling us the oil company had officially laid me off. They didn’t tell me what happened to make them send the letter. The company also gave me an eight grand bonus. It was eight thousand dollars that told me to go away. It was a bigger reward than when I was busting my behind for them. It was just life.

I let her bank it.

“That’s how the oil boys do business.” I told Aoife .

I always sided with Aoife, too, because she has the role of the mother of my children. By that time, we had walled off the dining room downstairs. That was where I had my primary landing pad.

During the day, I took turns driving places with the children or walking around the blueberry manufacturing plant we had installed. No one had plans to use it, though.

Aoife listened when I told her my frustration about time management, expenses and purchases.

Aoife looked at me and said, “Well, go back to the union.”

“I’m already there, sweetheart.” I said.

And it was just like a line from a ten-cent movie, the kind I grew up on.

I walked outside and I shut the door. I left New Jersey later that day.

The ten-cent movie that played was a beginning chapter instead of a final scene. I’m walking down the street, and the movie pans backward over my head and shoulders. It shows the whole scene of a guy like me starting out in life on his own, in his fifties, like it was just a big joke ever since time immemorial.

In the union they give you a shipping card. The next job comes in, everyone throws their card down. The guy who has got the oldest card gets the best job there. I had been aging my card the whole time I was working with oil. When I put it in, it was stellar. I got offered a Chief’s job on a high-class merchant vessel, sailing as the ship’s Chief Engineer. Everything felt cool again.

As for Aoife and as for my troubles in our relationship, I was kind of grateful I was getting a second chance at being divorced from us.

Chapter FOUR

HER TORN HEART

A letter from October of 1999…

Dear Floyd,

I am not sure what was said behind my back. It’s nice to know you have been my friend. Otherwise, I might feel completely betrayed. Of course, all joking aside, if you are still putting anything together with my dad I would like to be there. Just because his email has been printed on everything I ever sent to you, that doesn’t mean you both ought to skip me over. I understand you each can be fully in-charge of your personal existence while I, on the other hand, am still original and house-bound as a “young woman” without really very much legal authority.

Dad doesn’t know anything about your show idea for his work. Since you are dealing in crap at this point, I won’t be the one to say anything that helps you with this thing. I don’t spend my time helping mean, ambitious people do better than I am in my life.

Disappointment seems to be the thing you are dealing in right now so please leave me out.

We can be friends again if you want to dream the big dreams TOGETHER like I first told everyone!

Dad will not be friendly EVER AGAIN if you take me further out of the picture. No pun was meant there, that’s for certain. We all expected to find a modern businessman in you—or a businessperson, in other words.

This is not your “thing” when it comes to my family. I said at the beginning my dad and I just wanted to write a movie together. We never needed a third wheel. You just seemed like a clean guy.

We have one thing in this life: we are merely a father and daughter teaming up together on something important for each other’s hearts and our life together however long that may last. That’s important to remember.

You have really moved into frosty waters, and I almost don’t want you to even remember that I exist. I don’t’ need any extra things to worry about in my day.

I hope you will be nice and deal with fairness in the future.

Sincerely, Fiona

P.S. Dad has asked me to remind myself what the bigger picture is for us. Only for his advice to me will I EVEN BEGIN to include another short thing from him that I have only just learned how to print in full color. It’s all work for a secretary which they are paid to do for their bosses. So. There has been a LOT of paperwork and connections handled by me and a lot of heart-wrenching stories. I made a trip to the store to get the colored ink. I should be paid something for that single act. Think about my work when you get together with dad on a deal for any picture.

Here you go.

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, keep things sailing forward. No regrets. It’s a meaningful offer. I thought your mother told you about the little deal I made with Floyd. It’s some short film about her and I. Your mom turned out to be so sweet about us being used in movies. She loved it. You know that I would have told you all of this when it was happening. You got the thing started for us, honey. I was at sea and she caught me over the phone while I was in port. I thought your mom was telling you every detail while it was going on. When I do something good I come out the bad guy, every time. I hope you are forgiven by Floyd for getting angry. Delete this note, everything in blue ink and italics, please. Delete the note at the bottom, too. I put the color in blue there, too. Delete it all in case you print it for Floyd.

DAD.

Stories about my time at sea. Written for Wonderful Fiona, my daughter (header).

I met Aoife in Seattle, in the Seventies. She had my full attention the moment I saw her. I walked out the front door to my folks’ house and spotted her. I happened to be visiting that day, at their place just south of Seattle. Her red hair got my attention.

Aoife was out in the city on foot, walking around. She had gotten lost on Rainier Avenue. Then something scared her so she made her way into the residential area. She was carrying these big paper sacks.

Aoife didn’t drive. She had taken the bus over to buy sausages at Oberto’s. Their store was just a block or two down the road from where my parents resided. There was some big company party, and she was a secretary for an architect in the city. She was buying up all the good food everyone was going to get to eat at their thing.

Aoife has always had nice, red hair. It’s become reddish-brown as the years have gone by. She has alabaster skin with a lot of freckles just like the little orphan Annie. She’s really the demanding type, too. I thought she was nice. I knew that I could get a lot done with a person like Aoife in my life. Only thing was, she was twenty-three years old and I was closer to forty.

Right after Aoife and I met, we were living together pretty quickly. I had a new set of wheels. I had a fun time taking her out to expensive places in Seattle.

Around that time, I was hired as an engineer on a seventy-five-foot fish processor called the Bay Shrimper. It might have been the biggest in the world at the time. It was a big deal. It was a big job. It was my first job working as any vessel’s Chief Engineer. It felt like I could hire anybody on for my department, and do pretty much anything I needed to without having to ask permissions. And I pretty much did that. I went on a roll. I kept things up. Everything was moving well as we prepared to head out to Alaska.

Aoife begged me to take her along. I told her I would. She and I were still new. It seemed like an invitation was the right thing to offer her. That was the biggest mistake I ever made. Or it was the best thing I ever did. I don’t know which, right now.

She wanted to earn a lot of money for herself. I told her they needed to hire people on the ship, so Aoife went and quit her office work in Seattle. She took a job. She was a fast study and made it through all of her courses right in time. That’s when I saw how she works. When Aoife gets going on anything, she is the top. Any job Aoife ever accepted, it was like God had asked her to do it. She has always been that dedicated to her work.

On the Bay Shrimper she ran the IQF, which was the Individual Quick Freeze. The machine blew the shrimp up and froze them in midair. She had to load and unload it several times each day. When things really got rough at sea, she would stack up nautical hours dozing in ice cold air and shrimp guts flying all around.

Lots of caribou in Alaska. In a port one day, some of the guys wanted to go ashore and shoot one. Everyone had permission. The ship was in port for a while. I thought I wanted to go with these guys, but I found out that Aoife didn’t want to go at all. There were a few couples heading out together, and some good-looking women that she had already had enough attitude from. So, then, I was staying put.

I had a big red jacket, and I gave it to the man organizing things. Next, I took a quick walk out along the deck and encountered Aoife who was looking over the edge of the ship. She was really angry.

She was shouting, “You dirty creep! You dirty bastard!”

It was going on and on.

“You bastard! You-you-you rotten bastard!”

Looking over her shoulder I could tell that Aoife thought it was me standing down there in my red coat with the men and women,. That was before she got glasses. She couldn’t see much distance back then. The sailor I had given it to looked like it was normal for him to have someone shouting at him off the edge of a ship.

I walked close up to her and asked, “What’s going on with you?”

She couldn’t believe it wasn’t me down there in the coat.

We were fishing together in Alaska for three or four months on that job. When we got back down to Seattle, and when I woke up the next morning, Aoife was happier than I’d ever seen her. She had earned a bunch of money. She asked me to drive her around Seattle so she could buy some new things on her own.

I was caving in because I had quit the job, and Aoife didn’t know a thing about what took place. I couldn’t bear telling her the story.

A father and his son, Bill and Mike, had been the vessel’s owners. When they hired me, they were already running out of money. Then, they had gone over to another outfit, and went out and got drunk with them at lunch. They all signed an agreement. And the minute I heard that, I knew they had signed the ship away because they had to produce so much money, and they couldn’t.

The problem started for them when someone had purchased the wrong generators. The time and money consumed all they had. They couldn’t afford to fix the vessel after that. And they couldn’t produce, because of it. Then, they couldn’t hire well because they had no cash to pay anyone. I ended up in an Engine Room with people they had put in there who hadn’t even been to sea before.

I needed help. The truth of the matter was that they couldn’t afford me. I was running faulty generators that each needed some extra work to make their vessel run right. Some other things also needed handling outside of the Engine Room. Then, it was like I was running the entire ship, but by default.

One time, the ship caught on fire. I happened to be nearby. The fire was jumping. It spread to the Engine Room. Inside, the fuel was dripping down. I was thirty feet away. I knew if I ran to get a fire extinguisher to put it out, I could probably make it. It was only a good possibility and not for sure.

I could have left the engine room, and everybody would have followed me out. There were ways to get me off the vessel fast. Diesel is slow. It can take a long time before anything goes up. But it would have been the end. Instead, I ran over. I took up the fire extinguisher and brought some guys to help me, and we put the fire out. Then, I went up and told Bill, the father, who was in his room. He was real quiet for a minute or two.

He looked at the sea and said, “You should have let it burn.”

The people who were financing the operation wouldn’t give them help. Everyone only wanted them to go broke. Then, someone else would end up owning their ship. It was that dirty.

A little while after the fire, the son, Mike, came to me with one of those old oil cans we used in the Engine Room. He’d found it in the garbage. A guy had thrown it away because it was busted.

“This costs money. You know, I don’t think you know how to save money.”

At that time, it was like twenty hours a day keeping things moving. I told him how he could save another $1500 a month.

He asked, “How’s that?”

I said, “Get yourself a new Chief Engineer. I’m out of here.”

At that time, where we were at, the vessel was coming into port all the time. When I quit, Aoife was ready to go. A bunch of guys quit with me, and we were all riding away from the vessel together that afternoon. It was just better to get the problem sorted out when the ship was able to stay in port and didn’t even need to leave the shore. Alaska’s waters can get rough in no time. Faulty generators are too much of a risk at sea.

Bill had the parent company send five guys up to relieve me. They couldn’t find anybody to help me until that point. But, when I left, they sent over five more men. I tried to give them the details. They didn’t even want to talk to me about anything. They said they knew everything, already.

That evening, I got a message from them: “Come back to the ship.”

All of the vessel’s lights were out. They couldn’t get things running right.

“If you know everything, handle it.” I told the replacement.

They were able to get back to the dock, but the lights stayed out for three days. Bill and Mike couldn’t hire anyone quick enough to hold everything together with their bad equipment. The situation was too risky. Being certified, the situation was finished due to lack of adequate personnel and equipment required for safety reasons. It had gotten to the point where somebody was going to get hurt.

I’ll give a good example of what happened to men in the industry back then: the Welder who built all the equipment on the ship was a good one. He made everything. He was a good guy to everybody. He really had to be fast on his feet with what the vessel gave him. The company paid half of what they owed him. They were going to pay him the rest the following year. The next year, the ship started out already owing the Welder seventy-five thousand dollars so then the Welder was called a bad guy now. It was never “Thank you for what you did for me.” It was something like, “Screw you, because I owe you money.”

I’ve been through that plenty.

After the Bay Shrimper, Aoife and I headed down to California. We did anything she dreamed of ever doing.

When we were home next, in Seattle, we had a wedding that made things between us permanent. Then, Aoife and I were really putting things together. Back then, anyone could buy good homes for what seemed like nothing. She found a nice one, and I could afford buying it with what I had earned. She loved that place. She picked everything out, down to the last detail.

I became the Port Engineer in the Seattle yards. Aoife gave birth to two boys right off the bat. Some years later, we had our wonderful Fiona, our baby daughter.

Divorce Number One happened. I had floundered. Suffice to say, I had failed. It still hurts today whenever I am reminded about what took place, back then at the beginning of the Eighties.

Divorce Number One, Aoife and I rarely speak about.

The twins were young but old enough to realize what was being said. Aoife was pregnant. I was away at sea, in Singapore, and I was not decent at all. I had to let her know. But, the day I arrived back to Seattle, I knew how Marriage Number One would soon be over. So, I was more than a little worried about the approaching argument with Aoife.

When I deboarded the vessel and checked out at the dockyard, I brought a few buddies along with me for a free meal. After all, I knew what Aoife’s family could do, and I was scared they would all be waiting for me when I arrived back home.

I had a lot of money. I’d been paid off for the ship I had just finished working on. We all stopped and bought a case of wine. I grabbed a lot of flowers.

Aoife couldn’t believe I was so low to walk into the house with a group of sailors who all expected dinner. She was pregnant, and the twins were a handful. Yet, she had to make them all dinner, and play hostess, before we could talk.

I told her I was sorry about what had happened. I said sorry over and over again. She didn’t throw me out because I was so sincere. She gave in, and she let me stay a while longer.

It was Christmas time. We went to a big company party held by her friends. She had just regained her earlier position at the architect’s firm. Everyone was celebrating. I proceeded to get drunk. All of Aoife’s important friends were there, and I might have made an ass out of myself.

When we made it home, she couldn’t get me into the house. No matter what she did to help me, I wandered around outside, and then I passed out in the hedges. She never forgave me for that.

For the remainder of that marriage, I was sleeping in the basement.

Aoife gave birth to you. A day later, she said she needed time. The main thing I remember in the month that followed was my children each curled up in the bed beside me at night.

Aoife vanished. I couldn’t find her, anywhere. Every day, I got up and made the kids food. At night, they all ended up catching their sleep in my bed because no one felt right without Aoife at home. First, the boys asked if they could sleep with their old man so they weren’t scared all night. Then the baby—you—kept crying in the little bed you were in, so we brought you along with us. Eventually, my mom stayed with me just to take care of the little children.

One day, out of the blue, Aoife walked back into our house carrying divorce paper for me to sign. When I sat down to look at the paperwork, she picked up our baby. She had already gotten the boys out from their school.

She said, “I’ll take my kids with me. Now, go off to sea. You can pay for it all.”

Aoife took the baby and walked out of the house again as soon as I had signed for the divorce.

I was able to catch a ship for South America.

The last time I had been in the area was when Chile lost Allende, the president, back in 1973. It was a big deal. I was working on a job, sailing south from Seattle. We were off Panama, Ecuador and Peru, sometimes a thousand or two miles at sea. When we went into Peru and were anchored up there out in the water, I told everyone I was going to take them ashore.

There were seven couples and me, the host. I paid for the whole thing. We found a real nice restaurant. I had muscles on the half shell. It was just a great meal—wine, friends, and a girl with me. An album by an American singer, Roberta Flack, was playing in the background. So, I told the waiter to turn things up so we could all enjoy the music and the way the woman sang.

The next day, Allende was fired upon, and the value of money in that country plummeted. You needed a wheelbarrow of their money to pay for a dinner.

At the close of Marriage Number One, this next vessel I was headed down there on had, maybe, a thirty-man crew. It was a lot smaller than what I had sailed on before down there. The people doing the work were all from an American university.

The students and their supervisors were all taking readings. Actually, they were mapping the bottom. They had an incredible array about a quarter mile behind us. The thing was towed at the end of a cable, taking seismic reads like a little earthquake. The thing had a three-thousand-pound air shot, meaning it used three-thousand-pound air compressors that sounded like a shot and it kept doing its little, minor earthquakes, with explosives, while the ship went along. It made a “boom” and the thing behind us took a reading on sonar sensors to pick up the “boom” from down below. The time it takes it to go through the water let you know the depth. You could tell what was under there.

It was paid for by a big university, at that time, but it was all for the oil companies because everything was for the oil companies, back then. There were two or three people who knew what they were really handling, and another fifteen or twenty college kids running things.

When we were returning back to the United States, down off of Central America, we hit a typhoon. We were blown a-hundred-and-eighty degrees. It was a rough son-of-a-bitch.

The ship was about two-hundred-and-eighty-feet-long. The engine room had heavy glass windows with chicken wire running in them. These windows were arranged to open them up and let the air in on a hot day. When you’re having rough weather you shut them in case the water breaks over the high end of the vessel. Those windows were maybe ten or fifteen feet above the main deck, and the bridge was maybe five decks above them. And the water was breaking over everything in the Engine Room the whole the time.

The ship was blown backwards and then turned around to face the other way completely. It was rough.

There are only three-hundred-and-sixty degrees in circles. One thing that you can count upon is, once we got blown all the way around, we were facing the right way again. It scared everybody on board when the ship turned around like that. I thought we were going to hell.

I slowed the engines and brought the ship back under control. It had a calming effect. Did that over again until we were free from the storm. However, the company lost the entire array, and it cost them like a million bucks. It was all blown away.

I knew we could have all perished but we didn’t. That was too many years now in the past to worry over.

I’ll say this one thing: I never slept out of wedlock again, and that’s the real truth.

Fiona,

This reminded me of what a crass bastard I used to be. I know I took advantage of a pretty woman or two in my time. I had to get my ass kicked and nearly killed for it before I stopped doing it. You are going to be eighteen. Let’s get something clear in your mind: you’re still an illegitimate object of desire. And I don’t care what the movie script states. Plan on staying home with your mom until you are married or making enough to support yourself. Don’t become a broken girl because some guy pressured you to go around with him. And I don’t need to forget to tell you this and then hate myself for an eternity.

Dad (Meade)

Chapter FIVE

HER FOREVER JOB

A letter eventually written four years later and mailed at the end of 2003…

Floyd:

Please keep your calm. Your emails have all been received. I like handwritten things. I didn’t have stationary. Now I have some. That’s all.

I take to heart this from your emails: the project idea wasn’t supposed to be spread to A N Y O N E. I’m tired of being the one everyone expects to pick up the damage. I will apologize for “telling Ben who told your wife who told your VP who told you”—if that’s what it takes to end this ongoing anger.

“Friendship begets beauty” or something like that. I don’t remember how the saying goes exactly.

It would be nice if you found my little note from that month when we worked together. You were very kind. So, I didn’t want to embarrass anyone and I left it with the secretary. It says it all. Something sure was pulled on the shoot. If your own company is disrespectful to you then I don’t know what to say. I’m asking you to take off those rose-colored glasses and dig in when people on the payroll act hateful. Someone is manipulating things and letting you pick up the tab. That’s why I “charged ahead”. Get in there and talk to the people who shows you respect first if you want to find out if you are a good person. Not the others! Then ask me again if I am a friend you can trust.

I don’t listen to my dad anymore right now. I don’t understand why that is so complicated to understand. I asked you to call him directly. You said your interest was “in passing”, and now you are asking for his “alluring content” once more. It hurts because you’re asking more and more about my father’s life when you are kind of supposed to be interested in me.

You went around me. And you won a big award for the short film you made about mom and dad’s “sinking ship” of a relationship. My brothers and I are forced to bear that, socially.

Anyway… I did ask Chief Engineer Aidan Declan Meade for something new. He sent me an email. I’ll print it off. This will be all I ever have for you in the world.

With love from your busted, bruised and broken-up ol’ pal,

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:

You don’t go over very nicely when you’re mad, Fiona. You get that aspect of your character from your mother’s side of the family. I’m going to write something here for our project together, and, in exchange, you can be a little sweeter and kind to me inside your emails. You used to be perfect and friendly and sweet back when you were a little girl. Hey—take out everything I type to only you before printing this thing and sending this thing off to Friendly Floyd.

LOVE, YOUR DAD.

Stories about my time at sea. Written for Wonderful Fiona, my daughter (header).

Remember when everyone was scared that the turn of the millennium would hurt all the clocks built inside of all of the Earth’s machines? That happened before the Year 2000.

I was working on vessels in the San Pedro Harbor. I did night jobs as an engineer for every kind of ship or engine. I did that stuff for a long while. When 2000 was getting near, we checked through all the port’s systems.

One afternoon, I stopped in for a drink at a nearby bar. There was a merchant marine who talked to me for hours. He saw me feeling low, and he wanted me to cheer up. I told him I was divorced, for a second time, from the same woman. I confided everything I could think of. He went on and on to me about how he lived on a boat.

“Come on down to the docks here in San Pedro and live like I do,” he said to me.

He thought I should move in next door and live right there in the marina. He was lonely. He figured I could be someone to keep him company.

“If you find a boat I can live on for free, I’ll go along with it,” I said to him.

He actually found one. No mast, but I could do anything I wanted with the damn thing. Somebody had abandoned it long ago. He told me that all I needed to do was start paying rent. It was about a hundred and sixty dollars a month to tie her up.

It was a sixty-foot cement sailboat, but no ship builder ever called it cement. Ferrocement is the name, and it has a smooth finish that’s just like plaster. They put up a mesh, like putting up chicken wire. They can build any ship’s walls with that kind of stuff. When everything is finished, you can’t tell that the vessel isn’t made out of wood.

I could have lived in the sailboat he found. I meant to do it when we talked, and I intended to move in when he told me had actually gotten a place for me to stay. But, in reality, when it sank in, I had to decline. Living in the docks, it just felt so desperate after I had owned fifty acres and a blueberry farm. I left the sailor standing there.

I sort of fell into a hotel chair. When I wasn’t working, I was in front of a television set inside a pretty rundown hotel, down in Long Beach, California. I did it for a long time. I worked during the day on regular port engineer jobs, or I took night jobs there handling any machinery surprises. All the money I earned went to Aoife. She was building her own life without mine to intertwine with whatever she was making.

I spent a lot of evenings back in the hotel, sitting in the chair, drinking wine. I didn’t like being alone. Every day I told myself that I knew I was going to be okay. I believed I would end up back with Aoife. I thought about her every morning. She used to drive me forward to the next port whenever we talked during our phone calls, back when we were married.

I didn’t like having time off. As the year 2000 approached, I found myself spending more time alone.

Aoife and the kids were always doing great.

The little ones were taking their time, learning at an idiot’s speed compared to their older brothers, but I believed they would catch up soon. They didn’t have any inner-turmoil to overcome.

Meanwhile, the twins were used to constant challenge. Now, they were still going to a university but it was for a graduate program. They had gotten accepted to every university and graduate program they ever did, all on their own. They were about to rent the house they had bought in Jersey Shore. They wanted to mingle with wealth and politics down in Florida.

By then, you had announced your complicated decision to ignore the duty to fulfil my one, single requirement in your life: finish college. Your desire to work in film seemed far-fetched to me even though you had made some money to move into an apartment in Manhattan off some job you finished a year or so earlier.

Back then, it seemed like I didn’t fit a need in anyone’s life anymore. But, I liked that you continued sending cards to me. There was always pile of them stacking up at the union hall.

The twins accidentally bought a Volvo from 1973. They thought it was a treasure piece, but it kept breaking down. They asked me to visit so I could fix the car. Otherwise, the cost would prohibit getting it up and going, and they would have to sell the thing just as spare parts. I was able to break away for this and make a trip back over to New Jersey.

Aoife picked me up. She was cordial. There was a slim yield of blueberries but nothing was ever harvested so I shouldn’t have asked. It was only her, Malcolm, and Ted living on the farm, at that time. It didn’t seem like Terrence was around.

The weather was getting cold. The autumn colors were beautiful in the country. Still, New Jersey felt like the wrong side of the country, and the port-a-potties stacked like freeway signs were really getting to me. The car ride felt strange. Aoife brought up my history as a fighter in one of Seattle’s fight clubs. I did that only way far back in my teen years. I didn’t like her accusative nature.

Everyone looked nice and grown up when I got to the farm. The dining-room was sort of my permanent abode, whenever I was there. I never encountered Terrence. I’m not sure where Aoife had put him. I didn’t know if he even actually ever existed. He might have been a made-up character by all of you.

I spent a few days huddled over the Volvo. I had driven it up to the door of the building that still bore its sign that said, “Dad’s Place”. I started fresh and early and kept at it until after sundown, with only the light from the shop giving me enough to see the car.

I found an old box of Elvis eight-tracks. I had stuffed them up on a shelf when we first got the place. While I was fixing the boys’ car, I must have listened to every one of them things, just over and over again.

“It’s the deluxe edition, man. But from 1974!” You said to me one day when you stopped by from your place in the city.

I recall you leaning over the open hood while I removed things from the engine that I could see were causing all the trouble inside.

“1973, Fiona,” said Ben, correcting your error.

I didn’t know if you were visiting me or the twins. You all showed up to the farm on the same day.

Dinner rolled around, but Aoife had made plans already. She stuck sweet, little Ted with a babysitter. It was you and I, and the twins and Marcus, and we all went to get something to eat together. Do you remember that? It was one of the best times we ever had together.

The Volvo needed a test drive. Fiona, you and I thought it was the coolest car in the state of New Jersey. The boys were kind. They let the lady have the front passenger seat.

“This is a real fun time, guys!” You shouted out to a fairly dead scene inside the car.

The Volvo just rambled towards the closest burger joint I knew how to get to.

“Pretty fun,” said Sam. “But it’s not for us.”

“Yep,” Ben said. “Not very fun for me. Mom’s getting lucky, again, with Keith, while we’re going out for food.”

I just about ripped both of them in two by yelling at them both to stop talking that way. I took some care to talk about the fine woman I understood their mother to be. You and little Marcus were stunned into silence and pretty much dead for the rest of our trip out, so far as conversation went.

The burger place I knew of had closed down. I looked at all the empty windows and the “For Sale” billboard that was misleading to anyone who stared long enough.

“Hey, there, old man,” said Sam. “Let’s roll!”

“Yea, you’re not the Wonder Bread Champ I heard about in my younger days, Dad,” said Ben.

I let the twins pick the next place out. They said it would be their favorite burger restaurant forever. The place was busy.

I knew I should make a little lighter conversation for Marcus than the one we were having during our car ride. Marcus was the one in trouble all the time with math in school. But, I forgot about it when Ben and I sat facing each other inside the restaurant.

I said, “I’m glad we talked. I didn’t know about Keith. Your mom must not be seeing the other person? Where is Terrence these days? Anyone been seeing him around?”

“Nope.” Ben and Sam said in unison.

There was a lot of talk about selling the farm and getting into a new place. After they graduated their current university program, the twins were going to get into another school down south. They wanted more credentials. And, they planned to invest in houses in Florida for that.

Ben went to the bathroom. He returned and just strolled over to sit at another table. He didn’t care to bid anyone a “good-bye”. His friend was eating side-by-side to us, with his own family. All of my grown-up children looked older than I felt.

Sam stayed still. Whenever his brother was a few yards away, conversation with him went downhill. Finally, he smiled like a champ and then stood up and walked over and joined them, carrying both of the twins’ meals that had now been served by the waitress.

It was just you, and Marcus, plus me, left alone in that booth.

“I’ll get them back, Dad. Marcus, come with me,” you said and started to get out of the booth.

“They stay where they are,” I said.

Then I let you have it.

I said something like, “Fiona, don’t ever say something stupid like that again. You prompt those two dickheads every time.”

I cannot remember what you said in response. We’ll just forget it, for now.

On the ride home, you were crying all over the place, and Marcus followed your lead. You have that trait, like your mother does. Men go along with any emotion that’s on display for more than sixty seconds until they learn. Marcus looked translucent through his tears. I got so broken up after you both wandered off to your bedrooms that I also cried for the rest of the night.

You spent a day or two hiding in a book, and then said it was time to leave.

I finished fixing the Volvo well enough over the next few days. In front of everyone, I made a big production out of handing Ben and Sam the ignition key. Aoife had called everyone back to the farm for a final send off for both the car as well as for myself. It looked like everyone felt pretty good, by then.

The point of the story is sometimes things work out a way you didn’t plan for. Exactly one day later, the boys each were paid for their work on a campaign by some big politician who hired them. They bought themselves a new historic car, and they gave me the Volvo as a present.

I made the Volvo my ride up to Boston, to catch a ship. That job fell through, but nightwork was still available back in Los Angeles. I drove that old Volvo all the way across the United States. It stayed in one piece. I admit I had to spend a night or two getting some things adjusted at shops along the way.

Back in San Pedro, I sure felt better after seeing everyone. I had memories to last. That was what I had paid for, for all those years at sea. Finally, something came through for me. As well, I had a family even if my ex-wife wasted everything I earned on her current boyfriend.

Next, I was working a nightshift on a Military Sealift Command. It was permanently in the harbor, though in any normal circumstances these MSC vessels will go out to sea regularly as well as efficiently. This one was simply staying put. That was the plan at the moment, for the very least.

The Captain allowed me to bring aboard the Volvo so I could continue to improve it. I drove it straight onto the ship. I worked on it between my shifts.

Suddenly, a second MSC ship arrived into the harbor. I watched the thing brought in. It was temporarily shored up, close to us.

The second Military Sealift Command was headed next to Thailand. A regular engineer from the parked MSC wanted to transfer to it because a trip to Thailand would be a lot more exciting than staying put. I went up to the Union and accepted the permanent position to help the replacement work out. The sailor was thrilled. I didn’t really mind, either way. It was a different job in the same engine room, but on a set time schedule for the rest of the year. Plus, I could leave the Volvo parked on-board, and I would still have time to work on it.

It was the middle of the night in Long Beach. The car was in a corner of the ship’s largest hold. I might have been inside there all alone.

I got to work, and also I got to thinking. Somehow, I wasn’t proud of anything anymore. I used to tell everyone about my wife and about my kids. Now, I didn’t want to mention any of you, for at least a little while. I got to thinking all of you weren’t really that great of friends for me to keep. Of course, I would support everyone financially. I would always take care of you, but that didn’t mean I wanted to hang around with everyone, too.

Fiona, you have always been a sweetheart. But the twins—at that stage of their lives—were arrogant as sin.

The radio was on, but it was playing a list of songs I didn’t like. It played them again and again.

Maybe it was just because when Ben was about thirteen years old he had his head shaved. He was a big guy, about six-foot-one, with big muscles. He got to talking, and I got angry at him, and I told him I was going to punch him up. I almost did, too.

Sam had just looked at me. Ben stepped over to one side after I walked right up to him.

Ben said, “Dad, I’m not going to fight you.”

You and Marcus sat in the living room, watching all of us argue. When I thought I was going to get a nice word from my carefully brought up daughter, you glared every time you saw me walk by, like you couldn’t see me anymore.

All of you are completely different individuals. Even the youngest one, Ted, is just so inherently and completely different from the short one, Marcus. None of you really do understand me. I don’t think you truly understand Aoife, either. Of course, we as your parents don’t fully understand you and your brothers, either.

By then, the Volvo was half-pulled apart. The MSC was quiet. I should have been going to bed, but I kept cleaning and checking the parts, then laying them out around me on a tarp I had placed before I got started that night.

