Chapter 7 of the novel, The Talking Mime

Chapter 7

A bark worse than a bite

It took us nearly 15 minutes to get the dinghy untangled from the davits and lowered. I wanted to swear at the boys for not putting it away property, but I suspected it was my wine imbibing the night before that had improperly set up the lifting blocks after our trip to the Anchor Inn. But it was still aggravating, made more so by Nym's impatience to get over to The Talking Mime and see what shooting was all about. I was less in a hurry, thinking we would likely be waved off and I also knew I would be rowing in both directions. I vowed to work on our outboard motor later in the day. It had become comatose as we prepared for our voyage last week. It seemed the motor ran fine in San Francisco Bay, but take the 5 horsepower Honda offshore, and it was balky at best.

As we pushed off from Rocinate, both boys bleated their dissatisfaction at being left behind again. But this time it was Nym who played the heavy, arguing that we didn't know what we would run into, and besides, she simply said so.

I marveled at Nym's ease of putting her foot down today, when yesterday she had wanted to bring the boys with us to the harbormaster's office. Then I noticed that instead of her Rocinante sweatshirt and shorts, she had on a very military looking shirt, long slacks, boots more suited to climbing than boating, and was wearing her police-issue mirrored sunglasses.

"You're going to buzz these guys," I said, laughing.

Nym stared at me from behind the mirrored sunglasses, trying not to smile, but I just shook my head at her chutzpah and then resigned myself to probably having to sit in the dinghy while she got aboard The Talking Mime.

In police culture, cops from one jurisdiction frequently give special favors (such as ignoring potential speeding tickets) to other cops, when the police flash their badges to identify themselves (better known as a buzz). In this case, I was more than a little doubtful my 105-pound wife was going to buzz her way onto the boat, but then last night I knew she would've drilled out the kneecaps of any — or all three — of the men threatening us if she knew it was the only way to protect her family.

She also knew — which she told me later — that because she had witnessed their boarding and was an officer of the court, her testimony about the way they boarded, and whether they had just cause to shoot would be given some credibility. As I rowed, she practiced giving hard looks. I tried not to stare, or laugh.

I began covering the distance methodically wth strong, hard strokes, trying to establish a sense of purpose in case the deputies were watching. We seemed to have the water to ourselves as we crossed the distance. In fact, I could only make out a few people on the pier and the shore that seemed to be paying any attention.

At about 50 yards from The Talking Mime, I could see the boat reflected in Nym's glasses, and I saw that one of the deputies was holding his pistol at his shoulder pointed straight up in the air while he spoke into a hand-held radio. Then he yelled directly at us.

"YOU! In the dinghy.

Stand off.

Don't come any closer.

This is police business."

I stopped rowing but didn't turn around. I imagined a flurry of bullets whisking through the water around me.

Nym stood, holding her badge and ID folder directly over her head, showing her other hand to be empty. "I'm a DA," she shouted, whispering "investigator," so low I could barely hear it.

"It's still a sin," I said, getting a smile out of her, knowing her strict Catholic upbringing was already nagging at her for not telling the cop on the boat her true status.

"Just keep rowing, smart guy," she said, still standing up flashing her badge, reminding me of that famous painting of George Washington crossing the Delaware.

As we bridged the gap, I kept waiting for a second challenge and I noticed in Nym's glasses that the cop had dropped both his arms to his sides, the radio still squawking with calls.  We were within 10 yards when the deputy told us to halt again, but this time his voice was tentative and instead of telling us to take off, he said to hold our position, as he disappeared down the hatchway and into the boat for a moment.

I nudged us closer, letting the light breeze move us in, thinking I would be rowing against the wind when we went back. Then another deputy, this one with his baseball cap on backwards, yelled for us to tie to the stern where a boarding ladder hung down over a tall transom. "Just you though, mam," he said to Nym. "Your buddy can't come aboard unless he's a DA, too."

Nym answered him by patting me on the head as she climbed out of the dinghy, disappearing out of my sight, down low behind the transom of The Talking Mime. I could hear her introduce herself, now that she was safely aboard and at the shooting scene she said "investigator," first, DA second. Apparently there was no objection, at least none that I could hear.

I felt my stomach tighten slightly, the same way it did whenever Nym walked into these situations and I knew about them. She was very fit, and three years ago had been nationally ranked in martial arts. But I knew her size made assailants and martial arts competitors more likely to underestimate her, though generally they regretted it.

I heard Nym give a girlish laugh, and there was some other laughter from the deputies. I heard one loud, "Oh shut-up" from one deputy, then some more laughter, then Nym's voice saying my name. I heard several words like "stiff, slab" and "body," hoping they were referring to whoever had been shot and not a comment about me.

"Sure, let him see this mess." It was the voice of the deputy with the backwards baseball cap. He had the same southern drawl that you frequently hear from almost any American airline pilot when they make their announcements.

I stuck my head up, eyes peering over the transom and saw Nym standing with the deputies, blocking the entryway to the trawler's cabin. There's was blood, plenty of it, and it occurred to me that I should hear some ambulance sirens pretty soon — unless someone was dead. But even then, I wondered, don't they always call somebody, even to make the official pronounciation of death?

"Alex, you can come aboard, but watch your step, there's blood just in front of you on the cockpit sole."

I crawled up the ladder, weighing in my mind whether I wanted to view a  corpse, still a little unclear about why Nym was laughing. I had once gone to a crime scene with her where a man had been killed in a knife fight in an alley. We heard the call on the police scanner on our way out for dinner and she convinced me it was a good idea.

It might've have been a good idea for her — she would get the case and already have it half figured out before she ever went into the office. But for me it prove so awful to see the bloody corpse that I skipped dinner entirely, nursing some wine. Nym devoured a rare steak. The victim hadn't been just stabbed, it looked like his assailant had attempted an appendectomy and maybe a tonsillectomy at the same time.

I shuddered at that thought as I swung my legs over into the boat, glad I hadn't had breakfast yet. Seeing a dead body before breakfast must be some kind of bad luck, I thought.

The cop who had first waved us off, now was sitting on the rail, looking very unhappy as his two partners stepped aside. I figured he had done the shooting and was going to have to do the explaining.  And I could see Nym kneeling down on the cabin sole, her back turned to me.

As I stepped closer and looked down, I could see she was tenderly cradling the head of the apparent shooting victim — a very large, very dead, male adult St. Bernard.

Chapter 8 - Call the coroner, or the pound?

Chapter Six of the novel, The Talking Mime

Chapter 6

We meet an Oxymoron

      The next morning was as foggy as San Francisco Bay at its worst and we were all asleep at 8 a.m. or so when some passing boats threw large enough wakes to stir all of us and send my bottle of Bailey's — left on the galley stove — crashing onto the cushioned bench next to the table.

I rocketed out of bed to retrieve the bottle, thinking a lot more about my need for a future nightcap than the probable mess. The Bailey's was OK, but we rocked for a few moments as the boat settled down.

I looked out the porthole to see if I could spot who had shaken us, and I saw that Rocinante and the 20 or so other boats hanging on the buoys looked as disorganized as a Little League team on its first day of practice. The still air was letting each boat rock and drift pretty much in its own pattern. Rocinante seemed to be feeling some deep current with its keel, because our bow was still clearly facing the ocean while some pointed to Santa Cruz and others looked squarely at the windows of the Anchor Inn.

A 60-foot Cheoy Lee ketch was nearest to us with the name Golden Wings, painted in gold letters on its teak stern. A handful of well-varnished boats, mostly sailboats, were moored, too, with handful of large motoryachts. I wondered how many of them we would see in the Channel Islands and points south along the coast where I figured we would be in a few days.

