The Hemingway Maid ('16 revision)

Then the Sun was setting, winds were abating, and soon the island resolved through the last shrouds of mist. I sailed through the empty anchorage and dropped my hook on the north side of the town, sheltered Sabrina from the remnants of the storm as best I could. I set as many anchors as I dared, shut down the engine, and reeling with exhaustion, made my way forward and curled up on the berth.

+++++

In my dream, I heard someone's voice calling out to me.

"Hey c'mon, time to wake up!"

I hate dreams like that, you know, the ones that feel like real life, almost cinematic in their vibrant intensity? But there was this man, shaking my shoulders, imploring me to get my ass outta the sack.

He wouldn't stop. I wanted him to go away. I opened my eyes, knew that would make the dream go away, but there he was, shaking me.

"Go away." I managed to say before I shut my eyes again and rolled away from him.

"GET UP! NOW!" the voice said, and I shot bolt upright.

"What are you doing here?" I said to the stranger.

"We need to talk."

"What are you doing here." I said again, still deep in the fogs of 'not enough sleep,' and desperately wanting to get back there. "Go away."

"We need to talk, sir."

Whatever it was, it wasn't going away. Oh, what the hell, I needed to take a leak anyway.

"Jim, can you hear me?"

"Yeah, I hear you."

"Get some clothes on, Jim. You've been asleep for thirty hours!"

"No shit?"

I was sitting on the edge of the berth, and the man - in a Navy uniform, no less - just shook his head in apparent disgust before he turned away and walked into the saloon. He left the door open and I could see several men standing around in the saloon, and over the stove in the galley. Some wore uniforms, some were in suits, and no one knew how to work the stove.

This was, I told myself, rapidly turning into one of those really shitty, hyper-realistic nightmares. But then I smelled coffee. And - cheeseburgers? My idea of the nightmare from hell! I was still in my foul-weather gear, and became acutely aware that I smelled like a goat, that my skin was covered in greasy, salt-encrusted sweat, and that I was in dire need of the head. I slipped out of my foulies and hopped in the shower. I knew the hot-water system was shut down, but turned on the sump pump and flipped the water on.

Hot water streamed out of the shower head. I looked out the portlight in the shower compartment and saw that I was tied up to a pier. I started to blink my eyes really rapidly then, trying to clear away the foggy remnants of my dream. All of a sudden I realized that I was alive, and that there were a bunch of official looking types down below.

I soaped up, rinsed, brushed my teeth, shaved, and finally -- cut loose a really big fart.

Ah, now I was awake! It's always amazed me that I'm not ever fully awake until I fart -- the bigger the better. Anyway, I pulled on some shorts and slipped a t-shirt over my still damp frame, ran a brush through the hairs that hadn't jumped ship yet - all eight of them - and stepped out into the cabin.

Some navy type shoved some coffee my way, and asked me to take a seat

They had, it turned out, all sorts of questions to ask me. The operation had been a success, but several boats had been hit by the MIG and were lost. The MIG had been shot down by Navy F14s, and there was a very serious clusterfuck in progress between Washington and Havana, but the Navy had picked up the downed Cuban airman, and ruffled feathers had been smoothed.

All of the refuges on my boat, and three others, had been spirited away to someplace in Virginia and would be out of touch for a long, long time. The Cubans could never learn what had happened, who had been smuggled out, or lives here and in Cuba would be put at risk.

A suit from the Justice Department slid a document to me across the salon table. Sign this, he said, indicating that I had been informed about ultra-top-secret information and I had to sign a non-disclosure agreement, agree to keep what I knew to myself.

I signed the paper and slid it back to him.

"So that's it?" I said. "That's all there is?"

A Navy captain sitting across from me spoke next. "Jim, here's the problem. Bunch of reporters were down here covering the storm and they saw your boat come in, then Cuba started screaming about a bunch of boats leaving the country illegally, then the MIG crap came out and the press boys are screaming to talk to anyone involved. Get the picture?"

"Yeah. What do you want me to do?"

All of the men in the salon visibly relaxed. I guess they had been afraid I'd try to capitalize on the situation, maybe go for a movie of the week deal, hell, I don't know.