Aoife and I have a very different type of relationship. It’s not like anyone else. There has never been anyone in my life like her. We really understand one another. Rarely do we agree. I’d like to say it was the greatest love in my life. In the end, she was just the best friend I ever had, though she has taken every dime I ever made, any nickel I have ever laid down anywhere next to her. Still, she is the most honest person I know.

A sound went off outside like an alarm, late at night.

I ran to check my station. I learned what the trouble had been. The other MSC was back. I watched everyone pull it back into port. They had taken her out for a test run. Now, she was really smoking, and that is never a good sign. There had been a fire.

On steamships you can’t just turn them on and drive off. You have to take it easy. You’re bringing its engine up to an incredibly high temperature. It takes two or three days. You can do it by, maybe, one-hundred degree increments. If you don’t take that time, you can get accidents. Not everybody is patient to turn one up slow.

Everything was switched around during a meeting of the masts. The ship I was working on was now going to Thailand, and I was needed upstairs on deck for paperwork.

That old 1973 Deluxe Edition was laid out all around me. I somehow pieced it back together. I put some oil and gas into it and drove it off the vessel just in time. But I was so uptight. I don’t know where my head was at because I put diesel into that Deluxe Edition Volvo without thinking. I locked the damn thing up. It was all broken again, now.

Everyone on the parked MSC was getting the vessel ready to go to sea. But, I couldn’t think of doing anything else except returning in time to fix the car.

“Fiona said the twins had already promised to give her that old car, Meade. You know she’s broke. Probably, she is going to move into one of the twin’s houses when that rent money is finished in another year or two. Point is, don’t leave that car abandoned in some parking lot in LA. Don’t sell it just to get rid of it. She said she wants to keep it forever, Meade, because you spent all that time fixing it.” Aoife casually mentioned all of this over the telephone when I called to say we were about to leave the harbor.

She added, “It’s Fiona’s ‘abandoned part of family history…’ something like that is what she told me.”

I didn’t mention filling it with diesel. I was uncertain how all the parts were working. I promised Aoife I would get the car back to New Jersey after I returned from the next voyage.

As soon as I entered the cafeteria to pour myself some coffee, people were laughing and clapping each other on shoulders. Everybody on-board was getting a big raise in pay as this ship was now ocean-bound. It was a big jump upwards, especially working in the Engine Room of an automated ship headed to the Orient. Plus, the vessel was wonderfully built so it was just a joy to handle.

Stuff like that happens if you just take it easy.

The voyage out was calm. It was almost serene. I brought along with me a collection of writings by Sir Winston Churchill. I was reading everything I could get my hands on.

What did I want when I returned home? I was just trying to put things together in my mind. I wasn’t certain about anything at that moment. Still, crises aversions seemed second nature to my mindset.

In Thailand, I took time to go ashore on the last day of the year. It had been a really hot afternoon. I just relaxed by the ocean. Fireworks were going off everywhere. I kept my head back, watching all the colors, and I was looking out at the sea when 1999 became the year 2000.

I walked a few blocks inland, and then I walked back to the sea. I kept heading along the water, listening to all the celebrations, thinking about the family I had succeeded in putting together, along with everyone’s mother, Aoife. She was far away from me, but not that far from me.

It was really happening that night. People there had been really big on foot-boxing. Boxing matches were going on in all the bars. There were probably two square miles of bars along the beach. There was a big whore house because they use that there. Prostitutes and their groveling clients showed up everywhere I looked. The place reminded me of Singapore, where I had acted badly years and years ago. That was where I had blown to pieces Marriage Number One.

Sitting there, with all that going on, I just knew what course to take.

Finally, I stood up. I walked back to my hotel. I got the man at the front desk to help me make a phone call.

Aoife answered. I wished her a happy new year. She sounded sweet as well as happy. Then I proposed to her, over the phone that night. She agreed to another time together. It would be for the third time in a row. She told me how she had been thinking about us for a week straight. She didn’t like being alone with anyone else. We both knew it was right to do.

After that, I was just unwinding. I walked back outside. The people didn’t mind me smiling and laughing with them, like I used to do all the time.

A woman approached and told me, “You look like you’re made of money.”

I surprised her little crowd gathered there by telling her, “No, honey. I am made of solid bone,” and I walked away as fast as I could.

I was walking and enjoying my life. I really hadn’t expected everything good to happen so fast. I guess the magic was still able to happen for me, in my life. Above it all, nobody lost their clocks or their machines when the Year 2000 got started.

The car was fixed when I got back to Long Beach. That was a bit of a surprise. I never found out how that was done. It was sitting there unscathed in the parking garage I had to pay for.

Right away, Aoife flew in to meet me. She hadn’t done that in years. She was up in spirits. I guess you had agreed to take care of your little brothers.

I picked Aoife up at the airport, in the newly washed-up Deluxe Edition. And away we went!

We were married in Carson City, at some tiny chapel. It was really nice inside. Aoife spotted it right when we rode into town. She only wanted to gamble there, but we got married anyway. An old man stood there and married people by the hour. For him, we were some more people tying the knot. For me, it was the best time of my life.

Everyone told us, over and over again, “Third time is a charm.”

Chapter SIX

HER NEW FRIEND

A letter written in a hurry on New Year’s Day 2004…

Hello, Mr. Floyd Ladd.

Last night, I was caught by surprise. I didn’t expect you to make such a big deal out of everything we had said to each other since we met. I am fine that you brought up the so-called “permanent employment” thing in front of everybody you invited, even though it set me in your personal light, not my own.

Even though you and I have been “business contacts” for years, now I feel like I am losing a lifelong pen-pal for… what?

I had to make a choice this morning, and my choice is that I’m going to take a break from looking out for things for you and everyone you care about, for now. I am sick and tired of details that spill into people being terribly angry! I’m headed to Florida. I put my brother Ben’s address on the back of this. Send any letters you pen to me there, please.

Keep something nice in mind! I want to make a new place for myself. I have been thinking how to develop something new… so here’s one: In March of 2000 I was hired at “the biggest firm in Hollywood”. They had these huge investment properties. Every day their clients’ lives were trashed. What was okay then is terrible today, and what was terrible back then no one cares about today. Here’s my idea: follow their biggest star and watch him clear things out of the closet so the audience takes it all in. Hint: the person I am thinking of was married to an old friend of mine. I think you know who I’m thinking of. Big, big pull there.

My dad is kicking retirement around.

Say, don’t use anything from him since you haven’t committed yet to working together. He won’t be pleased if you change any of his past just to get sizzle out of your audiences—which is what you just did to me in front of the whole choir when you went on a roll last night during your “four-day Hollywood party” which was, in a word, egregious.

Nothing is official except for us being friends who are together in the same industry. Sorry things ended up terrible. It would be nice if you could open to me a little more. I guess that’s not stylin’ these days, is it??

I’m putting things on pause.

Fiona

P.S. Dad sent the enclosed writing to me right when I started up my computer this morning. Seeing his little e-mail address at the top of my computer screen made me feel strange. I saw your name on its subject line, and that reminded me about how good of friends you and I have finally become even though its still only a man’s world, isn’t it? Meade’s e-mail is the only thing that made me write.

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,

It’s my money paying for anything Aoife gives you. Let’s be clear on that. That gives me a lot more say in your life than you like. I know it. But, hey, mind your manners with me, will you please, kid?

Thing is, Aoife is the mother of my children. I pretty much gave into anything she ever asked me for. That’s the way it has always been. It’s how it’s always going to be. But you are on your own. You should be married to someone who supports you, or you should have a profession that covers your costs.

I am being “transparent” in this crap, if that’s your new word for the week.

I have a feeling you never read a word. I’m writing for my own benefit. Period.

If you are going to print this, will you hurry and delete the stuff I wrote for you? You didn’t delete anything—not a thing—from the earlier letters. That’s what Friendly Floyd told us. I’ll forward you whatever else he said when I get back from the shipyard.

Dad (Meade)

Stories about my time at sea. Written for Wonderful Fiona, my daughter (header).

There was both a fun beginning as well as an official ending to Marriage Number Three. Right away, Aoife and I settled our divorce in less than a year. We had become “in the know” about doing the divorce ourselves, too. It cost me a lot less, the third time.

I had returned to Seattle. I lived at my uncle Jerry’s place. He was in his nineties now. He was still the nicest person I had ever known. And I switched my drivers’ license back over to Washington State. Then, I went out and bought an old truck at one of the many used car lots.

I cruised around every day in my new truck with its windows down and the heat turned up, and with loud music playing that I enjoyed. In the mid-afternoon I was able to catch some double feature movies for something like $6.00 a ticket. Or, I headed into downtown Seattle just to get grilled duck from the Uwajimaya supermarket filled with Japanese food, or to eat fresh crab, or to get myself some corn on the cob.

About a month went by that way. By then, I had tried every donut shop in the city.

I kept plugging in to the ten-cent movie theater in my mind, from time to time. In those days, I imagined how cool it would be to shove off to American Samoa for a whole year, way out in the South Pacific, like I did when I first began my career as a merchant marine. There, the natives speared fish and would hand out a plate to anyone who walked by. They ate everything raw with some spices and herbs. It is still the best seafood I ever tasted.

With time, I started talking to Aoife once more. Next, I had to go down to the Port of Tacoma to start regular work again. I was fine with this arrangement.

I accepted an engineer job right off the bat. It was the first ordinary “day job” with “long-term prospects” I had held in thirty years. Driving in to that work every day really reminded me of Marriage Number One. Back then, I had been hired to be the Port Engineer in Seattle. It was a high-up position, one where I often worked overtime.

After the first divorce happened, I always thought that if I had just taken my time off when I had earned it, I would have been mentally safe.

If I had enjoyed a few months with the twins, and if, at the same time, I had helped Aoife while she was pregnant with our daughter instead of sailing out to the Orient solely to bring in more income, we would still all quietly have stayed put. Marriage Number One might have been “the one” if Aoife hadn’t demanded I go straight to work right at the beginning of my vacations.

This next installment of my life’s story took place in 2003.

Aoife was my ex-wife, again, at her own better judgement rather than a choice I had anything to do with. She continued to have me pay for most of her expenses. Fact is, I can’t say I didn’t like hearing from her. I always liked to get her phone calls no matter what was going on.

Aoife and I understood how the more our family needed money, the more we were always going to be stuck together, even if only to make ends meet.

After a couple of months, I was asked to hold the night shift from time to time.

One night, well after midnight, the Port of Tacoma was empty but for only a lone freighter whose crew was hard at work. The place felt dead. My shift was over a few hours ago, but my replacement was unaccounted for.

I waited.

The Port Engineer finally told me things were covered. He wanted to send me home. I was a young sixty-three, and so the guy goes ahead and calls me by my new name, “old man.” He does that even though he doesn’t really have any replacement there, and even though I have already worked harder than both the replacement and him combined. He was going to leave the position empty for another hour, rather than ask me to stay a little more.

“Good night, old man,” he said, one more time.

I headed out. It was April, and the weather in the Puget Sound was good. I didn’t necessarily need my jacket, but my Uncle Jerry insisted I take one. Every evening when I was getting ready to go to work he showed up. He handed me a coat and said something like, “Here you go.”

That night, it was eerie in the dockyard because it was too quiet. Docked ships sat quietly. The machinery that took things up onto them was shut down for the night. Things would start kicking up again there around 4am.

The pavement was slick with a little rain. The sky was clear. I turned the key in the door of my truck. I let the engine warm. While I sat there, I put on some music from my favorite band, Creedence Clearwater Revival. Five minutes later, I put the truck in reverse, and got on the road to my uncle’s place just outside of Seattle.

Back in the late Sixties, in these dockyards, when I was fresh out of the Navy and looking to build something up as a merchant marine, I would secure any possibility for an adventure that came my way. Eventually, big business crept in, and I guess they tore the dream apart with their fake industry take-overs. Maybe that’s why the young people are nervous. The boys and women who make it through merchant marine schools seem a lot more frightened than I ever have been. I’m not sure what they are scared of. The new ones aren’t really trying to get onto any high-paying jobs unless somebody anoints them. Some are happy filling spots a deckhand would have taken back when I was getting my start so long as benefits are listed out in detail.

The entire shipping industry had started to feel strange to a guy like me.

Then again, I was the one who got old, not the Port Engineer, nor all the other people I complained about.

Three months earlier, just before I returned to Seattle for good, I caught a ship just to keep things fresh. They placed me as Chief Engineer. It was one running out to Okinawa.

Everything was more high-tech than it had been the year before. Things were racing ahead in the industry. Pretty much all of them now had ship-tracking services to steer vessels away from storms and typhoons. In my day, we had to ride out anything that suddenly came our way.

During the trip over, the Second Engineer had trouble with apathy turning up in all his people. Over coffee together, in the mornings, we would talk about everything. We talked about the people who are younger than we had become. One day, the Second Engineer entered the mess hall with a fairly annoyed expression on his face.

“Dammit, it’s not making sense,” he said to me. “My wife didn’t get my check after four weeks.”

Then, down in the Engine Room, when it was only me and the Wiper holding the watch, the Wiper told me what he did with it.

He told me, “The Second gave me his mail to mail. I forgot to do it. I felt so bad.”

I asked what he did with all the envelopes and stuff, and he said, “I threw it away. I felt so bad. I forgot everything until it was about a week later. I couldn’t tell him I hadn’t mailed it in all that time, Chief. What do you think?”

I wouldn’t believe it when he said it. What kind of low-life does something like that? Man, the kid actually did it, too. Didn’t even feel a need to share his confession with the victim or to rectify anything.

At that point, I had to kind of take the Wiper under my wing. His name was Baxter. His dad was a Wiper in the Union, as was his grandfather, and his uncles were, as well. What was up? Was this kid just pretending? Did he like walking in someone else’s shadow?

Now, an oil spill in the Engine Room would normally be any Wiper’s cup-of-tea. The day after Baxter’s unsettling confession about throwing out the Second Engineer’s mail, there was an oil spill in the Engine Room. Naturally, I called for Baxter. He was awake, in bed, but couldn’t come over to do this work.

“I’m on Sanitary!” He shouted out to answer my query.

I dared look inside. He was in his pajamas.

“You’re in bed.”

“Well, I’m on Sanitary.”

I could handle the oil spill with my other crew members filling in for him, that one time. But that’s not the way I leave things. And if it was honestly Sanitary keeping him away from his work, then Baxter would have to be the one to clean up all the rooms and swab the decks down below. But, one way or another, he wasn’t doing any of that, either. He just stared at me.

I approached him. I reached over, and I put my hand on his shoulder but it felt strange to do that, so I removed it. I only did it because my own son, Sam, told me I seemed cold the last time we talked. Sam recommended I try putting my hand upon his shoulder to ease tension the way people did in the olden days.

“It’s a cosmic fraternal brotherhood, dad.” Sam had told me that day, with complete sincerity. “It’s a thing no one complains about. What’s the big deal about touching another man’s shoulder?”

Baxter happened to look offended the moment I touched his shoulder. I sat on the empty chair inside his room, instead.

I said, “You’re getting into bed without a thought about that oil you’re supposed to clean. Just leaving it to burn on the engine, where it can take the ship down. Take your bed up with it. You believe it’s your right. But you can’t be here if you treat my Engine Room this way, and I mean that.”

“Man, you know I’m trying to make everyone happy, down here. I’ve put in something like seven extra watches since I came aboard. Honestly, Chief, I don’t like this treatment. It isn’t fair.”

I didn’t take it all in, right away. I had to think about it, instead. Then I told him, “Your dad did it, and your grandfather did it. You don’t like it so you’re planning to take down your family’s reputation, single-handedly. Put all our lives at risk? You do it without a second thought.”

Actually, that was not what I had planned to say. But if he wasn’t solidly committed to the ship then he needed to depart it.

Then he screeched, “I don’t really like being in there—it’s hella frightening, man!”

Anyhow, Baxter actually did get out of bed. Did the job right, too. Next, he wanted to pretend we each had a new best friend in one another. That was fine. But, on Sunday, when he had a double-shift, he was too tired for it. Things changed back, and I had to round him up one more time.

But he was an all-right person, anyhow. I liked the kid.

Baxter didn’t want to go to sea, to begin with. That’s the type you ought to tell everyone to keep far from a ship. It’s the type of fellow who will throw the Second Engineer’s mail away. So, I never did ask him to handle my mail. Even in Okinawa, I would have walked over to the Marine base and put it in the box myself. That was about a two-mile walk.

Baxter had a glassy stare sometimes when he looked at you. I didn’t even want to ask. In my day, you would get fired, no matter what. If doing drugs was part of your doctor’s prescription, it didn’t matter. Handling the cargo, and keeping the ship afloat, you don’t mess around with anyone on drugs at sea, not if you want to stay alive. But, these kids had class-action lawsuit’ed a big tyrant for taking away all the boys’ prescription drugs on board, so I didn’t know if I had anything left to stand on.

I said to him, “Baxter, turn over your drug.”

He didn’t even complain. Just handed his bottle over to me. I let him know I would throw them all overboard. I gave him a pat on the shoulder

“You could go to jail,” he told me one night, when I got him back up again. He was shoving things around in his room, getting ready to go back to the Engine Room. He wanted a pill but I had already handled them. Threw them all into the water right when he turned them over. While he complained, I was forced to hold my tongue.

When we were through with work, I told him I was heading to the mess hall. It was my invitation to have some chow together. He walked along with me.

“I’m a hold-over, kid,” I said.

Baxter didn’t even want to look me in the eye when I started my little speech. We grabbed the food from the serving line and sat together. I watched him load his coffee with sugar.

I went on with, “Young people assume I’m out of touch until their ass is on the line, and it’s me who has to save it. I have to make sure the ship actually gets there. You’re expected to travel from Point A to Point B. Do it on-time, too.”

I was sailing as the Chief Engineer, licensed to handle any vessel. I told him he could do it, too, one day.

I said, “I’ve been working at sea since I joined the Navy back in 1969. I was a submariner for, oh, about seven years.”

I couldn’t tell if he had heard me. We both ate for a while. Then I said, “I can’t do anything about my age. Listen, I was a wash-up, too. I was stealing cars and doing everything else.”

Baxter didn’t like any assumptions about the things he stood for.

“Never been in legal trouble like you got yourself into. Sorry, Chief.” He told me.

I didn’t care if he had or not. I was hoping to start a conversation.

“I’ve got all my Coast Guard certificates for every job. It’s something like two hundred and fifty well-executed voyages at sea.” I looked him in the eye and told him, “That makes me a world-class merchant marine.”

He said, “You sound old. Sorry.”

Baxter took a good look at me.

He spoke more sincerely when he stated, “I don’t care if you are old.”

He wasn’t too embarrassed to mention I was out of touch with today’s times. He told me I wasn’t an expert at listening to his personal meaning of things outside the industry that had brought us together. That drove a wedge between us.

When the job was done and the ship had returned to Seattle, our captain gave the kid a great, big hug. Everyone thought Baxter was the greatest Wiper the merchant marines ever had.

“Keep up the good work, son,” was the last thing I heard the Captain tell him.

Hadn’t heard about Baxter for at least a year, maybe three, and then, tonight, the Port Engineer mentioned a Wiper called Baxter so I asked about him. Turns out Baxter’s family had paid for him to take classes to move up. Everybody told me how he was sticking with the merchant marines now.

It was a few more hours until sunrise. The Puget Sound sprawled. Fingers and shipping apparatus everywhere. I was racing home. Once I was on the freeway, I turned the music up loud.

Chapter SEVEN

A NEW COMMITMENT

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, DELTE MY NOTES.

Stories about 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.

Chapter EIGHT

TIME TO PREPARE

The next letter was sent in May of 2005…

Floyd,

Truly I do appreciate your having sent me the attachments from your big release! The publicity is very happening!

I was sincerely touched by what the article wrote about all of us. After our show was cancelled, I didn’t know what people really thought. I noticed the reporter included her “heart-to-hearts” about our past friendship and my employment at your production office. She was terrible. Can you tell me anything?

I don’t want to be a menace to you, my wonderful pal, but I am still hoping to be paid something, you know, so far as residuals go. If you get any word on that I would like to hear!

If I sound tortured it’s because the really good has mixed into the really bad, again. If I keep telling people “like it is” I am probably never going to be hired again. No one will want to help me at all. Yet, I have to say what I see or else I’m nothing anyone can ever trust! I end up being the odd one, I know. It’s been that way all my life. After last year, it has gotten even worse.

I’m including every remainder of the writings by my Dad. I wish I had more time between auditions, writing, a couple of side jobs and working part-time in the studio to read everything he’s been working on. Let me know on your end, okay?

I found your invitation to be delightful. So much meaningful placement. The colors are perfect! I accepted it on-line so I guess I am seeing you at the end of the year, at your wife’s big art event in southern California. Looking forward to it, and plus I made a point to tell your wife I’ll be her friend forever if she helps you and I become friends once again.

Your bitter and broke artistic geek,

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:

Hey, kiddo. Scoobadoo to you, too! Love, Meade.

Stories about my time at sea. Written for Wonderful Fiona, my daughter (header).

Friday continued talking to me about his work to man a crew for Sassy when I was trying to get out the door in order to see her in real-life. I had to go through the ship level by level before volunteering anymore souls to her demise.

I had my keys in my hand and I was walking over to my truck. Friday went on about needing to get a first mate and an adjunct for Captain White before the Coast Guard would dare give Sassy any authorization to depart.

Friday expected me to supply him with all the people I knew in Seattle who might be looking for work. I denied knowing any of them and got off the phone.

The new owner had paid to bring Sassy from San Francisco up to a shipyard just inside the Port of Tacoma. From what I was told, it sounded like moving the vessel went decently. I imagined the ship was fairly well intact.

The work orders for Sassy‘s on-board preparations were sort of sketched out. They had been faxed from the owner’s office in India to Ted Friday who faxed them to me. They were left on the seat of my truck. I sat behind the steering wheel, and I read through everything there. The orders were vague. I got the idea no one knew what was happening with the ship’s condition and yet they were pushing on us departing Seattle as quickly as possible.

I set the work orders down. I drove over to the dock. Rock and roll was on the radio the entire time. I played it too loud. I think I almost got pulled over.

My mind was on the Engine Room. I had Kingston Riggs for my First Engineer. I needed two more people.

This trip would be a perfect time for you to learn from me about ships and the ocean and the history of the merchant marines, but Aoife told me fifty times never to ask you about sailing on Sassy again.

“She wasn’t ever asking on her own to work at sea, was she?” Aoife spit at me over the phone, that night. I made a point not to tell Aoife anything about the plans I had for my success, these days.

Aoife drives every point home without remorse.

She ended off our argument with, “Fiona never asked to be a sailor, Meade—not even after she graduated that Able-Bodied Sailor class you made her take.”

“Able-Bodied Seaman, Aoife. It’s a precise thing. Or, it’s an AB. That’s it.”

I also told Aoife, “You want people to know you understand what you’re talking about.”

Aoife did not answer. She just kept talking about her prior subject.

She said, “You do not know your own daughter that well. Her brothers and I know her very, very well. She is not cut out for your lifestyle. You can tell her I told you so.”

So, that was what your mother said to me, Fiona. Still, I had a gut feeling that, somewhere inside, you were a merchant marine, just like your dad.

I played some music you gave me at Christmas this past year. In it, Neal Diamond was singing his song about Cracklin’ Rosie.

I thought about the conversation we all had last Christmas. You were tearing up, but the twins didn’t mean to make you cry. They played a mean trick on themselves as well as you, by stealing Friendly Floyd in LA away from you. Just let it rest. Better to stay friends than to go to war over something meaningless.

If you and I worked together on a sea voyage, eventually we could build our friendship up again so that it would be strong like it was when you were a little girl, and you were wholesome then. That’s been my plan for us, for years. I think you need me to help you regain some composure. A ship environment offers clean space for that. You and I could do a lot of damage to your woes. Elbow grease and swabbing the deck can work a wonder in someone’s life.

Driving across the docks that day, I passed by an outfit who had obtained a different one of the old WW2 refits. It had been kept up nicely. Their ship was in much higher demand as it was still functioning. I watched as they loaded up gear for what appeared to be a fishing expedition.

Sassy was prominently situated next door. She was a real mess staring me in the face. Standing outside my truck and looking at that ship anchored there, inside the nice harbor, sort of gave me an eerie feeling.

Sassy was built during World War II. She was one of a whole fleet. I called them Knot Ships because once they were refit for fishing, each and every one of her kind of vessel had to carry the word “Knot” in its title, such as the “Yardarm Knot” which was another vessel of Sassy’s kind—but the story of that ship was another tale meant for another time.

Sassy was christened the U.S.S. “something or another”. She had been employed during the Korean War carrying back frozen corpses to the United States. Sometime in the Sixties, all of these particular vessels were decommissioned.

An outfit called Aleutian Fisheries bought twenty of the Knot ships. Next, that company went broke. It happened after they spent a huge amount of money refitting all the ships. The closing of that company without any profit made in the long run was not a big surprise. Starting their own companies in shipping, small businessmen can lose their shirts easily and do, all the time. The shipping industry is tough even for the good companies.

Throughout my career, I would see Sassy‘s kind around in various ports, all during my travels as a Merchant Marine.

Ships sometimes get left in yards. Abandoned ships sometimes rot. Sassy had been resting in an unknown port for some unknown number of years. She was covered with junk, rust, old lines, clothing, wooden planks over trap doors, and other things I cannot describe.

The forward, lowest hold was filled with two-stroke diesel engines and an array of fish processors. They were called “dirty” engines because they generated too much exhaust. These things were all going to be outlawed in the United States for what they did to the environment.

The remainder of her abandoned shell was completely empty of the truth of her past. There was no telling who had been going through those holds. Her legend was creepy enough.

“This ship is haunted! It is haunted, speaks me the truth!” And then there was loud laughter everywhere.

I turned to look at who had made the noise. It was Baxter. He was standing next to me on the edge of the pier. I hadn’t seen him in a year or three.

I asked him, “How the hell are you doing there, buddy?”

We shook hands. Baxter had been waiting for me in the main office.

Baxter knew I was supposed to show up that day. He talked about how he had watched Sassy get delivered to the yard that morning. He said he just happened to visit an old buddy, an Oiler, who had sailed to the Orient yesterday. While he had been in the area, he had heard stories about Sassy. However, Baxter’s alibi was a little strained.

Baxter had a lot to say about Sassy’s appearance. He was certain there was a dead captain living somewhere in the Captain’s Quarters.

He told me, “It was just a thought I had when I saw the dockside pilot pulling her up. She looks light and heavy at the same time. Fun times, Chief.”

It was a gorgeous day in Seattle. Baxter gave me a nudge with his elbow, and asked the next thing without thinking: “Need a First for your big adventure?”

“Is that what you qualify for now, kid?” I asked him, looking at him closely. His skin tone was bright. He was smiling. He seemed stronger than the last time.

Baxter laughed aloud. “Yep, sure. That’s right. I do.”

I told him I already had a First, but he could take on Second Engineer. I was happy to call him Second because I genuinely appreciated his attitude. He was hired on the spot.

“The ship’s condition is substandard,” I informed him.

“Yea. It’s kind of a piece of crap, wouldn’t you say, Chief?” Baxter was smiling the entire time, and I couldn’t pull that thing off his face if I ever tried to do it.

“Maybe the guys from the company who moved her figured they could go aboard and grab hold of anything they wanted.”

He could see what I saw. Something had been misplaced down below. It was what sailors called a hunch.

The word Sassy was block-lettered. Paint and rust were just peeling off. Must have been layers and layers slapped upon her hull.

He asked me, “Have you been around inside the bridge, or the rooms yet?”

“Not one time,” I replied. “Let’s check her out.”

I got my thermos into my hands from the truck where I had left it. It was filled with coffee.

Baxter and I ventured into Sassy for her first official walk-through in, let’s just say, a long while. Sassy had been out of type for years. She had this single final last voyage to make. Would she be able to pull through? Baxter and I had a hard time telling each other she could be fixed up enough. She was missing a lot of parts.

The Main Engine looked decent enough though it needed some work. All the generators had been taken out of her but for a single one.

The ship was not huge, but she was big enough, with three decks above the main and three decks below. She had three holds. She was three hundred and thirty-eight feet long and rested eighteen feet deep into the water. Her shallow draft made her ideal for island hopping that took place in the Pacific.

Sassy would be unusually light on our voyage. With the exception of the fish processors and the extra diesel engines, she was gutted of everything but the barest essentials. I checked all the holds for any parts we might need, plus spares. I marked everything down.

Baxter complained about creepy feelings when we peered in every hold with can lights we held up, or by flashlight. I had to agree. It felt like fallen soldiers were waiting to walk over and stare us in the eye. I expected Baxter to take off and forgo the voyage. I wouldn’t be able to change my mind, but Baxter still could. I was hoping he would say it wasn’t worth the risk.

In the end, neither Baxter nor I expressed any discontent for the job ahead which is the mainstay of living a life at sea.

We started to understand what a task it was going to be. Getting Sassy from the Puget Sound to India’s western coastline would be risky. It might turn grisly in a minute what with water seepage, electrical failure or full-on black-out of every system the ship used to navigate.

None of the owners were forthcoming to give promises of anything successful in dealing with the ship. Ted Friday couldn’t even guarantee insurance for the trip. The only guarantee we had was that Sassy would be equipped with life rafts and other emergency equipment. We had to get the Coast Guard’s permission before departing. It would be an enormous inspection to get through.

When we walked into the Engine Room and saw stacks of old turpentine containers left behind, Baxter laughed out loud.

Baxter asked, “Can you even say no at this stage of things, Chief?”

“I can walk away any time I need to. But I don’t intend to change a thing. A promise kept—that sort of thing.”

He looked at me. “I bet you never walked off from anything. Am I right?

I looked at Baxter. He might have been about thirty. He had short hair. He was black and tall. He walked like a fighter, just like I used to. I couldn’t have asked for a better sidekick. I had to smile. The kid smiled back in full gusto.

I told him, “I wouldn’t have taken the job from the outset otherwise than that I was trying to make my point of youth being a mindset.”

He laughed and responded, “I am ruined, man! Okay, let’s do it. Together we shall sail.”

Baxter sang a song he made up while I was standing there.

We went into the crews quarters. Baxter shook his head. He had strange images of nefarious goings-on running through the picture shows inside his head. He had to take a breather, for the moment.

We walked along the pier.

I asked him, “We have our work cut out for us, don’t we, kid? Let’s get this thing out of our hometown, lay her to final sleep. What do you say?”

“Please!” Baxter said. “This is it. This is the thing we are going to do. This is our moment.”

I said, “Let’s see if the coast guard even will give us a leave from Seattle. I don’t know what they will tell us.”

We continued to walk.

I had to ask him, “Can you give me your credentials. Not today. But when I need to put things together?”

Baxter seemed to withdraw. He was thinking before he gave an answer.

