Rubber Legs and White Tail-Hairs, page 6
“Even if she had asked for your number, Rancid, it wouldn’t do any good. You don’t have a phone.”
“Ah knows that, but she don’t. Probably when she tries to call me and Ah don’t answer, she’ll write me a letter.” His grin revived.
“Yeah,” I said. “She’ll probably write you a letter.”
I chose not to remind Rancid that he didn’t have an address, either.
Claw of the Sea-Puss
One day some years ago, I awoke to find myself washed up on a beach in Hawaii. I made a mental note never again to partake of happy hour at a waterfront bar in Seattle.
Then it all came back to me. In atonement for some minor indiscretion, I had agreed to accompany my wife thousands of miles over the Pacific Ocean for the purpose of lying on sand, which is a popular pastime in Hawaii. Considerate husband that I am, I tried to conceal from Bun that I rank lying on sand well up on the list of the World’s Ten Greatest Tediums.
“Boy, this sure is fun,” I said. “Feel that sand, Bun? It’s made out of pulverized diamonds. That’s why the hotels have to charge the rates they do. Maybe later we can tour the diamond-pulverizing plant, what say? Wow, have you tried pouring the sand through the cracks between your toes? Fantastic! When I tell the boys back at Kelly’s Bar & Grill about this, they’ll be amazed. ‘Tell us again, Pat, about pouring the sand between your toes,’ they’ll beg, but I won’t tell them right away. I’ll just tantalize them with …”
Bun propped herself up on an elbow and shot me a glance that missed by a hair and knocked an innocent seagull head-over-tailfeathers into the surf.
“I’ve got an idea,” she said. “There was a dark little alley we passed yesterday. I saw a sign down there for a deep-sea charter office. I don’t know why I didn’t mention it then. Anyway, why don’t you go see if you can charter a fishing trip for yourself?”
“What!” I said. “And give up lying on sand with you? A man would have to be an inconsiderate lout to do something like that!”
The sand was still spraying out of my thongs as I scurried down the alley in search of the charter office. A crudely lettered sign identified the establishment as Scroom & Scram Deep Sea Fishing Charters.
A sporty-looking chap extended his hand. “Welcome to Scroom & Scram! What can I help you with, pal?”
“Marlin,” I said, shaking the hand.
“Biff. Good to meet you, Marlin.”
“My name’s not Marlin.”
“I understand. My name’s not Biff, either.”
“What I mean is, I want to fish for marlin.”
“Hey, no problem, pal. I can fix you right up.”
The one-day charter cost me scarcely more than a two-week cruise on the Love Boat, but Biff said he was able to give me a discount because I would be sharing the boat with three strangers, provided they all made bail, ha ha. “Have a good time, Marlin.”
Early the next morning I drove my rental car down to the lagoon where the fishing fleet moored, and began looking for the Sea-Puss, the boat I had chartered. It occurred to me that the owner of the boat must be of literary bent, for I recalled that the author James Thurber had somewhere written about a Sea-Puss. I think the line went, “The claw of the Sea Puss will get us all in the end.” Although I hadn’t known him personally, Thurber did not seem the fishing type, and I doubted that he had ever chartered the actual Sea-Puss. Still, one never knows. In any case, I was to recall the Thurber quote several times during the day.
At last I spotted the Sea-Puss, and was relieved to see that it was a large and nifty craft. There had been something about Biff that gave me the uneasy feeling my charter boat might turn out to be a nautical hybrid achieved by crossing the communal bathtub of a skid-row hotel with a sieve. This excursion might turn out all right after all, I thought. Since the captain and crew had not yet arrived, I sat down on the dock to wait. “No doubt,” I muttered to myself, “the catch here is that my three charter partners will turn out to be mobsters, homicidal maniacs, or life insurance salesmen.”
Presently, a taxi pulled up and three mild-looking individuals got out. They appeared legitimate and sane enough, and none carried a briefcase. They came over, shook hands, and introduced themselves as Ron, Bill, and Ed, a dentist, a college professor, and a minister. Much to my surprise, they were not old friends but had met only the day before on the Sea-Puss.
I said, “You fellows must have had a pretty good time yesterday, since you’re going out on the Sea-Puss again today.”