I had originally planned to pull out today for a short sail over to Monterey Harbor for an overnight, followed by another push in a couple of days south around Point Conception and on to San Miguel Island, the northernmost of the Channel islands and a bit mysterious. There is a wonderful, if somewhat tricky entrance to an anchorage on San Miguel Island where we had spent the night two years before.

Still feeling the ache in my shoulders from the all-night sail from San Francisco, I decided to not even raise the issue. I thought Nym was likely already planning a day ashore to do some sleuthing, sleuthing that definitely included talking to the coroner if she could find him.

I finally spotted the culprit that had likely awakened us with its wake — a 25-foot, twin-engined powerboat  with "Santa Cruz County Sheriff" painted in two-foot high letters on the side. It was out near the edge of the buoys, moving cautiously like a dog sniffing for something. It slowed way down as they approached a 70-foot fishing trawler. The trawler was anchored just outside the buoys in an area where people too cheap to spend $20 for the peace of mind a buoy buys drop their anchors. If I have the option of paying a reasonable fee to a local municipality (which becomes liable for my boat if the buoy breaks loose) or relying on my anchor and chain, I almost always opt for the buoys on the theory that my chain and anchor have a definite lifespan that's shortened every time I use them.

Nym thinks I just hate pulling up the anchor.  She's right about that, too.

The sheriff's boat circled the trawler, this time as the boat's stern swung towards us in the waves. I reached for the field glasses, and after getting everything in focus saw the name. I read it again, always amazed at the names people give their vessels. Looking closer, I realized it looked like a commerical fishing trawler but was really some kind of personal yacht. It was too fancy for a commercial boat. And the name The Talking Mime, seemed out of place for a fishing boat that went after tuna, or squid, or whatever they can catch.

I shouted to Nym that she had some of her law enforcement colleagues to thank for rocking us out of our bunks and that the sheriff's boat looked like it was looking for something on The Talking Mime.

"Dad. Did you say 'Talking Mime?'" Jacob asked from the V-berth. "Isn't that one of those oxymorons, like when you say military intelligence or jumbo shrimp?"

I smiled as only an father - who is also an English professor - does when their child grasps a concept, until it was shattered by his brother Jerrod.

"That's an oxy, you moron," he screamed and I heard the tumbling and wrestling start in the v-berth cabin. "Anything gets broken, you clean the decks all day, bozos," I said.

Back in the galley Nym was already making coffee, dressed in an ankle-length nightshirt she favored on cool mornings like this. On the back it says "Admiral of the Fleet," and there were times when she meant it.

"What's going on with the sheriff's boat?" she asked, obviously still sleepy or she would already be up on the deck with the field glasses.

"I'll go look," I said, pulling on some jeans and a sweatshirt as I realized how cold it seemed below decks, even as the sun was beginning to push some of the gray back.

Out in the anchorage, the sheriff's boat was circling The Talking Mime like a matador circles a bull, swooping around fast, stopping, then turning and swooping again, but in the other direction. The motion of the sheriff's boat was rocking The Talking Mime with its wake and it was hard to tell just what the deputies were thinking. I counted three men, one carrying a hand-held radio, one driving the vessle and a third securing fenders alongside the side of the boat.

"I think the guys on that sheriff's boat are going to board that big trawler out the edge of the anchorage. I don't see any crew above decks on the trawler though."

Rocinante has visited harbors all over the California coast in the 10 years we've owned it, not to mention many hours in San Francisco Bay and the Sacramento Delta. We have witnessed quite a few U.S. Coast Guard boardings of vessels — ostensibly to check for safety equipment — but there was a such a disproportionate number of boats stopped that had bikini-clad crew I often wondered whether safety or skin was the issue. Still, I had never witnessed the Coast Guard board a boat that was unoccupied. But then, these were cops. And for a minute I wondered if maybe the boat was stolen. It's rare, but it happens.

Nym came up on deck and we traded the field glasses back and forth, watching the three deputies, clad in short-sleeved, dark-blue shirts and matching shorts, now side-tied to The Talking Mime. Their shorts gave me great hope that it might actually be warm later today.

Nym peered intently, put the glasses down and then peered again.

"I'm sure," she said.

"Sure?"

"I'm sure that one of those deputies was sitting at the bar last night when we went in," Nym said. "He was the only one in the place with a decent haircut — except for you, of course."

I shook my hair in mock indignation, but didn't doubt Nym's observations. Our 10x50 binoculars could almost count nose hairs at this distance,  and I was sure she had picked him out.

"I remember him because he watched us the whole time we were there," she said. "Even when we had that visit from the planet of the apes."

I suspected that the deputy might have been staring more at Nym than all four of us. She had been certainly the best-looking woman in the place. Well, actually she might have been the only good looking woman in place.

Jerrod and Jacob popped their heads up out of the forward hatch, hollering back to us in the cockpit in the middle of the boat. "What are you guys talking about up here? Can't you see we youths need our sleep?" Jacob said.

I was pleased to see they had apparently not broken any bones and were, I hoped, going to now shift into their Hardy Boys personalities, which although pretty boisterous, was at least survivable on the boat.

"It look's like some sheriff's deputies are going to board that fishing boat or yacht, out at edge of the anchorage," I offered. "If your Mom would quit hogging the field glasses, I could tell you more about what's going on."

I turned to see if Nym was going to give me a hard time, but she was still staring intently, barely moving at all.

"Alex, they all have their weapons out. One is staying in the sheriff's boat, the other two are boarding. They have a pry bar, too. The one who was watching us last night is working the lock with the bar, I think. Damn. His back blocking the door now.
     Nym watched for another few minutes while I nudged her, trying to get her to give me field glasses back. She didn't take the hint.

"JESUS!" Nym suddenly shouted.

She almost dropped the glasses from her neck, snapping them back up to her eyes while I looked off in the distance, trying quite unsuccessfully to see what had startled her — Nym who never swore.

Then I heard the sharp report of the gunshots that Nym had seen. She told me later that she saw the gun flash — four times — all so fast and unexpected it had startled her.

"They're just staring down in the cabin now with the door open," she said, still peering through the binoculars. "The closest deputy still has his weapon pointed down into the cabin like he's ready to fire again.
      Somebody just got hurt Alex," she said shaking her head. "I think somebody just got hurt really bad."

 Next: Chapter 7 - A bark worse than a bite

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

Chapter 4 of the novel, The Talking Mime

Chapter 4

Service with a smile, sort of

Nym was wrong about the coroner but right that it was a man's hand, not a woman's. She was also wrong that Capitola was always friendly little town to strangers. To tourists maybe, but tourists are tourists and strangers, well, they're different. And we had crossed that line when we found the severed hand on the bow.

After the afternoon of reading clippings and a dinner complete with a nice Merlot and my special boat-chicken casserole, we rowed in to shore with the boys for a nightcap at the Anchor Inn saloon and dessert for Jerrod and Jacob. Nym insisted on carrying in her waterproof shore bag which usually contained a flashlight and some safety gear in case we tarried ashore and had to row out after sunset.
     The Anchor Inn was decorated in a combination nautical/sports bar/pub-restaurant motif that likely drove anyone crazy who tried to figure out what the owner had in mind. I had given up on the no-TV rule before we even rowed in, figuring that the boys deserved a little TV time at the place after being such good sports and helping with the research.

We chose a table in the back side of the bar, 20-feet from the big-screen TV, where the boys could watch TV and we could also see Rocinante rocking in the now settling water in the harbor. A 60ish blonde waitress, sporting an impossibly high beehive hairdo from the 1950s looked at our matching Rocinante sweatshirts as if they said "Hells Angels, Oakland Chapter" and avoided eye contact with us.