"Well, Mr Madison," said an Admiral (I assumed so -- by the number of stars visible on his khaki collar), "I just wanted to thank you. Your country thanks you, and owes you big-time. Oh, by the way, there's a rumor you're related to President James Madison. Would that be true, sir?"

"I've heard that rumor, too, sir."

The admiral smiled, shook my hand then left, and soon only the Navy captain and a casually dressed man remained. I just sat there, lost in the realization that I would never see Elise again.

"Jim, this puke over here is from the Agency, and he's got a check with your name on it. No amount filled in. Name a figure, or let him do it, but we owe you big time for what you did."

"I don't want anything, sir. Never have."

"I understand."

The agency bean counter sat there, pen in hand poised over his check.

I just waved my hand at him. "Put that away, would you?"

The man wrote an amount on the check, then turned it over and slid it to me. It sat there like an insinuation, glowing with tainted evil.

Then I saw there were still men in the cockpit, Navy ratings working on something by the wheel.

"What are they doing up there?" I asked the captain.

"They're putting in some stuff for you. A GPS chartplotter and a satellite phone. We want you to know where you are, how to call us if you need us. Anytime, anywhere," the bean counter smiled.

"I reckon there are some heavy strings attached?"

"Not at all, sir. But in case somebody finds out what happened, who was involved, and they want to toss a little revenge your way. No big deal, really."

"I don't suppose there's something in that stuff that'll tell you where I am, huh?"

The spook just grinned, then looked away. I was shocked just how much like Ron they guy looked. By the way...did I ever tell you how irritating that grin of his was? No? Sure I did...

+++++

Sabrina lay at anchor off Nassau, in the Bahamas, on a late September day. It had been almost four months since the flight from the Marina Hemingway, since I'd last seen Elise, yet not a day went by that I didn't think of her.

I'd left Key West almost immediately, and I missed her help getting Sabrina ready for sea again. Everywhere I looked I saw her, felt her presence, and every time this happened I had to turn away from her ghost. I replaced a few worn items in the rigging, fittings that had been stressed in the storm, but I had wanted to get all that behind me. I flew up to Ft Lauderdale and visited Mom and Dad, and told Dad the whole story over drinks.

Dear old Dad, ever the realist. So, what was his first comment?

"What did you do with check?"

Like I said. A realist. "Nothing, yet, Dad. It's still in my wallet."

"Want me to set something up with it? I can talk to my broker over at..."

"Dad, I was thinking of giving it to the Salvation Army, or maybe the Communist Party of Central Iowa. Or maybe setting up a fund for knocked-up nuns."

Big frown. "How much?"

"I never looked, Dad."

Even deeper frown. "You've got it with you?"

I nodded.

Look of total disgust. "Let me see it."

I never argued with Dad. Futile. Very futile. I took the folded check out of my wallet and slid it over to him.

He opened it up and whistled. It takes a lot to get Dad to whistle, so of course now I was curious.

"If I were you, I think I'd get on the next flight down to Grand Cayman and do something with that. It's drawn on a Cayman bank, by the way, just in case you're wondering." He was spreading the sarcasm a little thickly, I thought, as he slid it back to me.

O.K., I'm weak. I turned it over and looked at the numbers.

I whistled. "Shit...that's a lot of zeros..."

+++++

Dad sailed over to the Bahamas with me, and it was to be our last trip together on Sabrina. He stayed with me for three weeks, even got in the water and went snorkeling a time or two. He reminisced and groused about his arthritis. We talked, we listened, we got to know one another again. One of the rare things a boat does well -- bring people together.

"I guess that Hemingway thing kinda made up for those poor people on the raft," he said one evening as the Sun was racing for the horizon. "God, I'll never forget that day."

"Neither will I, Dad -- not ever."

I watched Dad moving around the boat, the awkward way he moved now, the joints in his feet and fingers swollen with arthritis, the labored breathing as he worked the sails. I hated to watch him endure the humiliation of getting old - men as full of life as he must be so keenly affected by the process. I thought of him and Mom, together since the end of the second World War. How love, true love, comes to so few people. The American landscape was littered with the flaming remains of divorced and shattered families in this, the closing years of our brief American Century. The Golden Age of the Divorce Lawyer, I thought. Disposable values, disposable families - disposable civilization.

But how valuable, how dear true love is, and how common loneliness had become.