They smiled inscrutably, although none appeared to be an Oriental. When a non-Oriental fisherman smiles inscrutably, it means only one thing—he knows where to catch fish and he’s not telling anyone. “Hoo-boy,” I said to myself. “Today’s my lucky day.”
Soon afterwards the captain showed up, followed by a clothed primate of indeterminate species. The captain had a narrow, pinched face, with mean little eyes. The primate was the crew. Its name was Igor. The captain’s name was Bly.
“So, back for some more,” Bly greeted my three companions, who nodded meekly. The captain laughed evilly. Igor made guttural sounds of amusement.
“You!” Bly yelled, pointing at me.
“Wha-what?”
“Clean off those shoes. You think I want you tramping dirt all over my deck?”
“Uh, no, sir. I mean, yes, I’ll clean them.”
“One more thing. I hope you’re not one of those posies who get seasick, although you certainly look the type. If you are, don’t use the head.”
“Don’t use the head?”
“No—over the side. And another thing. NO BANANAS!”
“No b-bananas?”
“Right. Bringing bananas aboard a fishing boat is bad luck. Boats have been known to go for years without catching a fish after someone ate a banana on board. I catch you eating a banana on board, I’ll keelhaul you! Now clean those shoes and go aboard.”
Igor made threatening noises as I wiped off the soles of my sneakers with my handkerchief. Bly then ordered us aboard. My fellow charter partners scurried up the ladder to the deck ahead of me. I could tell from their frightened demeanor that they were intimidated by the captain and Igor. They were also insane. Otherwise, why return to a boat like this?
I had previously encountered rude charter captains, but only rarely. This fellow and his crew took the prize as the worst I’d ever run afoul of—real nasties, if you get my drift. How, I wondered, could a boat like this stay in business, given its customer relations? Then I caught a whiff of a familiar odor. It was the sweetish smell of a tax shelter. Bly’s only interest in clients was to snooker enough of them aboard to qualify the boat as a business and thus make it tax-deductible! The captain may have been rude and surly, but he wasn’t dumb.
Still, why had my companions returned for a second outing? Perhaps the boat really did catch fish.
“How’d you do yesterday?” I asked Bill.
He glanced around to see if the Bly or Igor might overhear him. “Terrible,” he whispered. “Didn’t get a single strike. Captain spent half the day letting the boat drift to save fuel. It was horrible, worst day of fishing I’ve ever had.”
“Oh.”
Before putting out to sea, the captain lined us all up and gave us orders. “Don’t touch any of the tackle! Don’t ask a lot of fool questions! Don’t get in the way of the crew, because Igor will run you over and squish you on the deck! Anyone thus squished on the deck must clean it immediately. Don’t …”
I wondered vaguely where I might find a secondhand mast from which to hang the sporty Biff of Scroom & Scram Deep Sea Charters. I even thought about the size of the splash the scrawny captain would make if someone inadvertently threw him overboard. The sight of the hulking Igor quickly erased the thought from my mind.
The four of us charter clients cowered in the cabin as the boat put out to sea. I did not much care to be in such close quarters with three lunatics, even though they were nice enough. Besides lunacy, they all seemed to have in common a peculiar meekness.
After four hours of alternately trolling and drifting, we were overtaken by a dense cloud, which I thought at first was fog but which turned out to be boredom. The boredom sat on me like a foggy elephant. Two things I can’t stand are work and boredom. I drifted off into merciful sleep.
Suddenly—POW!—one of the lines snapped from its outrigger. The reel screamed. Bly had assigned each of us a fifteen-minute section of the hour in which a fish hooked on any line would be that of the person assigned that time slot. The marlin had chosen my time slot in which to strike.
I ran toward the fighting chair, only to be squished by Igor, who was rushing to tangle the lines. I immediately leaped up, wiped all signs of the squishing from the deck, bounded into the fighting chair, strapped on the fighting harness, and waited for Igor to hand me the rod with my marlin on it. And waited. And waited. The primate was still busy tangling the lines.
“Lines tangled,” Igor informed the captain, who quickly came down from the bridge to help tangle the lines even more.
“Oh-oh, he got off,” the captain said, shrugging.
“No, he’s still on,” Igor said, giving Bly a wink.
