Again Someday
“How did you know it was me?”
My truck’s door was open. I looked both ways. Nothing was moving. We were in the middle of a traffic jam stretching for miles both north and south. The Caribbean was on one side of the highway and the Gulf of Mexico was on the other. And here I was meeting Tim, the voice on the phone.
He smiled. “You said you were driving a white truck.” Tim pointed to my truck. “And when I saw your Manitoba license plate I turned to Deb and said, ‘What are the chances?’ So, I took a shot and yelled. 2,000 miles and we meet right in the middle of the Seven Mile Bridge. It’s a good omen.”
“Well, it’s too late tonight.” The large man looked at the late afternoon sky. “We’ll meet the owner and the boat tomorrow.”
“I thought it was your boat.” I said.
“No, I’m selling for a guy from our church. You’ll stay with us at the church tonight.”
The traffic on the bridge started to move. “Let me get in front of you and then just follow me!” Tim shouted as the traffic inched forward.
I followed Tim in his slow-moving peanut of a car along the Overseas Highway to Coppitt Key. Eventually, and to the relief of a long line of cars trailing behind us, Tim turned off the road.
He parked under palm trees and beside a large square office building. The only way you could tell it was a church was the large cross on the sign out front.
The clouds were cotton balls of blue-purple on the topside and orange-red underneath. Depending on which direction I looked the palm trees and water went from soft pink in the south-west, following the setting sun, to soft purple-blue tinged with black in the north-east. I had seen clouds like this in Saskatchewan once in a while but never quite so vivid. And never so many. Tim matched my stare.
“Is the sunset like this all the time?”
Tim nodded. “The sunsets around here sneak up on you. They go from full day to full night in twenty minutes. In between it’s always beautiful. There’s a bar down at Key West that has a clear view of the sunset. People sit on the deck every night, just to watch the sun go down.”
“I’d like to see that.”
“They try to catch the green flash.”
“I’ve heard of that.”
“Hang out at Key West bars long enough and you’ll be ableto say that you saw just about everything.” I planned to do just that.
I gathered up my duffel bag and made for the stairs to the church. Across the lane a gale of laughter came from an open door in a long, low building. Above the door the sign said the building was The Halfway Inn.
Tim looked at me and the back at the bar. From its open doors came a wave of hard edged laughter accentuated by a yell for someone to do the physically impossible.
“Deb wants to move.”
“You hear that every night?” I looked across the road.
Tim grimaced as he and Deb started unloading their groceries and carrying them up the stairs into the church.
“The church has rooms upstairs for travelling ministers. And people who need a short refuge. Right now, there’s a street festival on in Key West, so we got a couple of street buskers staying. Evan, he’s a sword swallower, and Tim.” Jack pointed to an RV under the palm trees beside the church.
“Another Tim?” I said.
“Timothy Terror. Tim’s living in his RV.”
“What does this Tim do?”
“Tim’s a chainsaw juggler.”
I stared at my Tim.
“In the other bedroom we have Roger. Roger’s been out of work for a while. He helps around the church while he’s looking for a job.”
Tim handed me some groceries. With my duffel bag in one hand and his groceries in the other I climbed the steps to the second floor.
Tim continued. “In exchange for keeping the place clean, me and Deb get a room upstairs. We kinda run the place.”
“You’re the sexton?”
“That’s an expression I haven’t heard in a while.” Tim smiled.
“Don’t you come with a deerstalker hat and a pack of beagles?”
Deb walked past us on the stairs with a tiny Pekinese puppy cupped in her hand. I turned to Tim.
“What’s your wolfpack’s name?”
“Samson.” He grinned at the irony. “Throw your gear in the middle bedroom and tomorrow we’ll go out to where the boat’s moored.”
“Well I’ve slept through some sermons before, but I’ve never really bedded down in a church.”
“Say your prayers.” Tim smiled.
