Chapter 5 of the novel, The Talking Mime

Chapter 5

Of stuffed mooseheads and stranger things

     Whether it was Nym's charm - or the fact that we were so simply dishelved and tired - it's hard to say, but the three barflies, or maybe should I say bearflies, seem to decide we might just be harmless tourists. Their sudden rudeness and confrontational style evaporated as quickly as it had appeared, and Jacob, Jerrod and I sat back down while the three men pulled up chairs to sit down.

The first man who had come to the table confessed that, yes, he was a commercial fisherman and he had found all kinds of weird things in his nets and tangled on his lines — hypodermic needles, bales of marijuana, and once a mounted moose head that was weighed down with a cement block but floating just below the surface. He said he personally had never found any human remains in 15 years of fishing, though when a boatload of immigrant Chinese sank last year near Point Sur, other fisherman only a few miles south had recovered several corpses. We bought the trio a round of beers, and vowed to visit their fishing boats in the next few days. We even offered them a tour of Rocinante, hoping, of course, that when they slept off their beers they would forget the whole notion.

Later, in the rowboat on the way back out to Rocinante (bobbing peacefully on its mooring), the boys asked me what we would have done if the three men had decided to take a poke at us. "Your mother probably would've fired a couple of rounds into the ceiling, like in a western," I said. "What do you think?"

Jacob said he figured a hammerlock would have put the man he had targeted out of commission with a good twist of his neck. Jerrod said he thinking he would use a shoulder throw on the fellow who was most likely to charge at me. "Coach says it's illegal," Jerrod said.
     "True." I said, "But not in a bar fight."

I rowed quietly, both proud - and a little disturbed - that my 15-year-old boys could have such an intuitive grasp of bar brawling without having ever been in one. Two years of grappling on a high school wrestling mat had apparently taken away fear of physical contact. I didn't want to disavow them of the idea that might be some rules of encounter even in the Anchor Inn.

Nym laid back on the rear seat and watched the stars like a lady of leisure as I pulled against the light breeze and the swell that was left over from earlier in the day. It was a postcard-perfect night, with a partial moon and some reflection of light off the water. In the distance we could hear the surf crash against the beach and the occasional cry of seagulls as they argued over food.

Back on board Rocinante, we all got ready to turn in, the summer fog creeping around the Santa Cruz headlands and headed our way. There was an unmistakable summer chill in the air which promised to drop some moisture on the deck before morning, a prospect which was fine with me. The moisture would be condensation and fresh water, not the salty mess that was crystalized on most of the cabin top.

I secured all the topside accessories, the cushions, lines, fenders and lawn chairs that might take flight if the wind came up strong in the night. Some of my worst scares at anchor — or on a buoy like tonight — came when an empty aluminum beer ban would go skittering across the deck in the, sounding like a 747 attempting to land. Up on the bow, as I checked the line secured to the buoy, I noticed there were even more seagull droppings, perhaps the leavings of the gull who had deposited the hand on our deck. There was no trace of blood, which surprised me, but then again, the hand apparently had been in salt water. Wilma Krebs had said what little blood might have been resident, probably bled out long before it crashed landed on Rocinante in the mouth of the seagull.

 I stared at the spot where we had spied the hand first for several minutes, wondering where the rest of Mr. X might be. It seemed common knowledge at the bar that the hand was actually that of a man, not a woman. Indeed, by the time we left, our three new-found fishermen friends, told us that most people thought that the man was probably in his 40s and, of course, the ring suggested that he was quite wealthy. I hoped that tomorrow we would be let in on the coroner's findings, though after hearing the remarks in the bar about the coroner's early morning drinking habits, I wasn't too hopeful of learning much.

Nym was hard at work in our cabin by the time I went below, tucking the boys in who were already nearly asleep, close to 11 p.m. Jacob had his Gameboy on his chest on with his eyes closed and Jerrod had one eye open, looking up at the stars through the forward hatch, still open from my earlier exit that morning.