Nym stared at her long enough that the waitress finally made a big flourish out of walking over with her cocktail tray and stopping in front of the boys watching television. "Help ya?" she asked, more of a statement than a real question.

I thought perhaps a little charm might help so I asked what she recommended.

"Another restaurant if it was me, mister!" she laughed nervously. And I laughed, and Nym laughed, too, but it was thin, nervous laugh that I followed with an order of wine for Nym and I and Dr. Peppers for the boys.

"Would you recommend the dessert?" I asked as a last shot for getting at least a neutral response. "You can eat it, I wouldn't," she said walking away.

Nym and the boys looked at me as if I had insulted the waitress, but I shook my head. "Oh no! Don't blame this one on me. Did you you guys eat here earlier and not tip her or something?"

A basketball game grabbed Jacob's interest while Jerrod studied the bar and the waitress. It was about 8 p.m. and I hoped we were going to be treated to a nice sundown before the fog rolled in for the night. The California coast in summer vacillates between socked in fog and sun, with Capitola right on the edge. I stared at the horizon, trying to figure out if we would be rowing back to the boat through mist, or actually get to see some stars tonight.

"It's kinda weird Dad, but, the waitress isn't acting all bitchy at the people at the bar," Jerrod said.  "And, uh, Dad. About three of the guys are staring at us. Uh, Dad, one guy is pointing at you."

I grimaced, thinking about the men who had been arguing in low tones when we walked in. Had we been a little farther south, I would have guessed they worked on an offshore oil platform. It had been so many years since I've had anything remotely close to trouble in a barroom that my senses were dulled. I looked around without making eye contact and realized that the Anchor Inn was one place during the day, quite another at night when most of the tourists head into Santa Cruz and the boardwalk - or to the better restaurants of Monterey.

The peanut shells on the floor reminded me of a night in Buffalo, New York 25 years before when a group of eight of us from Canisius College were confronted by five very large, very angry longshoremen who objected to our long hair, our youth, and finally, our existence on the planet and started a brawl that only ended when I was able to bring a folding chair across the noses of two of the men, dropping them to the floor.
     Now in the Anchor Inn,  I decided that it would likely take a good Louisville Slugger to dent the heads of men I had seen on the way in. And my reflexes and wrists were pretty soft from years of working on a computer keyboard and giving lectures to undergraduates.

"You found the hand."

It was a statement. Not a question, and it came from a bearlike man in a plaid shirt and baseball cap that said "San Jose Sharks." He and his three friends had ambled over slowly while I was checking the room for graceful exits.

"I asked you a question, bud."

It was certainly not a question and I was not his bud by any stretch, but I could feel my adrenalin beginning to surge through my arms and shoulders as two other men — equal in size and manners — edged up closer to the table, dwarfing us, all still seated.

"We certainly did find the hand," I said, wondering what that admission was going to mean to these people. They're limbs seemed intact.

"I hope that's all we find, it was quite enough."

I realized as I finished my sentence that I had stood up without even being aware of it. And I had stood suddenly enough that the three men backed up a step, interpreting my movement as a threat. I realized that Jerrod and Jacob had stood also, trying to look a lot older than 15, and that at their last wrestling match weigh-in, they topped 170 pounds each. At nearly 6 feet, they were probably more imposing to these guys than I was.

I could feel my heart beginning to pound, the situation moving a little too fast, too many questions, and in the dryness of mouth I remembered the last fisticuffs I had gotten into - many years back - when Nym and I were dating. After a dinner at Fisherman's Wharf restaurant I ran through the rain to get my car only to return to find Nym struggling with a man near the entryway of the restaurant. I thought he was trying to steal her purse — then I realized he was assaulting her and ripping her dress off, in nearly full view of the restaurant. Nym told me later she never wanted to see me in that kind of rage again, and that I had nearly clawed the man's eyes out in a manical fit. The police told me that I bit the top of the man's ear off — I still don't remember that — and I had to take penicillin for 10 days, as a preventive.

The boys eyes were flickering back and forth from me to the men and then to each other, the same flickering I had seen many times when they wrestled and were just about to dive across the mat to drop and opponent for a takedown. The three men were standing very still - no moving or talking - just staring at us with a dull look that suggested the movie Deliverance. I found myself wondering if I should grab a chair to swing or simply go straight to being a madman and bite someone's ear if they moved towards us.

"Are you three all professional fishermen?" Nym's soft voice came from behind me.

It broke the silence that had descended on the bar. In our male-lion, protect-the-species-mode, we had forgotten that she was even sitting there.

"You guys have that look of men who spend a lot of time on the water."

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Nym flash her best "you big strong man" smile and all three of us Cameron men exhaled silently.

Nym only turned on that voice when she had everything so completely under control that even the President of the United States couldn't make her sweat.

 We knew from that same voice that somewhere within easy reach in Nym's shore bag at her feet, was her police issue .38 special revolver, her badge identifying her as a special investigator with the San Francisco District Attorney's office, and a pair of much-prized handcuffs that had once been on the wrists of Charles Manson, a gift to her from a friend in the FBI.

There would be no trouble in the Anchor Inn tonight. But no dessert either.

Chapter 5 - Mounted Mooseheads and stranger things

Chapter 3 of the novel, The Talking Mime

Chapter 3

Researching

We had been away from most newspapers and television for several weeks. I have a rule about not reading newspapers or watching television when we're doing our summer cruising — a rule which drives Nym crazy, but one she respects, grudgingly.

She was a journalism major in college and is still hooked on the news of the day, frequently interrupting my writing with some tidbit from NPR that falls on my deaf ears.
        The laptop computers stay home, too, no hardship for me, but sometimes for the balance of the family.

I take my fiction writing relatively seriously, much more so than my publisher and my agent who were still waiting for a big book after three modestly successful novels in 10 years about the intrigues of university life. Since taking a position teaching American Literature at the University of San Francisco, I found that I had plenty of plot lines right outside my door on the campus, but precious little time to write with the staggering number of papers to grade. When Jerrod and Jacob were very young, I had tried my hand at some newspaper writing and gave it up when my editors tried to make me parargraph every sentence and rarely let me put together a story of more than 500 words.
      It might have been than experience that made me so dogmatic on our summer sailing trips, or perhaps it was the peace and quiet — and not hearing about the latest stock market problems or the riots in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Nym and I rowed quietly back out to Rocinante where the boys stood on deck, pretending to be bored but twitching with excitement to hear what had happened in the Harbormaster's office. I had made them stay behind, partly to get cleaned up before coming ashore, but also so that if things got complicated and we were gone, someone would be around the boat to keep an eye on things.

I opted for a nap, while Nym filled the boys in on our adventure. Then I heard Nym shout that she was leaving with the dinghy — and the boys — for some exploring in the town. It sounded like a lot of fun, but I was still a little nervous about leaving the boat unattended. 

I checked the bowline one more time, saw that the wind was still light and likely to remain so, and headed into the aft cabin where my bed looked more comfortable than it could possibly be. There's nothing quite like anchoring when you are tied to a buoy  attached by 3/8  inch chain to a one-ton block of cement sunk 10 feet in the sea bottom.

I all but passed out when my head hit the pillow and dreamed of our trip down and had visions of Wilma Krebs on the bow of my boat, checking for fingerprints around the deck and collecting little particles and feathers so she could track down the gull.

