Now this was Randy’s kind of sailboat: a Chesapeake Clipper running West Virginia moonshine out of Locust Point Baltimore. In retrospect this was no surprise. A lot of old West Virginia families migrated along the CSX railroad after World War II into Old South Baltimore. So it would make sense that they had already had some kin there to move in with.
Of course, the connection between the White slums of South Baltimore and West Virginia would be overlooked by the liberal academics who so ruthlessly edited us out of the history books. Shit, we stopped rich boy Bobby Lee long before Meade and his New England conscripts did at Gettysburg, and there is nary a mention of that, even in Civil War literature.
He had made a lot of connections back in 1986 when Mom had moved him to South Baltimore. He had run into old-timers who were related to people who had known Pap. These were mostly dudes that worked for CSX. Their sons had gotten into crime when a new generation of railroad men had not been required, and that had fit into Randy’s lifestyle just fine…
This is perfect. Old South Baltimore did not get leveled in the 1904 fire. So I will actually know the neighborhood. I will be sailing into town with a neighborhood connection, ready to slink into another underworld on the same damned ground.
There was one thing wrong with this whiskey runner; it was headed the wrong way! All of the moonshine had already been sold in Buenos Aires. Hence it was no longer loaded with booze. It was empty, except for the three of them, Captain Tandy and his six crewmen, and enough smoked jerky to choke every redneck at a monster truck rally. Sensei, having a need to get out of town in keeping with Burton’s known time of departure, had a dilemma. It was hurricane season up above the equator and Captain Tandy did not want to deal with that.
Having a historical hair up his ass and a case full of gold, much of which he had already spent setting up the Donessa in a house, Jan had decided to blow ten grand on a grand tour of the South Atlantic.
He is a good man, Sensei is. But who in Hell wants to take a tour of the South-Fucking-Atlantic!
Your boss, that’s who Bracken.
Jan wanted to see the cottage where Napoleon died in exile in 1821, and was a naval history buff to boot. They had become time-travel tourists and Rick was fine with that. But Randy was climbing the walls—Excuse me, the creaking hulls!
He had already used his derringers to kill every last rat on board and was growing dangerously bored with this stomach-churning life of leisure.
Damn, I could use some booze to make this South Atlantic rollercoaster slide by a bit easier. And almost all of our hash is gone!
Randy did not ever admit to a fear, even to himself. But he felt it in the core of his being, that dread of The Deep. Rick was nice enough to share some of his opium drops and they did have plenty of pretty strong wine on board, purchased by him for Rick. But drinking ‘mud juice’ as he called it stirred his deep Arуan loyalties. He did not mind his addiction, and actually managed the condition quite well, but he had his pride. Drinking something that had been pressed between some little wetback’s toes—or greasy Italian toes—just rubbed him the wrong way. He believed—Nepalese finger hash aside—in sticking with Arуan recipes when it came to intoxication.
Of course, nearly all booze is made by the reprehensible: rum by race-mixers made from sugar cane cut by Blacks; California wine pressed by liberal scum; and beer brewed by gay monks who worship The Enslaver.
Randy’s views on Christianity and its parent religion Judaism were so negative and virulent that he kept his impulse to express these feeling to himself. Although he savored the art of killing—his birthright as an Arуan—Pap Bracken had sworn him to use it judiciously, and never against friends and acquaintances that he merely disagreed with, even if that disagreement was on the most fundamental level. He habitually kept those rabid religious sentiments bottled up in that part of his being he referred to as ‘The Darkness’. He did everything he could to keep The Darkness contained, not to spare those who might become the object of his murderous impulses, but to maintain self control. Randy was a control freak where his actions were concerned. That is why he drugged himself, to maintain self-control, that discipline so central to his own inner myth; that he was righteous and independent.
You know though, that it will not be long, and you’ll be laying there in that hammock next to Rick sucking down mud juice to keep yourself on an even keel. It wouldn’t due to let The Darkness rise to the surface on a little rig like this.
Yes, mud juice here I come. It would be so much easier to stomach the prospect if I actually believed in your stated refutation of my beliefs.
You cannot help it. Your racial memory is too well developed. Pap clued you in, passed it onto you alone; how he felt more akin to the Krauts he killed than any of the other GIs in his squad.
Okay, so you still carry the torch, smokeless though it may be.
Shut up and drink your wine Whiteman. Think of it as imbibing the liquid toil of your lessers.
Yes, that’s an angle. There is always a way to get your mind right about getting your mind right!
He nodded to Rick who was smoking and drinking and reading as he swung in his hammock, and headed up out onto deck in his duster, feeling like the Gorton’s Fisherman ready to rob a bank.
When he emerged onto the windswept deck and took a whole bank of sea spray across the face, he saw him there: Sensei, poor Sensei, strong but sick, holding onto the rail as he heaved his guts into the sea. The South Atlantic was just rougher than they had expected and the ‘sea-legs’ they had earned on the Hammond just didn’t cut it down here. His boss was losing some weight. It was their tenth day out now, and his team leader still could not keep down a solid meal.
He walked over and put a hand on his boss’ back and helped him over to the mast, where they stood and looked at each other, and then out to sea, not saying a word. Only Captain Tandy and two hands were on deck and they had a few hours of light left, before they were rocking below. He handed Sensei an opium drop, not telling him what it was, and hoped that would help with the nausea, because he could not get the man to smoke any hash, not that there is enough left.
The older man just nodded to him and they stood holding the coils of hemp at the base of the mast, looking over their shoulders at the swelling mountains of water here in the central South Atlantic, on their way to the place where that Corsican stump-jumper rotted on house-arrest a generation ago. Sensei seemed to gather himself and strained his voice against the whip of the wind and the slicing of the hull through the waves, “The ‘Roaring Forties’ they call it Randy. In another day we will be above forty degrees latitude, up in the Thirties and it won’t be so bad. These winds whip around the landless belly of the world. If we ever go back for Cook we will ride them again, somewhere.”
Randy just nodded respectfully and sucked on his magic candy.
That’s character for you. You don’t have to agree with a man so long as he makes his suffering meaningful.
That sounds like Dad talking.
Let’s not get into that—we don’t have enough opium drops for that.
He leaned back against the mast and felt the deck creak beneath his feet, as the keel beneath it was being dragged across the world through this insane labyrinth of watery mountains.
A hillbilly’s worst nightmare this is!
