Cross Current - Kling Christine - Страница 28
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The way we were sitting, our knees nearly touching, made it easy for him to reach up and give my shoulder a reassuring squeeze. Then he pointed into the trunk. “What are those pictures?”
Some were scattered loose and others were bound into packets. A yellowed envelope contained a few dozen slides. Reaching for a packet of photos, I explained. “Mother was into photo albums and organizing pictures into books and all that. Each of us kids had a baby book. I remember she used to ask Red to give her these photos so she could put them into a book, and they argued about it. He didn’t want her to touch them. I was just a kid, I may not have even understood what the arguments were about, but I knew it was a big deal. It would usually send my mother into one of her bad spells.”
My mother had her good days and her bad days. Today, she probably would be diagnosed with bipolar disorder, but back then Red just told us our mother had her moods. When things were good, she laughed and painted and took us on adventures and picnics, and she made the world seem a brighter, more wonder-filled place. When she was having her bad spells, however, we had to tiptoe around the house and take meals to her in bed. I remembered feeling that I wanted her to be the mom, to take care of us, and the fact that it was often the other way around didn’t seem fair. I was eleven years old the day she just walked out into the water and drowned on a calm day off Hollywood Beach. I was the only one of the family with her that day, and I failed to stop her, failed to save her.
I picked up the packet of photos. When I pulled on the rubber band, the old rubber snapped and fell in a limp tangle onto the blue wool jacket. The photos spilled across the contents of the trunk, and several fell to the floor outside the trunk. They were all color photos, but most of them had a greenish tint, as though they had been exposed to too much heat before developing. They were boating pics, shots of people standing around on a sailboat, working the sails, talking on the docks. I didn’t recognize the place, but as I picked them up and stacked them on my lap, I did recognize in one photo a much younger version of my father.
I angled the photo toward the late-evening light slanting through the cottage’s kitchen windows. Instead of the big square man I remembered, the man in the photo had broad shoulders that narrowed to slender hips. He was wearing swimming trunks that showed his well-muscled legs. He still had the red beard, but his hairline was different, his forehead less broad. I had been looking so intently at this younger version of my father, I had not paid much attention to the other man in the photo. It wasn’t until I turned the photo over and looked at the back that I realized why he looked familiar. In pencil on the back, Red had scrawled, “With Joe D’Angelo, Cartagena, 1973.”
I flipped the photo over and looked more closely at the man standing opposite my father. He, too, wore a mustache and beard, brown, streaked with blond, like a golden halo surrounding his mouth. I recognized the eyes, and then the legs, of course. Where Red looked like he was in his late thirties, Joe looked like he was ten years younger. They were horsing around, acting as though they were fighting over a dock line, but they were smiling. The yacht in the background was a classic wooden schooner, gleaming white hull, pristine bright work, the name Nighthawk in gold leaf on the bow.
My mother had often talked about this trip. She brought it up several times when she was arguing with Red over something, and she’d asked him why he didn’t go into the yacht delivery business because he had made so much money on that Nighthawk trip. I had no memory of his leaving—I was only three years old in 1973—but I seemed to remember hearing that he had been gone for two or three months.
The way I’d heard it, he had been just over halfway through the building of Gorda. I’d seen photos of the aluminum hull, deck, and deckhouse all taking shape over time amid the sheds and changing backdrop of boats at Summerfield Boatworks. He eventually got to the point of nearly finishing, but he still needed to power his new boat. He was out of money and in danger of never finishing, of having to go to work for somebody else. He had thought his pension from the Navy would stretch further than it did. That was when he got this offer to go down to Colombia and help a friend deliver a schooner back to Fort Lauderdale. When he got back, he’d made enough money to buy the engine and finish off the boat. Gorda was launched in early 1974.
When Joe said he and Red had worked together, why hadn’t he mentioned this adventure?
“You know that guy?”
“Huh?” I looked up and blinked, tried to focus on B.J.’s face. The last of the light was leaving the room; I would need to turn on a light soon.
“You’re staring at that picture as if you know that guy.”
“Yeah, well, it’s pretty weird. The guy in this picture is Mike’s buddy. You know, the guy from yesterday who was on the Outta the Blue, who’d been out fishing with Mike all night? Mike tried to make out like the dead battery was this guy’s fault. He said the guy wanted to turn on every light on the boat.” Mike had made it sound like Joe didn’t know much about boats. Had that been Mike’s way of shifting the blame? Joe knew a hell of a lot more than Mike if he was on a delivery crew back in the seventies.
B.J. leaned in close to examine the photo. “Odd coincidence, huh?”
“I’ll say. But it gets weirder. I ran into him again this morning down on the beach. He told me that he knew Red, but he didn’t mention that they’d been on this.” I pointed to the photo. “He said back when he was with the DEA, when they used to impound drug boats, he’d hire Red to move them around.”
B.J. picked up the photos that had scattered when the rubber band broke, and he was leafing through them. “He’s in quite a few of these other photos, but there aren’t any more of the two of them together.” He straightened the photos into a neat pile and handed them to me. “Do you think this Joe guy was with the DEA back when these photos were taken?”
“How should I know? He was pretty young then.”
“I don’t mean to belabor the obvious, Seychelle, but think about it—DEA, Cartagena, Colombia, you know. What do you know about this trip your dad was on?”
My mind was still trying to comprehend that Joe and my father had been more than just client and captain. It took me several seconds to get what B.J. was hinting at. “B.J., you are out of your mind! You knew Red. Just a minute ago you were calling him a hero. Do you think for one minute that he would get involved with something like that?”
“Money makes people do the unexpected. You know that.” I dropped the photos back in the trunk and slammed the top closed. “We’re not going to talk about this any longer.” I stood up and looked at the clock on the wall over the kitchen stove. “It’s almost nine o’clock already. Where the hell is Pit?”
B.J. came up behind me and placed his hands on my shoulders. “I didn’t mean to offend you, Sey.”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said, jerking my shoulders and walking away, out of his reach. “I’m tired, B.J. I just want to go to bed.” I opened the front door for him. “Tomorrow I’ve got to start looking for this kid’s father, and I don’t even know where or how to start.”
He stopped in the doorway and turned to face me, our bodies less than a foot apart. “Seychelle, please. Don’t push me away.” I looked past him at the trunks of the oak trees barely visible in the starlight. I knew if our eyes connected, something inside me would start to collapse, to go soft and cave in.
“B.J., don’t. Not tonight.”
“You know, Seychelle,” he said as he reached out and tucked a strand of my wayward hair behind my ear, “what’s happened between us these past few months has been extraordinary. You’re feeling it, too, and it scares you. I can see that. That’s why you wanted to step back for a little while. You need to breathe. You are a very independent woman. That’s a large part of what I find so attractive about you, and I want you to know, I’m not trying to change you. It’s just that I’ve known many beautiful and amazing women in my life, but not one of them has ever felt like family. Everything’s different with you. When we are together, I feel like I am home.”
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