“Not much. You get the stuff?” And then, because he can’t help himself, he’s laughing aloud. “Shit,” he says, bending forward to swipe his card, “it sounds like we’re doing a drug deal or something.”
Wilson, still grinning — or no, grinning wider: “We are.”
“Sort of.”
“Yeah, sort of.”
And then the gate swings wide and they’re hefting the bags — Wilson takes two and he takes one, because to this point they’re Wilson’s and he’s in charge — and heading down the ramp to where the hulls of the boats wink and nod on the remains of the swell the storm has channeled into the mouth of the harbor. Black bags rippling and catching the metallic light in creases and crescents, nothing out of the ordinary, nothing anybody would think twice about, not even Mrs. Janov, coming up the ramp toward them from the Bitsy, a boat he hates not just for its name but for the people who own it, the type who never leave port but seem to have plenty of time to sit out on a deck chair with a drink in one hand and a pair of binoculars in the other, scoping out this thing or that and watching, always watching. . for what? Normally he ignores her, just walks right on past no matter what inanities about the weather, the gulls, the gull shit or whatever else she spouts at him, just being neighborly and what kind of burr you have up your ass? But now, because he’s feeling uplifted and right on his mark and maybe the smallest bit furtive, he treats her sealed-up face to a curt nod as he passes, the catwalk swaying beneath them and her flip-flops pounding the boards like twin jackhammers.
In the next moment they’re on board the boat, sliding into the cabin like seals into a tranquil sea, and all is quiet and calm but for the faintest whisper of the drizzle on the cabin top and the salt-flecked windows of the bridge. Wilson sits heavily — or no, he throws himself down on the couch with a sigh — and announces, “Ten thousand tabs, like you said. Think that ought to be enough?”
The boat smells the way boats do when they’ve been sitting in a slip in the rain and cold, the head making itself known, wax and varnish and scale remover competing with the must of fungus and the damp grainy woody sea-stink the cold compacts and ferments and holds there till the sun — or the electric heater — comes to burn it off. He’s already bending to flick on the heater, shifting himself around the table, adjusting to the reduced space that always makes him feel as if everything he’s ever needed is right here at hand, just cast off the lines and head out to sea and forget all the rest. “You want coffee?” he asks, setting the pot on the burner. “I’m going to brew some anyway — man, that shit they served me down at the Cactus was like paint remover.”
“Cream and sugar,” Wilson says, flipping through a six-month-old copy of National Geographic. He’s got his feet up. His eyes are half-closed. He is the type, when he’s not working, that is, and he’s definitely not working now, who can fall asleep anywhere anytime, whether it’s ten-thirty in the morning on a gently swaying yacht in the Santa Barbara marina or five p.m. over a plate of deep-fried calamari on the deck at Brophy Brothers.
“I don’t know,” he says, easing two mugs from their hooks, “this is all just guesswork, of course. They estimate there’s something like three thousand rats out there—”
“That all?”
He shrugs, a gesture that brings both mugs up to chest level, then drops them back to the counter. “Seems low to me too. But the environment’s limited, I guess, not like here where you’ve got people. And garbage. But what’s the deal with them — they’re fat-soluble, right?”
“Yeah, right. Fat-soluble. B-complex and C are the water-soluble ones, meaning you piss them out. Which is why you get scurvy. Or sailors do. Or used to, in the old days. But this stuff gets stored in the body fat or the liver.”
“So one shot should work? They eat this, they’re protected?”
“Hell, I don’t know. All I know is what I found on the Internet. Vitamin K2, one hundred micrograms per tablet, totally natural. Says they’re a ‘biologically active form extracted from a fermented Japanese soyfood called natto.’ You ever hear of natto?”
“No, can’t say as I have.” He sets the mugs down on the counter, just then noticing that one of them has a blackened ring worked into it about two-thirds of the way up. Which he chooses to ignore. “Sounds good enough to me, though. I mean, how complicated can it be — it’s just a vitamin, right?” He can feel the first stirring of warmth from the heater. The kettle is just coming on to a boil. Outside, the rain has picked up again, drilling the deck, and he’s suddenly transported back thirty years to the cabin of his father’s boat anchored off Santa Cruz Island, a day like this, his mother at the stove making toasted cheese sandwiches — Swiss on rye with mustard and sauerkraut, her specialty — so that the air grew dense and sweet with the smell of them, and he with a cup of hot chocolate and a stack of comics, cozy, cozy and safe and enclosed. Like now. Like right here and now. “What kind of price did you get, by the way?”
Wilson sets down the magazine so he can cradle his head and stretch, his legs kicking out and the muscles bunching in his shoulders. “Thirteen bucks for a hundred, that was the come-on, but I found a site where if you buy quantity it winds up costing like three bucks off the low end of that. So an even thousand.”
“You used your Visa?”
“No. A friend’s. And I had it shipped to her house, in Goleta.”
That sounds all right, not that anybody’s going to trace it and even if they do, even if the whole thing blows up in their faces, they’ll get it in the newspapers — and maybe save the rats too, because that’s the bottom line here and no matter how loose-jointed he might get, that’s what he has to remember: save the animals. He tilts the kettle over the brown-paper filter, fishes the half-and-half from the refrigerator. Back goes the kettle, then he’s handing Wilson his cup and settling into the chair opposite him while the boat ticks and sways, making its minute readjustments beneath them. In that moment he’s as calm as he’s been since he walked into that lecture—Alma’s lecture, and he hasn’t forgotten her and what went down in the past between them even if she acts like she has, Dr. Alma, with all her tics and airs — and he realizes how much just being on the boat does for him. It’s another world here, shut away from all the fights and hassles and the way people close in on you if you stop to take a breath. “I’ll write you a check,” he says.
“Whatever.” Wilson shrugs, stifles a yawn.
And then he’s leaning back, sipping coffee — real coffee — and thinking about the day he bought the boat ten months back — forget the cliché because it was a happy day then and it’s happy now too. He got a deal, a real deal, because the people were desperate to get rid of it, the guy some sort of executive with PacifiCare, bloodless as a corpse, took it out exactly three times in the three years he’d owned it and very nearly ran it aground each time, or so the story went, the wife (once maybe, but no longer anything to look at) pursing her feather-veined lips over the details. Fatuous people. Jerks. They’d named the boat, talk of clichés, the Easy Life. But as he sat right here in this cabin listening to the wife go on in what was meant to be ironic fashion about the husband’s seamanship, or lack of it, he knew what he would name her, as soon as the check was signed and the papers transferred, and he was thinking even then of today, of course he was, because how else was he going to make his intentions known, how else was he going to strike a blow for the animals when the animals were all the way out there across the channel where nobody could see them? And Anise — she’d been to college, but sometimes he wondered about the gaps, the yawning chasms, in her knowledge — asking, “Paladin? What’s a Paladin?”