The Hemingway Maid ('16 revision)

I called out her name. Nothing, then I felt feet landing on Sabrina's deck.

"You ready to go, Sport?"

"Where's Elise?" I called up to Ron.

"With Pete and Lupe and Rosalita. Making dinner."

More feet hit the deck. I looked out and saw the other two Amigos; they had large duffel bags with them, and my stomach did another double flip.

"Hey, Jim!" one of them said. "Flip the radar to standby, would ya?"

"Yeah, no problem," I mumbled. You ever notice how you go on automatic pilot when unavoidable shit starts to head your way? In those precious last seconds before it really hits the fan?

We backed out of the slip, then motored out toward the breakwater. Ron had the helm, of course, and the Amigos were hunkered down over their chart.

The same chart they used the last time we went out.

One of them pulled a very small hand held radio out of his duffel and plugged-in an earphone, then he fiddled with switches, slipped on his earphones and listened intently.

We cleared the breakwater and immediately turned to the left, to the west, parallel to the coast. We ran along under power about 50 yards off the beach.

"Hey, Jimbo, take the to radar active and go to max range - okay, buddy? Set the gain real high, too."

Say, there goes Jim the robot! See Jim comply! Watch Jim shit his pants!

"Ron, did they finalize the CAP setup?" That was not my question, by the way.

"Yeah, couple of 14s on CAP, screening the E2. The two queers are coming out of Key West. A couple of 16s outta Homestead will cover the Queers if we need 'em to."

"Queers? Out of Key West?" I asked. I knew that town had a pretty dicey reputation, but what would a couple of gays be doing coming over here?

"EA-6Bs, Jim," Ron said to the blank expression on my face. "Electronic Countermeasures aircraft. Radar jammers. Called Queers."

"That's just fucking great, Ron! Wanna tell me what the fuck's going on?"

"Later. When we get back. I'll brief you in then, buddy. Just right now we're going to watch a little airshow. There's an AWACs up that's going to watch how the Gomers react."

"Great, Ron. Glad to be of service. You planning on invading this place, or just trying to get me killed?"

"Radar still looking nominal," one of the Amigos said. "Nope! There he goes!"

I looked at the radar screen: it was full of electronic noise all around the northern horizon. The screen showed normal activity to the south - along the shore, inside Cuba.

"O.K. boys, here come the Queers."

I wonder to this day if Ron had any idea of how fucking weird he sounded when he said that?

They sounded close, but I couldn't see them. The Amigos were checking watches, writing on the chart furiously. Ron watched me searching for the aircraft.

"Jim, down there," he said pointing off the right side of the boat.

I couldn't believe what I was seeing. Two of the weirdest looking jets were screaming along over the water, and I mean just barely over the water - I guessed their altitude was about ten feet above the water! And they were scooting right along, too.

Air raid sirens start wailing. A rocket screamed right over our head. It had launched from land somewhere off to our left.

"Echo 2, Echo 2, SA-7 coming at you. Go active now!" That little bit of information came from the Amigo with the little radio up to his face.

The Queers went wild. They started changing altitude and heading every couple of seconds, huge flares belched from their bellies and shiny clouds of metallic stuff blew out behind them. The missile flew out over the sea, toward empty sky, then the Queers disappeared into the gray haze and were gone - just about as quickly as they'd come.

Ron swung Sabrina around and gunned the engine, heading right back to the marina. That was it? What a great day for a sail. Whooppeeeee!

Soon the Amigos had Sabrina tied up at the dock, rum flamethrowers in hand, dinner, music, dancing on the dock. Everything cool here, dude, so be careful as you pass, move along-move along.

We'd been back a little less than an hour when Elise came below looking for me, and she found me in the head. I hadn't quite finished driving the porcelain bus yet, and asked her to please leave me alone for a while.

But she didn't. She sat behind me on the floor, held a cool rag on the back of my neck. I was consumed with cold sweats and racking shakes, in fact had never felt so physically ill in all my life. But I finally had to ask the question.

"Elise, are you in on this?"

She looked down, then nodded her head 'yes,' and the little world world I'd constructed in my mind simply gave way and caved in.

+++++

I slept in the next morning. There were no exotic aromas coming from the galley, no places set in the cockpit. There was no Pedro - and no Elise, either - on Sabrina, only me and my headache. I put some old shorts and a t-shirt on, and headed - barefoot - up on deck. My mouth had that old familiar West Texas bullshit taste lingering on my breath, and it felt like I had suitcases hanging in boggy sacks under my eyes. I saw Ron sitting over in Blade Runner's cockpit.