I asked, “You need to tell me something?”

He said, “It’s nothing, Chief. I have everything coming to me, but I’m supposed to pick them up before I do it. There’s a wait. I guess, for right now, I am certified mainly to wipe. That’s all.”

Baxter was mighty disappointed.

“It will do,” I said. “All of us are going to see on this shell how the mind works under pressure. Either that, or we can each earn award as top swimmer in the merchant marines. One thing I got to ask...”

He raised his eyebrows. The man was on guard.

I smiled when I said, “Did you know my ex-wife, Aoife? She’s old friends with that son-of-a-gun in the main office. Even though we are friends again, it doesn’t clearly make sense how you showed up here today. Is there someone from the Port Engineer’s who drummed you up for Aoife’s purposes? She has spied on me before.”

Baxter was straight-faced a minute. I kept my gaze level.

I said, “I hate to ask.”

Then he laughed.

Baxter said, “Chief, tell me what you do. You spell it all out like that, and it’s like you’re reading a script I got written outside on my forehead, or something like that. I can’t lie. I did meet your very morbid ex-lady. Stacy, in the office—not your friend—handed me the phone to talk to her. So, I don’t know what anyone else has going on against you, but I guess you have been telling her how you are bringing your daughter with you. And she wants to know the trip will be safe. That’s all Aoife asked me to help her with.”

I nodded. I was more than a little tired of the games Aoife played.

I said, “My daughter is not going on this. Aoife has a bad habit of being a bit intrusive.”

To let him know that he and I were still good friends, I said, “Just don’t let me catch you watching me in my room, or something strange.”

Baxter couldn’t answer. He was laughing.

I told him, “See you at 9am. Show up on time, if you can make it. There’s going to be a lot of work before the Coast Guard will let us take Sassy out of Seattle.”

Chapter NINE

FOR ANY APPROVAL

Without a reply to the previous letter, this was sent in May of 2005…

Hi Floyd.

This is indeed forthright to send in a letter, but here I go… I am moneyless. My friends can’t help. I don’t want more help from family. I need work. Please, help me with anything out there.

You’ll understand more when I ‘m in LA for the opening I’m being shoved to attend. I don’t need to spend money on a party, but if I can at least work when I am there that would help so much.

Dad brought me out to a sea school a few years ago. I became an Able-Bodied Seaman. That was right after you and all of us had our big hoedown together. Seems like both things got me sidelined on my way to stardom.

Dad keeps tagging me as a merchant marine. He wants me to take a job offer that landed on his plate. I didn’t like him pushing me to begin with. But I have to admit that working on the sea allures me. Should I buckle? Take the offer?

I have a long way to go every way I try. That’s why I want so badly to succeed as an actress. That’s the career I have invested all these years into.

I think life is so tough. No one talks about how awful it actually is.

I am tired of sending people stories. None seem to care about anything other than their personal interests. I start something and it flies away. My friends have actually made a million dollars on my ideas. They are all happy to do my work for me.

You are the one who has always been so kind! Don’t let me drive you away. Please show me some friendship. I’ll accept any good industry work the town can offer.

Floyd, maybe satisfaction isn’t really the thing we should care about, after all. We could all be happy to be alive and healthy. That would be something.

My mom never intended to be a farmer, just like I never intended to be anyone’s executive secretary.

This is real life. People must pay attention to what all the women tell them when they suddenly cry.

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,

Hope you like my work. I’m working a lot of working for you, kiddo. Gong to pay me any time soon? This job I’m doing for you is therapeutic for me too. I better say thank-you real quick. Right?

Love from dad, Meade.

P.S. you’re going to be the star of this story about Sassy from here on out.

Stories about my time at sea. Written for Wonderful Fiona, my daughter (header).

“Dad, I’m trying to get hold of you. I’ll call you later, okay? I wanted to let you know I’m in. I’m in. I’m going on wherever that ship is headed, okay? Call me back, okay? This is Fiona.”

I listened to your voice message a few times. I put the cell phone back on the seat, and I closed the truck’s door. In the week since we last talked, I forgot that I had invited you.

Baxter and all six of the men who had flown in from the Ukraine were now hard at work on preparations for Sassy’s safety inspection. There was plenty of work left to go. Serious repairs were long overdue, with rust and parts missing all over. There were no replacements, and so I had been taking one of the other engines apart and soldering and re-building it right there in the Engine Room, with Baxter helping me.

Sassy was securely moored along the bay in Seattle. Each time I stepped on-board, I felt the hopeful eyes of everyone watching me. In my mind’s ten-cent theatre, I saw the entire vessel safely and slowly making the trip to India perfectly. I knew she could do it, if she stayed under my control.

Baxter was becoming a troubling man. Before Aoife met him, Baxter was someone whose easy attitude I enjoyed immensely. Now that our mutual acquaintance had recruited him as her spy, Baxter was watching me all the time. He would take phone calls on break which I didn’t think were from his wife. I couldn’t end the problem because he liked me, too. But when I got into questioning these phone calls, he brushed me off.

I knew Aoife was getting him into strange conversations, off there on the side. He sometimes sat and wrote texts on the cell phone he had. He looked at me for a minute whenever I caught his eye. Then, he laughed and said something like, “I’m putting the phone down, Chief.”

One morning, I got into my truck, put the radio on Loud, and I headed to the Port of Tacoma. I was at a stop light right next to this big movie theatre. All the lights were made out of neon and it looked like something else. Got me thinking about your dream to be an actress.

That morning, I walked on-board Sassy, and I headed back to the Engine Room. Baxter was there. He was going through the Coast Guard’s inspection checklist. Dmitry was standing there. He was a Ukrainian who happened to know about engines. We would be calling on him all voyage long in case something caught on fire.

Baxter said, “The Coast Guard’s list is a mile long, Chief. I’m getting together a list, too. It’s the parts we can still pick up at the depot.”

It was going to be another long day of starting at the top of the Coast Guard’s list and then sort of skipping around on things. There was always going to be a challenge to find the correct replacements. Baxter knew that I liked to remain solution-oriented.

Baxter was friendly and outgoing. He stayed that way most of the time. He talked about some children he has, and it made me think of Aoife. He talked about the family he put together in a showy and happy manner. It started to make me think he was putting us all on. He already had mentioned that Aoife “checked in from time to time”. When everyone finished that day, I wanted out.

I walked back to my truck.

It was another gorgeous day in the Puget Sound. I picked up my cell phone from the truck bench. The screen reported to me how Aoife had just left me a message.

She said, “I fought Fiona against it. I don’t think it is a good idea. From what I heard, Sassy is not trustworthy.”

This is the conversation I had been dreading as soon as I listened to your voicemail this morning. I thought about Baxter standing off somewhere, fiddling with his phone. He probably sent a text message to Aoife the minute I walked away from Sassy. That had to be how Aoife knew when to call me up.

Complexity in friendship makes me very tired.

Then there was another long speech from Aoife on a second message.

Aoife said something like, “What I understand is that you don’t have any Coast Guard approval. Is that it? I think it was Sam who said so. You must have told him. So… that’s a big no for Fiona taking one foot on that ship. You aren’t supposed to have that vessel in the harbor, in the first place. You might be surprised who wants to call the cops.”

That one dug too deep. I was fighting something in Aoife that turned brutal too quick.

In another message, Aoife was raising the bar.

She said: “This really is a bold scheme. You are trying to drag our only daughter into something terrible and awful. It could kill you both. I am not going to let you do it!”

Aoife’s anger cost her my friendship in the past. Sometimes, it was her short-sightedness that made her too bold. I didn’t call her. I called you back, instead.

I wanted you to be assured, so I said, “Hi there, honey. Heard you say that you are sold on my job offer?”

“What—what—what?” You said. There was a lot of noise in the background.

“I was happy when you told me ‘yes’. I got the voicemail.” I said calmly.

I thought I better warn you: “You’ll be in the Engine Room. Unless you don’t like it. You could also handle work on the decks though the company that owns this thing hired half a dozen Ukrainian men for all of that.”

There was so much on my plate in order to make the deadline. I didn’t know if we were ever going to be leaving. It had gotten to be late in the year. It was now well beyond the scheduled departure date. Pretty soon, it would get to the point where we had to depart in order to avoid bad weather.

“Dad, this is going to cost me my life, one day, right?” You asked.

It sounded like you were talking about something to order at McDonald’s. I didn’t respond. It was too much so I told you I would call you later.

Ted Friday was reviewing things. He was looking at myself in the Engine Room, along with Baxter and Kingston Riggs, with you stepping in to help alongside me. We also had Captain White solidly on our side, as well as the six Able-Bodied Seamen from the Ukraine. We really needed one more person: a certified First Mate.

Sassy had no need for tie-downs. There would be no cargo other than what we carried. The crew was substantial for an empty vessel, barring the most dismally obvious possibility of a collision with nature which might be a disaster given the reality that there would be nothing in the holds to give the ship any substantial weight, and we could die.

There was the chance we could never leave the dock at all. The requirements for the Coast Guard’s approval still seemed fairly out of reach. Despite these odds, we continued to work on the necessary requirements to get the ship from Seattle to India safely.

Aoife called the next evening. I didn’t answer. I already knew she would dig in. I was in my truck, heading back home, and I kept the radio warmed up.

The straight fact was Aoife had not once completed any long sea voyage. The most she did was the shrimp processor up in Alaska. That was in the summer, at the peak of the tourist season when everything was nice. Staying out at sea, day after day, can take a lot out of a person.

Aoife called every time exactly when I wrapped up for the day. She called exactly at the time I got into my truck to go home. The answer had to be Baxter. He probably let Aoife know in one of those text messages he sat down to write every five minutes.

I let Aoife go another full day before I called her. The recommendation from the end credits on the screen on the mental image picture show inside my head read thus: Aoife never was a sailor, was she, Meade?

We were working above deck all day. I looked at the loading bays, and the machinery, and the type of people around me. Aoife never was the same type of person I am.

I walked back to my truck, and I listened to the most recent message I had from Aoife on my phone. It said, “Fiona is adamant about that trip. Why does she have to go?”

I called her back. She launched right in.

“Take it easy,” I told her. I didn’t know anything more about our daughter’s choice than Aoife did. It was the truth. Aoife might have learned something more from Baxter, behind the scenes of the movie she was playing on my brain right then. So, I asked her what Baxter had told her.

Your mother replied with, “Meade, you are reckless.”

I stayed quiet. Aoife kept going on with what she had to say.

She said, “Fiona’s decision to go is against her better judgement. You are putting her on the spot. You think that you have Fiona’s interests in mind, but you don’t know how to do that yet. Everything is being put on hold between her and her man because of this. They need each other. They must stay together. They have to push things for each other, as a couple—not have Fiona go ride around on a sinking ship which is your only plan for our one daughter.”

I felt subdued. I didn’t want to pry into my daughter’s life.

I said, “No idea what you’re saying. But I need her. She wants to come along. It’s settled.”

Aoife didn’t come back hard. Instead, she said something kind. I won’t repeat it, but she was being nice. Then we both waited a minute. I was impatient, and so I broke the silence.

I asked Aoife, ”Why don’t you tell me what’s going on inside your mind, hon?”

Aoife was quiet. I used to tell her I could hear the wheels clicking in her head. Stopped making that comment when we were sitting in a lawyer’s office, during our third divorce.

“This will be your first job together. Why not make it something good? Not this. This is going to be terrible.”

In the end, your name was already written into the books, so far as the accountant was concerned. It was going to pay your rent. That single piece of knowledge ended the arguments from Aoife. The one thing that satisfied Aoife was telling her who was making any money inside our family and when it was planned to be spent.

I called you, Fiona, following that. You wanted to bring along a camera and “film your monologue from the top deck”.

I said, “No.”

All the crew would be disembarking off the main deck onto a Jacob’s Ladder and into a tiny boat. There was no way you were going to carry a bunch of photography equipment with you. After that piece of data was given, the disappointment could be felt in the air everywhere.

You said, “Her kind of vessel uses older engines. I read that they were all scheduled to be outlawed because they dirty up the atmosphere, anyway. Makes me want to know why you are going through all this, dad. What is Sassy’s value, really?”

These types of question put the friendship between a father and his one daughter on an entirely different level. The owners had hired everyone to work, and we had been getting paid every day to prepare the vessel. We were doing a job we had been hired for. Instead, I went with the short answer for my daughter.

I said, “They could earn about half a million dollars. None of us had that kind of money laying around.”

You said, “Oh. I get it.”

I said, “Fiona, let’s get an agreement on this one point: if you come, you’re going to do a single thing, and that is work for me. Got it?”

“Yes,” You said. Then you threw in something nice: “Thanks, Dad. It’s going to be good movie material.”

A few weeks then passed by and they were filled with doubt. The Coast Guard visited many times. Sassy flunked each inspection they gave. It didn’t get quite as gruesome as it could have been, but it was bad enough.

The Coast Guard told us, “Fix that,” and we fixed it. They said, “Do this,” and we did it. We had to because if we broke down it would be the Coast Guard who would have to save us.

It got to be three weeks past the day we were originally scheduled to get underway. I felt guilty about it every day. Sassy was such a disaster waiting to be had. In my opinion, the Coast Guard was bound to cancel the voyage.

Standing on the bottom of the vessel was surreal. The place was damp enough to feel the chill of a change in atmospheric pressure. The endless possibility of strange happenings down inside those bottom places went untold. The water felt close enough to touch and, for a sailor’s solace, that isn’t a good premonition to be had.

One morning, Captain White was standing on the dock when I arrived for work. He was a good-looking man in his early sixties, just like me. He was a few inches taller than I am and probably stood at six- foot-two, or about there. He had a battered captain’s hat on his head just like the one The Skipper wore on the old TV show Gilligan’s Island. He took it off and smiled when I approached. Then he placed the thing back on top of his head.

Captain White laughed when he said, “Meade. How are you? Good to finally shake your hand, talk to you in real life. Good news. The company decided to invest something like a hundred grand into the oh-so-much-needed equipment and for the supplies for our repairs.”

Next to him stood another man. White introduced me to Kelvar A. Hussein, who was fresh out of the New York Academy at King’s Point. Hussein had already taken all the tests. He was determined to sail as First Mate.

With these two auspices firmly under Sassy’s control, things had gone from tenuous to rock-solid in a single morning. It meant any further doubt from the crew or their officers was thereafter banned. We all seemed to move away together from complaining about Sassy.

Sassy would be Hussein’s first job on the books. He was ready to get it finished. He had a wife and a baby to think about. He mentioned these people to White and I. We all started talking about our families.

Hussein was not an easy, to-do-for type of guy, but it was hard to draw a hard line on this ship. He wasn’t planning on this level of heartache. I had to laugh when I saw him look at the vessel for the first time. The three of us watched as Baxter and the men from the Ukraine headed each to their stations. It looked like the ship the demigods forgot after some war with King Triton.

I was standing in the bridge when Baxter introduced himself to Hussein. They immediately brought up their sons. Next, they showed each other photographs on their phone. I know they wanted me to get into it, but I wasn’t about to. I didn’t need Baxter telling other people about my ex-wife. He embarrassed me every time he mentioned how likeable Aoife really was. I walked away feeling little guilt.

So far, the ship had missed every deadline the owners gave. It flunked every inspection it got. It was now clear into the last part of June, and July was approaching. We had to move unless it got too late in the year. If Sassy couldn’t pass, the trip was canceled.

Now that funding was approved, new metal was being hauled in to replace entire weak patches along the upper siding. That was comforting. Too bad no one wanted to clearly inspect the entire hull. As with any vessel, we were now pumping out water every afternoon from the base of the ship. But that was normal. For the most part, the ship was dry down beneath.

Captain White was now walking around to inspect things. He was paying his time to square things away.

Each sailor had a checklist of tasks. With the extra tools and materials now being purchased, I was too busy getting the checklists completed to worry about my social skills. Most of the time I ignored Captain White as he came and went.

“Chief, you don’t like me anymore?” Baxter asked suddenly in the doorway to the Engine Room.

“I like you.” I told him.

Baxter followed me to lunch. I bought him a couple slices of pizza. He gave insight into Aoife and you, Fiona, being cohorts against me, one way or another. It all came from some line Aoife had fed him. I couldn’t believe Aoife had money to bribe the kid at all, but he confessed every time. That’s how I came to understand my problem in life with you, behind the scenes, rattling everyone’s cage all the time. Baxter relied heavily upon Aoife’s information. He had a preconceived idea about the way you lived your life, long before you had arrived to Seattle, and long before he ever met you.

Miraculously, early one morning, Captain White called me with news of the Coast Guard’s sudden approval for the ship to depart. White was frantic. He couldn’t believe it. He had almost written it off. From that day forward, he was duty-bound to only speak in very positive terms about the vessel and the crew and voyage ahead.

I drove back to the dockyard. Captain White and the First Mate were listening to each other through the antiquated intercom system. One was in the Bridge and the other was down below. Each confirmed the system had worked yesterday but was now total crap today.

Everything seemed solid now about the departure so I called Kingston Riggs to let him know the good news. He was stunned.

Baxter came along and draped one long arm over my shoulder, shook me and gave me a big thumbs-up.

I said, “Riggs.” And I pointed to the cell phone in my hand.

With his big friendly smile to distract everything, Baxter took the phone from out of my hand and pushed the little “speaker” button.

Baxter happily said, “Mr. Kingston Riggs, we are now officially setting sail! Can you dig that? I called my wife to get my funeral requests in order. I’m joshing, of course!”

Riggs told him, “The First Mate probably pushed it through the hoop.”

If you ask me, we all felt sad about the Coast Guard saying we got approved to sail Sassy out across the Pacific. Everyone committed to bringing Sassy to India spent a few more hours going through things. Window replacement had been scheduled two days out. The Captain understood the matters. Taking care of everything was his job. It was agreed to spend three more days before departing.

We were about a dozen people. I got a list together of what would happen on-board for the food supplies to be taken care of, and what was needed to prepare the kitchen with. I went over kitchen preps in detail. I was hoping that between Fiona and Baxter and I, we could all learn something about cooking.

As we left, Kingston Riggs offered to buy everyone a drink at a bar, to celebrate. I directed us all over to my perfect spot in the town, Thirteen Coins.

The bartender there is a nice, old gal. She listened when I entertained the room with my story of a friend of mine who bought another one of these old World War II ships. It was practically the same ship as Sassy, but no one could believe the coincidence. Its name had been the Yardarm Knot. By the time I first was acquainted with that one, it was 1985. She had been set adrift inside the Puget Sound, and was floating somewhere between Poverty Bay, Vashon Island and Seattle.

We all crowded together at the bar as best we could that night. There, I told everyone a true story.

Chapter TEN

THE SHIP OF WAR AND FISH

After responding letters were received, this was mailed in the middle of June, 2005…

Floyd, my friend,

When I saw your stationary I couldn’t move. I was so embarrassed. I must be in trouble for ripping your heart out in my letter to you last month. I was impressed you sent me any response at all. You are remarkable, my friend.

That said, I must speak…Thank you, thank you, my good and dear and wonderful friend! Thank you for sending support to my inner spirit. Thank you for being virtuous every day when many others can’t take a minute of virtue.

I am growing up every day, even though I am going to be thirty in a few years. I hate that about me.

I am going to sail alongside my father to India. I fly up to Seattle early tomorrow. It’s a military-cargo thing called Sassy. Super sweet name! I admit I am looking forward to working alongside Chief Engineer Declan Aidan Meade… for the first time in my life.

I’m planning on making something after I experience this due to the supernatural sequences others have already felt on-board. My movie will be based on this trip, but it will be heavy into character actualization.

I want you to know that I think I found something to write about that is going to take reality and then hand it back over to the people but with sincere respect. It’s going to be called love… not the kind everyone is writing about. This kind is where sweat mixes with blood BEFORE you take anyone to bed. This is where things are for me, right now, in the art world. I am struggling to walk a line fifty feet above the ground.

I have something else. I have received a voice recording from Dad’s assistant Baxter. It was made last night. I got to hear a barstool rendition of a shaky ghost tale. I spent last night transcribing it.

Here you go: a classic tale from Chief Engineer Declan Aidan Meade!!!

If you take this anywhere you have got to bring me with you. I can’t bear more stabs in the back. Your friendship can be my only dream now that things went bad with my friends in Hollywood.

With my love,

Fiona

P.S. These days I see how I am now transforming internally into a tough girl and it’s all for the part I am about to play at sea—ya know it!!!

P.P.S. Send letters to my apartment because for the next few weeks I will be out in the middle of the Pacific! It will be like the olden days with no pagers or cell phones. We each can have a cheap radio but unfortunately they are illegal in India so we have to throw them overboard. Otherwise, we all will probably all go to prison or in front of a handgun firing squad. I don’t suppose the ship will have internet, either.

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

The Sea Story

that was told by my dad Chief Engineer Declan Aidan Meade

Last Night:

It was 1986.

A friend of mine had a cabin on Vashon Island inside the Puget Sound. Both are located inside Washington State. You can look at the Puget Sound on a map or I can draw you a picture if I ever can get around to it.

A ship had been floating vacantly for some time. Anyone on the shores could see it whenever the tides changed dramatically. Everyone there seemed to know about its existence. The owner was far from caring.

It was an old World War II cargo vessel. It had been decommissioned at the end of the war. There were rumors that it had carried fallen war heroes back to the States from the South Pacific during World War II. After that, it was possibly used in a fishing company, but no one cared or knew about that.

This had been going on for some decades. The ship bore its name The Yardarm Knot on its bow. There was a rumor that the owners had been planning to sink it, but Jack, my friend, had found out the truth: the owner was nowhere to be found.

Jack and his wife had an idea of getting a little shipping company going along the west coast. When they first had met each other, in Alaska, Jack worked as the captain of a fishing vessel. More recently, they both lived in Seattle and were accountants where they punched papers all day long. Jack was only a sailor upon the ten-cent movie theater inside his mind.

Jack had to get something new started. The day came along when he suddenly was able to buy the Yardarm Knot without even trying, Then, Jack’s whole world lit up again.

One year, Jack and his beloved wife Terry went up to the government officials and somehow arranged to buy the discarded vessel cheap. Jack wasn’t certain even which ship he had purchased. He knew the Yardarm Knot had been in the harbor somewhere, for a long time. He was counting on getting a ship he could use but it wasn’t to be the case—not at first, at least.

He called me one day out of the blue. He told me about the cabin he and his wife took vacations at on Vashon Island. They had watched the old ship go by.

Jack asked, “Since I don’t have time, Meade, and I’m slow on cash, would you get her located and then inspect whatever I got?”

“I can start her up,” I promised him, after hearing the ship’s story from him.

I headed to the Port of Tacoma. I could always recognize the ship’s particular build. Someone at a café mentioned seeing the old ship drift by last week when he was on his family’s yacht headed south from Elliot Bay. He believed it was going to be somewhere in the East Passage.

I recognized the signs of fair play. She was drifting all over the place. Probably, she got tugged away whenever she came too close to a port or someone’s waterfront mansion.

It would be a challenge because the ship wasn’t anchored down. I needed something to get out on the water. I called my oldest brother, Christopher, who lived thirty minutes away. I was counting on him to have something I could use.

Christopher loaned me a flat-bottomed skiff. It was a single-engine boat. Then my youngest brother, Phineas, offered to help. He had been sitting there, at Christopher’s place, all that day without anything much to do. We met at an old harbor. No one else came close to the place, ever. He helped me get the skiff loaded in. I told him I would probably have to stay the night on-board. Everyone was impressed with my resilience. Christopher carefully instructed me about what to do whenever I had finished with his craft.

Phineas remained with me. We bid good-bye to Christopher as he drove away. Then we headed out into the Puget Sound. I steered and kept my little brother Phinneas as co-pilot.

Phinneas said, “Good to have you back, Declan. Don’t you know that I’m newly in the Navy? This is my first Leave in a while.”

Phinneas, being the youngest in the family, never felt understood. When he came along to assist me I tried to hear everything, as best I could do. I gave him a clap on the arm. He had a huge smile across his face.

The sun was sinking down pretty fast. I was hauling fast on the light craft.

Neither of us knew where the hell we were at, but suddenly I spotted the old wreck. She was clear against the horizon. The setting sun outlined her there, in the water.

When we got close enough, we could see that any of the ladders or ropes were all lost a long time ago. Every access point for a gangway, and any open door for entry, had each been blocked by securing the ship completely, long ago.

It was October, and it was windy as anything. The waves were chopping up. They tried to hack our little vessel into oblivion more than one time.

I pulled up alongside. We didn’t know what might be on-board. I had to get a better view of the enterprise at hand. The light continued to dim. Phineas wanted to climb the anchor chain up to the hole at the top rather than mess around. The chain was apparently neither tied nor set. It swung when Phinneas came to grab hold of the thing.

Things were really moving. The ship herself was moving. It felt like more and more wind was blowing. Each time I tried to snug close in on Christopher’s skiff, the waves beat us about and pushed us away.

We should have been heading back. All sorts of water was getting into the skiff. We were going to begin sinking soon. The water was so cold. If the skiff went in, we wouldn’t be able to swim to shore.

It was a real trouble of a time.

Phineas grabbed the anchor chain. He pulled himself up. He got all the way to the top. Then he was grabbing through the chain holes. He seemed to be stuck. He turned, and as he called down to me lights suddenly shone all around us.

Up on the chain, Phineas was confused. Suddenly, there was a light shining in his eyes. He let go and fell about thirty feet. He landed in the water.

The Coast Guard had been watching. They threw Phinneas a ring. He saw the thing and grabbed on. The Coast Guard picked us both up. The waves drove Christopher’s skiff about two feet under the water, but they still managed to attach a chain and tow the thing back in.

The sky was now black as pitch. Phineas was cold and wet. I wasn’t certain of what step to take next.

Phineas big-talked his way out of the entire conglomerate of people manning the Coast Guard that evening. We got off with a lot of thank-you’s instead of having to come back and make restitution for our wrongs.

What was worse was the long drive to return Phinneas to his room at Christopher’s home and then meeting the oldest son in the family standing there in his driveway. Phinneas spared the difficult transition points. In the end, I had to listen to Christopher tell Phinneas and I what took so long when, of course, he certainly wasn’t there for any of it, to begin with. That was too much for me to take lying down.

The next day, at lunch, I returned to the Yardarm Knot. I just had to get that ship going. I needed to see if she could start.

Luckily, the Coast Guard had taken care of the little boat so that Christopher’s skiff still worked. I brought her back out into the East Passage. The waves were calm now. I had hours of daylight. I figured I might as well try.

I skipped climbing up the anchor’s chain until I understood the fastest approach to enter the Yardarm Knot. For that, I circled the 330-foot vessel a few more times. The morning air was silent. Looking at her, nothing was terribly strange. She seemed dismal like a forgotten woman lying on the ground.

I spotted there was yet another line hanging next to the anchor’s chain. I found it easily in the daylight. With me, I brought a fifty-foot tweed line in a burlap bag, plus a kit for fishing from the Navy surplus store. Nothing else remained inside the skiff.

I used the anchor and the firmly attached support line to pull myself up the entire way. Finally, I climbed over the edge of the gateway on the side of the vessel. With Christopher’s good intentions in mind, I attached the skiff to the ship for safety’s sake. But when I left I quickly forgot about it. I was too desperate to find the engine room so I could somehow start the ship’s electrical systems. Next would be to pull her back into any port that could accommodate her.

Walking on the main deck can’t be described though the mental pictures now emblazon themselves into the fabric of my mind. Everywhere it felt dank, musty, and eerie, and there was a silence hard to describe. I felt no entry to the vessel was possible as if a strange barrier closed any entry and yet there was nothing blocking me that I could see. There were empty walkways I dared not walk through.

I felt at ease with nothing when, in reality, this was merely an abandoned vessel floating mindlessly in the Puget Sound.

At times, my limbs felt unusually light but such a weight bore down upon the nape of my neck and into my spine that I cannot hardly even talk about it today. It seemed to be the maddening vaporous claws of some ungodly force held me by throat. It came and left me as I walked, trying every door.

Ill to my stomach, I walked through it, like a fine mist. I can’t remember successfully using any doors or ports, but I know that I did touch their handles. I ran my hand along the detailed work of one entry way and then stepped away. Detached somehow from reality, this sailor could not abide time. My watch, nor the sky, felt relevant.

I fell asleep standing there upon the deck until the next day’s morning light must have appeared. It shined in my eye like the wink of Old Man Sea reflected upon the sunbeam that shone so brightly in my eye. By then, I was bundled in the big sailor’s coat I had been wearing. The autumn weather might have frozen my body’s systems up. But when I awoke, nestled inside a coat like a young boy, I felt a sensation like being warm. I felt as warm as Father Time’s arm draped across my shoulders.

I got up. I shook the dust from my eyes. I moved my shoulders, and I stomped my feet.

I was hungry, and so I planned to fish.

With resolve not to worry about the details of my fainting episode the day before, I strung out salmon eggs from the kit. I used the kit’s hooks, lines and sinker to catch any fish I could. Making a fire on the main deck may be inconsequential in this story but it did alert certain people to my being there, alone on the deck, at sea for another night. The time had passed quickly and I slept like a son in his mother’s coat another time.

On that second night, sometime before the sun would rise, I got up. I was still looking for the engine room. In my mind, it was an ancient trek, one that I made impossible for success by a trick of my own mind.

Still, yet, I searched around. I explored. I found the thing I was looking for. The Main Engine was covered in soot. Rust went everywhere, up the floorboards and high into the ceiling. I blazed a fury across the night, then, for I saw a man in the same dress as I.

I can’t tell you what I said to the person I found in the next morning’s light. I don’t remember it well. And, like a vision in a dream, he was gone even as I realized he could have been a goblin or a ghost. I only thought it was strange how I slept at night, on the ship’s deck, like someone had pulled over a mesh on my very soul.

As he wept in the morning light, again I fell into slumber. I remained asleep for one more full day.

On the third morning, that was when I found the generator and arrested my deteriorated mental state. It was a turn back to reality. The gear shaft, the pull of the weight of the energy from the energy, remained like kin to this sailor’s soul.

I got the electricity going, somehow. It would require one more day before the engine fully kicked in. All that time, I stayed on-board, ate fish from the ocean that I could catch and clean and cook with my own hands.

During this, a vapor had surrounded the entire ship. I came to envision this thing as a stranded soul from a long ago battle. It was almost a story he said to me. And I set my chin against my chest without remembering how or why I could pose that way, until I died.

