John D McDonald – Travis McGee 07 Darker Than Amber

Four hours ashore at the mercy of the machine. Five big taxis were waiting, an indication that there were a few who had signed up for a tour of the island.

The chain was dropped, and as the harried staff checked them off, the folk came hurrying down the gangplank. In the lead was an overstrength platoon of the same beefy arid resolute women you see bursting into department stores on sale days the instant the doors are unlocked. Great hams bulged the lurid shorts.

“Attention please, attention please. Passengers taking the tour will please board the limousines off to your left as you debark. Thank you.”

The ship’s last cruise of the season, a short one, at the lowest rates. Yet it was at only a little more than half capacity, they had told me. During the height of the season, in the first three months of any year, when these small cruise ships that ply the Caribbean are at capacity, a good two-thirds of the passenger list is made up of what a friend of mine who worked aboard one for a season called the “mother” trade. To explain what he meant, he would give you a big expansive smile and say, “I always promised Mother that some day I’d take her on a cruise. Well, sir, with the kids married off and the store sold, I said to her, I said, ‘Mother, you better start packing, because we’re a-going on that cruise.'”

So they fill up the little ships, eat the spiced and stylized cruise food, get seasick, sunburned. They take afternoon dance lessons in the Neapolitan Ballroom, play organized deck games, splash about in the small pool on the sundeck, play bridge, get a little tiddly and giggly, dress up for dinner and appraise the dresses of the other women, get totally confused about which port is which, take fragmentary language lessons, vigorously applaud the meager talents of the ship’s floor show, take all the tours, write and mail scores of postcards, compete for prizes in the costume ball, spend a dutiful amount of time each day at sea in the rental deck chair.

In the brochures, of course, there were the beautiful people dancing gracefully and romantically by moonlight and the light of Japanese lanterns on the tropic deck of a brand-new ship, and the same lovely people smiling in the warm sunlight, their golden limbs in relaxed and effective composition around the huge shipboard swimming pool.

It isn’t like that. These little ships arc lumpy with endless coats of topside paint, and the ship’s staff is overworked, and the schedules are rigidly set, with brassy announcements coming over the speaker systems, sending the whole herd moving in one direction or another.

It isn’t like they thought. But it isn’t like anything else they ever knew either. Perhaps, in some wistful and tender sense, these are the beautiful people, and because this is the dream fulfilled, they hold onto it tightly, making small translations from reality. And down there, in the cramped inconveniences of the little cabins, in the slightly oily wind of the ship’s air-conditioning, in the muted grumble of the ship’s engines, the little vibrational shudders as she crosses the tropic ocean, sunburned flesh is coupled in a passion more like that of years ago, and in the breakfast morning they smile into each other’s eyes, a secret recognition.

But this was the tag end of the season, and a mixed bag. Scampering flocks of small children. A sprinkling of heavy men in their middle years, accompanying, with a certain air of apprehension, their young doughy blondes toward the Bay Street shops. A contingent of scrubbed-looking highschool kids chaperoned by a nervous-acting couple who looked like a male and female Woodrow Wilson, and an unchaperoned pack of kids of college age, the girls like a bright fluttering flock of tropic birds, the boys languid under the terrible burden of improvised sophistication, and thirty or forty couples of the “mother” classification. The tour caravan left. The others dispersed into Bay Street. The machine came to life. It could readily chew up the entire passenger lists of four deluxe cruise ships simultaneously, each one better than twice the size of the little Monica D. The saloons turned the music on. The strawmarket women began their sales patter, waving the merchandise, and making crude comments about the Jamaican hats a lot of cruise people were wearing. These people were a tiny morsel for the machine, a hundred and fifty or so, but with proper pressure, calibration, alignment of the rollers and levers and sluice gates, it might churn eight thousand dollars out of this motley group, and there was little else to do on a Monday afternoon in June anyway. The mystique of the operation is that a true-blue consumer will buy something she does not need and cannot afford when she discovers that the same item at home would cost her thirty dollars more.

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