Adam was quickly unlacing the boat cover as I said, “How can your sea anchor possibly be in front of us?”
“It can’t.”
“Then how can we be surfing on the `up’ side of a wave?”
“We can’t. Look, stupid, we’re not surfing any more. We’re not even floating. We have arrived. We have landed. This is a beached boat! What part of that don’t you understand?”
Adam crawled out of The Concrete Canoe and I followed. We were not on the rocky beach that I had envisioned, but rather in the shambles of a once-impressive building, a hotel, by the look of it. The bow of our boat was propped up on the copper top of a full-service bar. The wave that we had been riding for three days had driven our boat right through a set of boarded-up picture windows that had once looked out onto the beach. Water was still receding out of the hole we’d made, taking various tables, chairs, and other fixtures with it out into the blustery night.
The bartender, two attractive (if wet and bedraggled) waitresses, and four drunken customers were staring at us in disbelief.
Adam turned to them and said, “Are we too late for last call?”
* * *
We had not made landfall at Acapulco, as Adam had predicted, but at Zihuetanejo, just over a hundred miles west of it. All things considered, it would have been a remarkably good piece of navigation if it hadn’t been such an incredible load of blind luck.
“Luck, hell!” Adam said, “Why can’t you believe that I have God on my side?”
This time, I let it go, and ordered another round for all present. We had no Mexican money, but my credit cards worked. One of the waitresses, using her limited English rather than my nonexistent Spanish, eventually got around to asking about our strange clothing. I told her that we had been acting in an amateur Shakespearian comedy when we had been shipwrecked, and the story was believed. Buying new clothes was the first item on our agenda in the morning. Adam had to settle for some strange-looking beachwear until a specially made suit, shirt, and even necktie could be tailored for him, but then people his size always have a problem with buying clothes.
The Mexican police took only three days to decide that we were victims of the storm, rather than vandals intent on wrecking the best bar in town. The fact that Adam’s insurance policy on The Brick Royal covered the damage that its tender, The Concrete Canoe, caused when it penetrated the hotel didn’t hurt matters a bit. I hadn’t even known that we had insurance on our ship. Or perhaps I should say on Adam’s ship, since as it turned out, I never had gotten around to putting the thing back into my name. Also, the boat itself, completely unscathed despite all the rigors of the trip and the hole punched in the side of a major hotel, was graciously donated by the two of us to the local lifesaving society, which pleased the local mayor and his cousin, the chief of police, as well. It seems that they both enjoyed deep-sea fishing, and hinted that The Concrete Canoe was remarkably well suited for such a noble occupation. And since they were president and treasurer, respectively, of the lifesaving society, well, we took the hint.
It certainly beat the heck out of having them decide that we had stolen the forty-two pounds of gold we had on board, and retaining it for evidence.
I was about to reset my watch to local time when Adam stopped me. At his insistence, we carefully checked its time against the time given us by the phone company. It was only a cheap electronic watch made by an unknown outfit called “Innovative Time,” but the thing proved to be dead nuts accurate. With this information, and a book of navigation tables, we were able to calculate our true position at the time of the first fix we took after leaving the Western Isles. Then, given satellite weather photos, and modern charts of ocean currents, we figured that we would be able to make a good guess at the approximate location of the Western Islands for the next few months.
The Westronese agricultural samples were shipped along with everything we had made out of Super-Hemp via UPS to Adam’s mother in Bay City. It had taken me fifteen hours to fill out the paperwork on it to get it through customs, and unless the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency decided that we were small-time drug runners, there wouldn’t be a hangup.
My credit cards stopped working. It seems that the bank in the States hadn’t heard from me for over a year, and had put a stop on the account. Adam had never used a personal credit card once in his life, since they were issued by bankers and other unsavory people that he preferred not to associate with. His old company credit card was, of course, as defunct as his old company.
We bundled up all of our insurance forms along with our claims on the policies to send them off to our lawyer, Alan Greenberg, back home. I phoned him to tell him what was coming, and he just said, “Come home, both of you. Bring the papers with you. Do it now.”
So we gave away the rest of the food, supplies, and other gear that we had on the boat, mostly to the hotel bartender in thanks for his forbearance. We both thought that serving us politely showed a lot of class, considering the way we’d just demolished his bar. After we’d given it away, we discovered that both of our unopened water barrels were still filled with some of the rum we’d bought back in Puerto Rico. Had the trip lasted much longer, and with us trying to survive on rum instead of water, Adam and I could have died of dehydration, a nasty death.
“Adam, do you think that the rum could have been a third try at doing us in?”
“Nah. It was just some stupid mistake. We was real rushed, that morning, and tired, too. Anyway, nobody would be so rotten as to make you die of thirst with sixty gallons of booze right next to you.”
“No. Think about it. We bought four barrels in Puerto Rico. We pretty much killed one of them by the time we hit the island. Then we took another barrel from the warehouse to Roxanna’s place, for that party. That left two barrels still in the warehouse during the fire. These have to be the same ones, because the islanders don’t distill liquor.”
“Damn. You’ve got to be right. So whoever started the fire, stole the booze before they did it. Then they somehow switched these rum barrels for two of our water barrels. We are dealing with some nasty sons of bitches, there. And if they’re that bad, are they going to hurt our ladies when we’re not there? Even when it can’t do them any good?”
“Adam? Would you pray for our women?”
And such was our distress that neither one of us thought my request unusual.
* * *
The barrels never had any markings on them, since the rum was probably bootlegged in the first place. But studying the three barrels we had aboard, these two were obviously machine made, and the almost empty water barrel was just as obviously made on the island. Still, we had no use for them, and in fact we had already given them to the bartender.
The bartender was delighted to have the rum, and presumably put it to various good and profitable uses. At least, rum drinks were on special for the rest of our stay in Mexico, and presumably for a long while after we left.
We paid off our hotel bill with my credit card (which, after my third begging and pleading session with the bank, was again working), rented an old but well-cared-for car, and picked up Adam’s newly tailored clothes, so he had something to wear besides tights, a terry cloth serape, and a loud bathing suit. We bought two small carry-on suitcases to hold a change of underwear, a few trinkets, and twenty-one pounds of gold each, and we caught a plane that morning out of Acapulco for Detroit.
THIRTY-SIX
We were in Bay City that night, and in Alan’s office the next morning. After a minimum of social pleasantries, Greenberg pulled out a yellow legal pad and started right in.
“I know that the two of you have a year and a half’s worth of stories to tell, but we have to spend the afternoon in court, and what we’re seeing the judge about concerns the two of you. Now then, pursuant to your instructions, as implied by the powers of attorney that you gave me, I have looked into the strange circumstances surrounding the demise of your fortune, your company, and your marriage, Treet.”