He was once a man with children. His wife was his completely. Never once did she stray for their love was their gold. His children all still wonder where he dies every morning, because he takes them briefly through the wonder of his life and death, each time, but all in a single second which he can recall but they claim inside their minds that they cannot. It happens after the scare of the lonely night, when the sun is finally filling the dismal dark with its rays. The bullet shatters the brain from the misfired rifle of a friend who stood behind him, every day of his immortal life, ever since the day they both were killed during the war. Now, every morning, he tells his beloved children how he missed being in their lives. He could not make it back home for his fair burial, but rotted away like a champion inside a forgotten chamber.

As Chief Engineer, the movement of the engine comes with satisfaction each time. And as the machinery of the Yardarm Knot began to churn with life and future promise, I was strong enough to know that this man—this milky mind enshroudment whose thoughts rested across the vapor that was smokey and faint everywhere—this man was not the same as me.

We both pitied each other for he could not remember his name, and I could not be meaner to him by just ignoring my usual friendly disposition. I could not agree to help him if he could not state clearly his name. Truth be told, I could never help him without it being said clear enough to write upon a paper which I would have kept, for him, in my pocket until I found his bereaved and loving family to tell them all of what he had said. He only wished they understood what he could do and where he had been put, in the end.

Incredible how it all had happened.

The Yardarm Knot started okay, though, even after all that time.

The Coast Guard was watching. After three days, they traveled over to see me, and offered to bring the ship back to the safety of the harbor through the use of their tugboat system. They said they didn’t like how she had kept drifting, with me on board.

They admitted that, suddenly and like a crack of silent lightning, the electricity was roaring and the Yardarm Knot was lit. She was still functioning. They stood corrected. They wanted to hear the entire thing I said to you tonight. I couldn’t tell them anything strange. Tonight is the first time I have relayed what really happened there.

The boys talked about how they had also recovered Christopher’s boat, a second time. They managed to find it, again, and bring the thing back up. I hadn’t remembered to look out for it after I was on the ship.

This time, I had to pay to get my brother’s boat cleaned. I also had them put a new engine in it. After that, I was the greatest guy alive, in Christopher’s eyes, because I could have just let the thing go.

“Phinneas thought the worst, Declan, when no one knew what to do for these long three days.” Christopher told me in his parlor, with his wife steadily bringing us sarsaparilla and spaghetti as a late-day snack.

I told him squarely, “Never finish a grown man’s story, Christopher, else they can’t even tell you what to think when they are dead as the fish in the water.”

These are all the happenings concerning the Yardarm Knot that I care to relay in public.

I took a swig of whiskey. When I turned, the whole damn bar was watching. The room was silent. Hard for them to believe anyone could really become such an adventurer as me.

Chapter Eleven

her mother and the sea

This letter was sent in June of 2005…

Dear Floyd,

I am tackling the job my dad offered where I earn everything I need in 20 days. For now, I stay at my dad’s condo in Seattle.

I’m sorry I missed your call. It’s been a challenge. Seriously, Chief Engineer Declan Aidan Meade bought himself a one-bedroom and this place is gloomy. I sleep on the couch. He sleeps in his room. We fight over the one bathroom. I am more than ready to get back to my apartment in the valley. California dreaming…

The hidden fact is how I will be forced to leave California for good if I can’t begin to even pay my own rent. You haven’t met my new boyfriend, but he is lousy at paying anything.

Thank you for your interest in keeping score with my adventures. I am simply a merchant marine to-be. I know I will have a landslide story from all this work I am doing.

I stopped at the stationary store and I bought a leather writing-book. I am going to take it with me. I’m going to write in it every day.

Honesty is very important, I think. I am realistic when I tell you how I stand by the new work I now undertake. I will put together a story that I have actually lived myself and found out by going through it on my own.

We leave tomorrow, I’m told. I’m going to think about you every day. I mean that! Don’t forget me. This ship’s not safe, I don’t think. If we sink, no one will know. If we fall overboard, and if we don’t yell loud enough to be heard, no one will realize what happened until we don’t show up for our next meal.

For now, I mean to fix an already broken-hearted ship by standing by my much-distressed divorcé-parente because he calls on me. The Meades are dire people and yet they are honest people at the same time.

Your effervescent, nearly drowning, giddy actress-in-waiting,

Fiona

P.S. I’ll be back again in your limelight. I’m flying to LA after India. Talk soon!

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:

Hey, superstar. You can write a whole lot better than I can. This is what I put down last night. Appreciating the opportunity to creatively smooth things for myself. Love ya. Meade.

Stories about my time at sea. Written for Wonderful Fiona, my daughter (header).

Going to sea is no big deal. We had the Coast Guard’s approval. Sassy was free to depart at any time.

Ted Friday had the owners buy you a plane ticket. I drove out to SeaTac Airport to pick you up. We returned, and immediately you walked away for a tour of the ship from Baxter, instead of me.

“I know him!” you screeched.

You can’t realize the attack I felt from you by that one sentence. You sliced me to the core, Fiona. You and Baxter shook hands and smiled at one another like two people who grew up together.

Next you said, “Mom already knows Baxter. Dad, did you know? She introduced us last night on some phone call she arranged.”

You did it at your own insistence, daughter. You let me be alone. From there, I took charge on the assignment of living quarters. I put you across from me, up high in the ship’s superstructure, instead of down low, above the Engine Room where the rest of the unlicensed people would berth, but where no young woman in their right mind would ever venture in the dead of the night if it was left up to me.

Two days basically were consumed in filing paperwork. My daughter worked diligently every step of the way, right behind her dad. She got to know everyone on the ship from Captain White and the First Mate, on through Kingston Riggs, Baxter and our new friends, the Ukrainians.

On my way to lunch, my usually respectable daughter left me to get pizza with ten men instead of driving back to the condominium with her father who needed to pick up a laptop he had forgotten on the counter that morning.

Baxter was not as reliable once he had you around, Fiona. One day he was on time. The next day he threw some tool overboard because he said it was junk. Then I wound up telling him to pick it up or get us another one, and then I didn’t see him for the rest of the day. When he reappeared the following morning, he was back solely because he needed the work.

Now, he was suddenly your best friend and you all had to have pizza together. It was just more to deal with, that’s all. There is something you do to make things go that way for you, Fiona.

Baxter rushed by, “Chief, can we pick you up a few slices? Your wife said you take all the toppings.”

I ignored the question because I told him once, already, that I don’t like talking to him about Aoife, ever.

I walked back to my truck. I took out my keys along with some pocket change that fell on the ground. I cursed Aoife hurtfully, but it was all under my breath. No one heard the awful thing I said.

Suddenly, I heard Aoife tell me out-loud, “Hello, Meade.”

All of a sudden, Aoife was standing there with me there in the parking lot. Her suitcase was set upon the ground. A yellow cab was driving away. I could tell how she was ready to board. She eyed me like an eagle that suddenly found a soft spot.

“I knew something was missing on this ship. Turns out, it was…” She let the tension pull me to her. She brought out a bag of coffee from her handbag and concluded with, “…the chef!”

She laughed with a smile so big I knew she had already gotten deep into everyone’s affairs. She was just so happy about it. It was just like Aoife to bypass everything I had planned. And she talked the way you sometimes do, Fiona, where she had already pulled off the biggest heist ever made but no one else on the planet ever knew her name.

She had already called Ted Friday. She already had the owners working for her, over me. She was hired to prepare meals and wash dishes, just taking everything over I had already gotten going there. Aoife planned to run a makeshift kitchen on-board, for the entire trip.

I told Aoife I had figured each crew member would work his own meals out.

Aoife replied, “I am the steward, too. I make everyone make their bed, each morning.”

I brought a lot of adventure into Aoife’s life. She lived for it, too, though she never liked to say so, and she never gave me a proper thank-you. Probably, when I told her where we were voyaging to, and what we were going to receive in pay for the work, Aoife was sitting alone at home, feeling lonely, and looking for a way to get more income in. Everyone does it.

Aoife had an established system where she acted as go-between financial advisor for all our children’s income strategies. In the nest, and still requiring regular funding, were your younger brothers, Malcom and Ted. She never needed to go far to fund their travels or requirements, but sweet-talked everything they needed from me. I had paid, and I had paid, and I had paid happily for the family we built together.

To that very day when she surprised me in the Port of Tacoma dockyard, the shoes everybody needed to have brand-new continued to be this constant expense that I had consciously carried since the day the twins arrived. There we stood, years later. There was no war at all, but every year Aoife bought all five children another expensive pair of shoes, and I had to foot the bill.

In all these family needs, I didn’t at all mind being be the guy to come through for everybody. However, Aoife also liked to buy expensive things for her own happiness at any given time.

She stood before me. She was talking about going on-board Sassy right away. The way she talked, her ambition was only to get more cash on hand at the end of the voyage.

I smiled. I helped her go on-board. Inside my head and my heart, everything had reeled.

I felt dizzy with guilt because I had made the trip a possibility for Ted Friday. It was a reckless fling now, as far as I was concerned. There were a few people who could use more salt from the sea on their breath, but not my parallel-moving friend, my Aoife. Though we had been divorced for the third time some years priorly, my sense of alliance with her was never-ending. With Aoife, it was a turmoil inside my head and inside my heart, always.

I turned off a horror film with us sinking and all dying together because it came playing on the ten-cent movie theater in my head when I walked her around Sassy.

“Glad you can help us get things set up. Of course, you will get paid, but don’t give nobody no extra pressure. I mean that, Aoife. Ted Friday’s been reliable. Take this company card…” and I pulled my wallet from the inside pocket of my jacket, but Aoife showed me how she already had a card. Friday had the Captain go to the bank to get one directly for her.

How could I say how many weeks Aoife had been planning all this when no one ever told me?

I had to laugh when you walked around the corner with Baxter. You blew a fuse after you caught a first sight of Aoife. I promise you, Fiona, it was a big surprise on my end.

“What did you think of the pizza, Fiona?” I asked.

Baxter hid his head in his hands. He shook his head, standing behind you. You stared at Aoife and just gurgled.

“I’m sure she liked her food, Meade. Fiona, get a handcart ready for me. I’ll be back about four o’clock. I will need a big cart to unload your dad’s truck. Will you please be there when I return with some things?”

I noticed that you controlled yourself well and in a flash, I might add. Baxter ushered you up the gangplank. If I hadn’t seen the look on your face, walking alongside Baxter, but looking over your shoulder at your mother, I would have suspected you and Aoife had planned her ambush and never would have trusted you again, Fiona. You looked as dumbfounded as I felt. That made me feel somewhat better.

At night, we all crammed into my condo: Aoife and me, as well as you.

“Can we talk, dad? Outside—alone?” you asked me that night. We sat on one of the benches behind my condo. We were looking at the playground and the green grass that the building association spent a lot of time keeping up.

“I’m kind of disappointed, dad,” you said, and put your arm around my neck.

“Well, you don’t need to come along, you know.” I said it, and I could tell you didn’t like my answer. You stood and took a few steps, like you were practicing a dance, or something odd and screwy, like you sometimes do.

Finally, you said to me, “I was planning on this being the first time we could get to really know each other, you know? We haven’t really ever had time like this, together.”

But it’s not only you I think about, Fiona, and I told you that.

Prepping a kitchen is something your mom has had a knack for her entire life. She was getting to purchase food, and all the goods, plus the pots and pans to cook things in. In less than a day, she bought a new stove and a microwave and a collection of little cooking appliances. It’s things like that make life seem worth living for her. And now she had worked out how to make a living by doing it. She was expert at all the menu planning requirements. She loved it. Plus, we discovered this time around how much easier we could get along now that we were both older.

You pouted, and then asked me, “Are you going to have me work as an AB? Baxter said you may not even need me, but I prefer to work with you in the Engine Room.”

“I got to hand it to you, kid, you sure picked a bad time for a father and daughter get-together.”

You looked so let down.

I pointed out we were going to get to see more of each other than either of us could bear to take. You smiled, but your smile was in the dumps. You had tried to pull an emotional trip, but I couldn’t take it.

I said, “This ship is going to be real trouble, really fast, if everyone isn’t going to remain focused on it. Can you promise me to keep focused on the ship and our safety the entire time?”

I run the Engine Room on four-hour shifts, with four hours on and then four hours off, every day. I had three engineers on the job, between myself, Baxter and Kingston. I decided to ask Captain White for two extra people every shift, and I told you to be ready to be one of the extra people I needed.

“Thanks, Meade—Dad.”

There was a long silence.

You said something like, “Yes, I will remain focused,” which was the only thing I wanted to hear.

You stood, took my arm and we walked inside. Aoife had already made us cheeseburgers, and they were good. Next morning, she made a point of getting all of the beds ready before we left the place to head back down to the dockyards.

Aoife and I managed to stay humble with each other. We had been taking things really easy, between the two of us, for a while, now that she and I had developed our own personalities all on our own. It was enough to look one another in the eye without changing our personas one bit. If we could decide not to meddle with each other’s thought processes, too, we’d make it back without hurtling the other one into the ocean.

Things were feeling very “up” the next day. The three of us had coffee together. Seattle is just so beautiful in the summertime. I mean it. When we got to the docks, I looked around and took it all in, standing up on the Main Deck. You couldn’t ask for a nicer time of the year.

When I stepped onto the ship, I went up to The Bridge. The First Mate let me know Sassy’s intercom couldn’t be fixed without high cost. He handed me a receiver.

The First Mate said, “We each have telephone radios from the owners in order to avoid miscommunication between the bridge and the engine room...” Then a smile played on his lips. He said,”…and between the steward and everyone needing to make their beds.”

He thought I would laugh. I stayed silent. I told him I agreed that we would use the radios to talk to anybody on the ship.

I was going through the checklist one more time. The Coast Guard was scheduled to arrive shortly for a final see. Any remaining replacement parts I could get ordered for the Engine Room were finally at the dock. Captain White asked Dimitry to get every AB together so as to get the ship’s fresh parts loaded in.

“I really like working together, Dad.” You said.

You appeared wearing the coveralls Aoife had bought for all of us. You looked happy.

You said, “It’s cool this is finally happening. Can I help you?”

I was completely wrapped up in getting the checklist done, plus everything else. Aoife and I were going to meet in the kitchen, soon. I didn’t have time for a lecture, and I heard you went to see the First Mate in the event there was something for you to do on the bridge.

The customs official in Seattle had come on-board as soon as the Coast Guard authorized our departure. He noticed Baxter playing with his radio. He was taking the thing apart during his walk-through. It forced him to ask that Captain White have everyone there rounded up.

Standing in the middle of the tiny group headed to India, the customs official directed each one of us to get rid of the radios long before entering India’s water. In India people use these things inside of bombs, or even as a bomb. If you bring one on the mainland, they can send everyone on-board to jail. Some things you don’t mess around with.

As the day went on, I started to watch what I said. If Aoife was around, she repeated loudly as well as fifteen times anything I mentioned about the condition of the ship. And if she said something to my daughter, they both made a simple thing to be dealt with into the worst thing that could possibly happen inside the ship. So, I made a point of telling them, “You’re doing fine,” if they looked like they needed it. I felt better doing the extra thing to help Aoife and my daughter stay with the program.

Sassy’s officers walked through. We sped through the kitchen where Aoife was still organizing things. We went through every level, but when we were about to inspect the front hold where the fish processors were originally installed, the Coast Guard appeared. At the end of their once over, the Coast Guard gave new and finalized paperwork to the Captain.

“Good luck, folks,” was the final reprimand the U.S. Coast Guard gave us.

We were approved, but there was also this feeling of, “Okay, if you insist. We aren’t very likely going to save you outside of these waters.”

Everything was ready. Now that the ship was given a final okay, it was time to get the show on the road. It was close to the end of June, and we needed to leave. The Captain agreed it was a good time to split. First Mate Kelvar A. Hussein had a scheduled tug with her pilot coming aboard to take Sassy beyond their fiduciary lines. Things would get started within four to eight hours.

With minutes to spare, First Engineer Kingston Riggs, appeared at our gangway, with you, Fiona, helping him. I watched you each haul a big couch, plus an old armchair, out from a truck. You set each one down in the shaded part of the Main Deck. It would be the nicest place to catch some shade. He had them underneath the awning of the superstructure, beneath the bridge and everything else.

“I was throwing them away.” Kingston said to me when I inspected his maneuver.

Riggs sat himself down on the armchair. I sat across from him on the couch. The empty Main Deck stretched for a hundred yards. The smells in the harbor were terrible, but once we were underway things would be more controllable. I had a feeling that Kingston Riggs and I would end up talking for hours in that spot, moving across the Pacific Ocean.

Kingston Riggs was also divorced. We had that in common.

Baxter appeared. I hadn’t seen him alone all day. He usually was directing the ABs on some important tasks. But, he hadn’t returned my cell phone call to him the night before, and I wasn’t about to learn to text.

I wanted to talk to Baxter about the order of things, and I was worried I had lost his friendship.

“I’m back, Chief. We still good?” Baxter asked.

“That affirmative,” I said. Then I winked and said, “That’s Navy-talk for ‘yes.’”

“It’s been good pay working on this beast.” He sat for a minute. We all looked blankly at our own troubles with Sassy. No one said a word for a bit.

Baxter said, “Sorry that she can’t sink fast enough for the Coast Guard, though.”

Kingston Riggs snickered. I refrained for it would be just as heavy to walk around all day on post wearing a noose around my neck.

Washrooms and the quarters seemed to meet everybody’s approval.

Ted Friday had seen to the purchase of the essentials that each crew member needed, such as beds and blankets and towels. Anyone who had been assigned with purchasing duties had also taken into account our common areas by purchasing a few TVs and VCRs so that everybody could watch movies.

Aoife got to work rearranging a ton of mattresses which was part of her Steward detail.

I said, “Come tomorrow morning, I am sure everyone will have one.”

She replied, “Thanks.”

Aoife was marvelous in any role she assumed. She also took care of getting all the beds made.

The AB’s had one big room assigned down low above the engines. I had a bedroom and my own office on the main level of the superstructure. Everything in there was fine. My only daughter, Fiona, as well as Riggs and Baxter, each had their own room on my floor. The rooms were good and clean after a month of having the ship’s insides gone through. We had waited for the new window panes to be inserted before leaving, and that was a smart thing to do.

Any talk about ghosts on-board came across as very strange. To me, Sassy was feeling pretty empty. I wanted the people sailing this thing to know they were okay given Sassy’s peculiar history of carrying bodies home from the wars she had serviced.

I made sure Aoife had a room way high up in the ship’s housing, in the same place as the Captain and the First Mate.

Sassy, now being tugged, was headed to the air of the open ocean. She was steady enough, though light as a cork. There was nothing in the holds to give us any substantial weight. However, the big fish processers at the front of the ship meant we didn’t need to flood any of the holds as ballast.

I was on the Main Deck when we were finally leaving. Seattle looked beautiful before dusk.

“The major task before one and I, I guess,” spoke the Captain to everyone at the rail while Sassy was moving gently away from the Puget Sound, “is constant prayers and worship for perfect weather. I’m not sure how much bounce she’s really got.”

Baxter smiled at me.

He told everyone there, “No troubles. No troubles, everyone.”

Baxter and I walked down to the Engine Room together.

Soon, the tugboat joy had ended. We were on our own, with our bleak Engine Room coming to life, and people in charge of vital activities making sure to keep our vessel safe. We were set to travel eight knots all the way to India, and that really is not fast, at all.

The main engine that powered the vessel at that speed was a sight for a merchant marine. At the start, everyone in my Engine Room felt anxious. We took turns manning the thing, oiling and wiping, and watching every moment we could bare to. An hour stretched into two, then three and four. My watch finished and Kingston Riggs appeared. He took over from my duty requirements.

I was hungry. I had been looking forward to enjoying my first dinner from Aoife’s Mess Hall.

I walked into the Galley at eight sharp. That was the posted schedule. However, someone was missing. In the kitchen, I saw that no one had started cooking, other than two of the ABs from the Ukraine. They were making something with rice and beans on Aoife’s stovetop. Their dish looked regional but good. It only served enough to fill themselves.

“Should we make some more?” asked a very dark man whose name was Peter.

“Not on my account,” I said.

I turned around and walked back up for one more view of the land. I found Aoife up on deck. I had bought her a little electronic camera instead of the big one I paid for in New Jersey that used regular film. This was one she didn’t mind accidentally losing. Aoife was taking electronic photographs that she would next put onto her computer. She stayed outside for a long time. After maybe an hour, she walked by on her way to her berth.

“Any word on dinner?” I asked her.

She was about to respond. Then she pointed to you, at the top of the Bridge tower.

She said, “Go help her in case she falls. She’s your daughter.”

We were both looking to see you wave at us from there. Aoife added that she was headed up to her room and leaving the cooking to everybody on their first night.

She said, “It will be good for everyone on-board to find out where I put things in the kitchen.”

She was a little bit too abrupt. I put my coat around her. She shrugged me off. Aoife was playing things safe. Her little barriers telling her she was about to get yawned at, by me, had her using social graces nonstop. I hadn’t seen her nervous like this since we were young.

Then it hit me, suddenly. I realized she was downright scared. I could see thoughts go through her eyes, across her face. She wasn’t going to let me know anything, that was for sure. She walked inside.

I headed up to the kitchen. I made Spaghetti for everybody who was now waiting for food. Later, a larger bowl now had ten servings of the same dish. Turns out, the Ukrainian men were all tops in the cooking department.

I had hours before my next watch. I found Aoife in her cabin. She talked about watching the tug’s final push, and hearing the engines really kick in. She realized the sound of the engine was key to her own survival. She sounded fairly murky in her head because she was feeling low.

I was a little worried, too. Something was happening.

“It’s a lot more of a challenge than it looks from the shore, wouldn’t you say, Meade?”

I put my hand in the curve between her neck and her little shoulder. I was so glad she was with us. I felt calm again. And, I told her so.

“I’m glad I’m here, too, Meade. I have been dreaming about India. I want to smell the scent of her land. I’ve heard amazing things.”

She let me hang around her room for a while. Later, she told me she felt better with the ship finally on its way to India, rather than waiting for the entire job to be cancelled.

Aoife and I were at the beginning of another adventure. The possibility of our needless tragic deaths loomed. But, we both understood. We didn’t say anything further out loud to each other.

It felt like the first year we had come together as a couple. We needed to make it to the other shore. We were mutually excited about something in our immediate future. Everything felt like danger for both of us, back then, with our families coming together, and with all the work I ended up taking halfway around the world. No one really needed me, I came to find. But everyone came to rely on my work.

It felt like our good old days, that night. Aoife felt so real. I fell asleep happy by her side, one more time again.

Chapter Twelve

the pirates attacked

An email sent in June of 2005…

FLOYD:

Thanks for sending me an email this morning. You are sCARing me HOW CARING YOU CAN Be Because we are leaving to India in an hour And I need every word of friendship right now only to feel secure!

Yes, I think I love the girl inside me, too.

No one is bringing much of personal BELONGINGS .we will be going off the edge of the ship when we reach the FINAL destination. I have to bring things that won’t be ruined if they fall into the ocean.

You can probably guess how i feel giddy. TRUTH BE TOLD, I feel scared as well. It’s been looking grim. At least twice my dad said, “don’t touch that!” on the ship and then, “or it will break in two.”

Our ship’s little jaunt on the pacific should cover my rent for about six months.

I am moving up TO BECOMING A true merchant marine. Maybe it was my true calling the entire time. But inside, still, I really Hope this reality doesn’t become permanent.

There is necessity everywhere, and I’m the one who lives it. I feel my pain, and it is very serious (FOR ME alone).

book me into your schedule 21 days from today if you like.

I won’t have any way to email or call you for the first two weeks. We are supposed to get fuel in Singapore. Nothing on-line until Singapore.

We could sink and no one would even know!

Take care of yourself while I’m at sea.

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:

I keep writing this thing out. More for the movie here. I went on a roll. It’s a daily journal. Stop me any time. Hey, kiddo, write anything you want to add. I trust you. Love you. Meade.

Stories about my time at sea. Written for Wonderful Fiona, my daughter (header).

The Main Engine steadily bucked and turned. Black night was everywhere, now. The coastline had faded with the sun.

Only the safety and warmth of the ship meant anything. In moments it had become the single bearing to live by midst water surrounding everything in our sights. With every mile away from the coast, all our years inside our memories of the shore were wiping clean from the fabric of our minds.

In the middle of that first night on the ocean, I ended up cooking rations for everybody who was getting ready to start the next watch. It was spaghetti with hard-boiled eggs. I put out granola and leftover rice, on the side. Nobody complained (except for Fiona).

Fiona, you were jumping around. Every time you sat down to have some of the meal, you popped right back up. I didn’t notice until then that you were scared to be at sea.

Everybody was at work on four-hour watches. Each person handled three watches every day. If the cook was on the job, food would be set out in the last thirty minutes and first thirty minutes for every watch. That would mean every person could eat right before their watch, or right when they came off their watch. Also, three formal meals were served at 7:30am, 11:30am, and 7:30pm.

Two of the ABs entered the Galley. They were already awake as though it were the middle of the day. I put John Denver into the CD player. I turned it up. Everybody liked that.

All of the sailors who came from the Ukraine turned out to be singers. Each one could carry a tune whereas I couldn’t, even with a bucket in-hand. Every last one of them knew percussion. One of them had a guitar on-board. The rest all had a bell or a whistle or a tambourine. They liked to show off. It didn’t matter if it was seven at night or five in the morning.

I asked Erat, the leader, what the plan was when we all went over the side of the ship, in India.

“We will swim!” He said, laughing. Everyone there laughed, too. You laughed like it was the first time you heard a joke. I passed on making party friendships, at least on that first morning at sea. I needed to drink about a thermos and a half of coffee first.

On the third morning, I walked on the main deck. I carried my coffee in one hand and a schematic drawing of the engine in the other. Things were turning out to act up a little differently that we had predicted in there. I was tearing through everything, searching for a missing part I sensed needed to be found.

The air was dangerously calm. We continued along at about seven knots. I wanted to keep things going steady before we broke out the real gasoline expenditure and turned the thing up to do ten or twelve knots.

I needed to walk. I took a trip around the ship’s Main Deck. Baxter was off duty. I found him directly stern, at the end of the ship and dangled over the final bulwark of the vessel. I approached and spotted a fishing pole.

“Hey, there, Chief. How you doing?” He pulled himself back and stood when he saw me approaching him.

I rested my forearms on the bulwark. Took a sip of coffee. Looked at Baxter and asked him, “Had enough fishing for today?”

He had to laugh.

He said, “No. I’ve been out here about thirty minutes. Haven’t caught anything yet. Except for this one.”

There was a white bucket with a small fish at the bottom. It was already cut into little bits to use as bait. I looked at the cast line stretching backwards from Sassy. I told him, “Might be a tad too fast. Probably better at about five knots.”

“Oh. Well, I made it work this way before. On another ship. It was twice as big and fast as this.” He said.

We stood together for about thirty minutes. I didn’t have much to say. It was interesting watching the swells gather and pull apart. Before I strutted on my way, I told him, “Get some chicken from the crew stores. Chicken is more than highly effective.”

“Oh, thanks.” Baxter said.

A group of three Ukrainian men passed by me in the corridor. They were carrying their instruments. They held them high overhead with one arm and made like they were swimming through some water with the other.

Every time I put music on these guys were all having a good time. It didn’t matter if it was seven in the morning or seven in the evening. If they never had to ever work a day again, I imagine they would have been singing the entire time. They each told me that they love singing back in their country.

Pretty much any time one of them stopped to say anything to you, it turned out to be a big party. It was never just one person, on his own. They spoke Ukrainian all the time with each other, and they walked around the ship always in a group of two or more. It was nice having them with us. They were extremely efficient.

They let me know about plans to stay in the United States, “eventually.” Everything big, for them, was scheduled to happen at a later date. They all knew how to get themselves and their families permanently to the United States, but it wasn’t going to happen for a little while. They were going back home as soon as we made it to India, but there would be another job they would take before they departed. They were going to be a Ukrainian band eventually, but for now they were making money doing regular jobs just to help their families.

I caught up with you for lunch in the mess hall.

You spun around and asked, “What would it cost us to buy Sassy right now? We can turn this thing into a coffee shop, right? Just park it in the water and go all around Seattle. I could run everything for the twins and you.”

I finished getting my breakfast. We found a seat together. And then told you how the condition of the ship was terrible.

The ABs came into the mess area. They were singing. You looked directly at one of them. I still don’t know which one it turned out to be. I am guessing it might have been Erat, the shorter man. He seemed like a leader of the men.

“Dad, you should keep quiet with your evil comments about the height of men.” You told me that after I made some comment.

Captain White appeared in the mess during the live music show we were getting to watch for free. White made a motion to keep it down. Everyone was there, except for Baxter and Aoife who were sleeping and Kingston who was holding watch alone, for thirty minutes more, in the Engine Room.

White announced that Sassy had moved beyond the Pacific Coast Maritime Limit. He asked us to all gather together at the back of the vessel. Everybody there to eat followed the captain and headed outside into the sun.

He directed us stern, and I saw Baxter there again. He was wrapping up with his fishing apparatus. He was picking up the bucket. He had gotten no more fish at all. He was headed in to get some lunch but stood still when he noticed us all together walking his way.

White must have asked a few ABs to help him because suddenly three of the Ukrainian men appeared bearing a collection of firearms and ammunition. There were rifles, pistols and a semi-automatic. He brought them right out into the open. They had been stashed inside his private quarters.

White explained his theory. Our ship was no longer in US waters and therefore we were in danger. Turned out he was terrified of pirates.

Our captain was especially worried about us traveling through the Straits of Malacca. I had been through the Straits of Malacca a hundred times. Even today, there are pirates who like to attack ships. It’s true: it gets to you. However, I never encountered all that much to mention. On the other hand, I had not once ever traveled as light as we were that day.

White told everybody, “I plan to start daily training activities. They are scheduled for every afternoon, with today as the first experience. It’s for all our Able-Bodied Seamen to become capable of handling our fire power. Our resources are spare or nonexistent. We got to take care. We can be prepared for anything that could threaten us here, on open waterways. But we have to try. Never succumb.”

I was happy Aoife didn’t hear him say that. We all watched him load the guns, one by one.

You walked behind me, and stood close.

The First Mate didn’t say a word. His brow was folded over itself. His personality had changed the moment the guns were placed in the open. He watched the captain intently as he shared his plan. The First Mate’s eyeballs were following every movement. In the end, he didn’t complain. Neither did I.

Translations were needed. Ostop, one of the ABs, hustled down to all these men’s berth below. When he headed back stern, he carried a compact Ukrainian/English soft-backed dictionary. When they all understood, Erat relayed, in his mixed-up English, that they are always happy to do anything they are asked to do, so if the Captain needed them for anything, they would help him every time. Everyone he commanded nodded their assent.

I took your arm and we walked away.

“Don’t get it started with anyone, okay?” I said to you.