“Oh yeah, right, I see that now,” the captain replied. “Why did I ever think he got off while the lines were tangled?”
Bly thrust the rod at me. “Reel fast! Reel fast! Take up the slack!”
I cranked the reel furiously. But the whole line was slack.
“You lost him!” the captain shouted. “You lost him! Didn’t I tell you to reel fast?”
I climbed out of the fighting chair. As I slunk back into the cabin to join my companions, I noticed a change in them. Tension crackled in the air.
“Ask him if he’s going to throw in with us,”. Ed whispered, indicating me. “After all, they did lose his marlin. That should be reason enough.”
“We’re going to scuttle Bly, Igor, and the whole damn boat,” Ron whispered to me. “We’ve had enough of these louts. This is our revenge for the way we were treated yesterday. We sat up all night in a bar making plans. Are you with us?”
“You guys really are crazy!” I hissed. “Igor will kill you! Even if he doesn’t, this is mutiny on the high seas—a hanging offense!”
“They’ll never catch us,” Bill whispered. “Are you in?”
I thought of the only marlin I had ever had a chance for in my entire life. Igor and the captain had lost it and then blamed me. I watched Ron open a satchel and begin taking out the blunt instruments. I didn’t know if I was up to this kind of violence.
“You want one?” Ron asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Give me that eight-incher.”
“Know how to use it?” Bill asked.
“Sure.” I wiped my sweaty palms on my pants.
“Okay, let’s do it!” Bill cried. “Now!”
Savagely, we ate the bananas. Bly and Igor never knew what hit them.
A Really Nice Blizzard
Henry P. Grogan, proprietor of Grogan’s War Surplus, glanced up from his cash register as Crazy Eddie Muldoon and I bolted through the front door of his establishment.
“Quick, Mr. Grogan,” Crazy Eddie shouted, “we need to buy a parachute!”
“A parachute? What you boys need a parachute for? And why ain’t you in school? You fellas playin’ hooky?”
“No, we’re not playing hooky,” I said. “They let us out early when the blizzard got too dangerous for us kids to stay at school. We’ve got to hurry because the school bus leaves to take us home in fifteen minutes.”
“I don’t know about sellin’ a parachute to two fool kids,” Grogan said. “You probably got some notion about jumpin’ off a barn roof with it, ain’tcha? Gitcher selves killed or worse doin’ something like that. No, I wouldn’t feel right about it.”
“We got over seven dollars between us,” Crazy Eddie said, looking the proprietor right in the eye.
“But I’ve been wrong before,” Grogan said. “Lemme see your money.”
That was one of the things I liked about Crazy Eddie and Mr. Grogan. They both knew how to do a deal.
As Eddie and I hurried toward the door with our parachute, Grogan called after us. “Just out of idle curiosity, boys, what are you gonna do with that parachute?”
“Oh,” I said, “because we got out of school on account of the blizzard, Eddie and I thought we could rig a sail with the parachute on a sled and sail across a field. This is the only good blizzard we might get this year, and we don’t want to waste it.”
“Sounds reasonable to me,” Grogan said. “I always did like a good blizzard myself.”
When we got home and tried to hook up the sail to my sled, we discovered that rigging a mast with an old two-by-four and a broom handle wasn’t easy. We struggled with the contraption until we were both half frozen. Finally I said, “We’d better go get Rancid to help us. He’ll know how to hook up a sail. Rancid knows just about everything.”
Crazy Eddie and I tramped through the blizzard to Rancid’s shack and, covered with a snow veneer, burst in without bothering to knock. The old woodsman was standing by his barrel stove, stirring something in a frying pan with a hunting knife. He leaped back with the knife raised in a stabbing position, and yelled, “Aiiigh! Aiiigh!” (Later he told us that yelling “Aiiigh! Aiiigh!” in a shrill voice is a good way to confuse evil forest spirits until you can think of a good way to deal with them.)
“Gol-dang an’ tarnation, ain’t you fellas ever heard about knockin’? Why, in another second Ah mighta had both of you chopped up into itty-bitty pieces! Ah got lightnin’ relaxes.”
Eddie and I shook off our coating of snow onto Rancid’s floor and rushed over to warm our hands by his stove.
