Flotilla (5 page)

"Get that door shut!" Dad hollered from the galley distracting me from my nausea. "That thing will stink up the whole ship!" I slammed the door shut and leaned against it like I was afraid the stench might try to break through and kill us.

"What happened in there?" I whined. "Did someone die?"

"Shaddup," Dad replied, moving quickly to open the salon door and let some fresh air in. "You said you'd clean the head, now get going." He set the salon door it on some kind of built-in latch so it would neither slam open or closed in the constant breeze. Meanwhile, I was slow to move ... I'm serious: this stink was
bad
. Dad turned around and saw that I was reluctant to carry out my orders. I had been aboard less than 24 hours and already we were doing the Battle of the Wills. Dad knew how to win, though.

He took a single step toward me what appeared to be violence in his eyes. Choosing death by stink over death by Dad, I flung the door to the head open and locked myself in - I didn't even get to take a deep breath. I was locked in with the worst smell I had ever smelled in my entire life. I started gagging immediately. Inside the head the smell wasn't any worse but now there was no fresh air to find. A small window had been opened and I put my nose up to it, breathing big lung-filling gasps of fresh air. I spent about five minutes at that window like a dog trying to sniff under a door. Then I hiked the neck of my t-shirt up over my nose ... it was better than nothing.

I heard a fist thump against the door. "I don't hear movement!" he called. "You won't die. Get moving!" He punctuated this with another fist thump and I heard him move outside.

Realizing that there was no way I'd get out of this without cleaning this horrible room, I looked around to see if I could locate the source of the stink. Maybe someone had taken a dump but missed? I gingerly checked the small space to see if I was right. The thought alone was nauseating but the head was so small that it took me no more than two seconds to dismiss the possibility. No major evidence of a poop crime scene ... what had happened? I gave up and moved on to the rest of my chore.

While taking time-outs to breathe in the fresh air and cleaning the bathroom down, I was able to at least make use of an important lesson Mom had taught me: the proper way to clean a bathroom. I didn't want to have to do any of this over again if Dad didn't like the first pass.

Dad knocked on the door about fifteen minutes after I had closed it, I was nearly done. "You still alive in there?" he asked.

"Yeah," I replied. I finished wiping down the shower and mirrors with ammonia (which helped cut the smell) and then stepped outside. Dad was quick to shut the door behind me. "Phew!" I exclaimed melodramatically like I a coal miner suffocating from dangerous gases. "Is this what I get for drinking at parties?" I was trying to be funny, but it was the wrong thing to say.

It turned out to be poor timing on my part. Dad had turned from the door he was about to open and gave me a smart crack on the crown of my head with his knuckles before I was even aware it was happening.

"No," he said. "
That
is what you get when you drink at parties." He pinned me to the wall with his stare. My stomach clenched involuntarily ... I've never seen this side of Dad before. The tension in the room went from about a 3 to a 10 in the space of a second. "Don't ever joke about that to me. Not even a little bit."

I didn't know what to say. My brain just disengaged and hung there in Neutral while my face got hot and itchy. No ... it definitely was not going to be fun and games out here. Dad didn't wait for me to respond. He pulled open the door to the head, gave a cursory glance and slammed the door shut. "Very good," he pronounced. "Now do that to the rest of this boat. I'm going to give you" - he glanced at his watch - "four hours. This boat had
better
be clean by then." He disappeared through the salon door without another word.

I was still in shock from the smack he gave me. After a few moments, I sat down on the couch to consider my situation. It's like I was suddenly put into boot camp or prison. Just arrived, no sleep, bad food and I'm getting worked me like a slave. Was this guy
really
my Dad? Where was the guy who chatted with me over email and helped me with my homework?

After about twenty minutes, I looked up at the clock and realized that I was losing time. I got up and started cleaning. It felt good to be focused on something besides my own fear and uncertainty. I spent a lot of time thinking about everything I knew about him. For those ten seconds it was like he was going to kill me. Was I really in trouble or was he just trying to fake me out? Reconnecting with him had given me an impression of him that he was going out of his way to destroy ... Why would he do that? The email conversations we had left no indication that things would be like this when I visited.

I felt like I had gone crazy or that my Dad had been replaced by aliens. Was this some kind of a prank? Everything I knew about him, every conversation we had over the past two years and everything he told me about living out here. Nothing ...
nothing
was like what I expected.

Mom had built up a picture in my mind about him: smart, funny and a screw-up. "Like you, kiddo," she'd laugh. She showed me the pictures she had of him - the one where he was smiling through a scuba mask on a beach somewhere in Mexico was my favorite.

She'd talk about his jail time, the failed businesses and the times she'd caught him cheating more often than anything else about him. He disappeared from our lives three months before Madison was born. For ten years, it was just the three of us and my grandparents and then Marty came along. During that time, Mom didn't find anyone permanent in her life and the thought of Dad just made her angry more than anything else. She barely said anything about him but if she did it wasn't nice. It usually something like, "I'm not saying I don't love him. I'm saying he's a hard man to love." I think she thought I was supposed to be satisfied with that. It still doesn't make sense to me.

Dad's personality came up a lot after I got into trouble. Mom, Marty, my probation officer and my counselor ... everyone was very certain that I was 'acting out' because he left. My whole point was 'why did I wait twelve years to act out?' but nobody was really listening.