Sleeping on the boat is usually very peaceful for me once I settle in to the rhythm of the water. In an anchorage like this, motorboat wakes can stir things up a bit, but that afternoon I slept soundly, with the waves keeping the boat lifting and dropping gently with a regularity that would've put me to sleep if I hadn't already been so drowsy.

Sometimes at anchor I'll have awful dreams about the boat. The most common has the boat in shallow water and the tide going out. That had happened to us once in the Sacramento River Delta, earning us a nice photo in a sailing magazine of the boys and I cleaning the bottom of Rocinante while she sat high and dry on her side.

I had just awakened and fallen back into a sleep that was leading me to a dream about Ingrid Bergman — another favorite dream topic — when I was startled awake.

"Yo! Daddo!"

I heard the shout from the stern of the boat and rolled over wondering why they were back already , only to read the clock — 1400 hours. Good God. I would never get to sleep tonight, I thought.

They had been gone three hours, now it was just 2 p.m. and I realized that the wind had come up and with it some sizable swells that were making Rocinante creak in the wind as she rode on the chain. Jerrod and Jacob and Nym were bouncing pretty wildly right near the ladder and as I came up the companionway, I could see that the dinghy was riding low with groceries and two large sacks of plastic-wrapped newspapers in the back.

"Mom bought every newspaper for the last month, Dad," Jacob shouted, beating his brother to this bit of news by seconds. Nym cut Jacob off with a quick hand motion before I found out what it cost to  buy the last month's worth of the Monterey Peninsula Herald, the Salinas Californian and Santa Cruz Sentinel. Luckily they were all relatively small-town newspapers or the dinghy might've foundered from the weight of the newsprint.

When I saw the papers, I knew what we were in for. The "no newspaper" rule was out the window and there was little use arguing.

We had done something similar when we lived in Sacramento for a year and I was a visiting professor, teaching about the political writings of Norman Mailer to some generally unappreciative feminists at California State University, Sacramento. Nym worked part-time as an investigator for the Sacramento County District Attorney's office, as she does now in San Francisco, but she became obsessed with a rapist who lurked along a jogging trail adjacent to the American River, waiting for solitary women victims. The police kept issuing lots of "be careful out there" stories, but seemed unable — Nym said uninterested — in catching the perpetrator despite the howls of protest from the community that wanted the guy caught and locked up.

Nym studied news reports, looking at where he had struck, at what time of day, what his likely escapes routes had been. She put together a logical case describing a pattern — and where she thought the rapist would likely strike next. She ended up making the news herself when her boss discounted her theory completely and she went out, alone, to stake out a lonely stretch of the trail for several days.
      All without telling me.

Late one afternoon she was sitting under an eucalyptus tree a mile from downtown Sacramento when she heard a scuffle nearby and ran out to find the trail-side rapist pulling a woman jogger off the trail, a cloth stuffed in her mouth so she couldn't scream. Nym ran up and when he turned, she emptied a 24-ounce can of orange Day-Glo paint all over the face, arms and chest of the would-be rapist, most of which he was still wearing five hours later when the police responded to a report of an oddly colored man reeking of paint thinner who was trying to board a Greyhound for Los Angeles.

"Mom's on the case," Jerrod yelled as they dragged the newspapers and groceries below.

"She's a little out of her jurisdiction, too," I said, regretting it instantly when I felt her eyes on the back of my neck. I opted to smile and get the wine chilled for what was probably going to be a long afternoon of looking at mediocre writing on banal topics — and all printed in 9 point newsprint type.

Nym's methodology was like that followed by a lot of detectives in  novels. She would amass her evidence and pin up notes, ideas, and news clips in a melange on a bulletin board so she could visualize and make connections between disparate events and ideas. I had taught her the technique when we were first married. In literature, we call it a tornado outline, in which the main theme usually jumps off the page at you after a little staring. We kept a 2 foot by 3 foot bulletin board stowed on Rocinante for just such a purpose but it had only been used by me up until this point for writing projects — not junior crime stoppers' stuff.

After a snack of peanuts, we settled in around the table, but after about a hour of quality time of the family reading, I realized we were rocking just enough that my eyes had trouble focusing on the newsprint. The curse of being nearly 50 was that I now had to buy reading glasses in packs of three at the drugstore, usually getting several different strengths, for different jobs. Today the newspapers seem to demand pretty powerful lenses which were making me a bit queasy as the rocking continued and I began to worry about a summer windstorm. The bulletin board was littered with some clippings but still looked pretty bare.

"Mom, what are we looking for?" Jerrod asked.  "Somebody who lost a hand and is offering a reward?"

Jacob snorted from the V-Berth where he had retreated with his Gameboy, opting not to get his hands dirty on the newspapers. "Yeah, look in lost and found, under body parts..."

My offering was just as bad. "It might be less obvious than that boys. I think your mother is going to say, 'Look for missing persons first, attacks by crazed flesh-tearing seagulls second.'"

I was about to make a really bad joke about the hand belonging to Tippi Hedren, star of the classic Alfred Hitchcock film, "The Birds," when I noticed Nym had stopped reading and was staring at Jerrod and I over the tops of her reading classes, with only a trace of a smile.

"I hope you guys are more observant than funny," she said, shoving us each another stack of newspapers. "I do want you to look for missing persons, but also anything else weird.

...Grave robberies.

Theft of a corpse from a hospital.

A motorboat accident.

A missing scuba diver..."

Jerrod and I held up our hands in mock surrender and Nym smiled, returning to her stack of newspapers and I felt myself falling asleep as I scanned the Santa Cruz newspaper with its endless stories about planning commissions, rezonings for new sewer connections and some social event calendar items that made me long for being back out on the ocean. It was reminding me of a friend in college who had worked at a film lab, processing people's snapshots and making prints. I offered that it must be something to see all those different people and what kind of pictures they took. My friend said he would swap jobs with me in a minutes — I was working in the library, checking out books and refences for co-eds — because the pictures he developed and printed documented, he said, the most boring people on the face of the earth.

My eyes were wandering for the porthole by 4 p.m., nearly two hours into the research and many papers to go. Jerrod had started reading just the comics pages of each newspaper, clearly not part of the rules, but had great sympathy.

Nym snapped us all out of it with her clear, part-time DA voice.

"Stop!"

"We have to go back through all of these papers again. We can't assume we're looking for an incident dealing with a woman," she said, drawing looks from all three of us.
       She grabbed the stacks and newspapers and started dealing them out to us again, like a dealer at a poker table.
       "I think that might have been a man's hand, not a woman's. I just wish I could remember the ring better. Maybe the coroner will be able to tell us something tomorrow."

NEXT: Chapter 4, Service with a smile

Chapter 2 of the novel, 'The Talking Mime'

Chapter 2

The Harbormaster

The Capitola Harbormaster's office has all the normal tide tables, pamphlets on the ABCs of boating safety and local restaurant guides you find in most of the small harbors up and down the California coast.

This morning, however, the 15-by 25-foot wood-frame office overlooking the anchorage was dominated by a small, red Igloo cooler sitting on the desk of Harbormaster Harry Brookmun, which Brookmun, Nym and I took turns staring at.

Inside, neatly packed by Nym in ice and locked in a ziploc bag (16 ounce), was a severed hand, sporting the big diamond ring that we had found on our deck after a seagull gave up and flew off - but only after making one more run at trying to lift it off the deck of Rocinante.

It took us nearly a half-hour to get the Monterey Bay Coast Guard on the VHF radio, which after some discussion, decided body parts being carried by seagulls weren't under their jurisdiction, particularly because we were sitting hooked on a buoy belonging to the Capitola Harbor District. The Capitola Harbormaster wasn't monitoring the VHF radio at all, so I broke my rule and used our emergency-only cellular telephone, dialing 911 and creating a panic in the Santa Cruz County Sheriff's Office before they finally realized there was no real emergency, just an understandably gross situation.