"You want me to close it up for the night?" I offered. Jerrod shook his head and I was grateful that at 15, I no longer was responsible if he — or his brother — got cold in the night. They could get up and close the hatch themselves if the cold air got to be too much.

It was warm in the aft cabin, where Nym was already at work with her yellow notepad and a stack of blank index cards next to her. She had a half-dozen clippings on my side of the bunk, all of which she grudgingly moved when I came in to the cabin. She looked so intent that I wondered if she had found something or was just trying to block all the wonderful sounds of the ocean around us. I noticed a tornado outline in the works on the yellow pad, with a well-drawn diamond ring in the center. Before the boys were born, Nym had flirted with the idea of becoming a commercial artist, but found investigative work more fun and in some ways easier to work into the schedule we kept.

I undressed, slipping on my a nightshirt Nym called my Ebenezer Scrooge outfit — it can get damn cold — and I struggled with sleep for a half-hour. I finally gave up on sleeping and decided to read, my afternoon nap overcoming the fatigue and even the effects of two glasses of wine at the Anchor Inn.

It felt good to be back on the boat, well away from shore. Even though our encounter had gone all right with the fishermen, I didn't like the stares we were receiving from the other locals perched at the bar. They seemed more like residents of some small-town in the rural South than California coast dwellers. When the boys were still toddlers, we had drove a motorhome through several southern states, including Georgia. Many miles from Atlanta, we stopped at a widespot in the road at a diner for breakfast. The place looked like a run-down railroad car from the outside but had a nearly full parking lot. The diner was complete with checkered tableclothes and long strips of flypaper hanging from the ceiling covered with hundreds of flies, many still alive and buzzing with indignation.

All I knew that morning was the food smelled great when I walked in, though my eggs, potatoes, bacon and toast had more grease on the plate than I would cook with in a month at home.

We got the same brand of hard stares in that diner years ago that we had at the Anchor Inn. And so that morning I was somewhat relieved to see a Georgia State Trooper walk in and sit down at the table connected to ours. He was a beefy guy, looking like he probably played football for Georgia Tech or perhaps had even left the state for the far reaches of Alabama. He didn't return my hello as he sat down. He just stared at my over-the-ears-length hair. He sipped a cup of coffee for a few minutes while I shoveled in my breakfast. And then he reached over to our table picking up — and putting on —  my aviator-style Foster-Grant sunglasses.

"They sure look good on you Roy," one of the men sitting at the  diner counter shouted over to him.  (Nym would later introduce me to the expression white trash when she described the man sitting at the counter.) I smiled at the Trooper and he smiled back. He continued to smile as he adjusted the sunglasses on his nose, and keep the smile in place while he stood up and walked out the door to his cruiser and drove off.

I remember telling Nym quietly, "it seems the New South I have been reading about is a lot like the Old South."

Nym poked me with her elbow.

"If you're not going to go to sleep, why don't you help me think aloud about this?"

I mumbled something about being tired, but she showered me with newspaper clippings for my troubles.

"Okay," I said. "Here's my two cents and then I'm going to go to sleep and have a nightmare about a seagull flying around with me in its mouth.

"Those people in the Anchor Inn were way too surly to us. It was like we're responsible for someone being killed. Almost like blame us for it."

Nym grinned and stuck an index card in front of my nose with the words "Diamond ring. Big spender, Town secret?" written on it, with connecting circles.

"No, I don't think they blame us for the death, Alex. But they do blame us for drawing attention to it. We found the hand and now there's police and a coroner's investigation.
      "How many men could walk around that town with that big a diamond ring and not be noticed by somebody? I bet they have a pretty good idea who it is.... well... was. I just wonder how the hand got separated from the rest of him."

I swung my legs out of bed and decided to get a glass of Bailey's Irish Cream to put me to sleep.

With severed hands, crazed seagulls and a semi-hostile town keeping secrets, I was going to have a splendid night and splendid dreams.

Chapter 6: We meet an Oxymoron