The Maine has a wide beam—16 feet—so there’s room below for two decent-sized staterooms that sleep four, as I told Carlos, though a ten-day sail with provisions onboard could be a bit tight. And where was I going to stow sixty million dollars? I guess that depended on the denomination of the bills and how much room they took up. I’m sure we’d figure it out. Or, better yet, I’d just tell Carlos, “You need a bigger boat. Find someone else.”
I went into the cabin and checked out the electronics, which had all been updated about a year ago at great expense. To stay competitive in this game you needed the best and the latest in chart plotters, radios, radar, sounder boxes, and all that. Plus I had a flat-screen TV in the cabin, a DVD player, stereo, and four new speakers. I don’t even have that stuff in my crappy house.
I bought this boat—formerly named the Idyll Hour—from a rich guy from Long Island named Ragnar Knutsen, who had discovered that a pleasure boat was not always a pleasure. He’d sailed to Key West with his buddies for a fishing trip four years ago, then put a FOR SALE sign on his boat at Schooner Wharf. Someone at the Parrot knew I was looking and told me to check it out. I did, and made a deal with Ragnar for three hundred thousand, though the boat, new, had cost him about twice that—which should have been my first clue that I was buying a bottomless money pit. But I already knew that from growing up in Maine.
I also knew, as did Ragnar Knutsen, that the two happiest days of a man’s life are the day he buys a boat and the day he sells it. Ragnar, though, hid his happiness and told me he was practically giving me the Idyll Hour in thanks for my service to the country.
My father, of course, thought I was making a bad investment, a bad career choice, and an immature decision. I knew he was right, so I went ahead with the deal.
The bank liked the deal more than my father did, and for fifty thousand down—my Army separation pay and savings—I was able to sign a quarter-million-dollar note, and rechristen the boat as The Maine. With luck, I could get two-fifty for it, pay off the loan, and get a job back on Wall Street. Or I could go home and live on my disability pay. Or, holy shit, learn the financial planning business. Or, better yet, go back to school for a graduate degree in something. Never too old to waste time in school. I went to Bowdoin, as I said, the oldest college in Maine and one of the oldest in the country. When I was there, it was ranked the fourth best liberal arts college in the nation, but more importantly the second best drinking college. We got beat by Dartmouth, though I don’t know why. I did my part.
Anyway, grad school was also an option, and the Army—as a way of saying sorry about that Taliban RPG that almost blew your balls off—would pick up some of the tab.
Or . . . I could listen to what Carlos and his amigos had to say. As I used to say to my men, you gotta die someplace. And Cuba was as good a place to die as Afghanistan. And maybe that was better than wasting away here in Margaritaville, or on Wall Street, or in Portland. Lots of options. None of them good. Except maybe the Cuba option. Maybe this was my lucky day. Maybe not.
CHAPTER 6
Jack wheeled a cart alongside The Maine and called out to me, “Are those Beaners onboard yet?”
Well, if they were, they’d take offense and leave. Jack Colby does not embrace political correctness, cultural diversity, gender equality, or whatever is in fashion at the moment. He’s okay, though, with Key West’s gay and transgender population. “Everybody’s gotta get laid,” he believes.
Jack and I unloaded the cart, and I saw he’d scored two bottles of contraband Cuban rum—a liter of Ron Caney and a liter of Ron Santiago. He’d also bought Coca-Cola, limes, a bag of ice, and God-awful snacks. The Maine is not a party boat, per se, but I’ve had some interesting charters over the years, including a few drunken orgies. The captain and mate can’t drink, of course, but we can get laid at anchor. This job does have its moments.
We stowed everything below and Jack went topside, sat in the fighting chair, and lit a cigarette. He asked, “Who are these people?”
I opened a can of Coke and sat in the opposite chair. “The guy I met in the Parrot is a Miami lawyer named Carlos. There are two other people. One is a woman.”
“Why did this guy want to meet you at the Parrot just to talk about a sunset cruise?”
“He wanted to see the famous Green Parrot.”
“Yeah?” Jack took a drag on his cigarette. After three years of working for me, he knows he asks more questions than I care to answer, but before the Cubans arrived I’d tell him about the fishing tournament. And the other job.
Jack Colby was about seventy, tall, lanky, and in pretty good shape. His thinning brown hair was long and swept back, he had a perpetual three-day stubble, and his skin looked like it had been left in the toaster oven too long. Jack always wore jeans and sneakers, never shorts or flip flops, and today he’d chosen his favorite “I Kill People” T-shirt.
I suggested, “The Maine T-shirt I gave you would be good tonight.”
“Yes, sir.”
He doesn’t mean “yes,” and he doesn’t mean “sir.” He means “Fuck you.” Sometimes he calls me “Captain,” and I never know if he’s using my former Army rank or my present title as a licensed sea captain. In either case he means “Asshole.”
Jack had been an enlisted man in the Army, and no matter how short a time you served, the military pecking order stays with you all your life, and as Jack would sometimes remind me, “You are an officer and a gentleman by an act of Congress, but an asshole by choice.”
The military also discourages fraternization between officers and enlisted men, and that, too, stays with you, but Jack and I share the unbreakable bond of combat—same mud, same blood—and though we rarely socialize, we’re friends.
Jack asked, “How much did you clip them for?”
“Two thousand.”
“Good score.”
“I’ll split it with you.”
“Thanks. I hope this Cuban broad is a looker.”
“She’s a Cuban American lady. And what do you care? You’re so fucking old, the only thing you can get hard is your arteries.”
Jack laughed. “Yeah? And I think you spent too much time in the foxhole with your gay soldiers.”