Despite his determination to manage otherwise, their eyes met, and Captain Ron could draw only one conclusion: tonight, a woman he knew for her remarkable self-possession was a mess. “What’s up?”
No answer.
“You seem...” What’s the word? Upset? Pissed off? Disconcerted?
Regan refocused a thousand-yard stare onto Ron’s face, mere inches in front of hers. Her mouth opened, but no sound came out. Her eyes, which were of a green that the roadster could only hope to rival, liquified. She clutched the glass to her sternum. She shook her head.
Captain Ron dropped the sail bag and embraced her. He didn’t know what else to do. Her hair smelled of cigarette smoke. The glass smelled of whiskey. A shudder passed through her. Captain Ron realized that, beneath the knee-length faux-ermine coat, his boss might not have any clothes on.
After a full minute she pulled back far enough to place the empty glass against his own sternum, but not so far as to break the embrace. She watched her fingernail, lacquered to match the shoes, trace the rim of the glass. “I’m not going to cry,” she told the glass.
“If you can’t cry on your own boat,” replied Captain Ron, “where can you cry?”
She pursed her lips at the evident truth of this, but made no reply. A gust thrummed the stays. Boy Toy rolled to the limit of her snubbers and rebounded.
Captain Ron raised his eyes toward the overhead. “If this keeps up we’ll be sailing right here at the dock. We won’t have to go—”
“We’re going out,” she interrupted, still addressing the whiskey glass. “Are you ready?”
Captain Ron nodded toward the sail bag, on the sole abaft him. “Need to bend on the small jib. Then we’ll see if we can get out of here without holing somebody’s million-dollar yacht.”
“I’ve got insurance,” she whispered. And added, “The bastards.” Regan turned out of Ron’s arms and finished the drink. She placed the empty glass in the galley sink, and at last she looked at him in the eye. “I’ll change clothes, and we’ll be off.”
That is one good-looking woman, Captain Ron reflected, not for the first time, who pays me to take her sailing.
The hint of a smile crept over her lips. “That’s right.”
“Which part?”
She smiled only a little more.
“All of them.”
“Dress for weather.” Ron hefted the sail bag and pushed it ahead of him, out the companionway.
The wind brought with it the unmistakable smell of rain as it raked through the harbor in search of mischief, which latter, aboard Boy Toy, amounted to having carried over the leeward rail the working or forward ends of both jib sheets, left unattended on deck, along with what standing length could follow until the stopper knots halted the chicanery at the after-cars, just forward of the cockpit, which is why they’re called stopper knots. No big deal, although, as Ron soon realized, the ebb, falling strongly under the wind, had carried the lines beneath the boat, port to starboard. He had to walk the cordage forward, then aft and back again, hauling all the while, before he could tease the lines free of some object or other, beneath the rippling opaque brine, and drag them back aboard in a braided tangle, itself remarkable in that a braid is usually accomplished with three or more strands, proving yet again the adage, not confined to matters maritime, that if something can go wrong, it will. Hanging onto the cloth of the No. 4 while he bent its luff to the forestay presented another small challenge. A heavy weather sail is made of stouter stuff, and is respectively stiff, but that doesn’t mean it won’t blow overboard in a heartbeat of inattention. He used one of the sopping sheets to belay the bulk of the jib to the port bow cleat while he sorted clew from head and tack in the dark, then bent on everything in its proper order, the tack to the foot of the forestay, the head to the halyard’s venerable bronze pelican shackle, each with a sennit he’d rove himself, and in between clapped the piston hanks to the forestay, throats port to starboard, in their proper order.
The sail’s empty bag he kept aboard by kneeling on it. After a quick trip aft to drop the sail bag down the companionway and retrieve forty feet of half-inch line, back forward he rove a chain knot about jib and forestay, belaying the line to the starboard bow cleat, so the sail wouldn’t blow overboard on the way out of the harbor, yet at the proper moment he could raise it out of the slipknots of the chain with a reasonable amount of control. And now, as he deployed a variation on the bowline called a sylvain knot to reave the working ends of both sheets to the clew, an all-too-familiar sound rent the air, and before Captain Ron could so much as bring it to bear, the tip of an upper spreader had speared the big jib aboard Cohiba and the sail simultaneously ripped up to its tack and straight down to its boltrope, midway along its foot, opening as it were a vertical geologic fissure with a sound that most closely resembled that of eighty feet of one-hundred-dollar bills glued nose-to-tail being ripped down the middle one end to the other, only louder. The commotion of whipping sheets and streaming Kevlar gave Cohiba the appearance of flying to windward, a revenant ship. Maybe by the time we get back, Captain Ron reflected, observing Nature’s profligate spree, maybe they’ll have that mess under control.
Regan came topside in full foul-weather regalia — bibbed Gore-Tex overalls, cuffs velcroed over sea boots, hooded jacket with gasketed sleeves, watch cap, fingerless gloves, a personal flotation device, or pfd, that would inflate at the tug of a lanyard or upon contact with seawater, with a built-in harness, a tether — which reminded Captain Ron that he’d be well-advised to jump below and don similar gear. Engine started, they performed practiced maneuvers to get underway, Regan handling dock lines and fenders with Captain Ron on helm and throttle, for it is not at all uncommon to encounter a capful of wind in this or any other marina on the San Francisco Bay. Blanketed by the considerable mass of Pay Dirt, they poked Boy Toy’s bow into the fairway, got her headed up into the wind, and powered out. The water was very shoal at the entrance, and the chop was considerable, but, decisive on the throttle, they made the two quick turns, one to port, the next to starboard, and cleared the spuming breakwater without incident, leaving the structure’s “continuous quick” flashing green light to starboard. The shriek of spars and rigging and the flogging of the ruined jib quickly faded, replaced by the salubrious cough of the diesel, wind in their own rigging, whitecaps slapping and thumping the windward topsides.
After she’d stowed the three fenders, Regan took a seat on the starboard locker, opposite the skipper, just as Boy Toy lifted her bow and set it down with a crash. A gout of solid water engulfed the foredeck and streamed aft, port and starboard of house and cockpit, until it sluiced over the after-combing or drained away through the scuppers. Regan closed the companionway hatch and tore free the Velcro collar that covered most of her face. “I feel better already.”