How I appreciated that you nodded. We walked towards the stairs. We were headed back to the Engine Room.

I said, “One argument says we needed this from the get-go. The other side would argue there are only a dozen people on board. There will be as many foreigners armed with guns as there are Americans. I admit I don’t know which one wins this.”

Old movies I had watched as a little kid came to mind. Pirates take no prisoners, and throw the extras overboard, then make off with the booty after spending time with any women there.

In reality, Captain White had spent his years as a fishing boat captain in Alaska. He had only heard rumors about real pirates who work the waters we were scheduled to be traveling through. It would be three weeks, rather than two, due to our slowish sort of speed.

A shot fired from the bridge. There they were: White was loading and firing away, and three of the Ukrainians were learning how to shoot.

Man, it must have been totally, ridiculously illegal.

Perhaps they could get at us for a violation of maritime courtesies. Then again, perhaps this was the way to go when we had launched ourselves across the blue without any true protection on-board. If we were suddenly ambushed, the guns were fair protection. Out-running an opposing craft seemed like a mistake.

I was doing the math in my head. We were traveling somewhere around ten knots now just to keep the engine from exploding. Now that I was watching her work day after day, I was taking every precaution in the book. As a result, this trip was going to take us about three months rather than three weeks, it seemed. I continued going over the numbers in my mind. If we made it to Alang Bay in a month and a half we would be doing great. I decided to go for that.

Within a few minutes, Aoife was up. She ambushed me in the Engine Room, and she publicly came down pretty hard on me for White’s doings upstairs with those guns. Albeit in private, she also strongly expressed concern. She had a lot to tell me. She had heard about every painful deal of White’s plan from Baxter after she distrusted “Meade’s wishy-washy” concerns.

Aoife wanted me to get the Captain to turn over his rifles and, “Lock them in a storage compartment.”

Next afternoon, I made a point of eating my chow with him. I pointed out the facts of how the ship wasn’t owned by an American anymore, and operation outside of U.S. territory left us without American resources. He informed me how anything could happen, and that he understood he must take it easy. We both concurred there was something so gigantic about sailing across the Pacific.

“It’s bound to make some people in the South Pacific antsy when they see us there,” I said. “Might want to alert every port official that we’re heading their way.”

“Meade, safety is everyone’s concern. My plan keeps me safe from everything out there, in the water. We can’t be left off-guard.”

I thought about a quick replay to Aoife’s complaints. Nothing came to mind.

Captain White looked straight at me.

With a wink he said, “Confounded Coast Guard! We could more likely sink in this heap of trouble than get attacked by anyone out there, and I know that.”

I looked away from him, then at the ground. I wouldn’t participate. King Triton was always listening for fools and crews whom he could prove right about their disdain for their own vessels.

I asked, “How about I sneak over to the Bridge and recommend to Hussein that he notify anyone and everyone how we are coming through their zone?”

Captain White nodded because of course that would help. So, that’s what I did next.

It was the constant shooting from the bridge, in the afternoon, that made our safety seem in question. No one would have paid attention if White hadn’t expressed that much concern. Aoife was getting hard to handle. She’d find me and give me a lot of pressure to stop the daily target practice.

White was always willing to listen to me, most of the time, if I played things cool. But no matter what I said, he wouldn’t even consider letting go of the daily shooting. It continued to aggravate Aoife who found me each day like clockwork.

Every day, I watched Captain White teach one, two or three men learn about shooting straight while at sea. Then, I would go into the kitchen and find Aoife there, a nervous wreck.

At that time, in shipping, only the Captain had internet. It was a standard thing, and an effort to protect the ship. Aoife demanded the Captain send out an email on her behalf, to clear things with the port officials in Seattle.

Aoife knew better than to attack anything rough from the front. Like any sailor, she knew to avoid a head-on attack that could take her down in one motion. Here’s what she did: Since Malcom and Ted were staying with her mother, she used this angle to allow her to type a single email home. In this, she had asked your grandmother about White’s strategy and his guns so that something would be done.

For Aoife, Captain White’s treason needed no new trial. She sent the email off and expected a helicopter airlift removal tactic to take place. She dreamed of the U.S. Marines bringing us a brand new captain to replace the failed one. Incidentally, this was something she had done to me, before, as well. It wasn’t guns, back then. Rather, it was a centralized discussion concerning toothpaste, the twins and leaving the toilet cover in an upright, standing position.

She didn’t think the Captain would dare interfere, but he sure did. When the response came in, she saw that he had deleted that part about the guns, as well as his high treason, from her email before he had allowed it out.

Until that happened, most of the pressure was on me. By the time the email was edited, word had gotten around.

“Your daughter agrees with me. She wrote a little script for me to use with Captain White.” Aoife said when we got to talking again about the trouble area.

Aoife openly protested his firing off of the guns which sounded to her “like loaded cannons going off in the middle of a symphony”.

White was kind of high-strung about the topic. This subject had become the mainstay of the first leg of our voyage.

The weather was so perfect I started to feel like I was on a movie set. Everyone should have stayed calm and read the books on-board, or watched some movies. The guns and Aoife’s troubles would have been the only thing going on whenever I emerged from the Engine Room if the boys from the Ukraine hadn’t been there with the instruments.

Four days in, Baxter caught me relaxing on Rigg’s sofa after. Baxter had just been relieved in the Engine Room by Riggs. Both of my engineers were doing a mighty fine job.

Baxter was antsy. He told me in detail trouble he saw coming to the Main Engine. We had both seen the same type of thing before. I told him to carry on. I had already alerted the First Mate.

“The ship rattles sometimes. We are so light.” Baxter said. He continued, “If we get hit by anything bad out here, we are going to die.”

I glared hard at the man.

I said, “Don’t ever tell me that this isn’t going to make it. That’s an order.”

Baxter was quiet. . It was blistering weather. He stood up. He was about to head over to his berth to get some sleep. He wanted something to cool him down from the cooler, but it was just a bunch of warm cans. He sat down. He eyed me. I was enjoying a good book.

“Chief, I can’t help but tell you. I’ve had a bad, bad dream every night. My wife and my boys need me. Help is getting further and further away. The more I hear about those islands we are going to pass through, the less I like this.”

I threw the book at him, hard. It knocked him the chest.

I took him by the arm and said, “I already gave the order. Now, get out of here.”

Baxter ran away. I continued to read the book. Then, an hour later, Baxter returned to the sofa. He was now in a light mood.

He said, “Oh, Chief, remember you had me carry in some boxes to the Captain’s Quarters back in Seattle. Captain White asked if they can go someplace else?”

I thought about it for a moment, trying to remember what he was talking about.

I said, “No. He had better keep them there. He’s probably never heard of it before, but there is a long tradition of giving drinks to port officials. Happens everywhere in these ports in the South Pacific and across Asia.”

I explained this overall theory to Baxter who seemed to understand. The next day, at the exact same time, I arrived to the sofa to relax. I found Baxter sleeping on the sofa. He started to stand up, to let me have the seat. When he moved, I began to get myself settled.

He said, “Remember how you said Captain White is carrying all the booze inside the Captain’s Quarters? Well, I asked him, ‘Where is the liquor?’ because I wanted to be funny with the man! He said it was only for safe-keeping. I watch him come and go, and he’s been in there drinking for about an hour, so far.”

By then, I had positioned myself for a nap. I opened one eye and started to respond. Then I remembered all the trouble he and Aoife liked to cause together. I closed both of my eyes.

“I’m sure drinking something is Captain’s Privilege up in Alaska, where the man comes from. Forget about it. And don’t talk about it, kid. Get some self-worth under your belt, for a change.”

Baxter stood there. He might have been thinking about what I said.

Baxter said, “This captain, he doesn’t really care one way or the other. He is drinking it all. I’m serious, Chief. He started drinking right when he I told him it was alcohol for all the port officials. He ended up dead drunk by the end of the day. I stopped over today. He had opened up a case of whiskey, a case of scotch, and a case of vodka. Maybe, he also had a case of gin lying open, too.”

Baxter might have informed Aoife of his intel so that, now, with guns going off, and despite nothing but sky-blue water and endless horizons, Aoife was dead-set White would land Sassy, plus all of us, at the bottom of the ocean. The last thing anyone on-board needed was Baxter and Aoife making everyone on-board skirmish as well as quarrelsome.

I said, “Kid, you got to keep some sort of a standard in your life. Here’s one now: shut your mouth, mind your own business, but walk pretty and talk loud. Something like that is how my own story goes.”

Every day, I spoke with the captain about the areas of concern. He started telling me he would jump off the top deck, if we all really felt he was doing such a poor job. That’s where the conversation tended to end.

“It’s too many bullets, up there. Wasting ammunition is

not a good deal, not at sea,” said Kingston Riggs, with his eyes closed and his head bobbing back and forth against the sofa with each roll of a wave. But the shooting wavered not at all, with the blasts going off every few minutes or so, for a full hour, every afternoon.

I solved these things the way I normally did: I worked.

I knew as soon as I said a single thing it would be the wrong thing, and then I would be the bad guy. I worked, also, because I knew these things had a tendency to go away if you stopped feeding them or stirring the pot. I was content that we were moving, that the weather was okay, and that we were making progress. If we could get through another day, eventually all the days of travel would add up perfectly, and we would reach our destination.

Routine can hold things together.

Aoife never calmed herself down. Despite her rancor, we were still enjoying coffee together every morning.

Aoife’s berthing was in the superstructure and located close to the Captain’s as well as the First Mate’s. As the cook, it made sense she was above the galley. Even though she wasn’t living in an isolated location on the ship, and even though she had a decent place, at night it was kind of like traveling in a ghost ship no matter what room you had.

Aoife was often afraid in her own room, alone. She liked to visit whenever I was watching a movie. Often, I would find her sitting in my room, reading, after I finished up in the Engine Room. Then we would talk about business ideas and things that needed to be delved into concerning our children’s anxieties.

The captain and I kept fairly close conversation about the vessel. We ate lunch every day together. After forwarding any remonstrations to him about the guns going off every afternoon, from my ex-wife, our conversations quickly turned to his shower. It didn’t drain out very well.

Sassy has been laid up, essentially, for decades. We were taking her to the junkyard. The one thing I could predict would not get fixed was White’s plumbing. Asking the owners to install windows so that everybody’s view from their rooms wasn’t blocked by cardboard or wood had taken weeks of a sales pitch by yours truly to Ted Friday.

Captain White never came fully to terms with the reality that whatever was not working today in the ship’s housing should have been fixed before we departed Seattle. Still, I wanted the guy to be happy. His room was at the highest point so it should have done fine.

“I want to know what the hell you are going to do to fix it, Meade!” He said, one morning.

I had to admit he was going to smell pretty bad later on in the day.

He rolled on with, “I’m standing in an inch of dirty water! Trying to clean myself up. This morning, I had it. I said, ‘No way!’ Meade, fix it. I’m not standing in muck again.”

I alerted him to the fact that I was the Chief Engineer. I didn’t have a lot for it, up my sleeve.

I asked, “What are you thinking of? Cut a hole in the hull, and find the pipe, and plunge it out? Spend three weeks working on something that is on its way to being thrown away?”

Captain White laughed at that.

As the days moved forward, the problems of the guns and the broken shower became a challenge to articulate. He was the Captain, and I was dutybound to keep him smiling. I suggested he choose another room. He gave me a silent answer. Things were decent in his quarters so, regardless of his shower, he didn’t want to move out to another room. Everything else was so rusted and empty. I couldn’t blame him for staying put.

I suggested something simple: “You could move into the Second Mate’s cabin. The shower is working fine in there.”

It was on the same deck as my own, right off the Main Deck. There was nothing but nothing of dozens of rooms available everywhere. Technically, any member of the crew could leave their old room and move to another, if they didn’t like it. Things were relaxed in the ship’s steward programs and permitted that sort of transfer.

“I consider abandoning the Captain’s Quarters extreme bad luck,” White told me, firmly.

Me, I was spending more and more time in the Engine Room. As I kept things together, it was starting to feel like a constant gamble in Sassy being at sea. More than once, I decided to radio in for a rescue, and then I changed my mind. Things stayed together, hour by hour. The Engine Room gang continued to demonstrate accord without engaging in unlucky conversation.

I chose to keep most of my concerns to myself. I was determined to see land again.

All of the shower problems were forgotten two weeks into the voyage. That’s when things turned. You came screaming into my room with Baxter, and Dimitry. It was 2am. I turned on the lights. You all looked so scared.

“What the hell!” I shouted.

“Captain has all the ABs out on the Main Deck except for Erat who is inside the Bridge!” Baxter said.

“They have the guns out! And the captain is screaming! He sees a pirate ship! No one else does!” You told me.

No one there could tell a thing about what the real problem was. It sounded like the Captain was firing blindly from the vessel, in the middle of the night, at an approaching ship.

I launched out of that bed. I hurried into the clothing laid out and ready for emergencies. I emerged onto the Main Deck.

It was black outside. We were still many days away from any land sightings or Singapore. If we had been crossing into the Philippine Sea, other vessels would be predicted to go by, but not out in these waters where it was rare to see anything.

In fact, the last I had checked this afternoon, we were sort of lost at sea in the middle of the gigantic Pacific Ocean. I remember thinking then, “This is where Fate finally lets me go.”

I came to find that our vessel had come across a glorified fishing boat. It looked like a Japanese yacht with all its lights turned off.

“What the hell!” I said and tore off to find White.

At night, a fishing boat way out here could easily have shut everything down for the night. 
People go to bed, and there is nothing to worry about when that occurs.

The big issue, I slowly learned from the Ukrainians who were all either at the side of the ship or helping in the Bridge, was that no one on board the other vessel had responded to Sassy’s radio signals.

Fiona, you said, “The First made has been repeatedly asking if they needed assistance. Bad day for us all, I guess.”

“Quit that sort of talk. All of you!” I responded.

To me, they hadn’t responded because they were sleeping, or didn’t know what to do. Possibly they didn’t understand English.

Our Captain came from Alaska. He didn’t know what he was seeing out there, in the water. Maybe the guy on the other ship’s watch fell asleep. Maybe he had walked off to take a leak.

Captain White spotted me walking towards him. He hurried over and said, somewhat slyly, “We’ve caught a smuggler. Now we reel him this way.”

“We didn’t catch anything, White.” I said to him.

I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, and didn’t try to decipher it. He had all the Ukrainians out of bed. I stood with armed deckhands on one side and the nervous Captain on the other.

White pulled me away, like we were conspiring and didn’t want anybody to hear. He explained that the First Mate was in the wheelhouse, bringing us up upon the yacht. The First Mate was screwing with the other vessel’s radio signal, and the Captain had watched him do it.

“How am I going to turn your guy off?” I yelled to him.

Suddenly, every light on the yacht went on. We heard voices shouting across the water.

The other vessel had gotten its engines going without missing a beat. They were maneuvering away. It was evident they were getting the hell out of there. Captain White started to yell to the Bridge and to everyone who could hear. He wanted Sassy to chase the yacht.

We were situated about six hundred yards away.

I crossed the bridge to talk to the First Mate. He was a good man, but he was brand-new, and fresh out of King’s Point. He looked scared. Scared people often will do foolish things under pressure.

I was ordering him with, “Stop pursuing the yacht,” but the First Mate only nodded. So, I sent Peter, one of our Able-Bodied Seamen, downstairs to tell Riggs to take the forward thrust out and reduce the vessel’s power down to the very minimum. Peter seemed to want to comply. Instead, he looked complacent with everything. Later, I was told it was you who relayed my order to the Engine Room.

The First Mate thought about complying to my wishes, but then he said, “No can do. Sorry, Meade. Captain’s orders only accepted through clear command channels first thing, tomorrow morning.”

The First Mate continued turning Sassy toward the other vessel. I hoped Riggs would listen to Peter’s relay of my command, but Peter wasn’t willing to do anything to help me.

Sassy might have appeared to come bearing down on the yacht from out of nowhere. They couldn’t possibly know what was going down. Probably appeared like we swam up from a ship graveyard with all the rust. The Captain wouldn’t stop shining this big spot-light on them.

“Man, I hope they don’t have guns! Can you tell if they have guns, Baxter? They better not be armed!” My only daughter said, loudly, so everyone could hear her terror. Later, I found out that was just when you returned from relaying my orders to Kingston Riggs in the Engine Room.

Baxter looked ready for the next football play but hadn’t a clue which way to run. He sped over to me.

He yelled, “Fiona tells me they probably have their own guns! What should I do, Chief? Should I radio something to Riggs downstairs?”

He offered his handheld radio to everyone. I took it.

“Riggs. Vessel to a complete stop. Over.”

Riggs voice responded seconds later, “Got that. Complete stop being executed now. Fiona relayed five minutes prior. Over.”

Inside the Bridge, the First Mate geared the ship up to pursue. But, in the end, no one in the Engine Room would listen, as Kingston Riggs was snoring but standing in place downstairs. When Dimitry was sent to get some reaction from him, Riggs didn’t mention much at all. Instead, he said he needed something standard, in writing, from the Chief Engineer before he could modify a delicate situation which, in fact, was taking place inside our Main Engine.

And so Sassy rested in place.

The other ship’s deckhands were really running. You could appreciate their agitation, across the distance. They hurried back and forth on their deck. In the black of the night, with only a strained spotlight shining on them in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, it looked like they had a ninety-million-dollar fishing yacht coming under fire by an old battleship renegade.

They didn’t have guns out. Most seafaring people do not. Most were terribly polite. This would be a terrific problem White was giving everyone on-board both ships. I easily foresaw both crafts pulling guns out and firing shots.

So, there we sat, barely floating along in the water: a relic from WW2, with decades of sea and tarnish upon the hull, just a three-hundred-and-thirty-eight-foot monster.

I tried again with White. I walked next to him. He was drunk, and I could smell it. He had been drinking who knows what case of whiskey—or what other liquor he had gotten into—but he was so far gone.

I stood really close and said, “Here’s what you got: Japanese in Philippine waters, Ukrainians on an American bottom, owned by India. You chase that guy, they’ll put us in jail somewhere, and we will never get out of it. Nobody deals with that anymore, here in the Pacific. Lock you up and they let it go away because they’re the politicians and who the hell are we?”

I was talking loudly so everyone around me listened. The Ukrainian men understood. At least, they seemed to resonate with the general sway of what I was getting at. Erat, their leader, smiled and patted the Captain on the forearm. In this way, he advised White to leave the yacht alone.

The First Mate, standing upon the bridge also finally agreed. Maybe it was you, Fiona, who got it through to him. I saw you up there, next to him.

You were yelling, “No, no, no! Hell no! We aren’t chasing them down!”

Seemed like everyone understood now, except for the Captain. He was still hot to get them and shouted to everyone there, “They’ve got to be smugglers!”

I yelled in response to his shout, “They’re in the ocean so that makes them smugglers? How about a fishing boat?”

A little flag went up in his eyes. It was all I could ask for, and I thought to myself, “Well, damn.”

The Pacific Ocean is about twenty-seven zillion, million square-miles. There was going to be another ship bound to show up out here. Didn’t mean it was going to be smugglers or pirates.

Aoife was standing in the housing doorway when I headed back to my room. She followed me back to my bed. I could tell she was upset while she watched things play out on the deck though she would never admit it, and I didn’t say anything. She put her arm up around my waist.

I turned for one last look. Man, that fishing boat was moving out of there so fast. They were really hauling. I was grateful when it had disappeared.

White was standing upon the Main Deck. The First Mate told me he would get the Captain onto something else instead of staying up all night. I asked Baxter to hand me his radio one more time. I let Riggs know we had better go, and so we did.

“Dad, can you tell Baxter to clear his head, like you do me, sometimes?” You asked me with Baxter standing next to you.

“I’m fine, Fiona.” He said. Baxter was in no hurry to confess his sudden sadness that he had failed to act like a ready sailor during the last heated hour we all had endured.

You told him, “Well, at least let’s walk around the Main Deck. We can go up and down the Superstructure a few times. The exercise will help with our agitation.”

Fiona, I watched you put your arm around his waist and lead him away. It was a little misleading, my dear.

I invited Aoife to stay in my room, so she could get some sleep, and so she wouldn’t be scared. It was a good idea so she agreed. We talked about owning a ship like this, one day, and what it would take to keep ourselves safe. Some vessel like Sassy could have been our perfect dream job together.

When the morning came, as things got started, I noticed the entire crew suddenly had their heads on straight. Things had become calmer, it seemed.

I found Baxter leaning against the railing, once again, at the back of the vessel. This time, you were standing there, too. You looked surprised when I approached.

Three of the Ukrainian men had found a long-line fishing system inside a storage compartment. It was just a single line with hooks on it every two feet or so and a big buoy at the end. The line had to be a mile long. The buoy had been put to the side. Baxter suggested using chicken while I stood off to the side, complacently watching.

They might have gone through five chickens from crew stores baiting about half a mile of hooks on the line. They got tired of watching it smack itself on the sides of the vessel where they had it draped while little pieces of chicken fell off into the water. They threw the buoy overboard. It took about five minutes for the line to stretch out behind us.

I saw the First Mate. Then, I walked down to the Engine Room and asked Riggs to slow to five knots or thereabouts, for about an hour. It was the only time we needed to go slow for the fishermen in our crew because as soon as they figured out how to pull the longline back in, it was clear they were going to have about five hundred fish from it. It was all Mahimahi or small tuna.

Everyone wanted fresh fish. The men got busy with cleaning them. Fish was either cooked up on the spot or frozen by Aoife for the weeks to come. Aoife was more than a little distressed with the loss of chicken from her menu planning. But, in return, she was duly amazed by the catch of fresh fish.

That first day after the scare by Captain White chasing the fishing yacht, when the afternoon’s scheduled shooting class arrived, Captain White wasn’t around. Close to dinner, he appeared from his cabin. He watched men walking back and forth carrying fish off the long-line.

Captain White wanted something to do. He took the next fish off the line out of Baxter’s hands. He brought it to Aoife in the kitchen who prepared the thing to his tastes.

At the end of the day, everyone could tell that Gun School was now finished. Everyone had either walked off from it, or they had graduated already last night.

Chapter Thirteen

there was poetry at sea

Here you go, Kid. More of the finished work for the movie. Change it around in its final draft. It’s raw. Love, Meade (Dad)

Stories about my time at sea. Written for Wonderful Fiona, my daughter (header).

The days have become enchanting on this passage, I said to myself.

It was the early morning. Not a sound was heard other than the ship and the water. I was as far from land as I could be. The space of the ocean and the sky beckoned me. On a spiritual plain, there was satisfied existence here at sea.

Whenever we finally would reach Sassy‘s final resting place, she would be driven onto the shore during high tide as a predetermined wreck whose owners had fallen short of saving her from the disembowelment.

Day by day, the travelers moved closer to the ship’s final outcome. It was steady progress across the Pacific Ocean, at a speed of eight to ten knots, and twelve knots at the most.

The engine would not take extra heat. I decided to play things light. Keeping the speed low was one way to do it. Two weeks to Singapore was about to become three or four. Thankfully, we were each starting to enjoy our daily dishes with fresh fish as the centerpiece. Dimitry and Erat were often found in the kitchen. They were bringing ethnic cooking into the bellies of the crew while Aoife helped.

Our waters had been fairly calm. I was thankful for it.

Anything abrupt in temperature could have ended the tin she carried along in. The weather was hot enough when we started the adventure. As the ship moved south, the seasons started to change. By the time we were west and south of Hawaii, the weather became slightly cooler at night. As we moved across July, we still experienced only mild conditions at sea.

Normally, ships that are headed from Seattle to India travel upon the northward route, up and along through the Unimak Pass in Alaska’s territory. That direction can often save time and fuel. It was almost always considered a better route than drawing a line from Seattle to Singapore, which is essentially the route I had the ship going on.

Thing was, it was always rough in Alaska’s waters, no matter what you thought it was going to be. We needed smooth sailing above anything else. There was bad water up north, in general. It grew worse the later the season progressed.

Up north, as well, it was going to be far cooler at night. I had decided to skip that when I heard about a difficulty Sassy‘s kind had experienced up in cold weather before. There was some manufacturing technicality experienced in the hulls under cold weather due to the ship’s metal.

With Aoife on board, and with the condition of the vessel, traveling south and much closer to the Equator might have added up to a week’s time. Technically, the ship’s route wasn’t a decision I had the authority to make. Captain White held all powers of command and, ultimately, oversaw charting our passage across the ocean.

“We ought to go south, around the Equator. It’s getting to be wintertime. I’m not messing around with that,” I shot at him, the day we headed away from Seattle.

Captain White listened, nodded, and didn’t seem to care, at all. The ship was a piece of crap, anyhow. White had run vessels through Alaska for years. He knew it wasn’t a good way for Sassy to go. To solidify the decision, the more we had waited for the Coast Guard’s approval to leave, the later it had gotten in the year. We would have had a hard time, at that point, to travel north.

The First Mate overheard everything. He took it all in. He worked with Peter, the Ukrainian who sat in the control room with him, to plot a slow ride. The First Mate and Peter put together something that would head directly down into warmer waters south of us and then shoot the thing out westward to Singapore. So, I showed him a line I had drawn on a map. It was something I had picked up at some army surplus store in Seattle. I would keep that map next to me in the Engine Room. They made a modification on their plans, and that was the end of that. It had been a nice time each day with both the weather and the water.

One day, we had the best tuna salad I ever ate for lunch. Captain White invited Aoife and I both to dine with him. She had to admit the salad was made by our friends from the Ukraine.

Aoife got to talking about fishing up in Alaska which is White’s strong suit. Somehow, this brought about her detailed questioning concerning the ship’s current passage. White let it slip that he felt pressured by me ever since I called him to take this work at sea. For him, the choice of the route was yet another trial.

Aoife commiserated. She made a big to-do.

She said, “Meade, that’s all the proof I have. You were overbearing for me, for a long time. You treat the men in our family like idiots, too.”

Under the skipper’s hat, Captain White’s eyebrows arched up just like a cartoon. Aoife simply smiled at me, across the table. I was drumming something up. Instead, Aoife beat me to the punch.

She said, “The Captain should have decided the ship’s route, instead of your decision overshadowing the matter. That’s everything that needed to be said. Now, I’ll be quiet.”

Captain White’s shoulders heaved. I thought he might be having heart trouble. He looked up from his chow. He was grinning ear-to-ear.

She said flatly at the meal, “You’re too efficient. Overshadowing is a good word to use. I wish you would be happier with me and the kids, at times. It’s easier for us to take, then.”

Aoife rolled on about how I might have pressured Captain White into a route that was going to take a lot more time but left to his own creations, the passage might have been, “…well, different. And more adjusted for the Captain’s inner self.”

Captain White interrupted that. He assured her it was the best choice, and he was thankful for my input. He tried to stop the smile spread across his face. He didn’t make it quite yet then.

She said “It’s a matter of discipline. Captain White, this is sensible conversation, right? Meade, maybe give the other person a minute or two to make up his own mind?”

Captain White sighed. I was betting he would probably laugh in a few minutes if someone didn’t say something to cut Aoife off.

I said, “Waiting until the second after when we left the harbor was doing all right.”

Aoife said, “I don’t think anyone should be pushed by you, Meade.”

Captain White was still smiling and he said, “Everyone knew it would be a longer ride, right from the beginning. We are all content with it, Meade. You put together everything nicely for us.”

It sounded like White was taking hors d’oeuvres Aoife was serving everyone at some garden party. I felt like a person she had accidentally bumped into, again.

Aoife talked about everything she could think of, just to keep the conversation alive. Listening to her chit-chat about cutting straight across the Pacific and the Unimak Pass was ridiculous. White and I watched her going through this. It felt like grating gears inside my head.

Captain White seemed to have a need to leave, but he stayed there. He commiserated with Aoife until she went silent. I turned my chin to the table, continued to eat.

I said, “That guy from the Ukraine turned out to be the best chef in the world.”

There was no visible evidence of Aoife having heard me. The three of us sat silent. The table was now emotionless.

It was hard to believe I was being looked down upon. I looked at their faces. They were both eating the best tuna the ocean had to offer plus fish cakes Aoife had patted together the night before. Everyone was being paid for the entire ordeal. The water was beautiful every day. Didn’t seem like a bad deal now, for anyone.

I was in a situation where I couldn’t come down too hard on either the captain or Aoife, seeing as how it was indeed a Captain’s role to plan the ship’s course. In a similar way, Aoife has assumed a role of domination towards me. I felt betrayed by her letting me die socially in front of Captain White.

Neither were looking at me, sitting there on the other side of the table across from them. I concentrated on food. Next, Baxter walked in. He stopped at the table and gave Aoife a playful wink, then walked over to grab a coffee.

Since that fiasco with the yacht, it had been a straight week without any guns fired off from the Bridge, and without any other sightings of ships. It had become almost like a pleasant time.

Kingston Riggs and I worked well together. We had become a mighty team. You were a close second to that, Fiona. We were all followed by Baxter. He was just as efficient as Riggs, but he was bringing me down. I had a hard time seeing eye to eye with him anymore. I’m a sensitive guy when it comes to bad luck upon the ocean’s tides.

Baxter said, “Hey, there, Chief. What do you say you and I go down to Hold A and check her out? See if there’s any trouble? No one’s done that yet the entire time. I asked everybody. You and I are the only people and that was on, like, the first day back in Seattle.”

Baxter had food in one hand and, for some reason, he started balancing a pencil on the end of his tongue.

I said to him, “Get Fiona from the Engine Room for that. She’s not very busy down there.”

He slid to a stop next to me. He was trying out a pair of new rubber boots Aoife had generously surprised everyone on board with at dinner the night before.

“They work! Thanks goodness!” He said with a big laugh.

Aoife gave Baxter a friendly pat on his head when he leaned in for a hug. Plus, the hug got given, too.

About fifteen minutes after that, Baxter returned. He was running. Aoife showered him with questions. He was white as a sheet of paper. He complained about her being nosy.

“Get off me, woman. I mean, I’m married. Don’t touch me.” That’s what Baxter said. Then he walked away. Over one shoulder he said, “Tell your damn daughter to calm me down if she wants to know what it feels like.”

I put my arm around Aoife’s waist to stop any movement. I put my face to her ear and spoke. “Babe, you’re my style. Let’s beat it.”

The thing is, Aoife doesn’t take time to see who is short-changing themselves. When everyone is left alone at sea, the ride can be mighty silent. No one needed a mother hen.

Later on, I headed to the Engine Room. Baxter was sitting outside. He was wiping sweat from his forehead.

“Chief…” he began.

I kind of knew what was coming next, but I stood by his side.

Finally, he said, “There’s a ghost in the ship. He’s an old navy man. He wants to know why I didn’t like him. I told him he had the wrong guy. Then he sort of came at me… And Fiona was gone. I thought she was dead. Thought he ate your daughter, Chief. But she’s right inside.”