"Hey, Sport, how are..."

"Fuck you, Fuller!" I walked away from the little chuckles that hung in the air like insinuations. I think they tried to follow me to the shower.

One of the other dock boys fetched water, started the little propane boiler that heated it to body temperature. I told him to keep the water coming and gave him a twenty dollar bill. His eyes went saucer-shaped and wide and he ran off with empty buckets. I got under the warm water and stood there forever, letting the stream hit the back of my neck for what felt like hours.

At any rate, I think the waters running down my face hid the tears that seemed to come every time I thought of Elise. Which was only about every time I took a breath.

+++++

I was sitting in the cockpit later that morning, charts spread out on my little portable chart table and I was making some notes on the margins of my chart for the Florida Straits. My stomach was empty, and growling like a pissed off tiger, but I had arranged to get the water and fuel tanks topped off later that morning, get some supplies from the market, maybe a bit of food if I could stand it, and pull out of the marina later that afternoon. I would anchor off Key West tomorrow morning, get some barnacles scraped off my shoulders by a dermatologist I knew over there, and get some major provisions loaded on Sabrina. I thought I might head off toward the Bahamas, then on down to the British Virgins. When I thought about Elise I wanted to get as far away as possible, as fast as I could.

"Jim?"

Well, speak of the devil! Time for the wounded-silent act...

"Jim, please?"

"Sorry, Jim's not in right now. Leave a message at the tone, or why not try back -- next year." Did anyone say I couldn't throw a childish temper tantrum? What? Me worry?

So of course she hopped onboard, came and sat across from me in the cockpit. I watched her as she moved; her lithe, sure steps, now full of total self-assurance -- where a few weeks ago they had been anything but, then I saw Ron in his cockpit, his back to Sabrina, but with an ear cocked our way. My, what a tangled web those two had been working on. This could get interesting, I thought. If I lived.

"Have you had anything to eat?" she asked.

That's right, go for the stomach. Worked before, didn't it?

"No," I said. She got up quickly but I said something dismissive like "don't bother" and she sat back down. I could see the gears turning over in her mind, and I wondered how strong the link was between her mind -- and Ron's. How long had they been scheming? How long had they been waiting for a 'mark' like me to come along?

"Jim, this is very complicated," she said quietly, directly, "so pay attention." She stopped, waiting for me to look up, and when I did there was something new in her eyes. Something new, and dangerous, yet she was appealing to me, begging me to listen with my heart -- again. "When I was in Paris, you recall, when the minister sent me abroad, I was recruited by the CIA." She paused again, measuring the impact of these first few words. "Recruited me to go back to Cuba, to report on things I might learn -- from him, the minister. Eventually, the link was discovered and the Minister was killed." Another pause, her eyes on mine like lasers. "I was imprisoned, tortured, left for dead more than once -- when suddenly, they released me. During that time the security services killed my parents, and my brother Miguel only just managed to get Pedro out of Havana and into hiding, in the countryside. Then Miguel found me after they released me, down by the beach. It was so obvious: they wanted to release me, he said, then follow me, find out who my contacts were. By that time Miguel had gotten involved with people trying to get to Florida, and was making arrangements to get us, all of us, out of Cuba. He had gone out on a boat with others in his group to try to find the best time to try to make the run, but they were discovered and ran. They succeeded, too. He made it..."

She looked away for a long while, then continued...

"So, Pedro and I made our way into the mangroves and built our house, but I knew we were being watched. And I mean all the time, Jim. So I started to act crazy, then helpless, but Pedro knew what was going on. And you know? He always managed to keep us fed, even when I really started to go crazy. He is an amazing, brave young man, Jim, and he loves you like a brother."

I sat listening to this with a dull ache spreading through me. 'Me? I have a 13-year-old brother?'

"After many months the watchers lost interest, and for a while they would only check on us from time to time. Then not at all. Pedro started working at the marina, and he met Ron. He found out who Ron was, what he used to do."

"Say, Sport, let me take it from here," Ron "Captain America" Fuller interjected. "So, Jim, there are a lot of people in Cuba who've helped us over the years, and a lot of them are here, in the marina. They're vulnerable, their covers are shaky. And we're going to try to get them and their families out - before they get taken out."

"Ron, you keep saying we. Is this a 'company operation?' And do I get, like, a pension out of this?"