"The Undersheriff's on her way," the harbormaster said, listening to the police scanner on his desk. "Tolliver, the real sheriff, he's on vacation up north someplace chasing after abalone."

Gerald Tolliver, elected for six consecutive four-year terms, was a legend even in San Francisco for his low tolerance for outlaws and his high tolerance for Grey Goose vodka. I was a little sorry I wouldn't get the chance to meet him, given all that I had read about him in the San Francisco Chronicle.

The three of us sat transfixed by the cooler, as it sat like some kind of shrine on the corner of the gun-metal gray steel desk. I made a mental note to donate the cooler to the Santa Cruz County Sheriff's Department — or the harbormaster's office — because there was no way it would ever hold a cold beer for me again, provide cold storage for shoreside picnic lunches, or even be a basin for fish we had caught.

"Maybe just once more, before the undersheriff gets here, you could tell me again about the bird and this hand?"

Brookmun was well-dressed for the part of the harbormaster, even though the pictures on the wall behind him gave away the fact that for nine months of the year he taught geometry and wood shop to high school students in Seaside. He had the look of someone who breezed through the ranks of Boy Scouts, Sea Scouts, and Explorers, but came up short on the examinations to go the Naval Academy and now was stuck dealing with exploding hormones in high school classrooms while he tried to explain the dramatic importance of the Pythagorean Theorem.
 
He stared at us, after asking his question, with a brooding look I would be willing to wager he practiced daily in the mirror before facing his classes.

"One of our sons saw, well, recognized, that it was a human hand," Nym offered for the third time.

"Our other son saw it and went into the head and vomited."

I closed my eyes briefly, waiting for Nym to recount my episode of decorating the foredeck, but she as she was warming up to it, she was cut off by Brookmun, who adopted an exasperated tone.

"The bird, tell me about the bird again, please." His facial expression was flat, but I began to wonder if he was trying to play cop before the police actually arrived. His uniform was a little too clean, his shoes looked like they had been spit-polished by a Marine, and his haircut was dorky, for even a high school teacher.

"Are you asking if it had any scars or distinguishing marks," I quipped, regretting it immediately when I saw the look on Nym's face and the redness growing around Brookmun's ears. My sharp tongue has gotten me in lots of trouble over the years but I always see clearly when I should've kept my mouth shut well after I've let go with a few bon mots.

Brookmun's face did tell me that he had already been having visions of "Hard Copy" or "A Current Affair," as this might be his moment in the limelight, certainly the biggest event in Capitola in some time. Already he had told us not to even leave the Harbormaster's office, until the police arrived. I wasn't sure a harbormaster had that kind of authority, but his coffee was passable and it seemed only reasonable to wait for the police.

I was getting cranky and more than a little uncomfortable, with both boys waiting out on Rocinante, where I knew they were contemplating the short swim in to the pier because they were missing all the excitement. As we rowed away in the dinghy for shore — the cooler between Nym and I on the floor of the boat — I had warned them there might be sharks lurking. And between that warning and the cold water, I though we were probably safe for another hour or so before they showed up — dripping wet.

"Professor Cameron, there's no need for sarcasm," Brookmun said. "If we knew what kind of gull it was, it might help tell us where the gull picked up the hand and lead us to the killer."

I bit my tongue while I envisioned a seagull picking up the hand and flying from anywhere. It had barely been able to pick it up on our deck, a thought that disturbed me even more now. Perhaps the rest of the body was bobbing near my anchor chain right now. I shuddered at the thought of the boys spotting a floater after their reaction to the hand.

"Sorry," I said, "But maybe we should just wait for the sheriff. Excuse me, undersheriff. I'm beginning to believe this is all a bad dream."

Blackmun slid back in his chair and sighed the same sigh the boys perfected the week I had the flu and canceled our Disneyland trip the year before. They noted, quite accurately, that I have never been too sick to go sailing, but the mention of a theme park, a shopping mall, or visit from my mother-in-law has been known to bring on violent fits of sneezing and the approximate symptoms of recurring malaria.

We stared at the cooler for a few minutes of reverent silence, only to be startled by the slam of a car door, followed closely by the harbormaster's door opening and the arrival of the undersheriff, who brought in a gust of wind and highway dust with her.

If the severed hand with the diamond ring on the deck of Rocinante was a shock, Undersheriff Wilma Krebs came as a first-class surprise.

Barely five feet tall, and at least 160 pounds, she sported a knot of blonde, tightly-curled permed hair, and looked more like she belonged in a toll booth on the Golden Gate Bridge than in the uniform of the Santa Cruz County Sheriff's Department. She was wearing a .45 caliber automatic pistol that, on her, looked like cannon. Her shoulders were square and squared off with her hips, though she didn't appear fat as much as brick solid. And right here in trendy, nearly completely caucausian Capitola, Wilma Krebs was also clearly African-American, reflecting an almost blue-black skin tone that was as beautiful as it was hard to miss.

She spoke in a short, barking voice that made Harry Brookmun pop up out of his chair, as if his principal had arrived and found him sleeping in class.

"Harry, I forgot my rubber gloves. If I'm going to shake hands with whatever you people have in that bucket there, I want some protection."

Wilma turned to look at us, giving us a perfunctory grin while Blackmun scrambled through a cupboard behind his desk. She did a thorough visual examination of the room, slowly turning, taking in every detail as if she had a camera implanted in her eye, finally coming all way the way back to us where she stopped.

'You're the folks on that pretty sailboat that came in last night?" she asked, drawing the expected smiles from Nym and I.

"Is it named after Don Quixote's horse."

Wilma didn't wait for our response, but instead reached for a set of gloves offered by Blackmun.

Competent, quick-witted and even literate, I thought. Maybe it was going to be a good day after all.

She popped the lid on the cooler slowly, as if it might hold something that could jump out at her, then she gently reached in, poking the ice aside to get to the bagged hand. She lifted it out, the plastic bag dripping and the hand looking more like a piece frozen salmon than anything else. For just a moment I had a sharp jab of fear that it was a piece of salmon that the boys had somehow made look like a hand — complete with the dimestore jewelery just to fool me.

But when Nym stood up with me, to peer from a few feet away while the undersheriff laid the hand on the desk top, I knew what I had seen was real and that joking aside, we had found a damned body part on our deck.

Wilma held the hand, still in the bag while Blackmun grabbed some paper towels and put them next to the bag, anticipating Wilma's next move to get a closer look.

"Well, I'm glad you got this thing a little cold," Wilma said, unzipping the top of the bag and peering in as if there was a ham sandwich encased. "Human flesh gets pretty rank even in a seawater bath. And this is pretty decomposed. Another day and that nice ring would be on the bottom of the ocean. Hmm..."

Wilma slid the hand out of the bag onto the towel, poking it again with fingers and then putting a flat piece of paper at the wrist. "I was hoping you were maybe a shark attack victim, or part of somebody who drowned," she said, speaking to the hand.

"Afraid not."

She slid the hand back in the plastic bag and put it back in the cooler as carefully as if it was radioactive or plastic explosive, snapping the gloves off, and tossing them into the trash. "I don't know where the rest of her is, but somebody cut this hand off with something very sharp. It's as clean as a cleaver cut, or a meat saw, maybe. Maybe even an electric carving knife."

She turned to the harbormaster, who had backed up away from his desk, and looked a little ill. He hadn't moved the whole time she was examining the hand.