During one of the family sessions, Mom and I had a really bad argument. She came very close to saying that she was sorry she met my Dad. It was one of those moments where you're yelling at each other and then other person is about to say something. They almost say it and you know it's going to be really mean, but then they just clam up. They stop short and in the moment they're staring into your eyes, you know exactly what they're about to say. Not saying it doesn't change anything. There was that whole thing about not meeting Dad and therefore not having me - I think that's where she was going with it.

We stood there, eyeball to eyeball, knowing that she was about to say something really ugly. The counselor ended that session early but a cloud of funk hung over every other time he and I talked. Mom and I didn't talk again until she handed me that email printout telling me that I was coming here.

So ... now we're here. Between the fact that he's been gone and then he suddenly showed up when I was 12 and now this, I guess I really didn't know how I was supposed to feel about him. Maybe that's why I wanted to come out here ... I thought it was supposed to be a chance to get to know him. Does that make sense? It's like begging your parents for a new bike or something and then getting it and realizing you don't really want it. You aren't supposed to feel that way about your Dad.

I was putting the finishing touches on mopping the deck when he returned. "Nice work," he said. He was carrying a shopping bag, folded shut, under his arm. Silently, he set it on the counter out of the way and started to inspect my cleaning job. I think he wanted to make sure I wasn't hiding piles of laundry in closets somewhere. His inspection was a little more detailed than the one he did for the head. I guess he was pleased because all he said was: "Come with me." He picked up that folded shopping bag again and headed outside.

Out of the
Horner
for the first time today, I started to relax and take in the scenery. The entire colony was up and hard at work at whatever it was they were up to. We walked along the dock with Dad introducing more people to me and giving mini-lectures about 'how things worked'. "Each boat has its own network of nets, grows its own fish and essentially is responsible for everything in between."

We stopped and he introduced me to the two old gay guys who lived next door to us. Their boat was named the
Key West Forever
- they grew calamari and tuna. The younger one was over 50 and a built like a small grizzly bear. He reminded me of that old guy in Pete's Dragon some reason. What was his name? Mickey, Mickey something. Anyway, the other guy was tall and thin and I would later find out, did a lot of naked yoga positions on their back deck. Completely gross. It earned him his nickname: Naked Yoga Guy. NYG was into the whole neo-hippy thing ... tan as an Indian with a salt-and-pepper mullet and never without the silver and turquoise pendant around his neck even if he was wearing nothing else.

Dad continued the tour around the E-Ring. It took us a half-hour to get to the other side because of the introductions and Dad pointing little things out to me.

"We're going to continue raising tuna on the next catch cycle," Dad said.

"What's a catch cycle?" I asked.

"Catch cycles are the amount of time you spend raising fish that will be sold off and sent to the mainland," he replied. "Getting the fish that you can raise isn't that simple, though. You can't just pour a bunch of fish eggs in the water; you actually have to get juveniles from somewhere. Some of the other boats raise fish from eggs to larvae to juvenile fish just so that other boats like the
Horner
can raise them in the larger, ocean-facing pens. It's a complex little economy we have going on out here ... there are a lot of ways to make and lose money."

Dad introduced me to some fat Hawaiian guy who turned out to be a connection on juvenile tunas. They want back and forth on prices and a bunch of details that made absolutely no sense to me for another half an hour. Gradually, it became clear that they were negotiating prices for the fish. "I want 500 against 5 percent of the take," the Hawaiian guy kept saying.

"You've never wanted 5 percent - last time you were at 3 percent," Dad argued.

"What can I say, Rick? The prices have gone up."

They went back and forth for an hour, finally agreeing on six hundred dollars or 7 percent of the take, whichever was more. By that time, I was stumbling with fatigue but Dad didn't seem to be affected. He jabbed me in the ribs repeatedly to keep me awake. Then we continued the tour where Dad had left off. At one point, he nodded toward the
Phoenix
. "The company provides pretty much everything you need...at a price," he said. "Other people have a side business, along with growing fish. Like the restaurant we ate at last night."

"What's your side business?" I asked.

"I don't have one yet," he grinned. "That's the problem." Dad had only been here for a couple of years and had yet to settle into one scam or another. He dabbled here or there but couldn't make anything successful. "Straight fishing is difficult. You can eat, but you don't eat well. I'm trying to build some contacts here and get something going."

He turned suddenly down a very precarious-looking section of docks that separated the E and D rings. I moved to follow him but stopped when I saw what he was up to. A home-built pontoon bridge had been installed as a shortcut between the rings using only the most 'scrap' of scrap wood available. Sawed-off pieces of telephone pole and large logs had been randomly chained together. On top of them, sheets of plywood and particle board had been nailed or attached to give footing. No handrails, not even a rope to hold onto. It looked like the work of a drunken teenager and yet it was a major thoroughfare? The sheets of wood were splintered from months or years of foot traffic. Dad waved impatiently from the other side. "Come on!"

I knew I was going to regret this. Gingerly, I started to make my way across and almost immediately found myself stumbling. Just before I plunged in, I managed a shaky dismount back onto the deck. I don't know how Dad managed to walk across as easily as he did, I could barely hold on.

Looking across, I could see Dad and he was laughing at me. "First time's the worst," he called. "Com'on over!" Gingerly, I half-crawled across the pontoons and moved from one platform to the next making about a foot every minute or so. I'm sure I looked like an idiot, inching my way across this monkey fence on my hands and knees but it was either that or swim across. I was half-way there when I heard some laughs and looked up. A crowd of people were waving and snapping pictures with their phones on a completely functional bridge that wasn't more than 20 feet away. You couldn't see it until you were where I was and by that time, it would take longer to go back than suck it up and finish your journey. They clapped and cheered for me when I reached the other side.