He bit his lip and shook his head, never once breaking eye contact. "So, sport, here's the plan. There's a pretty fair-sized tropical depression building, and it looks like it's coming our way. All the families gathered here are going to off-load over the next couple of hours, drift back out into the trees, so to speak, while the storm heads in. We're going to send a couple of boats out, watch the navy board 'em and toss 'em, and then we're all going to make like we're going to hunker down and sit this thing out, here, in the marina. As the weather gets bad, maybe day after the next, sometime that night we're going to get everyone back in the marina, on an assigned boat, and get the fuck outta Dodge."

"You're fucking crazy, Fuller. You ever been in a full-blown depression, in the Straits, in a storm moving against the Gulfstream. Pyramid waves thirty, thirty five feet tall -- that's the norm. Shit, Ron, even supertankers don't try to run the Straits in a storm, it's one of the meanest stretches of water in the world. Why would you..."

"Well, Sport, we're only going to be using the really strong boats. And yours happens to be about the toughest one here, so you're invited to the party."

"Not me, Sport," I tossed his name right back at him. "I'm leaving this afternoon, thought I'd head west to Mexico, maybe to Belize."

Ron looked down at the charts I had spread out; of course my Bahamas charts were right there on top.

"Sure thing, Sport," he said, seeing through that lie in an instant. "I suggest you keep your tail right here. You don't want that kind of trouble. Hell, it'll be raining IRS agents everywhere you go for the next ten years." He sat there grinning, looking like he had the trump card -- and the game all sewn up.

"What are the jets and crap all about?" I asked.

"We're going to leave at night, hopefully when the storm has moved in and the patrol boats have gone in to weather it out in the inner harbor. But they'll still have radar, and sailboats show up real good on radar. And they've got those fucking MIGs, as I'm sure you know by now. All-weather MIGs that could really rain on our parade. So, when we head out, the Queers are going to jam them, which they're going to think is pretty fishy anyway, but we're counting on a little indecision on their part. MIG 29s don't grow on trees, and they probably won't want to send 'em up in this kind of storm unless the threat's real. We're banking on them thinking it's just a bunch of gringo yachties bailing out and trying to run home before the storm gets rough."

"Ron, pardon me for asking, but have you considered that they might have someone inside here who knows what's going on, and is reporting all of this to the bad guys."

"It's a possibility."

"So, jets jam radar. Then what. What if the MIGs come out to play."

"They get splashed, shot down," he said with absolutely no emotion. "You know, they run into trouble in the storm and lose control. Real tragedy. And, oh yeah, there'll be some of our guys in boats out there, too. Little ones like the Nimitz, that kinda crap."

"I take it there are some very important spooks in this group?"

"You have no fucking idea, Sport."

All I could see in my mind's eye was a leathery-skinned boy floating on the surface of Gulfstream tossed waters. A dead boy, and the helplessness I'd felt as I lifted his lifeless body onto that heaving deck.

"O.K., Ron, if I'm in, I'm in 100%, so no bullshit now. If you even think you've got the tiniest bit of information I might need, you get it to me. Deal?" I held out my right hand, looked him in the eye.

"Deal." We shook on it.

Of course, after that Elise was back in the galley -- merrily singing away while she worked, and after Ron left I went down and sat at the salon table, looked on as she produced yet another Condon Bleu inspired feast. I managed to choke a little down, too. Tough life, all in all. Me, the overfed spy who was about to go out in the cold. Well, there are worse ways to go, I think I heard myself say.

Or maybe it was just the wind.

+++++

Ron and the 'Two Amigos' came around just before sunset that night, and asked -- gasp, that was a first! -- if they could come aboard. The Amigos had a weather fax with them, showing the forecast out of Norfolk for the mid-Atlantic latitudes, including the northwest Caribbean. It looked like, they said, two nights from now the weather would be optimal.

"Optimal?" I said. "For what? Hoping my insurance policy is good?"

"Jim," Ron sighed, "you're going to be the lead boat out. We're going to pack all of the important assets in Sabrina; like I said, your boat is tougher than anyone else's for dealing with this kind of blow, and may be a little faster, too, even in rough water. Also, I'm going to put a couple of Navy Seals on board."

I tried not to look surprised. "Oh, joy."

"They'll get here tomorrow night. A sub will drop them off around dark, if all goes as planned. Someone is going to create a little diversion east of here tomorrow about midnight, so keep your swim ladder down after zero dark-thirty tomorrow night. And have some towels and coffee ready."