And now, there were no Elise's on my horizons. Only an empty sky, and endless oceans waited.

A few days later I pumped up the Zodiac and ran Dad to the plane for Lauderdale. Life is so short, but damn! He had lived every minute of it to the full. He and my mother had lived through so much, seen so much change, yet in the end they'd only grown stronger together. What happened, I wondered, to the rest of us?

+++++

I wandered through the Bahamas for a few months, stopping every now and then to take in a sunset or pick up some food at a local market. I'm one of those people: I try to fish, I throw a line in the water and I can hear the fish laughing. Give me a market or I'll starve.

I met new people along the way, made a friend here and there. Couples and lots of single men. Lonely single men, and couples that bickered at one another. What a scene. What a choice.

Why does it seem as if we are so intent on carrying our problems with us everywhere we go? Every now and then I'd meet a couple so very happily in love it was a joy to watch. They would come to me like a painting, like a stylized tableau of hope idealized, and eternity reconciled. Too, every now and then I'd run into a man or woman very happy with their solo wanderings, not lonely at all, just in love with exploring the world around them. Meeting people so different from themselves. Happy in themselves, though, and happy to be alive.

I envied them, because I felt I'd never find that kind of peace again. I'd touched the contours of such happiness when I held Elise in my arms, but then the thought struck me one day: I'd have never been happy with Elise, or anyone else, until I could find happiness within myself.

True, it's a cliché, but that doesn't make it any less valid. So. where would my wanderings take me, if only right back into the arms of my waiting cynicism?

+++++

With Christmas coming on, I headed east towards the British Virgin Islands, toward the Bitter End Yacht Club, a hotel, restaurant and watering hole famous throughout the eastern Caribbean as a grand place to pass the time, and to do so in good company. Hurricane season was over, the waters as I approached the Virgins unbelievably blue, the sky warm and clear, and the feeling carried a smile to my heart.

After six months away from Cuba, I was reconciled to a life of solo explorations. I would spend my days photographing people and their homes and lives, walking the towns and villages of small islands by day, reading about their culture at night, and taking care of Sabrina. I was, however, after more than a week at sea looking forward to lavishing some TLC on me.

Navigating the last approaches to the Virgins during the morning, I charted our way to the Bitter End, hoping to arrive by late afternoon. The day remained clear and beautiful, the sea grew swimming-pool blue the closer to land we came, and the islands, once so far away, now surrounded us in green embrace.

Threading my way through moored boats with the late afternoon Sun on my back, I dropped sail and squared away the deck, made ready the dock lines. I approached the local fuel dock and cut power early, drifted toward the dock, then backed down to a soft landing. I tossed the dock lines to Pedro, and went to shut down the diesel.

"Pedro? Pete?" I said, looking up...

"Hey, it's Puddknocker! Look what the cat dragged in!"

I turned toward that Cheshire Cat grin floating in the mist, and dared not hope...

But yes, Elise was standing there in the palest blue sun-dress, the deep gold afternoon turning her gossamer form into a misty, ghostlike shadow that stood before me in the beauty of her eternal creation. Suddenly I couldn't see her my eyes were so full of tears, and I was laughing and crying as she flew from the dock into Sabrina's welcoming arms.

And mine.

I held her with all the force of a hurricane as her mouth found mine, and she wrapped a leg behind my thighs as we fused in the fiery sunlight. Through the shimmering waterborne world of my eyes, it looked as though the world had turned to flame.

"Well, there they go again, Señor Ron," Pedro said with that little snort laugh of his.

"Shit, I forgot to bring a video camera -- again!"

Ignoring the world around us, Elise pulled my swim suit down, reached for me with the desperation of soaring passion long denied. She pushed me down to the cockpit seats, and when she had the situation well in hand she moved her body over mine.

"C'mon kid, Krakatoa is rumbling and we better get outta here," I heard Ron saying as they scuttled up the white stone steps that led through windblown trees to the hotel.

"Say, Pudd," I heard him say, "we'll be up by the pool, and we gotta talk! I heard about this new marina..."

Sure thing, Ron. Be right up...lot's to talk about, indeed...

Eternity is the road I walk; the way ahead glows in the light of our creation. I held that gentle light in my arms, and caressed her soul while the earth shook.

*

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