"Put some fresh ice in that cooler, will you Harry? No telling how long it will take me to find the coroner in Santa Cruz — whatever bar he's having his breakfast in."

Next - Chapter 3: Research

Chapter I of the novel, 'The Talking Mime'

The Talking Mime

Chapter I

Down the California Coast

We picked up a mooring buoy at the north end of Monterey Bay offshore of a little tourist town called Capitola where gourmet coffee prices would make a New Yorker blush and there are more men wearing pony tails than women. Capitola was the first stop in our annual summer sojourn southward along the California coast aboard our 45-foot sailing ketch, Rocinante, which seemed as tired as we were after fighting the wind and waves from San Francisco Bay in a rolling night voyage.

We had pulled in after a bouncy ride that the National Weather Service had said wasn't happening — even as we we're being tossed about on 12-foot swells with 30-knot winds pushing from all over the compass. It was just before 8 a.m. on July 6th, past the July 4th madness that passes for boating on San Francisco Bay and my wife Nym and I had taken turns hand-steering through the sloppy seas, unwilling to trust our autopilot, which had begun making strange groaning noises just off Pillar Point at Half Moon Bay.

Our twin teenage sons, Jacob and Jerrod, had slept below like mummies oblivious to the roar of the water around them through the entire night. Our calico cat Thompson, short for Hunter S. Thompson, had also slept through the trip, hiding somewhere below.

We had left in the early evening, enveloped in a thick fog inside San Francisco Bay which stayed with us out along the coast, laying low on the water even with the wind. It would have been a night of glorious sailing had we been willing to sail much farther out from the coast, but I was determined to make Monterey Bay by morning. The radar scope did its usual yeoman service, picking out a handful of freighters and a few fishing boats as we drew a line from the sea buoys and San Francisco Entrance to an imaginary point I had drawn on my chart three miles off the Santa Cruz headlands.

I had glanced behind me and was warming my hands on my coffee mug — trying desperately to visualize a sunny day at the Santa Cruz Harbor beach — when out of nowhere it seemed, I was staring at a huge wooden bowsprit that I recognized in a frightening moment as California's official tallship, the twin-masted Californian.

The Californian came out of the night straight at us from behind, sans any running lights and sailing at a good 12-15 knots, forcing me to turn sharply, almost causing a serious broach in the tall waves. I swore loudly enough to raise the whole crew out of their warm bunks, or maybe it was just the sudden lurch, but it was over quickly as we sped south and the Californian roared south, too. The twinge of seasickness I had felt was gone as I hailed the Californian on the VHF radio to tell them their lights were out and to report the near miss. But my call was only answered by static and a Portuguese fisherman who was lonely and commiserated with me about the close call.

I had almost forgotten about it as we cleaned the cockpit out, the debris of spilled coffee and snacks from the night passage hidden about cracks in the teak and on the fiberglass. I was watching forward, where the bowline was made fast from our cleats to one of several dozen firmly anchored buoys owned by the city when I saw a very ugly relative of Jonathan Livingston Seagull semi-crash-land near the anchor windlass on the bowsprit of the boat, extending over the water.

That a seagull — with or without poor navigational skills — decided to take up residence on the bow of Rocinante was not unusual. In our slip in San Francisco's City Marina, right next to the world famous St. Francis Yacht Club, gulls were always circling the area, watching for the leftovers from the meals of our twins, neither of whom would be allowed in Emily Post's home — let alone at her dinner table. But I had watched the bow and bowsprit take several tons of water on the trip down as we plunged through several troughs that almost stopped us completely in the rough seas. Some seriously sticky macaroni and cheese must be up there, I thought.

"Maybe he's hurt?" Nym asked, poking her head up from the hatchway and looking forward at our guest. A caregiver of epic proportions, Nym has at times taken in birds and more than a few stray animals into the house and nursed them back to health. "He's pretty ratty looking even for a male gull," she said.

I went back to scrubbing the cockpit, wondering if it was going to be open season on the male species today. Nym had made several comments during the night about the lack of hygiene in the forward head that the boys and I shared whenever we took an extended voyage, giving her the larger, and certainly generally cleaner, aft head and shower area for herself.

"Alex," she said, "The gull has something in his mouth. Oops, he dropped it. I bet it's a flying fish that landed up when we rounded the point."

I watched the gull pirouette around forward, but my vision was blocked by rigging and lines, dinghies and assorted paraphernalia that was part and parcel of our cruising equipment whenever we ventured out the Golden Gate. Nym always complained that we looked like a bunch of gypsies and heaven help the crew member — or captain — who left a towel hanging over a rail when we left the dock.

Our twin-boy demolition team roused from their snoring reverie when they heard mention of fish and realized that a live seagull was nearly at arms length, just above their heads through the hatch from the V-berth where they slept. Rocinante is a traditional, center cockpit rig, which gives her a nice v-berth (for the boys) a spacious central cabin with a galley, table and salon and my navigation station, complete with GPS, a computer, weatherfax, and several radios, including a Ham set purchased last year. The boat's aft cabin, with a double bed, desk, and private head is the reserve for Nym and I, far enough away from the bow when the boys want to stay awake, and far enough away to sleep in tidily in the morning when they opted to get up early to head out on some adventure.

Neither of the 15-year-olds could be considered a naturalist, but they had spent a good part of their summers in recent years scraping seagull droppings off boats in the harbor to make money for their small sailing skiff, Sancho Panza," new CDs or to treat our 15-year-old neighbor girl to a burger. She overlooks their neanderthal eating habits, if they're paying the bill. The boat took most of their money, because, like their father, they enjoyed the puttering on the boat that costs so much money, and while cheap in some ways, would never consider cutting a corner when it came to boat equipment.


"Dad! Is he still there?"

I peered forward from the cockpit where the gull was shaking something pretty large in his mouth but his huge rump blocked a good view of it from the cockpit in the center of the boat. ""He's up there, but I don't know for how long," I shouted down, hoping to get either boy out of the bunks so I could talk them into helping me wash down the decks.

Normally early risers, both boys had perfected sleeping in with a science that bordered on precision when we were traveling, recognizing that there are jobs that need to be done on boats at all hours, but early in the morning there were more than normal. And having just completed an all-night passage, there was plenty to go around.

The forward hatch, located about ten feet from where the gull was perched, began to slowly lift, blocking my view entirely, and I wondered if this gull would take off quickly when he saw the twins malicious eyes. Finally it was up all the way, standing up straight and I could see someone's fingers on the outside edge as they pulled themselves up out of the bunks.

I felt the boat lurch from a passing motorboat wake and leaned down in the cockpit, looking at a row of peanuts (my favorite on-watch snack which had found their way to form a perfect circle in one of two large drain screens in the floor of the cockpit, blocking the salt water I was splashing from draining out.

I was actually thinking some peanuts might taste good with the fresh coffee I could smell from the galley when I was interrupted.

"DAD!

DAD...

JESUS CHRIST!

DAD!"

The forward hatch over the boys' cabin dropped like a stone back to the deck and as I shot down the companionway ladder headed for the V-berth, I noted that the gull was still shaking his prize, but I was concerned about some disaster forward that probably included a badly pinched finger — or worse — in the bunks.

Nym beat me by seconds, her slender five foot, two inch frame well-suited for quick motion in the small spaces below. I huffed into the cabin, banging my head slightly on the six-foot overhang, swearing, then catching myself because unless somebody was seriously hurt, the loud "Jesus Christ" that had reverberated across the water to half the boats around us was going to call for at least some stern talk.

"I hope Jesus Christ himself is on the bow, or else..." I bellowed.