"Right." Call me Smiley, ready to handle his spies.

"I'll come over after I see 'em board. And, oh, they know how to navigate, Jim."

"Imagine that," I smiled.

One of the Amigos spread out a new chart on the table, and pointed to some positions marked on the chart. "This is where we're going to head. There will be a full carrier battle group eastbound outta the Gulf, and for some odd reason they'll be transiting the Straits about the same time we make our run. Cubans have been advised to keep their distance. We're only going to have to make it about twelve, maybe 15 miles offshore to get under their protective umbrella, make it two and a half hours from the breakwater to this line -- and if any of the boats start to crap out, they'll have to make it at least this far. The Navy guys won't leave international waters, not for no one, no how."

"Where's Elise going to be?" I asked, not really wanting to hear the answer.

"With me, Sport. Pete will hang out with Lupe on Blade Runner, and you'll be full-up over here."

Elise was sitting next to me now, and she took my arm and leaned her head into my shoulder.

The Two Amigos stood and in turn shook my hand, wished me luck and said they'd see me 'on the other side' -- which meant Key West, I assume -- or somewhere back in the States. I wished them luck as well, and turned to Ron as he started to speak again.

"Your real cargo will get here after dark the night after tomorrow. A couple, late sixties. Rig up a couple of storm berths and strap 'em in. The Seals will give 'em something to help them sleep. We may have another young girl, if we can get her out of Havana."

"We?"

"You bet, Sport. We're going to go drinking tomorrow night with the Seals, maybe bring some girls back to the boat with us. Ya know, have some fun? Why don't you be ready to roll around eight?"

"You really are too fucking much, Fuller."

"Yeah, ain't life grand?" he said as he bounced up the companionway steps - and then he was gone again -- with the wind. You can bet he was grinning like a fool, too. Hell, I know I was...almost. Kind of like Death, standing there with nothing left but sadness in his eyes.

+++++

"So, assuming we get across, then what?" I asked Elise.

"I think we're going to Washington. The rest of us, I mean, but I don't really know the plan."

"I hate to sound so self-interested, but what about me, about us?"

"I don't know, Jim. A few hours ago you hated me, remember?"

"I've never hated you, Elise. I was disappointed, if you know what I mean? Nobody likes to be made a fool, especially by someone they love."

"Do you love me, Jim?" She was blushing, if that meant anything.

"Yes," I said, though I'm pretty sure my voice cracked a little, "I just happen to, with all my heart."

"That's good." We sat quietly for a minute, watching time slip away. "I would hate to love you as much as I do and watch you sail away, thinking you hate me."

I got up and walked to the galley, got a couple of glasses and put some ice in them, then went to my secret hiding place and got out my last bottle of Grand Marnier and poured a couple of stiff ones. Handing her the drink while I sat across from her -- unconsciously increasing the distance between us -- I looked into her eyes. Or I tried to, anyway.

"So, when all this is over and done with, I reckon I get to sail away by myself. Is that a pretty good read on things?"

"Jim, I don't know how this story ends. It hasn't been written yet...we haven't written it yet, but the story I had in mind doesn't end that way. So," she said as she held her glass up to mine, "maybe we should have a drink -- to happy endings."

"To happy endings..." I recall saying, but truthfully, I didn't feel very happy. I felt lonely, exposed and lonely, because there was still something gnawing away in the back of my mind...something that looked and smelled a lot like death. A chill ran down my spine, and I saw Death standing in the galley behind Elise, looking down at her -- with a sad smile in his timeless eyes.

+++++

Elise and I lay next to each other in the forepeak later that night, watching the Moon dart out from behind backlighted clouds scudding away to the southwest. We were arm-in-arm on our backs, just listening to each other ramble on about nothing in particular, looking at the clouds through the hatch and talking about what lay ahead. I told her - in unmistakable terms - what crossing the Straits would be like under the forecast conditions, and told her I'd never been caught in the Straits before in a major storm, but had ridden out my share of storms in other seas, more than a few on Sabrina, and most had been far, far away from land. Which was, I explained, a good thing. Boats and land, by and large, are not a good mix because boats tend to break when the collide, but, I added, being in a small boat at sea in a storm was a lonely, frightening place to be. When I look back on events with the perspective of so many years, I often wonder if I made the situation clear to her, if she really understood the risks involved.