He pointed ahead to the Engine Room. I took a quick peek. You were there, seated close to Kingston Riggs. Your head was bent over your work.

I said, “Buckle down on your work, son. Better keep that to yourself, too. I don’t have any business with ghosts. Glad you told me, though!”

I let him feel strong about the connection he had with me. But I don’t waste time with ghosts, ever. I walked into the Engine Room.

“You’re over in an hour, Fiona.” I told you

You looked a little ghost-stricken yourself. You were white. You assured me it was nothing so I headed up the stairs.

Hours later, at dinner time, all of our good men from the Ukraine made the ship feel like some sort of Disneyland. They sang. They danced. They were laughing. They picked each of us Americans to stand up and dance with them.

The Ukrainians liked every American song I ever played for them on my machine. They spent a little while figuring each one out. Then, they played the same tune themselves on their own instruments. They were pretty good. I liked the rendition of Bee Gees the best.

In the middle of all that, you meandered in, picked up some chow, and sat by yourself. At times, you closed your eyes and sat still. You almost looked ill. Eventually, you got a distant look in your eyes, and headed out to either your berth or back to the Engine Room where Baxter was holding watch.

I didn’t get a chance to talk to you again that night, however.

I headed into the kitchen to chat with Aoife who was just about to keep cooking dinner for everyone. She had been distracted by the Ukrainians when they wanted to sing something for her a few minutes earlier. Two of them began showing her a special dish.

Aoife called over to me while I was staying out of everyone’s way.

She said, “I have a bad feeling Fiona is drowning. Can you please check on her?”

Right there, I found Fiona through a radio connection. She was totally fine. She complained of a terrible headache and was catching a few hours of sleep until morning.

Later, I caught sight of a strange sight of Baxter hung over Captain White. Looked like they had been drinking together. Baxter told me something and patted the captain’s arm. I never heard a single word. Captain White meant to brush him off. When they shook off the buzz, Baxter stood up and hung his head.

I followed him to the edge of the craft. He mopped his brow. I acted like nothing had happened.

“Kid, aren’t you supposed to be on duty in the Engine Room?”

He couldn’t speak. He mumbled something. I patted his shoulder, like I had tried to do the first time he and I met, back when he was taking Sanitary instead of doing his job.

I said, “Okay. I’ll talk to Fiona, first. Meet you there.”

I walked to the corridor, headed over to Fiona’s room. Baxter appeared behind me just as I was ready to knock.

Baxter said, “You’re kind of a mean man, Chief. Didn’t know your daughter had anything to do with your bad attitude towards me.”

By now, Baxter knew me well enough to say the type of thing that gets to me, every time. I had been pulling his chain when I said I’d bring Fiona into it, and now the kid was trying to pull mine.

I told him, “This is between us. Leave my daughter’s sweet and good reputation out of this.”

He yelled, “Thank you!”

Captain White had been lurking. He walked up to us.

White said, “You know, Chief, you’ve got two competent people in The Engine Room. I sent them there. The place was empty.”

I went down to see. Captain White and Baxter trailed behind. I found Riggs seated squarely in his proper seat. But his back was up against a wall. Turned out, Riggs might have been taking a nap and a long break on his easy chair when Captain White checked in. He couldn’t quite remember.

Riggs said, “Fiona is crapping out on us completely, Chief. She’s gotten into the ghost-chasing thing, behind Baxter’s back, I guess. And he has been up at arms. Wants everyone to stay out of his way. I told them both they had better get this quit fast.”

Baxter went mute. He stared at everyone there.

Captain White said, “There is indeed a ghost! We all chatted for a while, last night, down below, he and Baxter and me.”

“I bet.” I told him. Then I said to both of them, standing in the passageway, “I don’t deal in ghosts. Just say ‘get lost’. Don’t feed them anything.”

Captain Stanley White wasn’t about to respond. As if in a dream, everyone walked away. The next morning, things were serene upon the ocean and in the sky.

Captain White wasn’t completely off about smugglers and pirates because when I headed back down to the Engine Room, I happened to look out at the water. Two bona fide pirates were approaching starboard. They pulled up alongside in a racket of a ship. We might have been closer to the Marshall Islands than I had thought we were.

I flew into the Mess Hall.

The First Mate and two of our men from the Ukraine were talking all together while they drank coffee. As a complete surprise, Aoife ran in. She was real excited. She had seen them, too, from her berth. Aoife told everyone to look out a porthole.

Aoife said, “Look! The pirates!”

It was sort of like a big relief for everybody to finally see some even though the guys in their pathetic ship looked fairly malnourished. There was a line hanging off Sassy. One had his eye on it. He had gotten himself a knife. He was standing up on the bow. I could tell he was ready to cut it. He was figuring out how to reach up and grab hold of it.

Everyone ran outside onto the Main Deck. Captain White joined in the parade, and so did many of the ABs. They were all running to see the real pirates.

Aoife was now the closest to the edge of the ship. She caught the man’s eye while he was studying our ship. Then, both of the pirates’ heads turned. You never seen anything like that.

Aoife had them both absorbed at about a hundred yards. Man, it’s crazy how the woman can do her thing.

Aoife waved. She smiled.

The Ukrainians looked closely at what she was doing. I got a creepy feeling, but then the Ukrainians all followed her example. Everybody smiled and waved at the men in their craft next to ours. Next, the pirates were getting out of there as fast as they could.

Everyone had witnessed it: Aoife had saved the ship. And, it was pure Aoife—her genuine and friendly countenance—and no guns were needed.

My sailor’s sense told me this interplay was the reason she was on this passage.

I watched her laughing to Captain White’s comments. He was proud. He didn’t mind getting her recognized by a little applause from him. I didn’t take it very well, not here at sea, where it was just the three of us.

Perhaps, now everyone there understood the depths I have been dealing with in my life whenever it comes to Aoife. She is pure devil and the queen mixed all together, just like a hungry father might foretell.

There are a lot milder pirate actions that happen around the globe. It’s not often like the movies where’s he got a saber in his teeth and a plan. They take a line and throw it over the side, like the people in the speedboat had been trying to do. Lines are worth a lot of money, and it’s two minutes of work.

Pirates are often some young kid who has gotten to become something like a rat. You corner him, and he’s going to do what he’s got to do. It’s more poverty than bad intentions all around the world. These guys are all treated like garbage. Do you think they’re going to treat you like a king? They don’t even know where their next meal is coming from. The trick is not to get into that situation in the first place.

White spoke first.

He said, “Going away from the regular route isn’t a wise move. Better to stay where Americans are traveling, who see you, and notice if you have disappeared.”

Everyone listened.

He continued, “I don’t want to have any more trouble with those folk.”

I was thinking all of these things, already. Now, Aoife was by my side, and she took my hand. I pulled it back because it felt that she was trying to help the captain, again. She had to be reading my thoughts on my face, or maybe inside my eyes.

Aoife sees things I’m thinking, sometimes. She’s always piecing things together. She has strong perceptions about my mannerisms, but doesn’t always say what her perceptions mean to her.

I shrugged these things away. I headed back down to the Engine Room.

All day long, the men from the Ukraine were laughing about Aoife and how she saved Sassy from harm’s way. They mimicked expressions on both pirates’ faces. It was like a little show, and they did this about five million times for the rest of the time we were all together on-board Sassy.

If Aoife was serving chow, they would line up and wave and smile alongside her. They loved doing that. They had a lot of ambitions, and they made a big deal about how Aoife’s beautiful smile was going to end the next war. The whole adventure was an ongoing work of art, so far as the crew’s Ukrainians were concerned.

I had to laugh without stopping myself from doing it. They were happy people, even though I myself was not happy with Aoife being on-board. It was starting to feel promiscuous with all the men laughing with her this way. I shook my head.

Then the next day, I came downstairs to relieve Riggs. I saw you staring intensely at your work.

I said, “Fiona, lighten up. You look like you need a break.”

Your eyes were as big as plates during your watch. You hung your head. You wiped a spot on your face where tears might be. You gave me a hug.

You were crying when you said, “Dad, I wish I had saved the ship. Mom always ends up doing the important things. If she wasn’t here with us, it could have been me. People also like me a lot too! I’m going to be thirty in a few years. Whenever mom is around me, no one realizes I exist. I’d like to grow up now, in your eyes. Even you see me just as Aoife’s daughter. It’s terrible.”

I had to treat you just like I would any sailor lest I risk both our lives.

I said, “Stupid viewpoint. You can get us all killed thinking that way. Safety is the only priority. Remember that, kid.”

I gave you a hug. I wished you luck. Then you headed out to get some sleep.

The next evening, at dinner, you grabbed the spotlight from “Team Ukraine,” which was the name you had gifted their nightly entertainment with.

You walked up on the little stage they had put together, and I want to thank you for doing it. That was the night I felt okay about Aoife’s friendship again, because you are like her, and when a lot of light is playing on your face you look like her a lot.

Life is really magic! Plus, children are amazing.

I watched you walk on the stage, and I thought about your pretty mother, seated a few seats away. Then, I realized that she was deliberately seated much closer to the Captain’s seat than she was to me. She should have walked over on her own and taken a seat next to me. Still, she looked sweet when she was kind enough to smile my way.

You said, “You think our showboat only gives Ukrainian productions… so, I am here to present a new spectacle you haven’t seen in years!”

It was too much showmanship, but it was the right thing for most of the people there that night.

We were chugging along, getting closer and closer to Singapore every day. There had been rain in the sky all afternoon. We were approaching land in the coming few days. The little ship was still all alone at sea. At times, I was just a breath away from my eternity.

The ocean outside was calm. A thick mantle of clouds was overhead, though it never seemed to rain. We traveled through skyless waters that evening.

From the stage, Fiona announced to one and all, “In my family, we break through awful social graces. In our place, anyone can fall, or die, but only so long as it is carefully and prettily done! We come alive! We die! We break away from every convention landlubbers adore. We do this by our use of… long, awful poetry!”

Everyone groaned.

“I thought you was going to sing us something pretty, Fiona!” shouted Peter.

You went on with, “My great-great-great-great grandpa started the tradition, in the south of Ireland, and it passed through the entire island. As a young, wee girl, I was told with complete sincerity from very trusted people how we saved the entire country of Ireland using… long, awful poetry!”

Aoife stood up and said to everyone in the room, “This is not my thing. I’m going up to my cabin.” Aoife walked out of the room like it didn’t matter. I didn’t throw in that Aoife has seen this show a few times play out in her own home.

Your eyes looked down for a minute. Right away, I understood what you meant earlier that day, when you were crying in the Engine Room. You like to take your time studying things. Then you lifted your face. Your eyes were bright. A smile stretched across your face. You went straight ahead with your performance style.

At that moment, Fiona, you flirted with every man in the room. I’m only saying this to improve matters for you, in the long run. It had to do with the way you struck your next pose. Don’t feel down. In all, the show went marvelous, honey, so it’s nothing to get worried over. It’s a matter of grace. That’s what your mother didn’t take to, I think. It’s probably why she said she had to go.

You continued. Everyone’s attention was held in the palm of your hand. You went on about this and that, and next you said to us all, “My family’s beautiful craft was been passed to my grand-father, and to his son, and to my dear, old dad, the ship’s delightful chief engineer, Declan Aidan Meade. He is sitting there!”

The man holding the spotlight shone it in my eyes. I held a hand up to block the glare.

You continued on with, “Yes, this fine example of humanity has taught my brothers and myself the craft! Also, we learned the plights and sorrows of the stage’s insightful ruse! And, we use it long! And we use it tall! Or fat and short, we stand here… to spew out long, terrible poetry! And… we get all our drinks for free!”

Everybody laughed.

“Where’s the booze!” Cried Kingston Riggs, and the Captain looked perplexed.

“Drum roll, please.”

Nine sets of hands were little drummers on the Mess Hall’s tables, just for your enjoyment.

You said, “I present to you: ‘The Cremation of Sam McGee’ By Robert W. Service.”

You knew it was always one of my favorite pieces by Service. My own dad used to tell Service’s poems to me, frontways and back, when I was young.

Daughter, that night I was impressed. You gave your heart to it, and it looked just as dynamic as how I taught you and my boys to do it. You were animated with bits of flair appearing here and there, just like your good, old dad’s showmanship.

You took a place that seemed like it was the only one that mattered upon the make-shift stage inside the weathered vessel’s Mess Hall. During your show, your stage was the only place that mattered.

You recited the entire thing without a mistake. You flourished your hands. You mimicked the old-fashioned speech with care all along your tiny show:

There are strange things done in the midnight sun

      By the men who moil for gold;

The Arctic trails have their secret tales

      That would make your blood run cold;

The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,

      But the queerest they ever did see

Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge

      I cremated Sam McGee.

Now Sam McGee was from Tennessee,

where the cotton blooms and blows.

Why he left his home in the South

to roam 'round the Pole, God only knows.

He was always cold, but the land of gold

seemed to hold him like a spell;

Though he'd often say in his homely way

that "he'd sooner live in hell."

On a Christmas Day we were mushing our way

over the Dawson trail.

Talk of your cold! through the parka's fold

it stabbed like a driven nail.

If our eyes we'd close, then the lashes froze

till sometimes we couldn't see;

It wasn't much fun, but the only one to whimper

was Sam McGee.

And that very night, as we lay packed tight

in our robes beneath the snow,

And the dogs were fed, and the stars o'erhead

were dancing heel and toe,

He turned to me, and "Cap," says he, "I'll cash

in this trip, I guess;

And if I do, I'm asking that you

won't refuse my last request."

Well, he seemed so low that I couldn't say no;

then he says with a sort of moan:

"It's the cursèd cold, and it's got right hold

till I'm chilled clean through to the bone.

Yet 'tain't being dead—it's my awful dread

of the icy grave that pains;

So I want you to swear that, foul or fair,

you'll cremate my last remains."

A pal's last need is a thing to heed,

so I swore I would not fail;

And we started on at the streak of dawn; but God!

he looked ghastly pale.

He crouched on the sleigh, and he raved all day

of his home in Tennessee;

And before nightfall a corpse

was all that was left of Sam McGee.

There wasn't a breath in that land of death,

and I hurried, horror-driven,

With a corpse half hid that I couldn't get rid,

because of a promise given;

It was lashed to the sleigh, and it seemed to say:

"You may tax your brawn and brains,

But you promised true, and it's up to you

to cremate those last remains."

Now a promise made is a debt unpaid,

and the trail has its own stern code.

In the days to come, though my lips were dumb,

in my heart how I cursed that load.

In the long, long night, by the lone firelight,

while the huskies, round in a ring,

Howled out their woes to the homeless snows—

O God! how I loathed the thing.

And every day that quiet clay

seemed to heavy and heavier grow;

And on I went, though the dogs were spent

and the grub was getting low;

The trail was bad, and I felt half mad,

but I swore I would not give in;

And I'd often sing to the hateful thing,

and it hearkened with a grin.

Till I came to the marge of Lake Lebarge,

and a derelict there lay;

It was jammed in the ice, but I saw in a trice

it was called the "Alice May."

And I looked at it, and I thought a bit,

and I looked at my frozen chum;

Then "Here," said I, with a sudden cry,

"is my cre-ma-tor-eum."

Some planks I tore from the cabin floor,

and I lit the boiler fire;

Some coal I found that was lying around,

and I heaped the fuel higher;

The flames just soared, and the furnace roared—

such a blaze you seldom see;

And I burrowed a hole in the glowing coal,

and I stuffed in Sam McGee.

Then I made a hike, for I didn't like

to hear him sizzle so;

And the heavens scowled, and the huskies howled,

and the wind began to blow.

It was icy cold, but the hot sweat rolled

down my cheeks, and I don't know why;

And the greasy smoke in an inky cloak

went streaking down the sky.

I do not know how long in the snow

I wrestled with grisly fear;

But the stars came out and they danced about

ere again I ventured near;

I was sick with dread, but I bravely said:

"I'll just take a peep inside.

I guess he's cooked, and it's time I looked";

... then the door I opened wide.

And there sat Sam, looking cool and calm,

in the heart of the furnace roar;

And he wore a smile you could see a mile,

and he said: "Please close that door.

It's fine in here, but I greatly fear

you'll let in the cold and storm—

Since I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee,

it's the first time I've been warm."

There are strange things done in the midnight sun

      By the men who moil for gold;

The Arctic trails have their secret tales

      That would make your blood run cold;

The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,

      But the queerest they ever did see

Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge

      I cremated Sam McGee.

The room was silent. I could have dropped a pin. It would have been heard above the ship’s driving engines. Next, the place got crazy with cheering you all over again. They clapped and laughed while you sat back down in your chair You seemed to have something going on with Erat, when you sat and he put his arm around you. That’s not my business.

All in all, things were going along.

Aoife turned out to be not only a good chef, but a great sea-cook. Only thing was, she kept taking my portable CD player into the Mess Hall, and she never got the idea that a meal had to be there at 11:15am, and 11:15pm, so that the next guy up can relieve his watch by 11:30. She just never would get the watch thing in her head, throughout the entire trip, and I mean it. That’s how it was, the whole way there. In Aoife’s mind, everyone could wait.

But I didn’t give a damn. It was true that the woman has got a beautiful smile.

When we were living on the blueberry farm together, at times we both forgot about the financial problems, and then our farm was beautiful. There were these acres of rolling pasture. Had about two acres of blueberry bushes. We had bonfires every year where we could invite the town, and the people all showed up.

The farm never ran out of water but, sometimes, the water pipes sucked cold air. Water flowed again, in the kitchen and in the bathroom, only by someone pouring buckets of water down a well shaft. It was located far from the house, inside of a pumphouse that was located at on top of a little hill. The long suction pipe ran all the way down the hill to the river that ran across our property. The procedure I followed is called, “priming a pump.”

I’d be getting out of bed and going outside in the frost, or with the dew, at about five in the morning. Aoife would keep sleeping. I remember that scene in my mind like it happened the day before yesterday.

I’d walk up the hill the little pump house sat upon. I’d carry a bucket of water all the way up to it. It was beautiful, just beautiful, up there. Quiet everywhere. The sun would suddenly appear. I’d see the mist.

Plus, there was a single-lane street running in the front of the house. A water pipe ran under the road. After I went up the hill, I’d walk across the road, down to the river, to get the other pump running, too. Just to feel good about it.

It was nice going back to bed with Aoife after I did all of that.

One year, I got all the pipes tied together so we had water running out to every different irrigation tank.

Another year, I built a bridge across the river, and I was so damned proud.

I said, “The cables I laid myself and they aren’t going anywhere,”

I told that to a man named William. He was a metal sculptor who lived on the other side of the river. His family owned a hundred acres or more. They’d lived on that side of the river for generations.

William wanted to know if the wooden planks would hold in a flood.

I told him, “The river might take those cables away. But there will be a tree on each end when it gets to wherever it’s going.”

The flooded river was a monsoon in January. It was almost twenty feet up the banks. Still, it didn’t take away those cables. They held, like I had told William they would hold. Sadly, everything else—all the wood and the stairs I had cut and laid to lead up to the bridge—all were washed away down the river.

I could have hung another bridge on those lines. I looked at them every time I came home. I never could work up the energy for that, though.

Strange memories like this rolled back to me on-board Sassy. The more Aoife and I talked, the more I realized we had never spent this much time together since we first got together in the Seventies. We were more thoughtful as a couple than I had ever realized.

It turned out that a sinking ship in the first decade of the 21st century was the only place our conversations could be had.

Chapter Fourteen

the engine broke


Well, I couldn’t miss telling this one. Hope you like my rendition of it. Love, Dad.

Stories about my time at sea. Written for Wonderful Fiona, my daughter (header).

Our crises hit us when we were about halfway to India. The day had started fair. By afternoon, it was hot. We were expecting to reach the Marshall Islands in about five days.

First Engineer Kingston Riggs was sprawled across his couch catching a nap. It must have been about a hundred and ten degrees now that we were far enough south to nearly touch the Equator.

Baxter was now rarely on-time in the engine room, due to needing extra sleep. Ever since whatever trouble he had encountered in the hold that night, Baxter told everyone he was sleeping off a bad fever. I let him have the sleep without any pressure.

That morning was the single day he made it there on time.

I asked, “You doing fine, son?”

He smiled big and told me, “Feel great. You?”

I turned things over to Baxter and let him work on his own for the first time in several days. Two of the Ukraine’s sailors, named Vanko and Ostap, were working with him. They got busy cleaning up a mess they had to deal with from an earlier oil leak that sprang active again.

Fiona, you wanted to help push the mop bucket around the place, but I insisted you follow me upstairs.

The ocean was flat. It was mostly calm our entire voyage. There was the exception of occasional rolling.

Aoife called any activity we encountered at sea, at all, “storms” and “bad weather” but they were each nothing to mention. Cost us ten thousand extra miles to make the voyage in that calm of a route. I didn’t think too much of it, until afterwards, when I reading about some storms that summer up north. If we had hit any of that, Sassy would have been sunk completely.

That day, I sat down next to Riggs. Fiona had already filled the ice chest with varied sodas and sarsaparilla.

“Grab us all some water bottles, Fiona!” Riggs called out when he saw you.

I grabbed myself a lime soda.

Kingston Riggs and I were really enjoying ourselves, laughing at the things we’d seen. Riggs wondered where exactly in the ocean we were at. Sometimes, in the Engine Room, we would lose track. He made a guess about our location. He thought we must be somewhere in the middle of the Philippine Sea.

Meanwhile, you were cleaning or taking care of some other chore by the ice chests.

Riggs and I were really laid back, just hanging in the hot air. I told a few stories. On a ship, when you get to talking with another sailor, sometimes it feels like it is no big deal to say the next thing that comes to mind.

The sun couldn’t touch us on the second deck. Still, it was hot enough outside to keep sweating no matter where you walked to. All the metal was brought up in temperature by the sun.

Fiona, you brought over more soda and the water Riggs asked you to get. You sat down for a minute or two in the shade, on the edge of the easy chair. Riggs enjoyed having you there. He pointed at you and gave me a thumbs-up as well as a big smile.

Eventually, you said you had to go back to the engine room. You looked at the deck for a long time.

I asked you, “Are you going to start your watch now?”

“In a minute. I feel a little sick.” You told me.

“Ghost surprise you again, Fiona?” Riggs asked.

Fiona, you turned to me, and you looked straight at my heart. After a minute you said something like, ““Mom has mahimahi. Erat caught some this morning. I got sick watching her clean everything.”

I turned up music by ZZ Top.

Man, we were just relaxed. Then, I switched the tunes over to Aerosmith, at Riggs’ request. Eventually, you walked off to start your watch. I could tell you weren’t having the time of your life.

I suspected you were indeed worried about the ghost at the bottom of the ship. Since I don’t deal in ghosts, I made a mental not to head down to the lower hold tonight and tell the thing to get lost.

Out of nowhere, Captain White appeared. Never had him stop by our recreation area before then. He even brought along a folding chair for him to sit on.

Riggs looked at me. I was studying the Captain’s face. Then, Riggs wanted to go. He shut off the music, excused himself. White asked him to stay, told us both he wanted him to hear.

That afternoon might have been the first time I had seen the Captain sober. He looked more relaxed. He had a friendly demeanor whenever he was playing it cool and taking it easy.

The captain launched into a long speech.

“We just about made it across. Chief, I got to compliment you because I didn’t want to say before—and I won’t lie: I didn’t think this ship would hold together. She’s just a piece of floating trash. That’s what the voice in my head tells me. Every day, I wake up and get started just asking myself what am I doing this for. The pay isn’t really that much more than what I used to make up in Alaska. She’s not a complete disaster. She’s been holding up. She’s holding up even though she belongs inside Triton’s war chest. And it’s thanks to all of you. I want you to hear it from me—"

BOOM!

–right in the middle of the compliment.

Sassy creaked. In less than a minute, smoke was billowing out the top. Swells of black, black smoke poured through from the engine. She began to drift. I could feel the momentum shift. We ceased to go forward.

The only time our captain ever said anything nice to us, the ship’s engine exploded.

Greatest mistake I ever made leaving Baxter alone with that machinery after he showed up on-time. It was terrible luck, and I should have known it would be so.

In the stairs, more smoke was everywhere. I couldn’t see a damn thing. I moved forward. I called your name every few minutes.

I can’t take this, I said it only to myself but it was another person’s voice going on in my own head.

I made it to the Engine Room. Baxter was still there. Thankfully, Fiona was safe.

The two ABs were also well and fine. They were assisting Baxter. Together, they had all managed to shut Sassy’s engine down before I arrived. I watched Baxter work, didn’t interfere. Somehow, I understood what he had to do.

All of Team Ukraine eventually had sifted through the smoke. Everyone had made it to the Engine Room to, hopefully, help us recover.

Captain White followed me down there. Standing mid the smoke and a quiet without the engines to fill it in the open air, the captain looked aghast. He was just close enough to watch me work, and then he flaked. I didn’t see him again. I never saw the First Mate either. Even my good friend, First Assistant Kingston Riggs, took one look, then yelled, and walked off.

Riggs shouted out, “I can’t take it! This ship is going to drown me!”

But there was quite a fire to put out that had already spread to the main deck. I got ventilation on down in the Main Engine before a few more vital things crapped out. Once things were a bit better, Baxter stood to the side while I inspected the Main Engine.

I said, “Kid, you’re not paid to be a socialite at a dance hall. Help me move this thing.”

And he did. That was the start of the process where Baxter was up most of the time, and I couldn’t sleep. Fiona, you stayed put but helped with anything I asked. The men from the Ukraine were a saving grace with their strength.

Finally, I saw the trouble. One of the pistons had busted. And that’s never a good sign.

A piston is full of lube oil. They pump, and the oil moves up from the crankcase, through the piston shaft, to cool things off. Then, the oil goes back down. With the thing split in half, it pumped oil all over the engine. The sizzling mess gave the black clouds that still filled our Engine Room and sifted inside many of the ship’s passageways.

Took a full day to find the trouble. We were working through the night, strung out and on the edge of a cliff. Everyone had to help. The engine is the size of a big room. There are six cylinders. It was the crown at the bottom of one of them that had busted in two.

Once we spotted the trouble we were looking for the spares were needed at once. In a little bit, everyone was staring at the single spare part on-board. I looked everywhere for others, and many more missing parts. That’s when we went to see the Captain who was hunkered in his berth. White told me the remaining spare parts were taken by the outfit back in Tacoma who also owned a ship of Sassy‘s kind. They had made a deal to purchase everything “extra” from the owner, just before we left. Of course, it all happened after we had spent a month setting the thing up.

I said, “That’s a bit like the old-fashioned treason and sabotage, White. Leave me alone. And I mean forever.”

He said, “Don’t blame me! It was everyone that jerk Friday had checking us out! They all got together on something and I thought they had told you what was up!”

I had inspected everything before we left. I marked it on my checklist three months ago. The missing parts had been ordered in. But if they didn’t have someone chaperoning every time a person came on board, vital pieces were sold off. A precious set of rings, and whatnot, were now missing, along with two more spare cylinders. It was totally nuts. My damn chain balls were gone, too.

Man, that made it rough.

You know what a piston is in an engine? You know how it goes up and down? The chain balls and the rings are the things that go around it, make it easy for the piston to go back and forth. It’s supposed to have five full rings. The rings on the old one were busted, except for one: the bottom one. That one was okay.

I thought about the other outfit in the shipyard. I saw it all—our predicament and the things that happened beforehand—sitting there with my daughter and all my friends, inside the smoke.

I could feel the movements of waves beneath Sassy. We drifted. A light rain would fall soon. Bad weather was on the horizon. We now had no forward thrust to guide our vessel. I couldn’t ask for a more terrible condition to get to work in.

The Ukrainians stayed with us in the Engine Room. They were clearly used to dealing with these types of problems. They rolled their sleeves up, and they even laughed. They got right to work.

Even if I couldn’t correct the ship’s problem the right way, I could pull that broken piston up, take the rod out, put our spare in its place. I would have to make use out of whatever I could throw together. If it turned out we couldn’t do it without the rings, then I would be forced to run Sassy‘s engine on five instead of six cylinder, something which is like an old sailor’s joke.

I thought about pirates. We were sitting ducks there, and I knew it.

Pirates could show up, take our ship, or break it up for the parts and sell off our fuel. We would be screwed, at that point, if one had stopped by.

Sassy broke down right in the place where that kind of event actually happened a lot. Pirates do approach vessels they know they can take over. They can strip the ship, take your clothes, throw you over the side, and you can’t really call anybody then.

You can send an email but when is someone going to show up? It was a two-week run for an American tugboat. Don’t think the company who bought Sassy is going to pay for that. I just had been around. I knew what happened. Not to Americans, typically, but, remember that Americans on vessels that looked like ours didn’t typically get into these waters very much. People with plans are in a hurry, and they go on the usual, faster routes. Most ships bear a familiar appearance. Meanwhile, ours looked like war.

The broken piston was a huge thing. Altogether, it weighed more than a ton. It had to be pulled out of the entire shaft, then turned upside-down to retrieve the parts we still needed, then discarded properly. That’s what we ended up doing. With our hands, without extra equipment, we pulled that piston up and out.

I took every ring I could off of the thing. I put the one good ring onto the replacement. I kept another that was broken a bit, but could still help, somehow. I put something together, piece by piece, using the broken bits. I did, and it actually worked.

On the third day after the crises began, the engine was repaired. It turned on properly and started running again. We checked through the systems. The engine was tested, and it crawled through its first slow run okay. Everybody watched. The air changed after it picked up and, for the first time since it had broken, the Main Engine began to move Sassy forward towards her destination.

I saw you. You were crying the whole time.

I turned on the music. I played “The Eagles, Love Will Keep Us Alive”. I played the entire album. Baxter and the men from the Ukraine belted every word.

I kept expecting Captain White to walk by. Thought we would hear something encouraging. He was nowhere to be found. He must have been thinking we were all dead anyway. They were probably all thinking something like that. The ship had been torn out of their control.

Don’t get me wrong about Riggs and the captain. They had been around the ocean forever. But neither of them had become a professional seaman. They each called themselves a fisherman. There’s a total, total difference.

When your ass is on the line, a seaman tends to be able to do anything he must to keep the ship afloat. Staying alive has always been my first policy. It seems to make things work.

A seaman will go to sea, and this is where he or she can live a life. Out here, in the middle of the ocean, it’s pretty much where you’re at as a person, and what you’re doing. It’s where your whole world is at. If a seaman has got a broken piston, he or she fixes the thing.

Boatmen are not often the same thing at all. They are always close to the shore, where they can call someone else for a tow. Somebody else takes it over, fixes things.