The next morning broke without a cloud in the sky. We drove out to the harbour to meet the boat’s owner. The sunlight filtered through the streaked window of the converted garage, deepening the crags of the old man’s forehead. The light brightening his grey pallor and tiny pink veins streaked under his skin. The old man stood as Tim and I entered. Away from the beam of light he looked like a cadaver.
“Lorne.” He extended his bony hand by way of greeting.
He breathed as if he were biting off chunks of air, his breath a burbling deep in his throat. My Grampa Ranson was gassed in the First World War and had sounded like that. Grampa spent the rest of his life sitting in a chair, listening to sports on the radio, paying for each breath and looking like a cadaver. This guy looked like my Grandfather.
Across three walls of the room, pictures of boats and calendars hung at various levels. There were wedding pictures, pictures of babies, pictures of couples in ill-fitting clothes holding hands stiffly. There was a tea-coloured picture of a teenager, not yet a man, in a sailor’s uniform, clean and sharp and scowling, just waiting to be put into an obituary.
The fourth wall was blank, except for one small unframed photograph. The gray curled picture seemed to be placed where it could be seen from any part of the room. It was a page ripped from a magazine of a sailboat under blue skies with full white billowing sails.
“Years. Every night, every weekend. Sawin’, planin’, sandin’, restorin’. Wife ‘n’ I didn’t take a holiday for years. Built the trailer myself.’ Course, to restore the bulkheads and hatches I got a finish carpenter. I seen some of those other fiberglass boats, and this one is bettern’ all of them.
“I dunno, after all those winters I wore down. Spent every minute on the boat. I burned out. I’d go out there in the morning, full of piss and vinegar, and about two o’clock my wife would come out, and I’d be just sittin’ there, staring at the boat. Just seeing it would make me tired.”
Tim and I exchanged a glance. I pointed to the picture on the wall.
“Is that the boat?”
The old man rubbed his forehead.
“That’s the identical boat. The sistership.”
He continued. “I got busy in the business, and I hadn’t laid a finger on it for most of the summer and the wife, she starts in on me. Just ta please her I put it up for sale.”
Tim unfolded the home-made advertisement. The picture taped to the ad was the picture on the wall. I turned to Tim and asked.
“Sistership?” My meaning clear.
“Close.” Tim’s face was blank.
Tim and my exchange was lost on the old man.
“But I sure like that boat. You can see that it’s going to be good in the water. The boat has some sweet lines and a real nice entry. She’d be stable as a rock, no water on this boat’s deck. You could go anywhere in that thing, even the North Atlantic, maybe even from Panama to Tahiti. And I was gonna. Damn it, I was gonna. Still might, I sure liked that boat.”
He looked at us fiercely, almost defiantly.“I sure like that boat.”
The old man grabbed the edge of the worn maple table and forced his body to something close to a standing position. The black blob that was a tattoo on his forearm covered the stringy muscles. He wobbled like a kid’s top finishing its final spin.
Tim reached out to help, but the man shooed away the hand. The old man stood at the garages door and looked towards the sailboat in the quiet of the canal. He looked around at the chickens, the derelict barns, the cars, the jumble of equipment.The man’s voice was directed more towards that distant hull than to us.
“Someday I’ll do it. Someday.”
Lorne’s voice trailed off into the canal. The sound hung in the air like after a song playing on the radio was snapped off. I found myself interested in a passing chicken.
Floating in the bay and framed by the trees, was a white sailboat. The sails were splayed on the deck, pockets of brown gunk gathered in the sail’s low spots where rain-water gathered. The ropes hung over the side into the canal. The ends of the ropes hanging in the water were green with algae, announcing that they had been soaking in the canal for a very long time.
“Has it gone through a hurricane?” I asked.
We rowed a life raft out into the bay where the boat was moored. I turned to see the boat. I turned back to Tim as his head was down concentrating on the oars.
“Sistership?”
“Ah, its close.”
“Sistership?”
“It’s good, you’ll see.”
Lorne shrugged his old man’s shoulders.
We didn’t have to paddle far. The owner followed with his own barely floating scull. A half-dead derelict, paddling a half-sunk boat.
