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| Arrogant or confident? |
Casey and Anna were cozy at the helm where they'd been watching the action when I came out of the cabin. Her eyes were
riveted on me while I walked back to the stern to sit and air out what had
transpired. The Blatva… it was something I’d heard of but hadn’t paid much
attention to. The LSD affects were at that stage where my brains felt fried and
my eyes burned from the light reflecting off the seas.
“We’re
goin’ to the Bay now, the Boss wants us there,” Casey’s voice interrupted the
thought.
“What?”
I had begun to wonder what Ryan was doing ashore. I knew he would have
something planned but I had been in the dark up to then. It would be easy to
get Casey to tell me everything he knew of it. I probed, “I know Ryan wants us
in San Rafael but you must know more than me.”
Casey
was bubbling with joy to be part of a big plan… that he knew more than me, “I
have a good friend, Jimbo. He has an old boat I heard he’s been workin’ on. New
canvass and paint. Other than that I gots no fuckin’ idea what Ryan’s up to.”
Anna
interrupted, “Speaking of fuckin’ ideas, I want to know what the fuck’s going
on with Doc, huh? What’s the plan with him?”
“He’s
still tripping pretty heavy. I sent him below to chase the bats from his
belfry, I suppose. I’m done with him though… got what I wanted.”
Anna
entered the cabin and went straight below towards the berths where Doc was
quietly sitting on the bunk.
“I
gotta use the head and change clothes.”
I
wasn’t sure what she would do so I called out, “Wait, Anna. I’m done with him
but you and we need to pow-wow,” and followed close inside.
Casey
was watching us from the wheel.
The
Dinky Dao had a layout similar to the Sherlock’s except that the Casey’s tub was
an unmodified working lobster boat. The Sherlock had the same cabin and
berthing configuration. Converted to a popular yacht design, it’s stern wasn’t
open for hauling in lobster traps. The cabin was a step up from the deck to the
galley. It was about three steps forward of that to a level accommodating a
small shower and head. Forward of that space and through a hatch were four
bunks… two on each side. The helm was outside in the weather on the starboard side
but under the same canopy as the cabin.
Everything
about the Dinky Dao was the same except it was in dire need of a paint-job and
the clutter everywhere. Empty plastic water bottles, empty beer cans and gallon
wine jugs, newspapers, doubled plastic bags stuffed with laundry, and junk…
fishing line and flasher lures etc. covered every counter and table top.
However, a stack of skin magazines was a conspicuous exception. They were kept,
covered in cellophane in a neat bundle in a plastic milk crate under the table
I’d cleared for our breakfast.
It
was noon by the time I was done with Doc but I was anxious to keep him out of
reach of Anna. Once paranoia slips into one’s psychedelicized consciousness it
is difficult to sort out which fears are justified and which ones are not. I
knew a few Lurps (an affectionate name adopted from the initials for Long Range
Recon Patrol) that liked to go into the bush on acid to enhance their
environmental awareness. This worked well for real reasons to be safe, “left of
the bang”, but it might also account for some of the Geneva Accord violations
against innocent villagers. My paranoia told me that Anna had a motive to take
out Doc beyond mere revenge. He might expose more than she wished of how she
fit-in. I had to keep those suspicions in check, however, because they might
just as well be chemically induced fears.
Anna
was already stripped down and stepping into the shower. I could see why Ryan
was in love with her. Her nudity, while my mind was sucked into cosmic reality,
didn’t evoke any desire at all to possess her sexually but I was completely in
rapture at the sight of her innocent beauty. My mind raced from big questions
to wondering whether women got the same depth of sensual arousal at the sight
of a man’s naked body. They might but I suspect not because I don’t see women
keeping a neat and bundled stack of old skin mags. I million and one such
ruminations passed through that transcendent Bardo as she slipped out of sight
into the shower. I went from paranoia to awe in less than a flash… the time it
takes for a match head to flare upon striking.
Her
shout from below snapped me out of that Bardo of reflection, “Hey! There’s no
fucking water!”
She
came out and up to the table wearing a weather jacket and nothing more. She
knew she was going to be grilled and was prepping herself to craft the best
defense she had leaving the jacket open enough to expose the partial curve of her
breasts. Just enough to keep me distracted. There is a line from the Bible…
hell, I don’t know where to find it. I just heard Thumpers quote it in jail. It
says the eyes are the windows to the soul. Anna had been trained by someone on
more than that Mac-10. Her eyes suddenly became hard to read and that’s a skill
known by only a few amateurs that are unwelcome at poker tables or by
specialists in trade craft. I knew full well when the subject’s eyes became opaque
and unbreakable.
I
broke the ice, “We aren’t playing the school-girl now, are we?”
She
wasn’t playing alright. She had become robotic and my task was to remind her that
she was human; that I was human, and hardest of all, that Doc was human. Her
jacket opened to expose more Modigliani flesh but I was transfixed on the opaque
eyes. The painter studied eyes. Each portrait displayed a fascination with the
deception of eyes. It was as though the painter never quite figured them out.
He painted what he saw. There is one painting of a teen with the pupils blurred…
there could be a three ring circus behind them but there was no way to get past
that matte glaze. No wonder he drank himself to death with absinthe and wine.
Her
hands lay flat on the table with her fingers spread as though on display. They
were another work of art; long, thin and graceful, a Gothic saint that had just
blown away a man with a Mac-10 a few days ago.
I finally saw
in them. Her eyes turned sad… full of regret, "Look
Crash, I've got nothing more. This tub needs swamping out if we're staying on
it for any amount of time. Let's not play cat and mouse for a while and get to
work."
"You
might be right. Bit we have to talk."