“Why cain’t the two of you shake off thet snow outdoors? Now it’ll just melt and turn to mud. Ah’ll be slippin and slidin’ on it all day. You raised in a barn?”
“Sorry,” I said. “We were just about frozen. Anyway, what we want is to have you help us build something we can use to sail on the snow. We’ve got a parachute for the sail. It’ll work great in this blizzard.”
“Hmmmm,” Rancid said. “Let me thank about it a spell. You boys want somethin’ to eat? Ah got plenty to go around.”
“I don’t think …” I said.
“Sure,” Crazy Eddie said. “I’m starved.” He had never yet had the experience of eating with Rancid.
Rancid blew the dust off a couple of tin plates he kept for guests and scraped out a glob for each of us from the skillet. He ate his share out of the skillet with the hunting knife.
“This is pretty good, Mr. Crabtree,” Eddie said. “What is it?”
“As best Ah can recall, it’s some chopped up b’ar meat, b’iled taters, beans, a chunk of hog fat, and, uh, let’s see, oh, some dried wild mushrooms and a couple of squirrels. Why, you thank your momma might want the recipe?”
“She might,” Eddie said. “She wouldn’t use the wild mushrooms, though, because she can’t tell the difference between the good ones and the poison ones.” He chuckled, presumably at his mother’s ignorance of wild mushrooms.
Rancid joined him in the chuckle. “Thet’s okay, Ah cain’t tell them apart neither.”
“You can’t?” Eddie croaked, staring down at the few little bites left on his plate.
“Nope, Ah cain’t. But don’t you worry none. Ah always tests wild mushrooms out on maw dog, Sport. If he likes ‘em and don’t drop daid, Ah eats ’em mawsef. Fed him a batch of these mushrooms a couple hours ago. Here, Sport, come show Eddie here you ain’t daid. Sport! Here, Sport! Sport! Where is thet dang dog? He always comes when Ah calls him.”
Eddie rose slowly from his chair, wild-eyed and suddenly pale. I stared uneasily at him as he selected a finger to put down his throat.
“Don’t do it, Eddie,” I said. “I’m still eating. Besides, Rancid doesn’t have a dog.”
After we’d all had a good laugh over the mushrooms and Rancid’s mythical dog, Eddie and I presented our idea about the sailing parachute to the old woodsman.
“If thar’s one thang Ah knows about, it’s parachutes,” he said authoritatively. “Ah done a lot of parachutin’ in the Great War. General used to have me dropped behind enemy lines to do spyin’ work. Ah ever tell you about the time—”
“Yeah,” I said. “But what about using the parachute as a sail in the blizzard?”
“A sled won’t work,” Rancid said. “The sled will cut through the snow crust and you’ll be stuck tighter’n a fly on a stirrin’ spoon. You needs somethin’ flat on the bottom, somethin’ like a big pan.”
“Shoot!” Eddie said. “There ain’t no pan that big. Right now we’ve got this great blizzard and no way to use it!”
“Hold on a sec,” Rancid said, putting on his thoughtful expression. “Hot dang, Ah thank Ah got just the thang!”
He stomped outside and soon returned with a large, curved metal object. He banged the snow off it onto the floor, in his enthusiasm apparently having forgotten about turning the floor to mud.
“What is it?” I asked.
“A fender off an old wrecked truck. Been keepin’ it out in the yard. Figured some use would turn up fer it, and one has.”
Eddie and I shouted with joy and relief. We would be able to put the blizzard to good use after all.
Rancid was a person who could never take a good idea and leave it alone. He had to improve on it. Eddie’s plan had been for us to sail across the open fields on the icy crust burnished to a high polish by the wind and driven snow. Rancid, however, said the best idea would be to hike over to the Old Market Road. “It’s just one long strip of shiny ice,” he said. “It’s so slick thar won’t be nobody drivin’ on it, thet’s fer shore. We can have it all to ourselves.”
“But what about a mast?” Eddie said.
“Won’t need a mast,” Rancid said. “Ah’ll show you how it’s done.”
We cut through the woods to the Old Market Road, and sure enough, there was not a vehicle on it as far as we could see through the driven snow. Off in the distance, an undisturbed snowdrift slanted across the road. We had to lean into the wind in order to stand, and even then our feet skittered along on the snow-polished ice. It was slick.