As we bumped alongside the hull the owner shooed away several gulls, waving his hands at the offending birds. Lorne gave me a sidelong glance. The gulls must have been roosting on the boat for years. With a beady-eyed glare the last seagull inflicted on us the full extent of his attitude.
“That’s why I like boating, the chicks love it.” I deadpanned.
Nobody smiled.
Climbing gingerly over the rail, Tim and I tried to touch the boat without any bird shit touching us. The boat’s deck was completely covered in bird shit. What was not covered in guano mashed softly beneath, leaving wet foot-shaped depressions. I grabbed the rub rail. The mahogany turned to moist gravel in my hands. From the open hatch of the cabin came a sweet smell of rot. Black, glistening water gurgled in the bilge slopping around whenever anybody footsteps moved the boat.
The mast lay across the cabin like the lance of a knight who had lost the joust. What should have looked like shiny stainless steel ropes hung tangled in lazy loops around the dull mast. The rusty strands and broken whiskers stuck out of the rigging, looking to inflict vicious bites on naked hands. There were nests in the cabin.
“Chipmunks?” I asked hopefully.
“Rats.” Tim answered.
The cushions were bloated and rotten like a body in a horror movie. The layers of paint covering the hull were cracked and chipped like an old car that had been abandoned by everything but time.
Lorne followed us into the cabin, the sun catching his face and his skin changed to match the gray mahogany of the boat’s trim. Running his eyes over the once-smooth lines of the boat’s hull, he looked up into the sky as if catching one last look.
“Do you know what this is?” He patted the boat’s hull.
“Yeah.”
“Do you know what it’s worth?”
“Yeah.” I said.
“Well, you, me and Tim here, gotta be the only ones in a hunnerd miles that do.” He turned and looked defiantly at the world.
The old man slowly and carefully placed his hands and feet as he left the boat and lowered himself into his small boat. He paddled away. He glanced just once back towards us.
The boat slowly rocked when Tim and I climbed into the main cabin. Tim pointed to the floor.
“He kept his dogs on this.”
“This was their kennel?”
“I guess so.”
“So much for the old guy’s dream.” I said, looking towards the old man’s receding row boat.
“I know what it looks like, but the hull’s good. The rigging’s good. The sails are all there. The boat has good bones. She just needs some, ah, love.”
“She doesn’t need love. She needs a whole romance novel.” I said.
Tim sighed.
“The boat’s $2,100.”
During a sales course I took years ago one student had asked the question ‘At what amount do you open negotiations?’ The teacher, who had earned several million dollars as a used car salesman, and could bargain the birds out of the trees replied, ‘Oh that’s easy, you start with a number that makes the person you are negotiating with ask, ‘Is he serious?’
I looked at Tim. This was going to be my is-he-serious offer. Poor unsophisticated, Kansas farm boy, church-going Timmy the simple church sexton was going to get the full power of my negotiation skill.
“Try $1,500.”
“Rick, the hull is still in good shape, the sails are still reasonable, the standing rigging is, well could be, standing. Sure there’s no motor. But it’s still $2,100, final offer.”
“How about $1,900?”
“Look Rick. $2,100 for a 30-foot boat is a steal anyway. Lower than $2,100, we’re losing money.”
I had him right where I wanted him. I had driven 2,000 miles to get here. I accepted his offer of free bed and breakfast at the church. I told him of my traumatic divorce and that I had no other place else to live. Tim, this poor unsophisticated American farm boy, was going to be putty in my hands.
“Okay $ 2,100.”
Never stood a chance.
“Congratulations, Rick. This,” looking around the boat, “Is a real diamond in the rough.”
He offered his hand.
“Well, it better be a diamond. I cashed in some pension certificates for it.”
“She is a classic.” Tim volunteered. “All she needs is a second chance.”
I looked around at the dirt, the peeled paint, the dog and bird shit, the bloated cushions. All this was now my dirt, my dog shit and my dead and bloated cushions and thought, ‘I got nothing. I have no place else to go. This boat isn’t the only one who needs a second chance.’
Rick Ranson 