I was sure Aoife would take care of the people. She’d do something to make them feel better. She used that stuff on me, all the time, whenever I was ashore. It was very nice, anyhow.

The only thing a sailor depends on, every day at sea, is the forward motion of the ship. Other than that, life is painted limitless blue, and with no land in our sight.

Having you with me made all the difference. Really, that’s what it did, because you just knew I could fix it. You just knew it, and you believed I could do it, and you can’t buy that kind of thing.

Drifting for nearly three full days, that’s a scary feeling. There was so much smoke when it happened. When Sassy came back to life and dutifully pulled along, everyone was flying happier than a pack of pigs in the sky.

I watched that engine for some time. Eventually, Riggs clapped me on the back.

He said, “Get some sleep. I’ll take over.”

Then, I walked myself upstairs. The bridge was going crazy. The First Mate was intent at his tasks to bring the ship back on course.

She was going a bit slower. But we were making progress once more. And that felt terrific.

I followed everybody’s advice and slept. I took a shower first. I was a real mess.

When I finally got up again, it must have been about five in the morning. I picked up some coffee in the kitchen. Nobody was around.

Standing on the Main Deck, and feeling the sun whenever it came up, I almost forgot it had existed.

I took in the fresh air. There were no troubles. It felt good.

The water was slushing around the boat. We might have been making ten knots. That was about as high was I was going take our speed. Not until we made it to Singapore for better fix on the Main Engine would I dare to try.

Life was good again. It felt exhilarating. There was a peace but there was a lot of energy. Plus, the ocean was mesmerizing. All of it made me think of the music I play all the time. Maybe my feeling was something that makes people want to sing the big, hit songs.

Aoife appeared to tell me, “Thank you, Meade.”

She patted my arm. Then she hugged me.

I tried to talk to Aoife about all of it, but it was just totally over her head. Aoife had been scared out of the sailor mindset, just a bit. All of the people who couldn’t come down to the Engine Room to help us out were probably dumbfounded by what they couldn’t handle.

Aoife was playing it casual. She talked like she was still sitting in a coffee-house in downtown Seattle.

She said, “So, what’s on your plate today? Busy again?”

I rubbed her shoulders. Then, I asked her to get me another cup of Joe. She looked at me for a long time. Then she walked over to bring some coffee to me, and I gave her a thank-you kiss on the cheek. But she moved her cheek away. I didn’t comment.

I said, “And thank-you, God, for our steady good weather.”

I said it to the sky. Aoife had to smile.

Sassy was in terrible shape. It was a miracle we were moving. I thought about it.

I said to Aoife, “If a storm had kicked up when we were drifting, we would have bounced around like a cork.”

She only told me, “Fantastic. Thanks for letting me know.”

I like having Aoife with me. She’ll come on down to my room and sleep on my couch, or wherever, and that is okay with me, even though she’s divorced me three times.

I said, “Ship should be in Singapore in two days’ or thereabouts. Want to spend the night there?”

Aoife’s demeanor had changed. I noticed her smile shift right away. I sifted out of the Nineties a lot smarter than I was back in the Seventies, back when she and I first met.

For a while, we stood at the railing together, quiet. It was peaceful. A little bit of wind.

Aoife’s name is pure Irish, but she has a different background. She isn’t full-blooded Irish, but I still love her all the way through. I act like I believe everything she ever tells me about anything, really. Aoife is maybe the best friend I’ve ever had. Whenever we are far from each other, it doesn’t take us very long until we can sort of tell what the other one is thinking.

“Did you… see the Captain much while we were drifting?” I asked her.

Aoife looked back at the deepening sky. She wouldn’t say nothing, and it made me think.

Chapter Fifteen

Singapore was brief

A letter written and mailed from Singapore in August of 2005:

Dear, dearest Floyd,

We have finally arrived to Singapore! You won’t believe how many ships have come in to wait with us since we arrived. It’s something like a hundred. We are sitting in the middle of them waiting to be allowed to dock.

The trip across the Pacific was awesome. I thought we were all going to die. It’s been stupid, the pressure. It’s always high-pressured here. I can’t dream at night because I am too scared.

Email access is kept by the captain who is here in the bridge, with me. I wanted to email you something to let you know I was safe but our Captain told me, “We never, ever do that at sea.” I thought it wouldn’t matter anymore because we are staring right at the city.

Captain White is now looking at me. I am smiling at him. He is not smiling back. He’s a decent person. He just waved at me. I am going to wave back now… I like him very much!

Since the owners pay for every little cost we sure won’t have time to enjoy Singapore, that’s for certain.

Well, I stand corrected. The First Mate (name: Kelvar A. Hussein), walked in and he just told me no one is getting off the vessel in Singapore at all. I am eternally sad.

Well, the First Mate promised he would mail this letter to you. Hope you shall receive it soon, dear Floyd!

That man actually broke a promise right after he made a promise to me. I am standing here, writing you, telling them what I’m doing, and Without a care for all of us that man spoke to the Captain about five minutes ago, right here on the bridge, and he really is going to pay the captain to let him go home from Singapore!! So, this ship won’t have a First Mate!!

We are about to be in “heavy waters” as Chief Engineer Declan Aidan Meade calls the water between Singapore and India!! There be whirlpools and pirates and collisions with other ships that drown people every day!!

Look for a phone call from me in one week. I hope I am alive to swing into your office another time. Ask Titan below to guide Sassy and bring us safely to the final port.

Well, I stand corrected again: the captain decided we can all deboard as we originally agreed before I took this job. There was paperwork already in hand for it, I guess. Silly!

Should be home in about two more weeks.

From your friend who is lost at sea and lost from show business, too!

With all my heart, 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:

I poured my heart into every line. Enjoy. I love you, kid. Meade.

Stories about my time at sea. Written for Wonderful Fiona, my daughter (header).

It was the end of the day. You appeared at my cabin door just when Sassy arrived into the Singapore shipping harbor. Not your best timing there, Fiona.

You were briming and gushed at me, “Dad, I can’t tell you how much respect I have for you. You saved the ship. You saved everyone. You saved my life and mom’s. You saved Dimitry, Erat, and Ostop, Baxter, the Captain, Kingston and everyone else. We all owe you!”

I said, “Thanks. It’s nice to hear you tell me that.”

You were looking at me for a bit. I thought you had something to say, but you didn’t talk.

I had been reading a collection of Robert Service poems, and I had to put it down when you came in. I had been meaning to ask how many you knew by heart, but when you gush at me, at times, it’s too much live a movie, like we’re pretending something that isn’t real.

I said, “Listen, pal, I’m not into talking to you right now.”

I stood up to open the door for you to leave. I thought about your mom spending time with the Captain, and now you going around the place making friends with all the Ukrainian men. It was becoming too plain to see you both were far too devious of creatures for me to ever cut loose with.

“Fiona, I have been afraid for you.” I had to say it to you because, from where I stood, mother and daughter were not all that different from each other. I said something important to me, and you responded with, “I actually have another thing I need to talk about.”

You looked at me until I sat down again. Then you plowed on.

You told me, “Dad, the First Mate just quit the ship! He is leaving! Right now! He kept telling the captain that there was something seriously off from the beginning of it all! I don’t think he didn’t know before we all departed on this, do you? It sounds like he is worried about his wife. They have a baby. He went on shore and called her. Now, he’s leaving the ship for good, right in the middle of our voyage!”

That hit a nerve. I had some bad forebodings the other night. I needed to get a grip on what the Captain intended to do. I couldn’t tell you anything unless I knew for certain. Of course, we could never go the rest of the way without a First Mate.

“Thought the Coast Guard told us he had to be here for us to sail at all,” you said to me.

“That’s affirmative,” I said. “That’s Navy-talk for ‘yes’.”

I needed a second or two to think. I stood and opened the door again for you to leave. Just then, Baxter was walking up the stairs from the Engine Room. I was holding the door for you to leave, so I simply allowed my foot to close. The door to my berth shut closed.

“Was Baxter down in the hold?” I asked.

You just ran off, and I didn’t get a chance to tell you to calm down.

I found out from Kingston Riggs that Kelvar A. Hussein had been allowed to use the internet, and to find out about flights back to the United States. Riggs happened to be checking in on the Bridge, and the Captain watched him do the entire thing.

“Captain didn’t say a word to him. Like he was just some fly-by-night character heading on his own way out the door,” said Riggs.

I encountered Hussein on the Main Deck. His seabag was already in hand. There was a determined look in his eye.

The Captain had already signed his discharge. I had it out with Hussein, right on the spot, right on the Main Deck where anyone watching from any vessel in the harbor. Told him he was committed to the job, and he couldn’t dive off. The rest of us were put at risk, without him.

“There is an issue with the Captain. And I’m not comfortable with his position about, well, my life. Daily, extra duties is dumped on my life. And even after that, he has put us all at risk by failing his duty with you, as well as the ABs on securing things and such.”

He finally said it straight to me.

He said straight-faced, “He recorded me as done, Meade. Please, step out of my way.”

I did. He set the bag next to where the gangplank would eventually be. Then he walked towards the stairs leading up to the Mess Hall.

To his back I asked, “You are leaving now? You’re going to have to swim. Check if Aoife has a sandwich bag you can blow up as a float for your seabag.”

At the bottom of the steep stairs he turned. He was smiling. He looked up at the sky. Then he drew a straight-face.

He said, “No. There’s a flight every day some time around noon. I’ll set it up after we reach the dock. I have to be there for all of that political business, of course.”

In the same hour, I found the Captain tucked away in his quarters. He answered on the second knock. He looked scared.

I said, “You’re not a very talented man. Why is it that every time you sneeze in the wrong hallway we all hear you. Maybe take care to do things delicately.”

The Captain tried to leave, but then he would have been leaving his quarters unprotected so he stopped himself.

He said, “I take it Hussein let you know I signed him off as done. We won’t need him.”

There was just so much faded glory in his eyes. It was hard to take.

I told him, “White, I play things straight. In my fighting years, I could have laid you to rest with a single well-delivered punch to the jaw. My fighting days are done. I tell people what I need, and I usually get what I’m looking for. I need a hand right now. I need you to pay for Aoife’s ticket home.”

He looked confused. He thought for a moment and then nodded.

He said, “Done,” and gave me a quick smile.

Then, the man actually licked his lips. He was smiling. He gestured me to step inside while he walked to his writing desk and wrote a check that was enough to fly her a First Class ticket. I put that payment into my shirt pocket. Then, I let him know I had to get the ship’s refuel underway, and left him.

I walked into the First Mate’s quarters. I was ready for a stare-down contest. After all, what he was pulling was illegal. You can’t be crew on a ship and then get off halfway, just leaving everyone else in the crew to debate who’s next on shore leave. Either he took the matter all the way up, or he carried on with things to the last destination.

The man looked dejected now. I had to assume he understood without my saying a thing. I took that as a sign things were headed my way. I continued to rest there, inside his doorway.

“This is permanent, what you aim to do right now.” I told him. He understood the matter as I stated it to him.

But he had a wife, and a young son. The break-down, the captain, the threat of sinking—all of it was weighing on him like a strange ballast which could be hoisted by none but him.

He stood up. He straightened his shoulders and took off his hat.

He said, “You win. I will remain… motionless… on the bottom of the pit of hell you see fit to carry me another day… to Hades.”

“Sit down.” I told him. “No one needs to know this happened.”

He sat on the edge of his bed, and I sat on a chair.

“However, I need a written apology from you to the Captain. In it, detail everything. And I need my copy, thanks. That’s what the Captain is looking for, and that’s what I need. And I need it now, because then I’ve got to get us to refuel in forty minutes. I won’t say a thing. No one sees my copy, or White’s, so long as you don’t pull anything again.”

So, he walked alongside me to The Bridge. When we walked in, the Captain was there. He was crying before we entered. But he had done that time enough we didn’t pay attention. He had got caught up in that dream stupor thing after two weeks straight of whiskey and gin.

Kelvar A. Hussein typed up a written apology. He printed it out with enough copies, and then he signed it, and I signed it, and the Captain signed it, even though he was confused and thought I was “bat dung crazy”.

Hussein said, “My apologies, Captain. I am broken, aren’t I?”

The Captain was hysterical with mood. Somehow, he managed to utter, “No more than most men, my friend.”

I wanted to keep the beat high so I proposed the First Mate to accompany me to the fuel agent.

I had been to Singapore a thousand times and refueled vessels in the position of Chief Engineer on humongous ships. I had stood by for refueling when I filled the position as a Second Engineer, as well as on much lesser vessels. Plain and simple: the person I kept running into for fuel inside the Singapore harbor for decades had his own tape. Watching his work, I got to understand that when one person measures out the fuel using their own tape, instead of a standard one, you got something.

Most telling was on a trip two years ago. It was a Chief’s position on a great big industry ship. We needed to take in fifty tons of fuel. The guy offered twenty-five thousand dollars cash for our vessel to take in fifteen tons, instead. He said nobody would know. He couldn’t get it through his head that I wasn’t going to ever do that, ever.

I told him, “First of all, Singapore is right in the middle of everything. I am going to be through here fifty more times. I am going to be traveling through Singapore for the rest of my life. This is how I earn my living.

“Think about it: I can refuse to accept twenty-five cash from you today, or I can be your whore for the rest of my life. Saying you are going to get me twenty-five grand, and actually giving me twenty-five grand, are two different things. But me ever agreeing to do it, that’s one thing, no matter what happens.”

The agent had become a little nervous.

I brought out my standardized tape. He left us, and moved aft in his craft. Then he was on the radio direct with the ship’s owner in the States on a bypass of my authority. Our company gave a go-ahead. Up until then, it had only been my name on the line, no matter who gave the okay. Then it came down from the top, and the Captain told me he wanted it done the way the man said. That’s how I kept myself good and in the clear.

“It’s my reputation, isn’t?” I told him. “No, sir. Ain’t doing it.”

There I stood, at the desk with the same fuel porter to refuel Sassy. He was standing onboard with that same tape inside his hand.

“I am taking my own tape down to the fueling tank,” I said to him. “I don’t care who has a problem with it.” I told him.

Baxter stood next to me. The man looked a little aghast.

I told Baxter in front of anyone who could hear me, “Remember: if they won’t let you use a regular tape, they won’t play fair.”

“What you said, Chief,” Baxter replied.

I remember asking myself if the man seemed a bit too interested in all this. He was right alongside me throughout this ordeal.

After getting the fuel and measuring the amount with a regular tape, Baxter said he had a better idea of what not to do the next time anyone showed up onboard carrying their own tape.

Aoife packed up her things. She was resigned to do whatever I asked. She looked at Singapore from her window. I could tell Aoife was happy, but she didn’t want to say it.

We were given a sudden clearance to bring Sassy into port. I managed to schedule a crew to help me go through the engine for a full overall. Hopefully, any extra parts we needed to replace the new ones with would be found in an old scrapper there.

As soon as the gangplank was connected and the ship was securely tied, most of the crew walked around to get some air. After a month at sea, it was so nice to be in port.

I could see that Aoife wasn’t having a good time getting through to anyone at the airport. Neither of us chose to mess with internet service. She got a cab scheduled for a ride to the international airport. She would stay in a hotel close by for a night or two, if it was needed. She would take the next open seat she could find just to go home.

Fiona, you were standing by, watching us with a frown. Baxter appeared. I told you both to get some fresh air together without me, and let me talk to your mother.

We sat on a bench. Neither of us were hungry. She scooted next to me.

I said, “It is just rotten being divorced, hon. It’s the only thing on my mind for all these years. The wound is still fresh. I was looking forward to patching things up while we went on the trip, but I things are worse.”

I could tell Aoife was thinking about what to say.

Then she responded with, “I was thinking about a big road trip, Meade. We could make it with the kids, even though they are all grown up. Rent an RV, and do the works!” I could hear in her voice that she was trying to imitate my own style of enthusiasm.

She said, “We did it once before, when it was just you and me and the twins. That was one of the best times I ever had.”

I told her I liked the idea, but the twins probably wouldn’t make it, and I let her know you already had plans.

She smiled, and I suppose I liked that.

She said, “I was stupid to fight about anything with you, Meade. This trip opened my eyes. I think I put you in danger. I know that… sometimes… maybe, often… I am not all that friendly to you. And, you kept putting your life on the line the whole time.”

“Which I told you about a hundred times, let’s not forget,” I told her.

Aoife looked down, but she agreed with me and said, “That’s right. Like you said to me about a hundred times.”

A long time passed. Then Aoife told me what I had known since the week we were first going together: “Meade, it was about a thousand times, and I never really listened because even though I love you more than anyone else I have ever known, I never was solid.”

“Listen,” I told your mom, “you don’t have to tell me now. I’m so old and rundown. I really don’t care about anything in the past. Maybe I’m being stupid. I think I just like you too much. I’m pretty stupid that way, Aoife.”

I thought she was going to cry. I handed her my handkerchief but she handed it straight back.

She said, “Those are gross. Please, Meade. I used to have to wash them. I don’t even want to know what’s on that.”

“Well, you knew that the entire time. But you never said something.” I said.

Aoife said, “You do a lot of right, Meade. I feel bad.”

She was crying for real then.

She told me, “I’ve lied to your friends, to mine. I spent so much money on horses and gambling and never told you. Yet, I’m so confused… by my own stories. Honestly, I’m not sure what is truth and what is a lie these days.”

This I was interested in hearing. I kept still and I hoped she would keep talking.

She said, “I told them you were bad, but it wasn’t true. I told them that you slept around everywhere. I think I slept around twice more than you ever did. They believe it because of what happened when we were first married. You were stark staring mad. People kept laughing at you confessing to everyone who would listen. I guess I was caught up in that. Then… it was hard to remind myself why I shouldn’t’ be just vicious to you. Because you were always gone so you were almost like a ghost to me.

“But, in the end, you are solid. It’s me who is not. I’ve never been solid anywhere, in anything. I don’t even have a profession I like. And you don’t care about that. I could be anyone you know, and you’d still be happy. Like I’m not the most special person you have. You just never care. After our second divorce, I thought you were just crazy. Or stupid.”

And then we both laughed and laughed because obviously I’m smart.

I said, “You’re great, Aoife. You always were.”

She laughed for a long time.

She squealed, “I hate that you are so funny when I need to be really serious for a minute.” But she kept laughing. After that, she was really quiet. She gave me a long kiss.

Then she told me, “I came from nothing that’s very special… So, I thought we were just two people without real class. We don’t belong anywhere, you and I. That’s what I finally came to know.

I let my fingers rest in her hair at the base of her jaw.

She said, “I’m thankful our kids all seem to have direction. Marcus has plans to outdo, Fiona. Don’t say anything to her, please. He’s sweet.”

Thing is, Aoife is really pretty. And she stays calm when I get angry, and she laughs when I don’t know why. And I like having that in my life. She is a nice person. People think she’s got a lot of class, even though her family didn’t have any long-term stature in their community. Mine didn’t, really, but then again maybe we did. We just didn’t have a lot of money to work with, and we lived in a substandard part of the city.

Aoife said, “Meade, you’re kind and you did everything I asked, and you made the money we needed to get the kids through school… and you gave anything you could when our kids needed it… You paid for about a hundred pairs of shoes… “ Then, she put her hand in mine, and told me, “When you get angry, you’re a lot to handle. I just want to be with people with dignity.”

I talked about my disappointment when the work I put into putting together a blueberry farm fell through. I kept thinking about those times. There was too much stress on both of us every day.

I told her, “I even built a bridge, by hand, over a river that ran across our property, and the bridge fell through. It was lost the first winter, during a flood.

“No one took care of the blueberries.

“There was a big, orange tractor the previous owner had left behind in the wooden shed. I worked on it. I attached an old trailer to it, one that seemed to come with it. I put hydraulics on it so it had a lift on the front. I drove that thing all over the hills and the fields. No one cared.

“I drove the tractor up to the top of the hill of our property, up to an apple orchard located at the far edge of the pasture. That’s when I saw how you had gotten yourself some horses. I wasn’t mad, just really surprised. The horses were all friendly. I filled the trailer full of apples, fed some to your horses, and then drove it back down. I walked inside for a glass of ice water right when the telephone was ringing. It was a call from the union to let me know they had a good job come up, and wanted to know how soon I could fly back to Seattle. So, I just parked the tractor with all the apples in the trailer right next to the gate. It was right beside the red barn. I came back three months later. That tractor was still sitting there with all those apples rotting in it. All you had to do was move the tractor over and dump them over the side where the horse would have eaten them. They were left to rot.

“Back there on the farm, I had a feeling none of my ideas were needed. Each time I came back, you had made some more new friends. You were always moving up. Who was I, anyway?

“The thing is, I could have come home between jobs. I could have insisted that you were respecting me. I had a feeling you were seeing other people. But, you never should have been left alone for so long. I shouldn’t have yelled at you in front of our kids like I did. I shouldn’t have yelled a single time, not to such a pretty girl, especially one who all the other men are looking to take away from me, all the time.”

At dinner one night back in the nineties, I told Aoife, and the children, that I was worried about what we’d do with all the blueberries when they came in. I could see they were about to turn blue. But, I didn’t ask anyone to help me. The next day I went to the shed to get ready to harvest them without even talking to Aoife. Then, I would never forgive Aoife for this, even if I lived to be a hundred years old: Aoife left. Took the kids and she just left to her mom’s house across the United States. All those blueberries, and I didn’t know a thing about harvesting them. When they all needed to be picked, Aoife called me and I raised hell with her. Eventually, she told me how she had hired a lady to come over who couldn’t pour water out of a boot. Aoife told me this girl was going to run the farm for me. I accused her of destroying our farm.

I said, “We could have sold fifty times the blueberries we had raised if we worked together. All these customers came by every time I put out the sign. Only thing was, I was mad at you because you and I didn’t know a thing about it. And I couldn’t find things out because you never allowed me to relax during my vacation.”

“You’re right,” she told me.

I said, “Together, you and I made every mistake. I could have listened more. I lied when I said you came across insane. You’re not crazy at all. Definitely not crazier than I am.”

Aoife let me put my arm around her. She rested her head on my shoulder. We both just looked off, for a while.

She told me, “The kids loved the chickens and the horses, and the goat. You never hit me or beat me or anything terrible. We are both good people, okay?”

I said to her, “When it didn’t work out, it wasn’t because I didn’t love you. I’ve always loved you. And that’s a fact. But things will keep moving at home while I’m gone. Then, I’m falling behind.”

Aoife didn’t say anything much in response. I kept talking.

I told her, “It felt like you were always my wife, even when we hadn’t been married for a while. If we got married again, it would be number four. I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to understand the love I have for you, Aoife. It gets me. I don’t understand anything about it, even now. I’m going to be seventy here, real quick. We’ve done so many things together. I know I love you. I want you around me. I used to know all the reasons it was more complicated than that. Now, it’s really simple. I love you. I like having you with me.”

She gave me a kiss.

Aoife said, “The way you say things, I feel, sometimes, like I am being torn inside. I never feel that way with anyone but you, Meade. It’s time. I’m leaving. Say good-bye. Wish me well.”

Aoife started to turn away. Then she stared directly at my heart and said, “Oh, I forgot to say this. There’s a ghost underneath the ship, Meade. Be careful.”

She turned for another look at the vessel from the boardwalk. Sassy was a total junker, covered in rust and mildew, amidst ships and boats of all kinds. There she rotted quietly, with fantastic, new docks and structures of the Singapore harbor. But I could still envision the romance of the whole moment for her, and with me standing there in her foreground.

Aoife caught the cab at two o’clock. There was a flight looked like it was lined up just for her when she walked in the front door. She was able to fly back to the United States that night. The check from Captain White for her travel was in her safe-keeping, and I thought of her patting her purse while she rested snugly on the airplane.

That evening, Fiona, you were knocking on the door to my berth.

You said, “You and I have a discussion to finish.”

I thought it would be about Baxter’s adventure beneath the ship, in the hold. I was starting to get curious about the ghost hanging around. Aoife had shaken my solid state of mind on that subject matter.

Instead, you said, “The day the engine broke down, I was with you and Kingston Riggs. We were all taking our break together. You and he were telling each other about the worst things you had ever done, and you told him that you had been locked in a hotel room, right here in Singapore, by a prostitute! Is that why you and mom were divorced, back when I was just born?”

I said, “Whenever I get a look at your face from one angle, it looks just like my own—I mean, just the exact same. And, you have a similar build. The boys looked like my grandma, in a way. Of course you are all my children. I love each and every one of you, equally. And I mean that.”

You were too annoyed so I just said it, before we started throwing words at each other again.

I said, “Tell me what you got going on. Are you sleeping with everyone you meet?”

Well, we did throw words at each other. Then you left. Later, I head over to the Engine Room. Before I can say “hi” you come at me with, “I am not your daughter, am I? That’s why you never came back for us, isn’t it?”

Now, how the hell do you expect me to respond, Fiona? Of course you’re my daughter.

I asked you to return to your room. I told you we could talk in the morning, when we were underway. I was looking at one more week of travel. It could become the most troublesome part of the voyage. Except that by the time I turned to leave, three of those Ukrainians ABs were walking by. They invited you to eat with them.

“She’s in trouble with the law,” I told them.

I got your arm and pulled you all the way back upstairs. Inside my cabin, I told you, “Sit down.”

I thought about your predicament, in general. Then I dropped a blanket on your lap. “Stay on the couch tonight where it’s safe.”

You asked what I was getting at and then said, “Dad, when I’m having sex, or when I’m not having any at all with the people on the ship, you don’t need to find me out. Okay? Yuck. I cannot deal with any of this! I wish mom was here.”

I said, “Me too. But that’s us being selfish. She doesn’t need to spend any more time on my sinking ships.”

We were both quiet. Who would be more dramatic next, only time could say. The emotion was quietly building.

You asked me, “Is this thing really going down?”

I said, “Not at all. Stop saying that.”

You pouted.

You said, “You are terrible, terrible. You are so bad to me sometimes, Dad.”

“That’s not exactly the issue, Fiona. In general, I don’t know what you are up to, but I’m keeping an eye on your behavior. So long as you can’t pay your own rent, you owe me a little bit of respect.”

Like a member of the Meade lineage, you walked sullenly across the room and brewed a perfect pot of coffee. We both had gotten settled with our coffee cups.

You said, “For the record, Dad, I am artistic. Artistic minds search every kind out for pure friendship. They look for pure friendship in every detail. I always engage well with friends—my friends. No sideways glances. My life consists of talking, being open about everything… that’s who I am. That’s what I have this trip around the sun. You know what I mean? And the Ukrainian people are something I never understood before. Now, I do know them. I know each of them really well. Dad! Please. Listen to me. They are into my vibe. You’re going way off track with your accusation so, please, stop!”

She put the blanket down on the couch. I got the book again, and pretended to read it.

I said, “Great coffee, Fiona. Get out of here.”

You said, “Dad, you can tell me what happened.”

I was irritated for the reason that I cannot tell her anything.

I said “Fiona, you are my only daughter, but that’s not only private business between your mom and I, it’s also something you should know better to bring up again. Ask your mother.”

You started to cry, but I know the routine already.

I said, “Tell me your own dirty little secrets. Tell me something I need to understand.”

You wiped your tears. You stood and then sat back down. Finally, you said something I needed to understand.

You said, “I have a fiancé.”

I put the book down again. “Well, you and your mom pretend he and you aren’t living together. One day you are, then you aren’t. I don’t believe either of you.”

You finally told the truth. You said, “He never has been faithful, not one time. We both messed up at the beginning, but I never messed around… not after the first time it happened.”

I just looked at you. I didn’t say a thing. I hope that now you understood where I was coming from. I wasn’t quiet because you didn’t do anything wrong.

I said, “Let me get this question out: you and I have a mutual acquaintance you have run into trouble with?”

There was a moment of quiet.

You asked, “Mutual acquaintance? You mean, my mom?”

I said, “No. I’m talking about Friendly Floyd. You did something. I can feel it.”

You stood. You were so mad.

“Dad, don’t send some friend of yours to check in on him, okay? That was so cheap when you pulled that when I was eighteen! You taught me to carry on, and that’s what I am doing. Don’t ever tell me that I’m the crazy one, dad! Tell me what’s so happening about Singapore!”

I caved. I had to tell you.

I said, “My buddies on a ship, back then, in 1981, were all talking about getting screwed. They knew all the right people. So, we took a group of paid ladies out for drinks. Fiona, do you know what I’m saying when I say ‘paid ladies’.”

You said, “Yes. Like, hello. You mean prostitutes. Right?”

“Exactly,” I told you. I couldn’t talk until you prompted me again.

I said, “So, we had taken everyone out for drinks. We were supposed to go to a hotel. Everyone got separated. She led me to a place I didn’t know. She pushed me over the edge. Except when we were in the room, no one did any real screwing. I vomited all over the place. I was drunk as a skunk. She got mad. Left the room. Locked the door. I couldn’t leave. I was so confused. Back then, Singapore was thought of as in the stone ages. They did terrible things at night, back in those days. And if you got caught with the wrong person or doing something wrong, some of the men died in front of a firing squad or something. So, I called Aoife. And she got ahold of the ship which is a miracle. Then, they had everyone out looking for him. They found the hotel, by a hunch. The American embassy got a call from the ship, and some people were able to bust my door down.”

The dramatic conversation had drained itself out. You stayed up with me for an hour. We started looking at the Robert Service book together. That was nice. If you asked me, I would say the entire moment was all “quality time” for a dad like me.

When the midnight watch was about to start, Captain White got a call that we would be tugged out of the harbor sometime around seven the next morning. Peter went around the entire vessel on behalf of the First Mate to let everyone know to be ready.

“Good night, dad.” You told me and left.

I don’t blame you for not staying on the couch, that night, like I had asked you to. It would have been nice to keep an eye on you, and have some company with Aoife gone. But, you know, I can see you as an adult as well as a bright and shining kid of mine.

Fiona, I’m sure you have been an angel the entire time.

Chapter Sixteen

her return home

The letter that was sent from India in late August of 2005…

Floyd,

We made it to India!!! I can’t describe to you how it feels though.

Our contract said the company would pay for a nice hotel in Mumbai. They got a hotel that was nice enough for all the men, but it wasn’t all that nice. I walked to my room and there was a woman waiting for me already at the door. She was there with her son. He asked for one dollar—that’s a day’s wage or more. I was happy to help her, but once I started giving a dollar they stopped over every day. I looked at her every time, but she never smiled. Her not saying anything at all when I thought I was helping her made me cry! Then, today, I spent all morning finally talking to the woman in the hallway. I want to help her, otherwise she and her little son could both perish!

Children are in the streets who are left there. I want to bring everyone back. Or, at least, I want to return to India someday to start something positive. Maybe a school? They could all believe in America. I should give the kids in India a chance! Is there any program for this in California?