A look from Nym told me to stop there, and I didn't like the look on either of the boys' faces.

"Dad, that seagull's got a hand and some guts in its mouth," Jerrod said. "No shit, Dad."

Jacob looked a little uncomfortable with his brother's observation - and the shit -  but didn't dispute it. "It's gross, Dad. Take a look."

We had played enough practical jokes on each other that I knew I was somehow being set up, but as I require them to be good sports, I went along, hoping it would be over quickly because I was exhausted from the night voyage and was looking forward to a day of sleeping and reading — in that order.

I inched forward, stepping up on the bunk so I could lift the hatch, laughing silently that two boys who once watched all of the Friday the 13th movies in an all-day movie marathon with their friends would think I would be so gullible that I would believe they would be intimidated by something in the mouth of a seagull — mostly likely the insides of a tuna or some other fish killed by a shark. As I inched it open, the gull ran by on the deck, trying to take off heading for the cockpit.

"Shit," I yelled, dropping the hatch and tumbling down with Nym and the boys, who were now laughing. "Let's go see this critter. Whatever he has is too heavy to fly with."

As we extricated ourselves from the bunk, the boys pulled their sleeping bags around them unzipped while Nym moved up into the cockpit. "He's back on the aft deck," Nym says. "No! There he goes forward again."

"ALEX!"

I was still trying to get clear of the V-berth debris of clothes, shoes and empty potato chip bags and Pepsi cans when Nym shouted. She was still standing on the ladder, and I saw the gull skitter by the main cabin portholes, back up the bow and out near the end of the bowsprit where I had first spied him. Nym hadn't moved, and without the entanglements of the two boys, I jumped up on the bunk and popped the hatch like it was submarine.

I had had enough aerobics, the fatigue of the all-night sail beginning to sink me. "Alex, be careful," Nym shouted.

Careful? I wondered if she was in on the joke, whatever it was. Our practical jokes were sometimes pretty grotesque, but part of the unwritten Cameron family joke code was that although you could make a total ass out of someone, they could not get physically injured in the process.

I edged up out of the hatch, reminding myself that I really wanted to trim down to 175 pounds this summer from the high 190s I'd crept up to since last fall. Since I had turned 45, the spare tire around my stomach came and went without much warning. A week of pizza and beer — and no exercise — could mean as much as a 10-pound gain. And it took a lot more than a single week to get rid of the same poundage.

The gull was startled by my quick ascent and struggled, dropping his prize finally but not without a screech that hurt my ears. I also saw him drop a present from his hind end for the boys to clean near the end of the bowsprit, but the thing that had been in his mouth was just ahead of me as I slid out on all fours to look where the gull had been.

It was certainly no flying fish or tuna that this gull had had in its mouth.

And it certainly looked like a human hand.

I mentally congratulated the boys on their adeptness. This thing was far more realistic than any dimestore Halloween joke I had ever seen. This was far better than Jerrod's last attempt to convince me that he had a broken arm, a dramatic skit one evening when he came home from a snow-skiing expedition that was completely plausible — until he yanked the case off his arm and declared that he was miraculously cured.

Ahead I saw the gull, which had returned to the very end of the bowsprit leaving its prize between us. He was ten feet away, eyeing me the same way a dog does when you take away its bone as I took a lot closer look at what I thought the boys had tossed on the deck.

I wished later I hadn't looked quite so close.

The hand was neatly severed at the wrist, pecked out in spots, though still relatively intact. But the detail that ultimately triggered a gag reflex in my throat, sending last night's coffee, snacks and a half jar of peanuts onto the deck was a beautiful ring, polished by its exposure to salt water, — a ring I would later tell police was at least two-carats and smartly displayed on the ring finger, at least the stub that was left of it.

It seemed the joke was on me, but I wasn't laughing.

NEXT UP: The Harbormaster

On a birthday numbered 62, a marriage, a fiesta and personal vow

VALOIS, New York, USA - The nearly insufferable heat broke last night, a few hours short of my hitting 62, that wonderful age at which I can file for Social Security benefits and also can now claim I am officially old enough to do whatever I feel like.

More or less.

This birthday comes on the heels of reading Pat Conroy's novel, South of Broad, a fabulous book, filled with characters that are so burned in my brain I want to dive right into the storyline, much the same way as I feel about the movie, Casablanca. It's a book that reminds how important friends and family are in lives, even when those same people can be such pains-in-the-ass you want to kick them down a flight of stairs.

And today, a birthday for me, is also a day that marks the wedding of my wife's second cousin to a beautiful girl, some years his junior. But they seem perfect for each other, in similar ways to the way I see with my wife. For me, it's the finishing sentences of the other, knowing exactly where the eyeglasses were left, anticipating the need for some privacy - or a cold beer. For this young couple, it's younger things, more subtle, but obvious.

It should be a party-of-parties. And while everyone will be toasting the wedding of Brett Beardslee and Jesse Ringsmuth, I'll be pretending that the party is in my honor, too.

Why not, I am officially old enough to do whatever I feel like.

So what is the vow from the headline?

One of those things I want to do - vow to do - is to resuscitate my moribund writing schedule. Perhaps moribund is not the correct word. Distracted maybe, distracted by the unbelievably sunny days and nature here in the quiet woods of upstate New York.

But some of the various blogs I have written, for the past five years or so, seem (to me) to have turned as stale as two-day-old bread from a natural food store. (That's a no-preservatives joke, of course. The bread is excellent, minus the rhizopus nigrican spores that sprout so quickly.)

Maybe that should be the title of a new blog: Rhizopus Nigricans Rule. Or the title of a children's book.

Perhaps after the wedding today, it will all be more clear.

Year of the Robie - a chapter from 'The Class of '66'

In honor of the passing of Southwestern High School English teacher Harry Robie, here is posted a chapter from an unpublished manuscript, The Class of '66.

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The Year of the Robie

Senior year was not the best year of high school. Junior year was.

Junior year, when the brain and body started somehow working together before real decisions had to be made. After junior year of high school, there's no real "I-must-make-big-bucks" summer job, no real need to sweat bullets about college. Not quite old enough to be a real adult, the summer after junior year is a simple time of enjoying a last gasping, crazed run at being a kid — irresponsible and getting away with it.

But senior year! Good God! Suddenly it was college looming and ever so quickly the Yale and Harvard-bound separated themselves out simply by applying and we — we of the next level in the echelons of higher learning — we knew that our colleges would be Oswegos and Brockports and Fredonias, state colleges of the vast SUNY spider that couldn't touch the tassel's of the top rung but still held plenty of reason to be smug when compared to the joke schools people clung to keep out of the draft: Parsons, Miami-Dade Junior College.

And right in the middle of all of it was Harry Robie, English Teacher, 5 feet 10 inches, a smug, smiling sonofabitch looking at us right in the eye and reminding a dozen of us that while we had slipped through his wide-webbed net by passing a state regent's English exam (after nearly failing his literature-based class as juniors), it was Robie who stood like a hanging judge waiting for senior year to be over and for us to head out to real literature classes in real colleges and have those real teacher/professors write real slashing comments on our papers like he did, but without the safety net of some kind of state test to absolve a semester's sins.


"Trying reading the book before writing the essay next time, Mr. Fitzgerald."
"How can you write so well and know so little?"
"Do you not read these books because your eyes hurt?"
"Even wrestlers need to read."

It was the Robie who waved my report card in the air like a greasy taco shell the final day of junior year and announced that he was "darn proud" that the Regent's Exam of the great State of New York recognized talent and ability and didn't penalize for flat-ass laziness.

