We spent two months sailing around the Great Lakes, shaking down the boat and the crew, seeing the sights. I was in a strange, empty mood, and spent a lot of time alone in my cabin. The double catastrophe that had befallen me at the very moment of triumph still had me hollow, empty and numb. No one asked me to stand a watch or help with the boat, and I never volunteered. I took to drinking pretty heavily, alone, until Adam came in one day, silently picked up my case of scotch and threw it over the side, a gift for some future aquatic archaeologist.
Every now and then, one of the single girls would come in and let it be known pretty plainly that if I wanted a little company, well, so did she, but Helen had messed me up so bad inside that I didn’t want to trust another woman, not even for a one-night stand.
Everybody else seemed to be having a marvelous time. We had fifty-three people on board. Thirty-one of these were me and my former employees. I’d had quite a few husband and wife teams working for me. Five were spouses of employees, eleven were children, two were boyfriends of two of the girls, and four girls had been sort of communally invited aboard by nine of our male bachelors. None of my business, so I never said anything. That and there were two dogs and a cat. The cat went missing on the second night out and I felt a little better. I never could stand cats.
At first, I took my meals in the galley along with everybody else. We were so crowded that we were eating in shifts when the weather was bad and you couldn’t eat on deck. But my presence seemed to throw a wet sleeping bag over any group I was with, and after a bit I took to eating alone in my room.
We hit a major storm on Lake Michigan. There was plenty of warning, not only from the weather services but also off a fax machine that was hooked directly to a satellite. Adam had furnished us up proud, communications-wise. Besides the satellite hookup and two fax machines, there were six separate radios and radio telephones. I mean, we could be in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and place a collect phone call to somebody in Fiji, if we didn’t care about getting the people there up in the middle of the night.
For me, the storm was just a lot of banging around in my cabin. It never occurred to me that I might drown, but if it had, I still wouldn’t have much cared. For some of the other people, well, the storm got to them right where they lived. Shirley was the first person to tell me that she was leaving. She and her husband said that thinking about sailing for three years was wonderful, but the actual doing of it was more than they were cut out for. I really missed them.
We took down the mast and motored through a canal in Chicago, which put us on a tributary of the Mississippi River, and then spent six weeks playing Tom Sawyer heading south. I suppose that there were lots of pretty sights along the way, but inside I was still a dead man.
We lost six more couples, a single parent and all the kids and dogs at St. Louis. They had planned it that way all along. Summer was over, and the kids had to get back to school. They all promised to rejoin the crew next summer once school was out, but somehow none of them did. At least now there was enough room on board so you could turn around without rubbing someone’s back.
Everybody loved New Orleans except me. I saw it as just an overrated, overpriced, and overheated place where all you could do is sit listening to octogenarians playing music that nobody else would want to listen to at all under normal circumstances. The swamps just south of that city are nice, though, and Cajuns are more fun than people. Eventually, gorged on shrimp, crawdads, and hot sauce, we raised the mast and headed into the Gulf of Mexico. Yet even these infrequent moments of pleasure were just a surface ripple over my inner feelings of nothingness.
For me, the Caribbean Islands were a mixture of overpriced tourist traps and pitiful black children living in shacks that would be condemned back home if they were used to house chickens. The water itself wasn’t bad though, once you got away from the people. Adam finally got me out of my cabin and into a SCUBA rig, and that was beautiful. Fresh-caught lobster is the food of the gods, and even picking up some sort of infection from a coral I brushed against didn’t blacken my mood all that much. For a little while I felt better, and then suddenly I was farther down than ever in the depths of depression. Adam bought a case of St. John’s Wort, and made me start taking it, but I didn’t feel any difference.
Sea sickness got to some people, and nine more of our crew left the boat at San Juan. We took on four thirty-gallon barrels of rum there, since rum sold for less than Coke, and Adam let me resume drinking, as long as I did it in public.
Slowly, I was starting to become a human being once more. As the winter passed, I even started noticing girls again. I wasn’t quite to the point where I wanted to get involved with one, but I was noticing. Especially since most of them were in bathing suits, and the island fashions that year provided about the same coverage as two Band-Aids and a cork.
I got to noticing Dawn in particular. Now that the kids and older folks were gone, she let the exhibitionist side of her personality come out. Any time we got out of port, she got out of her bikini, which a guy just naturally couldn’t help noticing. That, and it seemed as if every time I caught sight of her out of the corner of my eye, she was looking at me, and grinning. I figured her for a tease, albeit a pleasant one. Then one of the mechanical designers told me that it wasn’t a tease at all. She was ready, and what was I doing, ignoring a nice girl like that? But Dawn was young enough to be my daughter, if I had one, and anyway, I wasn’t quite ready for another woman yet.
Then we hit a hurricane, or vice versa. Normally, a storm isn’t much of a problem with a good sailboat, as long as you have plenty of sea room, and we did. You just take in all the sails, hang a bit of sturdy canvas to the backstay, tie off the wheel, seal up all the hatches, and try your best to ignore it. The boat just automatically puts its nose into the wind and you do five or ten knots, backwards. Adam had a surplus parachute rigged to one of the anchor lines, as a sea anchor. If we ever got close to shore, he could throw it out and stop us dead in the water, but we never needed it. We were even going in the direction that we wanted. Toward Panama, and the Canal.
Maybe the reason that bad weather and such never bothered me was because, deep down, I still didn’t much care if I was alive or not. It bothered most of the other people a whole lot. As soon as we docked at Colón, ten more of our crew left the ship. They’d had all the sailing they wanted to do, thank you, and Bay City was actually a very nice place to live. We tried to talk them out of leaving, but they were adamant. This left us with a controls designer, a Bridgeport operator, Adam and myself. And all four of the bachelorettes that had joined up for kicks back home. None of us were married, and it looked like it could become a nicely balanced little group.
In fact, Adam bought some decent lumber in the port of Colón, and the rest of them were busily converting the dormitory into two big staterooms, as we motored our way through the Canal.
I was taking my turn at the wheel, now that we were getting shorthanded, and naturally, given the pairing off that was going on, Dawn was getting more flirtatious than ever. I got to thinking that maybe I should stop being such a grump, and come out of my shell a little bit. She was twenty-four and I was forty-two, but maybe that wouldn’t be an insurmountable problem. She was certainly a fine-looking young woman. She was down to the buff, lying on the glass top of the solar still nine inches in front of my windshield, and pretending not to notice me. A pleasant sight, but probably against the law in Panama. I mean, she was also ignoring the people on other, taller ships, though they weren’t doing the same with her. Then I got a radio phone call from a passing freighter, thanking me for the scenery, but telling me that Panama being a staunchly Catholic country, the fines for doing what she was doing were huge.