I bet this is how movies get made—right now. I’m seated at the writing desk. It’s in the middle of the lobby. Yet there are people dying when I walk around outside the hotel. The clash of cultures here is just amazing. I got a world-class adventure, but I need some time for character-work.

Something must touch a person’s heart with so much intense emotion that they can’t talk. You can only say what you are thinking with a page of a script… the pictures with the right lighting and all the background music are how we say meaningful things.

Things are so different from what we tell each other, sometimes. We all need specific masterpieces which are made from both our imaginations and the real experiences we have to endure.

If I was a poetry expert and this was the start of the movie I could say something like this… “We have been marooned from a shipwreck that no one believed in, from the beginning. It was terrible for all of us, but we are all still alive. India, of all places, gave shelter to no one except for me.” Because it’s not fair, the whole system they have.

I’ll call you if we ever make it to a big airport. I’m bringing my big journal back with me to LA.

Please pray hard for all of us, Ken. I’m just some floozy you know, but please pray anyway!

With my heart and all my love, Fiona (the one who dissed everyone she knows loudly… until she needed them!)

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

Fiona, This is all I can say. After this one, it’s your turn. Get me a script or a book or something I can read after all this hard work on my end. Make it good. I love you, kid. Meade.

Stories for Wonderful Fiona, my daughter. (header)

Aoife boarded a plane in Singapore going back to the United States.

There was just one week more of travel still ahead of Sassy in order for the ship to arrive at Alang Bay. We would be there some day in August. We would walk away from the entire Sassy thing as soon as its life was ended on the shore.

I expected White to say something salutary after Singapore. Instead, he gave me the shoulder. That’s why I knew someone was in trouble, but it was not me.

Captain White did his short practice of walking along the decks and passages. When he walked through the Engine Room, I beckoned him. He walked out. I found him headed upstairs. I approached him.

I said, “Are we going to need chef services assigned, Captain? With Aoife gone and everything?”

He didn’t answer.

I told him one last thing, “I don’t like playing games, but I sure as hell can. You stay on duty the rest of the trip, you get me? Keep the First Mate from getting blind-sided by someone shoving him some plate of nonsense. You get it? Show some self-respect, Captain, would you?”

Now, here’s where it became funny. I started to turn. I was headed back downstairs. The captain grabbed my shoulder to spin me around to face him. I saw his fist pulling back so I ducked just as it cracked by my head, about an inch away from hitting my nose.

White had thrown himself forward. Now, he was off-balance.

I took his arm . I turned him quick. Then, I got him down. I pulled back my fist. But we didn’t do anything. We just stared at each other.

“Chief, you get off me. Now, that’s an order!”

We both stood.

White said, “You’re an animal. You hear me? Your wife and I never did anything, but she needed a man at night. I told her to stay off my lines. Yet, you let her go around my vessel like it’s her crew and her Captain. You’re just a wash-up, do you hear?”

That cut deep.

I told him, “Don’t take that any further, White.”

He told me he wanted out of his life, permanently, but psychology is not my thing. I just walked off. We were men who could fight then get back to work.

Sassy departed Singapore around eight o’clock in the morning. We proceeded to clear the Strait of Malacca without incident.

While we were underway, Captain White was all eyes and ears on deck. He even brought the rifles back to the bridge and offered to hand them out in case any trouble was started. Everyone was alert to the possibility of warfare in the area, or attempts to steal Sassy from us, in the final leg of the journey.

My only daughter (you) had stationed herself permanently on Rigg’s sofa with a pair of binoculars. I saw you looking at the huts on the shore and taking photographs. Aoife had left you with that same electronic camera she had been using during our entire trip.

Day after day, the ride was intense. The heat was unbearable. Suddenly, one morning, India was in sight. Riggs was down in the engine room. The First Mate and I were up on The Bridge trying to spot India as we approached. When I saw her, the atmosphere felt downright majestic.

I found you and Baxter enjoying a cup of coffee together on the Main Deck. You both watched the sun rise above the little strips of land that were now visible. They were still miles and miles away from us.

Baxter turned to me. He gave me a big grin and stuck his thumb in the air like the two of you had a great night together. That’s when I came to realize I might have been jumping to conclusions a lot with you in your life. Maybe I ought to cut you a lot more slack and pay you a lot more respect. I was planning to but if I firmed up solid facts in my head, first.

Born as an historic ship that serviced the American military during World War II, but otherwise named Sassy, our vessel had concluded dozens, if not hundreds, of journeys. Sailors’ lives, and the lives of soldiers and fishermen and passengers alike had depended upon her hull and the main engine. Hard to say the weather our ship had endured. No document was ever written to resolve the number of miles she delivered in her time. Her regal existence would be taken from us all soon, upon the shore.

Later, in Alang Bay, a pilot boat traveled across the water, headed towards us. They would clear everyone on board Sassy for customs. When the boat was coming out, but before it reached us, everyone on-board ran to the other side of the ship to throw their handheld radios into the ocean. They were now considered illegal.

A group of hardened men walked aboard. They visited everyone. I kept you close by my side. I was grateful Aoife wasn’t there for any of their close quarters inspection.

“How about me? I’m here.” You finally told me.

Captain White held onto everyone’s passports during the voyage. He was obliged to return them now. Before he had the chance to give them each back, he met with the shipping brokers and officials. He was in trouble. Even though Captain White had the good sense to throw the firearms over the side of the ship, along with his radio, he had drunk every bit of the Captain’s alcohol long before the trip was over. The Indian men were expecting us to bring them some booze. They figured there would be plenty left over. Even though they really hounded him, he, of course, didn’t have any.

Sassy and everyone on board was finally cleared. Took a long day to do it. That last evening, we were waiting for tide reports, to plan the next day’s landing. They hadn’t come in yet to Captain White. The next morning, I spent some time getting the Main Engine fired up. Seemed morbid that this piece of history was soon to die.

We had what would be our final lunch all together in the Mess Hall. The ship was waiting close enough to the shore to feel at peace. Everyone ended up in the Mess Hall all together. We ate a bunch of fish.

The engineers all returned to the Engine Room. Baxter was going on about the ghost he had become friends with. His conversation was charging up Kingston Riggs.

Riggs said, “I’m more tired than worried, Baxter. But if it’s going to be a hit on this ship, it’s going to be by pirates. No ghost stories, thank-you.”

Thing is, pirates will try to hit vulnerable ships, one way or another, but they don’t hit rust-buckets. The whole idea was too ridiculous now that we were close to other large vessels that had already been run up onto the land. I had to laugh whenever I got to thinking about it.

Baxter wouldn’t let it go. He had a terrible feeling we were about to succumb within an hour of landing at our destination.

A thought crossed my mind.

In addition to the Engine Room we had all spent the last six weeks inside of, Sassy was refit with more expensive fish processors that were stored at the front of the ship. Must have been about a million-dollars-worth of machinery. We didn’t ever get to turn them on, but they sure had my interest. Everything inside the craft was about to be torn to pieces and resold at face value. Now, was the last and only time to take a final look.

I walked toward the front of the vessel and approached a ladder leading down, down deep into the front hold. I stepped out onto it, but a surprising blast of cold air hit me. I walked back to my berth, got a coat from my room and returned. I took a deep breath and I walked down the ladder.

There was ample light through the slits in the hull.

A mass of machinery rested quietly across one end. I could make out each one of the fish processors. They were all still in place. The nape of my neck came alive with prickling hairs. I turned my head, almost too timid to look behind me.

“This is the ride of this life, isn’t it, soldier?”

I forced myself to turn back to the rusted up engines. Then, I looked all around the empty space. I saw nothing. The voice was gone as soon as it had come.

I didn’t move. I didn’t want to disturb the source of the trouble. Then, from outside the vessel, the sounds of approaching motors filled my ears. There were other vessels in the water. They were approaching Sassy.

It was then I realized that this hold was terrible. It smelled. It was coarse. It was ugly. It held too many secrets.

No wonder the company who had invested all this trouble and laid down their lives for this dream had succumbed. The attempt to ride over something that was too massive to forget cost them their lives.

No coats of paint would ever trouble the dead. The only road to relief could be finally revealing their unspoken truth. Only the horrors of the dead expressed inside the world the living stole could do such a thing for these lost souls that would allow themselves to loose their hold upon the morbid spot where their bodies had rotted away.

Then, standing there, was an apparition of a man I knew. He wore his tarnished uniform, gray and white against his sunken dark skin. He slowly slid from the depths of darkness. He moved in my direction.

It was Baxter. Only it wasn’t Baxter in any way. It was him sometime earlier, far back in 1942. He was another person, gone from the fray, stranded and decayed inside the holds of a hideous mistake. It was a transport vessel that was still being readied to bring him home to the United States of America.

In all that had befallen this world in those years, this ship had failed to clear someone’s name or someone’s lifetime fully, neither for the soldier’s sake, nor for the fallen soldier’s family’s relief.

I coughed. It had a syrupy quality to it. It reminded me of blood. The entire sea was poisoned with the craft of warfare then. Few men dared to know the sea, nor to understand her, like I can, still, today. The words came to me, softly, like a dream I knew before lying still upon a vessel I myself had found and secured in the Puget Sound, some day in the Eighties.

I coughed one more time. Tasted okay.

I looked up.

The place was surrounded with terminology from the war etched everywhere. It stood in the foreground, black like soot up against rotted rust and worse on all those walls of the hold. The writing on the wall was everywhere, here.

Who could have done it but the timeless hands of those who still waited here for their loved ones to let them die completely or, somehow, restore life to all their many hopes.

“I’m sorry I was a real mean man to you that day.” I told him.

The relief washed through the olden-day version of Baxter. With that, his face resigned to part ways with me. The apparition shimmered for a moment like water. Then it disappeared one more time.

“Chief? Is that you?” Baxter called.

He stood at the top of the ladder into the hold.

“It’s me, alright. Come down, if you like.” I told him.

He was quiet for some time. I thought perhaps you had called him over. Then, I heard him take a few steps this way. His boots appeared on the top step. He leaned over so I could see his happy face.

“Nah, not for me. No, thanks, Chief. I’ll stay here.” He told me.

I had to smile to myself. Almost all the dots of the mystery of that lost floating ship were finally coming around, full circle.

“Unless, of course, you need a hand up?” Baxter asked.

“Not yet, I don’t.” I said.

I climbed back up to the Main Deck. I closed the lid on the horrors of the war this ship had witnessed in its past. I started looking around for Captain White.

“How we getting off this thing, Chief?” Kingston Riggs asked.

Riggs had caught up to me in the hallway, with you, Fiona, trailing behind him.

You said, “If we’re run up on the ground, we won’t be very safe for very long here, right? I mean the ship can fall over, right, when the tide goes back out?”

We needed something from the Captain about deboarding after we got the actual grounding completed tomorrow. As well, none of us had data concerning who was picking us up when the grounding was finished.

I went straight back to the mess hall. I sat and I waited. Eventually, Captain White came down to make his evening coffee.

“I understand you don’t really want the position of captain. Do you know what that means to me? It means you make me the captain by default. I don’t really need it. I’ve got my hands full in the engine room.”

White sighed.

He said, “Meade. You know what I meant. I never should have told them yes. Or you.”

It was like a confession for him. He had something to get off his conscience. Turned out he didn’t have the right license. Told me he was just a fishing guy. He passed as the Captain with all the officials because Sassy has the right kind of tonnage and her records included her fishing history up in Alaska.

“Hey, at least I brought the longline with me. Caught a lot of fish for food on it. That was good of me to do.” He told me.

I said, “Is that a quiz question?”

“No,” he said.

He said he was feeling remorseful. But we had made it across the sea, so he couldn’t have done such a bad thing, after all. I told him that.

I said, “Leave the pity party to me, White. I’m a professional.”

I walked with him up to The Bridge. In front of the First Mate and anyone else who was wandering around up there, White launched into a second confession: instead of giving the owner’s broker-free alcohol as the original plan had been, he had been compelled to give over all of our passports for them to spend time going over in detail.

“They asked. I forgot to ask for them back. I’m sorry!” said Captain White to anyone in earshot.

By then, Baxter and you, Fiona, had arrived. Next, Captain White told us what had thrown him into a maddening state.

He said, “I have not had any internet for the last four hours. There’s no way to reach anyone, at all.”

The Captain showed us an email from the vessel’s owner. He had printed it immediately before he threw every computer item including the modem and the printer inside the bridge over the side of the ship at the start of the day, to carry on the current theme of throwing guns and radios into the sea.

He said, “I thought that’s what I was supposed to do. Right after I did so, I knew I had done wrong.”

The printed e-mail let us know that those officials needed to collect a large fee from the owner, or from all of us, before we were cleared. It was all a bunch of red tape. It meant we had to get from the vessel, to the beach, to the Port Authority, miles away, in order to pick back up our passports and, if they were actually there in Mumbai, after that we could get a place to sleep.

It was pretty much extortion, at that point.

White got up. He seemed to be backing out the door, away from me and the First Mate.

I was caught up in the expression on Baxter’s face, and yours. We were both watching the Captain seem to disappear by slow backwards steps he made towards the door. It was all moving in slow motion because the Captain kept his eyes unmoving upon the email and the paperwork he had kept with him throughout the entire trip. It was spread out across the chart table. In my younger days, I would have caught him before he escaped.

The Captain disappeared. I told everyone who had just witnessed the madness to wait a minute. In my older days, I came to realize they always come back around.

Eventually, Captain White returned to pick up his paperwork.

The way you tell the story, Fiona, you were waiting for him. And on your own, you escorted him to the Mess Hall. By then, the men from the Ukraine had helped get everyone packed up. All the personal belongings that could be easily carried were in back-packs and soft seabags. Each person told me they were now ready to abandon the ship at any time.

The First Mate sternly addressed Captain White.

He said, “You’re under custody till we get our passports back, Captain. That’s the way this work. So, also, our pay must be given to us, and our hotel rooms covered by the company in Mumbai.”

White actually looked relieved for the help. Someone telling him what to do next was a good thing.

He said, “Thank you. Thanks for being a team. Thank you for staying here, Kelvar.”

White’s last sentence was directed at the First Mate who was caught off-guard.

“There are sixteen boats heading towards us,” Baxter suddenly cried out. “I counted.”

Kingston Riggs said, “But we still have no information about who is going to take us to land, and who is going to get us over to get our passports. And how the hell this is all getting done tomorrow.”

Riggs walked downstairs to the Engine Room. I headed up to the Main Deck.

We were flanked on every side by vessels. They were filled with men who were ready to tear Sassy apart the minute she was grounded. Some of those crafts were teeming with shirtless and shoeless men ready to climb all over Sassy and take her apart.

I looked over the guardrail. An old sailor, like myself, stood on the deck of a nearby boat. I waved my arms, and pointed at the water and the shore.

I shouted to him, “What time?”

I pointed at the water. I pointed at the land. I did it over and over again. I hoped I could get him to understand my body language.

“Five! Soon!” he replied, and it was as simple as that between two old boys who learnt the sea, and the missive of seamanship.

Then, the man hollered at us, “Fast! Go!”

The path became clear to me. I cleared the idea with the ship’s top men inside the Bridge. I asked the Ukrainian men to hurry and get ready to deboard. Then, I hurried after Riggs, down to the Engine Room, for our final push.

The First Mate called in with the signal. We could hear everybody waiting in the water outside. They wanted action, and they wanted it right away.

We had been waiting for the tide to roll in, big, in order to finish the thing. The plan had been for the next day. It didn’t matter. Everyone was ready to go. And, now, the tide was high so we could bring Sassy up and let her roar.

We dropped everything and got the thing going full speed. At, say, maybe, twelve or fourteen knots, we ran her boards right aground, right there across the bay of Alang.

Baxter ran up to the Main Deck when she started running forward. He was headed towards the ship’s bow right when the Sassy went aground. With her metal scraping against the beach, Baxter reached the bow and braced himself as the ship slowed its sliding movement to a final stop. He was standing at the front like the last scene from an old movie. He had his fists raised high. Baxter turned to look up at the Bridge and Fiona who was watching him.

Baxter gave everybody his great, big smile, and you, Fiona, took a photo. A year from now, that photo is on the wall of my home office.

Man, the final ride was just a terrible sensation. I realized the bottom could have been torn right off the hull. Aoife’s good advice filled my head, “That’s some criminal outfit you’re working for, and I would just walk away.”

The bottom stayed in place, but already I realized her holds were gradually filling. That is never a good sign.

I walked to the deck. I dared to look over the edge. There was water still lapping around her. We were still yet a good three hundred yards from the dry shore. The tide would be heading out again in no time. It was time to deboard and quickly lest she start to slide or fall. Or, worse, we would never have another boat there ready to accept us. The time was right now to go.

I hoped that everyone was still ready. At that point, we were relying on common sense and hand signals. We needed everybody to grab their gear fast.

A skiff was already waiting for us to load it up and depart. But nobody in the skiff spoke English. It didn’t matter.

With the tide slowly changing in order to head out again, soon the skiffs wouldn’t be able to get us off the ship. In India, I had no guarantees of a later pick-up. In addition, the vessel wasn’t supported at all. She could give way.

We were being pushed along by Team Ukraine who dealt highly in efficiency. We had to deboard.

Getting off a grounded ship in the changing tide is one of the more dangerous things to do. A rope ladder dangled off the main deck. Bags were being tossed into a flat-bottomed boat which was, for some reason, already brimming with natives trying to see if this was their opportunity to get started. Some of these people sat squarely at the bottom of the ladder we needed to climb down.

The first people to deboard were Captain White in the custody of the First Mate and Kingston Riggs.

The water was acting up. The tides were shifting. The skiff kept hitting against Sassy. At the same time, it was moving up and down. The Ukrainians were working hard to get everybody onto the skiff safely. At the same time, some of the workers tried to get a grip and climb up.

Captain White shouted, “Stay off that ladder! Don’t use it until we are all safely in.”

Everything was moving. If anyone had gotten caught between the big wooden boat and the side of the ship, that would have been it. If anyone had let go of the ladder when the ship was moving downwards, it would have hit someone when it came back up.

It was a real bitch of a time.

You and I, along with Ostop, Erat and Dimitry, we each managed to go down the rope ladder and get a seat in the crowded skiff one after the other.

There was just so much noise and confusion. Each of the work ships were overflowing with men. They were all from the outskirts of India’s caste system. This way of life was as bad as it can get on planet Earth.

The last of the ABs came down the ladder with any remaining bags. They had big, huge smiles, like they were having the time of their lives. They made things work, getting each of the crew off Sassy safe and sound.

Everyone made it to land like clockwork, except for one.

“Baxter!” You cried out. “Where the hell is he?”

Just then, a gun shot rang out. The front compartment of the ship had a door that had been fully shut. It suddenly was opened up. The sun was sinking now, but I saw him clearly. It was Baxter. He finally had gone down to the front hold. He needed to meet his demon fully. I saw him standing there in the cavity at the front of the vessel.

Like a true sailor, Baxter next hooked a rope ladder some place along the ship’s side and threw the thing off. Then he proceeded to go down it without any trouble. He dangled at the bottom of it for a few minutes before he let himself go crashing into the water.

“Baxter! Baxter” You cried, and it was just a scene from a movie when he popped up yards at sea, on the other side of the ship. Thankfully, one of the smaller crafts picked him up and brought him in. Otherwise, I bet he would have come swimming in to us like he was on an Olympic team.

“Chief! Chief!” He cried out, “That was something! One mighty fine day!”

“Temperature be damned.” Said Captain White. “The water is disgusting and filthy!”

And I watched her standing there, with the insides of her hull gushing water. But for a moment, Sassy stood there, a lone, teetering creature. She had promised me to stay afloat, and her promise was kept fine. Now it was time for the memory of her saga to be lost for good.

All together, we traveled in a bus to a ferry. We were herded into an uncomfortable ride that seemed to take all night.

We made it to the port authority, finally, the next morning. I met the owner’s representative there. Neither he nor the officials didn’t feel much like extorting more money from twelve proud sailors who looked at them without flinching, and with me at the front, who used to be a fighter in Seattle, back in his teenage years.

We were so tired. They signed off on the pay, and we collected our passports from a fairly detached-looking personnel. I told everyone it was time to go—like, right away.

Outside, the sun was rising up on everyone’s first full day inside India. I opened my check and saw that the owner had even included a bonus, one for each of us. Our lives had been in danger from the beginning. What’s so funny about that it is they all needed to go to hell and burn together, and instead they brought it to a head inviting Americans like us to watch things.

The Ukrainians needed to depart. They were walking together, and you walked with them. In that minute, I feared you would go forever. But, you gave Erat a kiss on his cheek, and ran back.

They were singing, then they were walking in the parking lot, then they were getting into a station wagon that picked them up, and then they were headed back to the Ukraine or wherever else.

“Have a great life!” Called out the First Mate, Kelvar A. Hussein, and he sincerely meant it.

“Bye-bye, you guys!” Said Kingston Riggs.

“You men truly, truly are king! King! Stay true! Stay connected!” Shouted Baxter.

“I love you guys!” You squealed, over and over again. I just rolled my eyes watching you throw away the Meade repute one final time in front of these guys.

When they drove right past me, with their hands held out of a window so I could touch them all, I guess I must have told them, “Take it easy.”

Remember how, at the beginning of the trip, Aoife told us that she wanted to smell the smells of India? In the bus, I could, indeed, smell the land.

That’s why I looked over and told you and Baxter, who were seated together on a ride to the hotel, “We are smelling the new world. It’s India!”

In all that, Captain White disappeared one more time. Later, Ted Friday told me his college buddy relayed to him that White had returned safely to his regular fishing work in Alaska.

What’s the nicest hotel you can think of?

Whatever it is, that’s the one you, Fiona, found, about two blocks away from the one the company had already paid for. It was way upscale.

Every afternoon, you asked me and the Engine Room gang to sort of pretend we were living at the other one. We did. And, we ate in the restaurant and visited the bar.

You discovered you could get a total rebuild there for about twenty bucks: a facial, a shower, a hot bath, all your fingernails and toenails, along with coloring your hair, and doing every other thing you could think of.

All the meals we had in India were good. In the mornings, I saw you out on the hotel veranda, and in the early afternoons, and when the sun was setting. You were taking things in.

On the last night, we all went to the bar at the nice hotel and proceeded to get hammered. I should mention that you never drank a thing or else I’ll probably get sued by you as soon as we’re back home.

On the flight back to Seattle, I secured everyone’s attention.

We had traveled through seven seas and oceans to take Sassy to her final resting place. We sailed the Pacific, the Strait of Malacca, the Andaman Sea, the Bay of Bengal, the Philippine Sea, the Laccadive Sea and the Arabian Sea.

“Something that I want you to remember is that Sassy’s engine didn’t break because of Baxter, though I know he thinks he did it. Truth is, that engine held together because of some of the work Baxter did on it. He saved the engine, not the other way around. That’s everything I’m going to say about it.”

Baxter was beaming. Everyone was happy, after that. And we talked a lot about the time we spent onboard Sassy, all the way during our trip home.

What an interesting time it had been for all of us.

Chapter Seventeen

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…

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! My 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! My 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

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!)

What happened to be also enclosed with the aforementioned email was this here attachment…

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.

EPILOGUE

A letter a sailor once wrote that wasn’t opened by his humble daughter until 2024…

Fiona,

It’s your dad. Here’s my letter-writing action. Thought I’d drop you a line in the way my favorite daughter always showed me. I boarded a monster of a freighter today. I headed up to my Chief’s quarters. It looks pretty good. There is a writing desk here. Thought I’d write something short. Remember all those letters you sent me when you were a little girl?

Don’t get excited about me working. I’m feeling okay.

But I can’t make it to California for Patrick’s birthday. I’ll send something I picked up for your little one. Tell each of your boys and sweet, darling Matilda Hello! from Grandpa Meade!

I need to find a good seamstress. Kingston Riggs’ daughter is getting married. Baxter brought in rolls and rolls and rolls of pure Singapore silk on his last trip. Riggs’ little daughter loves the stuff, and Baxter was a good friend to pick everything up for her last time he went there. The family will need shirts and dresses made for the entire wedding party.

Your mom has somehow managed to stay in touch with everyone from the voyage, even Captain White. She sends Christmas cards off every year to the Ukrainian men you were always chatting with.

Remember the nice lady from India whose life you saved? The one you paid for so she could stop living on the streets? I can’t tell you how impressed I was when you moved them both to California, dear. That was a fair share of luck you shared with her and her son.

You said she owns a sewing shop and has a place in Oxnard? Well, if she needs another task to do, pass along Riggs’ phone number to her. Ask her to give him a call.

Baxter and his wife are going to the wedding. Aoife and I are also going. Your mother is letting me take her as her official date. Would you make a trip up to Seattle for that? It’s nice when everyone comes together.

Been thinking about you and Aoife and even Captain White. I realized that I am not the same since that trip, and I won’t ever be.

Today is the anniversary of when Sassy was first scheduled to depart to India from Seattle. Of course, she couldn’t make that happen. It took a month to make her ready for the trip, because Sassy needed a lot of work. What a lot of hassle!

Not sure I told you this, but Aoife confided our adventure was the first time in her entire life when she had signed up for something that turned out to be awful, but she couldn’t get mad and quit. There was no place to run away to out there in the middle of the ocean.

Your mom has always been tough. She had to venture out into the wild and make a trip across the Pacific before she understood perseverance.

Yesterday, Aoife told me she had a dream about catching fish from the ocean, and cleaning them up, and frying them for a meal. She loved those dinners on Sassy as we cut across the deep Pacific. Fresh fish at sea can’t really be beat by anything on land.

I noticed how you haven’t made it back to sea since that voyage, Fiona. Your credentials are expired. However, you finally got to work with giving me my allotment of grandchildren. Every one of your beautiful babies is good for a full 18 years of respect from your dad. So, instead of giving you a hard time, I had better apologize!

When you sold that last film, I meant to ask you to spend a few million on a shipping fleet that came on the market yesterday. I’ve got something in mind for a company I’d like to start. It’s okay if you don’t have time. Maybe one day getting a small shipping company going will be something you and I finally do. The twins sure don’t care about anything I have going down. Those guys are just obsessed with marketing and politics. How thankful I am that you still care at all.

Remember back on our blueberry farm, back in those days in New Jersey? The place we had there had a workshop, and there was a sign up from the twins that read, “Dad’s Place”. I spent a lot of time out in that shop. I probably was fixing a broken step or putting together some kind of a crawl space for all of Malcom’s cats.

The twins must have been twelve or thirteen years old. They wanted to attach motors to their bicycles. I helped them both out. We worked on everything all together as a team. We connected the throttles to the handlebars and got them going.

The twins were driving those motorbikes all over the place. And, next, you wanted a try. You didn’t know anything about throttles, so Ben pointed out, “The handlebar turns.”

That was the last thing he told you.

You turned the handlebar. The bike jerked all over the grass. You sped around the farmhouse and you were yelling the whole time about how you couldn’t stop, with the twins running behind you, telling you to hold on to the bike the entire time. You went in a big wide circle around the house. You ran right into a tree, and you got all those scratches and scars up and down your arms. There were tears pouring down your face. I walked over and you wouldn’t let me know. You said you were okay.

“Honey, you’re crying. Why don’t you just cry?” I asked.

“If I cry you won’t ever let me do it again,” you told me.

I remember that very well: If I cry you won’t let me do it again. That’s the attitude. That’s the spirt, kid.

I’ve been thinking things over. I looked up at the machinery and the massive size of the ship I am about to head out on. I was wondering what adventure the new voyage might hold for me. And I made a choice on my own that this will likely be the last voyage I will ever make. This sailor’s clock has ticked itself out.

I am choosing the right route by retiring. I have made sure everyone onboard my ships got home for more than sixty years.

Every step on earth is different. Every step depends on the circumstances you face.

I became an adult at aged sixteen, in the Navy. Later, I got a good life behind me with my merchant marine’s license in the Engine Room, eventually to sail as Chief on any vessel. That’s why I’m not risking everything for no real reason, at this point. I am dreaming of being better prepared for what life deals out.

Friendly Floyd did a mighty good thing with his life, and I hope you put in a good word for him for every curse you give me about the same man.

Honey, people can really tell when you are mad. It’s terrible to be around you, when you are.

One last thing. After your Uncle Phineas passed last month, things have become a bit surreal. I miss my brother. He was the baby of the family. Even if he had grandkids who were all grown up, he was always the baby of the family.

Before he died, the twins invited him and I out to a big-deal dinner, the same thing they had invited all of us to go to for years. I never had any time for it. I had no intention of ever going. Then Phineas’ eyes light up about meeting the big names the twins told him would attend. It sounded to him like every celebrity on the planet would be at that party. We agreed to make it.

“Yea. If you want to go, we’ll all go. Rent you a tuxedo and anything else you want.” That’s all I said. It set off a whirlwind. The whole family jumped on it, even the little one, Ted. I pulled up in my big black Cadillac car. There were some old movie producers standing outside, smoking cigarettes and talking.

Ben abandoned us. He walked off chasing one of the guys down from The Shaft. Phinneas and I casually walked by. The boys helped us all get a picture together and the man’s signature on a napkin. Phinneas thought that evening was the best thing he ever got to do. The twins were macho the entire night.

I think about these old days a lot. Nothing more to say other than good-bye to my wonderful brother, Phineas.

Fiona, you know how much I love you. I’m proud of what you did. You showed Friendly Floyd you were the real deal and outsold him and Malcom combined with your own movie deals. You proved every last one of them wrong for throwing in the towel on your ambition. You made it happen. And that’s how people will remember you.

Being a famous person is sometimes important. And a hell of a lot of people are very, very important people at least once during their lives. A regular person can become important really quick, you ever notice?

Being big and important, that’s not me. I don’t happen to have that in my DNA.

Aoife and I are happy we dived back in. Marriage Number Four has worked out fine. It’s the longest streak we ever have had going.

Best part of being this old is that I haven’t had to sit up, night after night, wondering what is going to happen next. It takes a lot out of me when I think about the people I love. I keep remembering that night with my little brother, how happy we all were. Just one night made all the difference for Phinneas.

I don’t want to leave you nor anybody else high and dry. I should have taken more time with each of my kids. In the end, if I had, they wouldn’t have lived as good. The last thing I have to offer are stories about days in my past.

Wives and friends, and children and their friends, and brothers and sisters, they all ask for my gests and for the lore. Everybody swears by a true story about sailors upon an open sea. In the end, it is pure romance that has kept me happy. Plus, everybody on the planet wants love and music and alcohol. Looks like they are going to have all of it, in time. Life is like that for a person who tries to do something with their life.

A lot more things will go everyone’s way, Fiona, so enjoy your life and take it easy.

From a sailor as well as,

From your dad,

Meade

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