"Nice job on the exam, Mr. Fitzgerald. See you next year When you're a senior."

And in senior year, Robie had us all, all caged-in for a double-class period, an hour and a half of sitting on skinny rear ends, starved by having to “make weight” for the wrestling team. He had us all in a senior-seminar English/History/Civics melange that no one really understood much about except there were 50 of us packed into a long, narrow study hall and the half-dozen teachers rotated in and out like characters on a Swiss clock — with about the same impact. We were supposed to be preparing for college, which I suppose it was, because it was long and boring and basically ineffectual in such a large group — precisely what happens in the large lecture halls of academe where balding professors drone about the reproductive system of the lizard-like anole while the real reproductive studies take place after dances called “mixers” by those in charge and "shake and bake" by the students.
Senior year was the year when a wild, angry wall-pounding punch broke my left hand — my writing hand — and Robie seized on the first paper I turned in a week later to show as an example to the class of what sloppy work was being produced. When he did, anger got the best of me.

"I broke my hand, Harry." (Sweet Jesus, did I really say Harry!)

I did! And in saying so broke an unwritten rule that was as big a sin as pissing inside the Mormon Tabernacle. You never, never call a high school teacher by their first name. For us, there were no first names attached to teachers, only Mr., Mrs., or Miss. No Ms. had appeared on the scene yet, though the boy/men could feel it in their bones when they watched a Sherry Tower or Carolyn Coulter calmly shred a male opponent to pieces in class debates by carefully blending the "I'm-a-girl, take-it-easy" coquetishness with a prosecutor's hard talent of going for the throat.

The class debates seemed more like Tijuana cock fights than structured academic contests, with the teachers throwing in their champions, asking other teachers to sit in to judge so they could sit on the sidelines and snort. They pretended to look serious but laughed like hell later, in the teacher's room, where the smoke was thick and the talk mostly about houses and upkeep with a smattering of socializing and flirting going on. These were the teachers who couldn't drink in a bar, get caught speeding or even avoid church on Sundays. There were moral clauses in contracts in 1966 (most often written and, if not, certainly clearly understood). If the male teachers seemed to be eunuchs, they had to be, if they weren't before they took the jobs.

But Robie was no eunuch. He kept up a play-by-play banter through five classes a day that made even Silas Marner mildly interesting to the farm kids who sat in the back, too tired to argue early in the morning after milking the cows, tossing a little hay, and riding a solid hour on a diesel-smoke-spewing schoolbus to get to high school. Robie used the now-famous technique favored by politicians wanting to have a "down home" image. He started class with his sports coat and tie intact, gradually taking his coat off and loosening his tie, sometimes rolling up his sleeves. Eventually he would give up the podium and walk around the room, becoming “one” with the class, making everyone forget he was the teacher, Mr. Robie, though calling him "Harry" nearly cost me a trip to see the principal, a man whose smile had all the warmth of a cobra on acid.

Drugs weren't a part of the Year of the Robie, though we heard weird strange tales from some of kids had graduated and gone to “big schools” when they came home for their first break, freshman, but full of themselves, strutting down the halls of the high school during class, laughing aloud, calling teachers by their first names!

They talked quietly — very quietly — about smoking “stuff,” but if we knew they were talking about marijuana, we didn't say it aloud. We maintained our reverent attitude toward these older brethren who we really didn't like much anyway, having played the junior student to their senior superiority.

Our drug of choice senior year was alcohol, mostly beer, though a nice mixture for insulation against the New York winter was slugs of Southern Comfort washed down with gulps of Colt .45 (if we bought it) or Rheingold (if we stole it from the stashes kept by parents). The combination was lethal if you drank it fast enough, and we did, of course, as if by imbibing what was illegal for us to even carry around, we could avoid getting caught. Of course, we got stinking, puking commode-hugging drunk, a fast high that frequently faded fast, too, but when it didn't, it usually turned into a wild Mr. Toad's ride for the non-drunk who loved to parade the drunkest person in public for what we would later recognize as some kind of rebellious demand for attention via shock value.

We were oddly scrupulous at that age about not driving and drinking. Jesus! Can you imagine, getting caught drinking and driving and then losing your driver's license? In New York, if you were seventeen and had passed a driver's training course, you could drive at night. And the world was clearly demarcated between those who could drive and night and those who couldn't. And if you couldn't, you were doomed to double-dating with some smug bastard who was just a little older than you or who lucked out and got into driver's ed a half year before you did. And after a date, the bastard would always drop you off before your date, with a wink and the suggestion that your date could sit up front.

Shit.

But if losing your license was a horrible, unendurable agony, so was driver training, particularly if you already had your license and the driver's ed teacher had seen your new Mustang or GTO or Chevy Malibu in the parking lot, a decided step above his Chevy Bel Air, Ford Fairlane four-door, or aging DeSoto. Between teaching wood shop to an odd assortment of seventh grade miscreants, the socially retarded and a third group so generally backwoods, upstate-New York weird that they defy description, these driver's ed teachers came out to a carload of 17-year-old boys with an unsettling mix of anticipation of getting free of the school for 45 minutes and utter dread at the thought of teaching us how to pass on a slippery ice-covered highway.

My group drew arguably the gem of the group, a dark-haired Swede named Mr. Anderson who despite 15 years of watching accidents ready to happen in a metal shop filled with lathes, ball peen hammers, and hacksaws, retained a wolf-like smile that revved up us when he would get into the car, always a minute or two late, reeking of cigarettes.

"Ready boys?" And we always were.

We were mostly ready to see who would drive first, who would get the chance to accidently let the dog-of-a-Chevy fishtail ever-so-slightly when we turned out of the parking lot, in full view of the main study hall where at least 50 or so upperclassman were probably looking out the window instead of reading whatever claptrap the Robie had presented that morning. The trick was to let it slide just enough for people to see but not push the smile from the Anderson's face. If you did, he would watch out of the corner of his eye for the rest of your turn and a single instant of one-hand-on-the-wheel would draw a sharp rebuke.

We always came back with some tale from those drives. Rick Shevalier would slide the wheels off the asphalt to send us briefly spinning. Jack Eckdahl would keep turning around to say something to us in the back seat, only to have Mr. Anderson demand that he stop talking. These outings were like a conjugal visit with freedom.

Out on that road we were still shackled by the school, but with only a single bull to watch us, and in Mr. Anderson's case, he was as close to a friendly guard as we dared imagine.

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Stories right out the back door of my condo

SACRAMENTO, Calif., USA - A walk out the back door (ok, the only door) of my house into the neighborhood to take a stretch, reminded me that stories don't have to be dug up, sometimes they are right in front of your face.

I walked a half-mile to the Sacramento River, which looks ever-so placid these days (at least until the rain arrives this weekend), and while watching a ski boat glide across the water, spotted a river dweller, neatly hidden right at the water's edge.


A blue tarp to keep out the weather, a bicycle for transportation

Whoever is living underneath the tarp is also living below the radar of most of Sacramento. From time to time, the police raid along the river, chasing out people they call 'transients.' I say call transients, because there are some folks among these river dwellers who are there by choice, living as free as is possible in the USSA, way beyond credit checks, snooping landlords, police and the ever-present TSA.

This person - or persons - chose their spot well, as it's necessary to stand up on top of a concrete abutment to even see that there is a tarp and bicycle below.

My writer-hero, American author Jack London rode the rails of freight trains once, doing a chronicle of the lives of the men - and some women - who took to the road at the turn of the 20th century. They did so mostly because of tough economic times, but some just to escape from, well, whatever haunted them.

The River People.

Hmmm.... now there's an idea for a literary journalism piece.